Modernism
“Make it new!”
- Ezra Pound
Modernism
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Fragmentation and disconnection:
Frequent quotations, allusions, and references to
information outside the poem
Divided self/detached speaker
An overall feeling of powerlessness and alienation
A focus on language
Difficult to understand
Deals with subject matter that had traditionally
been considered mundane or trivial
The presentation of an individual consciousness
against a panorama of the age
Imagism
• Led by Ezra Pound; William Carlos
Williams was a later adherent
• short poems that used ordinary language
and free verse to create sharp, exact,
concentrated pictures.
• Pound’s definition of the image
• Eliot’s objective correlative
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
• Early academic
career
• London in 1908
• 1920-1941: London to
Paris to Italy
• WWII: charges of
treason
“In a Station of the Metro”
• Remember: Pound’s definition of the
image.
• Whenever you approach an Imagist poem,
you should ask yourself: what complexities
of intellect and emotion might be packed
into this poem?
“In a Station of the Metro”
1) What emotional connotations are suggested by
the “wet, black, bough”?
2) Pound’s main metaphor in this poem involves
the “petals.” What does he compare to petals?
3) What does that metaphor add to the meaning
of the poem?
4) Think about the crowd: who do you think they
are? Why are they riding the metro?
5) Pound was deeply interested in Japanese and
Chinese poetry. Can you detect the influence
of that poetry in this poem? How so?
6) How does this poem exemplify the ideologies
of the Imagists?
“The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
Identify the speaker of this poem in terms of gender,
age, character, and occupation.
List the events that occur in stanzas 1-4.
In the last stanza, what does the speaker promise to
do?
How is the third stanza a turning point in the poem?
What does the image of the husband dragging his feet
suggest?
Find three more images in the final stanza that add
meaning to the poem. List them, and tell what meaning
they suggest.
Why do the butterflies “hurt” the speaker?
How does this poem put into practice the Imagist
theory of the objective correlative?
William Carlos Williams
• Multi-ethnic
background
• New Jersey doctor
• Influence of Ezra
Pound
– But differed in style
• “No ideas but in
things.”
“The Red Wheelbarrow”
1. Note the exact visual imagery.
2. What has just happened before this poem
takes place?
3. What is the one metaphor in this poem?
4. What is it exactly that depends upon the
wheelbarrow? Why?
5. How does this poem employ the objective
correlative?
6. What’s the point of this poem? Does it mean
anything? If so, what?
“This is Just to Say”
1. To whom do you think this poem is
addressed?
2. Do you think the speaker really feels
sorry for what he (or she) has done?
3. Even though the speaker of this poem
does directly state a feeling (i.e., “Forgive
me”), does this poem still employ the
objective correlative? How so?
A Note on Williams
• When we read poems like “The Red
Wheelbarrow” and “This is Just to Say,”
our first impulse might be to criticize and
dismiss.
• But you must always remember the
context.
• Think of these poems as experiments in
poetry.
“To Elsie”
• A poem about a devastated and despoiled
America and about the alienated and selfalienating human condition. (characteristics of
Modernism)
• Critics have called this Williams’s “great poem
about America.” In a short, solid paragraph,
analyze “To Elsie” as a piece of social criticism
about the nation. How does Elsie, “with broken
brain” express “the truth about us”?
• Can you connect the form of the poem to its
meaning?
“Queen Anne’s Lace”
• Queen
Anne’s Lace
is the wild
progenitor to
our carrot.
“Queen Anne’s Lace”
• The critic Sharon Doblin has said that this
poem “is an early example of Williams' use
of the Cubist model as a way to confuse
two frames of reference—to subvert the
hierarchy of tenor over vehicle in the
structure of metaphor via the poem's
enjambments: . . .”
“Queen Anne’s Lace”
Her body is not so white as
anemone petals nor so smooth – nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness,
white as can be, with a purple mole
at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand's span
of her whiteness. Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over—
or nothing.
“Spring and All”
•
•
•
•
•
•
Images in 1st 3 stanzas
Contagious hospital (2 meanings)
What might the word “they” at the
beginning of the 5th stanza mean?
still in line 25
Ending
What overall meaning, theme, or
message can you read into this poem?
“Spring and All”
•
•
•
•
•
Describe the specific images the speaker sees by the
road in the first three stanzas. What kind of landscape
does he describe?
Identify and list the adjectives Williams uses in the first
three stanzas. How do these adjectives contribute to
the tone of the first half of the poem?
“Contagious hospital” is a colloquial term meaning a
hospital for people with contagious diseases. What
does the reference to “the contagious hospital” add to
the poem?
If we read “contagious” as an adjective that modifies
hospital, and not as a kind of hospital, what other
meaning can we get from that phrase?
The first three stanzas are about plants. The pronoun
in line 16, however, might refer to more than plants.
What broader meaning might the word they have?
“Spring and All”
•
•
•
•
•
Williams was also an obstetrician, and he delivered
thousands of babies in his lifetime. How does that fact
change your impression of the last three stanzas?
What specific references would apply equally to the
coming of spring and the birth of an infant?
Look closely at the last stanza. What two meanings of
the word still make line 25 a paradox?
Look very closely at the last line of the poem. Do you
see anything interesting about it? Why do you think
Williams might have chosen to end the poem this way?
What overall meaning, theme, or message can you
read into this poem?
[look at the title]
e.e. cummings
• This guy really shook
things up.
• Experimental painter.
• WWI—volunteer
ambulance driver;
wrongly imprisoned
• After the war, went to
Paris to study art
• Experiments in syntax
and typography.
“since feeling is first”
• Sets up a number of dualities
• Is simultaneously:
– 1) a love poem, and
– 2) a poem about poetry (ironically, the
inadequacy of language)
“in just—”
• Critics have identified the balloon man as “a rendition of
Pan, the god of the goatherds and shepherds. A goat-man,
he was akin to the satyrs; like them, he inhabited the
thickets, forests, and mountains, all places of wilderness.
Upon his reed pipe (called a Panpipe), this lesser god
played music for the dancing nymphs. Like the satyrs, he
loved the nymphs but was rejected because of his ugly
appearance: cleft foot and deformed and aging body. He
was a lecher whose pursuits of nymphs such as Echo,
Pithys, and Syrinx are well-recounted in classical literature.
The haunts that he frequented, the urges and appetites
that impelled him, and the distinctive cleft foot all
profoundly affected later Christian conceptions of the devil,
whose humanoid appearance in art resembles that of Pan
and the satyrs....”
“O sweet spontaneous”
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Cummings takes issue with the way three groups of
people treat the earth. What are these three groups?
How do they treat the Earth?
[Cummings portrays them as dirty old men!]
List the adjectives in the first four stanzas of the poem.
Which nouns do they describe? What does a study of
the adjectives tell us about the meaning of the poem?
Why is death Earth’s “rhythmic lover”?
What does death have to do with spring? How is
spring Earth’s answer to “them”?
Look closely at the form of the poem: how does it
create the poem’s meaning?
“anyone lived in a pretty how town”
•
Structuring elements:
–
•
•
•
•
•
refrains and repeated grammatical patterns, repetition of
parentheses
Complete grammatical chaos! Adverbs, nouns,
adjectives—everything all switched around
What kind of story is narrated in “anyone lived in a
pretty how town”? Who are the main characters?
Notice that Cummings repeats the names of seasons,
but rotates them each time. Why might he have done
this?
Why is it that only the children perceive that no one
loved anyone?
What does Cummings mean when he says of the
children: “down they forgot as up they grew”?
T.S. Eliot
• Born in St. Louis in 1888;
father was chancellor of
Wash U.
• Moved to London just
before WWI
• New Criticism, objective
correlative
• Scholar
• British subject
• Nobel Prize
• “Prufrock” first published
in 1915 in Poetry
magazine
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
• The most Modernist poem we’ve read!
• A dramatic monologue
– A type of poem in which a speaker addresses a silent
listener.
– a poem written as a speech
• stream of consciousness: a writing technique
that depicts a character’s random flow of
thoughts, feelings, and perceptions
• The critic Laurence Perrine wrote that Prufrock
"presents the apparently random thoughts going
through a person's head within a certain time
interval, in which the transitional links are
psychological rather than logical."
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
• The title: it’s all about dry humor.
• Translation of the epigraph: If I thought my
answer were to one who could return to
the world, I would not reply, but as none
ever did return alive from this depth,
without fear of infamy I answer thee.
– Spoken by Count Guido da Montefeltro, a Damned
Soul in the Eighth Circle of Hell in Dante's Divine
Comedy, the Inferno, Canto 27, Lines 61-66.
Review for Modernism Test!
• You must know the authors and titles of
the poems!
– Ezra Pound
• “In a Station of the Metro”
• “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”
– William Carlos Williams
• “The Red Wheelbarrow”
• “This is Just to Say”
• “Spring and All”
Review for Modernism Test!
– e.e. cummings
•
•
•
•
•
“l(a”
“since feeling is first”
“anyone lived in a pretty how town”
“in just-”
“O sweet spontaneous”
– T.S. Eliot
• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Review for Modernism Test!
• Make sure you thoroughly understand
Modernism and Imagism, as well as:
– Their relationship to each other
– Their relationship to other literary movements
– The historical context
• The 5 changes to which modernism was a
response
• Terms:
– Pound’s theory of the image
– objective correlative
Review for Modernism Test!
• Know the Modernism and Imagism
handout!
– the 8 characteristics of Modernism
– Eliot’s “Few Don’ts for an Imagist”