English 11
Modernist Poetry Packet
Your Name:_________________________________________________________
Imagist Criteria (from F.S. Flint’s Imagisme)
1. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the
metronome.
4. Complete freedom of subject matter
5. Free verse was encouraged along with other new rhythms
6. Common speech language was used, and the exact word was always to be used, as opposed
to the almost exact word.
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Ezra Pound (1916)
(1885-1972)
Questions: Imagism and “In a Station of the Metro”
1. What is imagism?
2. What are the criteria of the imagist movement?
3.
What is the poem describing?
4. What does the word “apparition” mean?
5. What does the word apparition mean in the context of the poem?
6. What comparison is Pound making?
7. How does Pound’s use of imagery create symbolic meaning?
8. What characteristics of the poem satisfy the various criteria of the imagist movement?
9. Using the imagist criteria, write your own two line poem.
The Unknown Citizen
(To JS/07/M/378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his
generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
W.H. Auden (1940)
(1907-1973)
Questions: “The Unknown Citizen”
1. What subjects are present in the poem?
2. Who is speaking? How do you know?
3. How is he/she is connected to the Unknown Citizen?
4. What is the tone of the speaker? How do you know?
5. What is the tone of the author? How do you know?
6. What ironic discrepancies do you find between the speaker’s attitude toward the subject and that
of the poet himself? By what is the poet’s attitude made clear?
7. What does the title of the poem allude to?
8. What is the significance of this allusion in the poem? (Why does Auden make this allusion?)
9. What tendencies in our civilization does Auden satirize?
10. Read the three-line epitaph at the beginning of the poem as carefully as you read what follows.
How does the epitaph help establish the voice by which the rest of the poem is spoken?
Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen (1920)
(1893-1918)
Questions: “Dulce et Decorum Est”
1. Owen is poet who wrote the majority of his poems from a military hospital during World War I.
What battlefield experiences is this poem primarily concerned with?
2. What images illustrate these experiences? (Find 3 specific quotes):
a.
b.
c.
3. Do the words describing the images have positive or negative connotations? Pick specific words
to discuss from each quote.
4. What is the author’s tone as he describes the subject(s) in the poem?
5. What does the tone reveal about the authors’ stance on the subjects of war and patriotism?
6. What might the theme of the poem be?
Grass
PILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
Carl Sandburg (1918)
(1878-1967)
Questions: “Grass”
1. Look up each of the following and explain what they are:
a. Austerlitz:
b. Waterloo:
c. Gettysburg
d. Ypres
e. Verdun
f. What do these places have in common? Why does Sandburg allude to these places in his
poem?
g. What would be different about the poem if only one were mentioned?
2. What words/phrases are repeated in the poem?
3. What is Sandburg trying to accomplish through this repetition?
4. Who is the speaker in the poem? What literary device is employed?
5. What is the “work” that the speaker does?
6. How does the speaker feel about this work?
7. What is the tone of the poem? What reveals the tone?
The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things-at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
.... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
e.e. cummings (1922)
(1894-1962)
Mirabeau Bridge
Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away
And lovers
Must I be reminded
Joy came always after pain
The night is a clock chiming
The days go by not I
We're face to face and hand in hand
While under the bridges
Of embrace expire
Eternal tired tidal eyes
The night is a clock chiming
The days go by not I
Love elapses like the river
Love goes by
Poor life is indolent
And expectation always violent
The night is a clock chiming
The days go by not I
The days and equally the weeks elapse
The past remains the past
Love remains lost
Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away
The night is a clock chiming
The days go by not I
Guillaume Apollinaire (1913)
(1880-1918)
Subway Rush Hour
Mingled
breath and smell
so close
mingled
black and white
so near
no room for fear.
Langston Hughes (1951)
(1902-1967)
To Lucasta
On Going to the Wars
Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breasts, and quiet mind,
To war and arms I fly.
True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such,
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.
Richard Lovelace (1649)
(1618-1658)
High Treason
I do not love my country. Its abstract splendor
is beyond my grasp.
But (although it sounds bad) I would give my life
for ten places in it, for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, fortresses,
a run-down city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history
mountains
(and three or four rivers).
Jose Emilio Pacheco (1969)
(b. 1939)
Sindhi Woman
Barefoot through the bazaar,
and with the same undulant grace
as the cloth blown back from her face,
she glides with a stone jar
high on her head
and not a ripple in her tread.
Watching her cross erect
stones, garbage, excrement, and crumbs
of glass in the Karachi slums,
I, with my stoop, reflect
they stand most straight
who learn to walk beneath a weight.
Jon Stallworthy (1963)
(b. 1935)
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens (1921)
(1879-1955)