, one of the most influential modernist poets The roots of English-language poetic modernism can be traced back to the works of a number of earlier writers, including
Walt Whitman, whose long lines approached a type of free verse, the
prose poetry of
Oscar Wilde,
Robert Browning's subversion of the poetic self,
Emily Dickinson's compression and the writings of the early English
Symbolists, such as
Arthur Symons. These poets largely remained true to the basic tenets of the Romantic movement and the appearance of the
Imagists marked the first emergence of a distinctly modernist poetic in the language. Poetic sonic effects selected for verbal and aural felicity, not just images selected for their visual evocativeness also became an influential poetic device of modernism.
Imagism '', published by
Ezra Pound in 1915 in 1917; in 1911, Ezra Pound cultivated her and
Richard Aldington as major forces in the launch of the modernist poetry movement. The origins of
Imagism and cubist poetry are found in two poems by
T. E. Hulme, published in 1909 by the
Poets' Club in London. Hulme was a student of mathematics and philosophy who had established the Poets' Club to discuss his theories of poetry. The poet and critic
F. S. Flint, who was a champion of
free verse and modern French poetry, was highly critical of the club and its publications. From the ensuing debate, Hulme and Flint became close friends. They started meeting with other poets at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in
Soho to discuss reform of contemporary poetry through
free verse and the
tanka and
haiku and the removal of all unnecessary verbiage from poems. The American poet
Ezra Pound was introduced to this group and they found that their ideas resembled his. In 1911, Pound introduced two other poets,
H.D. and
Richard Aldington, to the Eiffel Tower group. Both of these poets were students of the early
Greek lyric poetry, especially the works of
Sappho. In October 1912, he submitted three poems each by H.D. and Aldington under the rubric
Imagiste to
Poetry magazine. That month Pound's book
Ripostes was published with an appendix called
The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme, which carried a note that saw the first appearance of the word
Imagiste in print. Aldington's poems were in the November issue of
Poetry and H.D.'s in January 1913 and Imagism as a movement was launched. The March issue contained Pound's ''A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste'' and Flint's
Imagisme. The latter contained this succinct statement of the group's position: • Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective. • To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. • As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the
metronome. • Complete freedom of subject matter. • Free verse was encouraged along with other new rhythms. • Common speech language was used, and the exact word was always to be used, as opposed to the almost exact word. In setting these criteria for poetry, the Imagists saw themselves as looking backward to the best practices of pre-
Romantic writing. Imagistic poets used sharp language and embraced imagery. Their work, however, was to have a revolutionary impact on English-language writing for the rest of the 20th century. In 1913, Pound was contacted by the widow of the recently deceased Orientalist
Ernest Fenollosa, who while in Japan had collected word-by-word translations and notes for 150 classical Chinese poems that fit in closely with this program. Chinese grammar offers different expressive possibilities from English grammar, a point that Pound later made. In Chinese, the first line of
Li Po's, called "Rihaku" by Fenollosa's Japanese informants, poem "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter," is a spare, direct juxtaposition of five characters that appear in Fenollosa's notes as mistress hair first cover browIn his resulting 1915
Cathay, Pound rendered this in simple English as While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead Between 1914 and 1917, four anthologies of Imagist poetry were published. In addition to Pound, Flint, H.D. and Aldington, these included work by
Skipwith Cannell,
Amy Lowell,
William Carlos Williams,
James Joyce,
Ford Madox Ford,
Allen Upward,
John Cournos,
D. H. Lawrence and
Marianne Moore. With a few exceptions, this represents a roll-call of English-language modernist poets of the time. After the 1914 volume, Pound distanced himself from the group and the remaining anthologies appeared under the editorial control of Amy Lowell. Lowell expressed her extreme debt to the French, to what she preferred to call "unrhymed cadence" instead of the more common "verse libre." Henry Gore (1902–1956), whose work is undergoing something of a revival was also heavily influenced by the Imagist movement, although from a different generation from H.D., Flint, and others.
World War I and after The outbreak of
World War I represented a setback for the budding modernist movement for several reasons. First, writers like Aldington found themselves in active service; second, paper shortages and related factors meant that publication of new work became increasingly difficult; and, third, public sentiment in time of war meant that
war poets such as
Wilfred Owen, who wrote more conventional verse, became increasingly popular. One poet who served in the war, the visual artist
David Jones, later resisted this trend in his long experimental war poem "
In Parenthesis", which was written directly out of his
trench experiences but was not published until
1937. The war also tended to undermine the optimism of the Imagists. This was reflected in a number of major poems written in its aftermath. Pound's "Homage to Sextus Propertius" (
1919) uses the loose translations and transformations of the
Latin poet
Propertius to ridicule war propaganda and the idea of empire. His
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, published in (
1921, represents his farewell to Imagism and lyric poetry in general. The writing of these poems coincided with Pound's decision to abandon London permanently.
Sound poetry emerged in this period as a response to the war. For many
Dadaists, including German writer
Hugo Ball and New York poet and performer
Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, sound poems were protestations against the sounds of war. As
Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo write, “Born as the trench warfare intensified, phonetic poetry was the language of trauma, a new language to counter the noise of the cannons”. The Baroness’s poem “Klink-Hratzvenga (Death-wail)”, written in response to her husband’s suicide after the war’s end, was “a mourning song in nonsense sounds that transcended national boundaries”. Working from a confrontational feminist and artistic agenda, the Baroness asserted a distinctly female subjectivity in the post-World War I era. The most famous English-language modernist work arising out of this post-war disillusionment is
T. S. Eliot's epic "
The Waste Land" (
1922). Eliot was an American poet who had been living in London for some time. Although he was never formally associated with the Imagist group, his work was admired by Pound, who, in 1915, helped him publish "
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which brought him to prominence. When Eliot had completed his original draft of a long poem based on both the disintegration of his personal life and mental stability, and the culture around him, he gave the manuscript, provisionally titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices", to Pound for comment. After some heavy editing, "The Waste Land" in the form in which we now know it was published, and Eliot came to be seen as the voice of a generation. The addition of notes to the published poem served to highlight the use of
collage as a literary technique, paralleling similar practice by the
cubists and other visual artists. From this point on, modernism in English tended towards a poetry of the fragment that rejected the idea that the poet could present a comfortingly coherent view of life.
T. S. Eliot's "
The Waste Land" is a foundational text of modernism, representing the moment at which Imagism moves into modernism proper. Broken, fragmented and seemingly unrelated slices of imagery come together to form a disjunctive anti-narrative. The motif of sight and vision is as central to the poem as it is to modernism; the omni-present character Tiresias acting as a unifying theme. The reader is thrown into confusion, unable to see anything but a heap of broken images. The narrator, however (in "The Waste Land" as in other texts), promises to show the reader a different meaning; that is, how to
make meaning from dislocation and fragmentation. This construction of an exclusive meaning is essential to modernism.
Others and others and brother and mothers , photographed by
Carl Van Vechten in 1948, wrote in
syllabic verse and sometimes utilized
stanza in her poems. Although London and Paris were key centres of activity for English-language modernists, much important activity took place elsewhere, including early publication in
Poetry magazine in the United States. When
Mina Loy moved to New York in 1916, she became part of a circle of writers involved with
Others: A Magazine of the New Verse which included
William Carlos Williams and
Marianne Moore, among others. This magazine, which ran from 1915 to 1919, was edited by
Alfred Kreymborg. Contributors also included Pound, Eliot,
H.D.,
Djuna Barnes,
Amy Lowell,
Conrad Aiken,
Carl Sandburg, and
Wallace Stevens. The U.S. modernist poets were concerned to create work in a distinctively American idiom. Williams, a doctor who worked in general practice in a working-class area of
Rutherford, New Jersey, explained this approach by saying that he made his poems from 'the speech of
Polish mothers'. In this, they were placing themselves in a tradition stretching back to Whitman. After her initial association with the Imagists,
Marianne Moore carved out a niche for herself among 20th-century poets. Much of her poetry is written in
syllabic verse, repeating the number of
syllables rather than stresses or beats, per line. She also experimented with
stanza forms borrowed from troubadour poetry.
Wallace Stevens' work falls somewhat outside this mainstream of modernism. Indeed, he deprecated the work of both Eliot and Pound as "mannered." His poetry is a complex exploration of the relationship between
imagination and
reality. Unlike many other modernists, but like the English
Romantics, by whom he was
influenced, Stevens thought that poetry was what all humans did; the poet was merely self-conscious about the activity. In
Scotland, the poet
Hugh MacDiarmid formed something of a one-man modernist movement. An admirer of Joyce and Pound, MacDiarmid wrote much of his early poetry in anglicised Lowland
Scots, a literary dialect which had also been used by
Robert Burns. He served in the
Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I and was invalided out in 1918. After the war, he set up a literary magazine,
Scottish Chapbook, with 'Not traditions - Precedents!' as its motto. His later work reflected an increasing interest in
found poetry and other formal innovations. In
Canada, the
Montreal Group of modernist poets, including
A.M. Klein,
A.J.M. Smith, and
F.R. Scott, formed at that city's
McGill University in the mid-1920s. Though the poets of the group made little headway for the next twenty years, they were ultimately successful in establishing a modernist
hegemony and
canon in that country that would endure until at least the end of the 20th century.
Wallace Stevens' Of Modern Poetry Wallace Stevens' essential modernist poem, "Of Modern Poetry"(1942) sounds as if the verbs are left out. The verb 'to be' is omitted from the first and final lines. The poem itself opens and closes with the act of finding. The poem and the mind become synonymous: a collapse between the poem, the act, and the mind. In the poem, the dyad becomes further collapsed into one: a spatial and a temporal collapse between the subject and the object; form and content equal each other; form becomes not simply expressive of, but constitutive of. The poem goes from being a static object to being an action. The poem of the mind has to be alternative and listening; it is experimental. The poem resists and refuses
transcendentalism, but remains within the conceptual limits of the mind and the poem. ==Maturity==