1914 1945 Characteristics of Modern Poetry A blanket

1914 -1945

Characteristics of Modern Poetry • A blanket condemnation of modern life and modern society • The confident bourgeois world before 1914 has been irrevocably shattered, and the modernist poet believes that the collapse of modern civilization into vulgarity and triviality presages the complete dissolution of Western culture.

Characteristics of Modern Poetry • Autonomy of the individual and the poem • Living in the midst of chaos, the modern poet abandons all hope of social structure and contemplates essentially the role of life for the isolated individual. Each poem is therefore an island unto itself, not to be related to other works but solely to its own evocation.

Characteristics of Modern Poetry • The private symbol • The loss of any conscious universal symbols in our fragmented society results in the purely personal symbol, often incomprehensible to the uninitiated and failing to communicate to many readers.

Characteristics of Modern Poetry • Purposeful difficulty • As T. S. Eliot states, “A confused and complicated age requires comparable expression, not a false simplification. ”

Characteristics of Modern Poetry • Tension • Modern poetry emphasizes tension rather than seeking the time-honored resolution of it through poetry. Such verse tends to disturb rather than soothe, reflecting the contemporary temper instead of placating it.

Characteristics of Modern Poetry • Irrationality • • Regarding as grotesquely naïve the pre-1914 belief in man as a creature capable of solving his problems rationally, modern poets tend to write by free association (though their revisions are frequently quite cerebral). Ideally, modern poetry consists solely of symbolic and descriptive images, ignoring the propositional, the denotative, and the explicit.

Characteristics of Modern Poetry • Myth • Not conscious but unconscious symbols, archetypes from the collective unconscious of man, fascinate modern poets. Tapping such deep veins of hidden emotive concepts constitutes the means of a communications with others.

Characteristics of Modern Poetry • Aggressive unpopularity • Modern poetry has sought to create a new elite, since the 19 th-century bourgeois triumph obliterated the old stratification of society. Jose Orgtega y Gasset (Spanish Philosopher) explains recent 20 th-century as “the art of a privileged aristocracy of finer senses” united less by aesthetic theory than by scorn for the nonintellectual masses.

Characteristics of Modern Poetry Defiantly Urban contemporary The nature escape of the Georgians is blatantly scorned, as the subject now is the tortured spirit in the industrialized jungle. Modern poets in their language frequently spout the idiom of today. Instead of the traditional poetic emphasis upon the cosmic, moderns concern themselves with the everyday.

Characteristics of Modern Poetry Unceasing experiment in form and technique Modern poets have vastly increased the scope of poetry by subjects, allusions, and phrasings never previously deemed appropriate to poetry. Daring rhythms and irregular metrical patterns have often created an exciting freshness unknown to earlier verse. Some modern poetry has explored perhaps the limits of verbal magic and mood, minimizing rational content.

Characteristics of Modern Poetry emphasizes the individuality of the author, while at the same time the author often hides behind a persona, or "mask of the self"; stresses interior modes of consciousness while exhibiting "a concern to objectify the subjective" (Bradbury 48 --think of imagism). Poems often allude to past cultures and avoid the formulaic and generic (e. g. , Richard Watson Gilder). Sometimes one poem will feature many voices or personae (e. g. , The Waste Land) from various time periods and social classes