Modern Art and Poetry

The birth of the Modern era saw so extensive and broad a restructuring of cultural values and their media as to merit classification as a renaissance. This Modern Renaissance was defined by simultaneous revolutions in literature and the visual arts, and acted at once as a barometer for the era's turbulent change (such as the incalculable impact of the First World War on society) and as a precipitant of cultural trends (consider the impact of new movements in art upon the collective conscious). Arguably, this reciprocal relationship between art and society has existed as long as art itself has, and will continue to do so. Art reacts to culture and culture reacts to art. It is the extremity of the evolution seen in both the sociopolitical climate and in art, however, that distinguishes the Modern era from preceding periods.

At the close of World War I in 1918, it was widely recognized as the deadliest war in the history of the world. Resulting in over 40 million casualties and over 20 million deaths, as well as the dissipation of several empires, the so-called "Great War" left the political and social landscape of the world irrevocably altered. Consider the coincidence of the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak that killed over 50 million with the latter months of a conflict that had already wreaked death and loss on an unprecedented scale and it is easy to understand the sense of disillusionment that gripped the involved nations. The world was ripe for change.

That change came in manifold forms. On one end of the spectrum, citizens of the affected nations began to cast off the values that had defined the late 19^th and early 20^th century. The nationalism that was the perceived cause of involvement in the war was replaced by an increasing sense of globalism, as reflected by the establishment of the League of Nations in 1919. In place of the sense of optimism and progress that had charged industrializing nations during the first decade of the 20^th century, there arose a sense of deep-abiding disillusionment and cynicism, and a longing to return to simpler, more natural times. In place of traditional religious values, there arose a sense of nihilism. Virtually every foundation of faith upon which Modern society had been founded came under fire. On the other hand, many began to adopt a still more militaristic, reactionary view, valuing military power as the sole deterrent to future conflicts.

However, the voice of the period, namely the artists, the poets, and the writers that transfixed the public eye, seems to tell the former story: that of the disillusioned, the unhomed, the "Lost Generation" still bloody and reeling in the furrow of destruction. The artistic response was understandably varied, and each of its many manifestations offers a different perspective and a unique form of cultural catharsis.

Wilfred Owen, the best known poet of the First World War, captures the bitterness and disillusionment of his generation through his best-known poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est." Writing of his own traumatic experiences with trench and chemical warfare, he asserts that, had proponents of the war effort born witness to what he had, they would not tell "To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori." The Roman saying, translating roughly to "it is sweet and right to die for one's country," was commonly employed by patriots to support the war effort and instill in it a sense of honor and heroism. Owen's savagely ironic treatment of the adage, however, speaks to the growing sense of disgust with the war and such unthinking patriotism. More ironic still were the circumstances of the poet's own death: Just one week before the signing of the treaty of Versailles, Owen was killed in action. His poetry and the circumstances of his death became emblematic of society's rejection of pro-war dogma, and influenced poets writing in the post-war climate.

Ezra Pound, one of the most widely-known modern poets, responded less directly to the horrors of war, choosing instead to explore its effects and those of a consequently evolving society on the nature of art. Through his long poem, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," considered to mark the turning point in his career, Pound both encapsulates and castigates the Modern artistic renaissance. Conscious of the fact that every age gives rise to its own vision of art, he simultaneously laments and acknowledges the prevalence of what he saw as the bastardization of Modern art from the legacy of the more Classical institutions of form and rhyme:

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace,

Something for the modern stage,

Not, at any rate, an Attic grace ("Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," II.1-4).

By describing the Modern age as bearing an "accelerated grimace," Pound displays his innate understanding of the Modern condition. In one regard, he alludes to the overwhelming tone of loss and bitterness that defined British culture in 1920; the nation was in mourning for years over the nearly one million lives lost, and the social landscape reflected that. However, by referring to that grimace as "accelerated," Pound also displays his distaste for what he perceived to be the increasingly philistine and consumerist nature of the public, and the increasingly shoddy and formless nature of the art that it seemed to demand.

In one sense, Pound's lament serves as his acknowledgment that his own poetic style had, hitherto, belonged to an earlier generation, one whose conception of art is now dead. He likens his former attempts to "resuscitate the dead art / of poetry" to being "bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn." This metaphor implies both the futility of such efforts and the disparity between the nature of his poetry and the environment in which he wrote it. His poetry, in its attempts to mimic the "Attic Grace" of a bygone era, more closely resembled the exotic lilies of the Classical and Chinese landscapes featured in much of his earlier work than the rugged, plain oak tree poetry that the American landscape and the Modern age demanded.

As one of the key players in the Imagist movement (1910-1917) and Vorticism (1913-1915), Pound would have been highly conscious of contemporary visual artistic movements, as well as those in literature. At its height from 1915-1921, Dada pushed the bounds of art, shattering conventional European aesthetics. It was considered an "anti-art" movement, in that its proponents hoped that, by destroying the traditional restrictions of European aesthetics, it would also strike a blow to traditional culture.

Francis Picabia said of the New York Dada movement, "A very important item is the fact that, in America, work of an artistic nature is possible where it is utterly impossible in Europe today. The war has killed the art of the continent entirely" (Kuenzli 3). Thus, avant-garde, especially New York Dadaist works existed as a direct counter-culture movement to conventional European art. According to Peter B�rger, professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Bremen, this bucking of tradition represents two manifestations of the Modern desire to cast off the societal values of the majority culture: "an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society," and on "art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men" (Rainey 10).

Despite the lofty ambitions of Dadaism, it would seem that by 1920 and the writing of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly," Pound had largely lost faith in many of the more experimental art forms. Pound's "prose kinema" undoubtedly refers to the trend in poetry away from form, meter, and rhyme in favor of free verse. Pound himself had labored to further the field of free verse during his involvement in the Imagist movement, one defined by the paring down of poetry to its sparest and least verbose form in imitation of forms like the haiku. However, considering the publication of "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" in 1920, and the ending of the Imagist movement in 1917, Pound's admission that he had striven "for three years, out of key with his time" ("Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," I.1) would seem to imply a disillusion with his efforts to promote an unsuccessful medium.

Correspondingly, Pound expresses his distaste for what he sees as the loss of the sense of craftsmanship that had defined earlier poetic works. In its place he sees art and literature defined by materialism and poor taste, more interested in that which can be mass produced and easily assimilated, and enjoyed with a minimum of effort or thought. It is fitting, then, that the imagery he employs to renounce his foray into free verse in favor of more formal poetic forms alludes to contemporary movements in visual art. Through his claim that the age demanded "A prose kinema, not, surely, alabaster / Or the sculpture of rhyme," he likens the perceived bastardization of poetry to that of visual arts like sculpture and paint. Pound's "mould in plaster, / Made with no loss of time" calls to mind the ready-mades and found art of New York Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp, particularly, his "Fountain," a nonfunctioning urinal.

Upon his arrival in the United States in 1915, Marcel Duchamp discovered that there were numerous English terms that had no exact French counterpart. One such term was "ready-made," one that he quickly adopted to describe the nature of his artwork. He was drawn to it both because it implied that his art was found in a complete state, and because of the ready-made garments of the American fashion industry. Now, in addition to the implications of industry and mass production lent to his art objects by his French term, "le tout fait, en s�ries�rie," benefitteditted from the idea that their purpose and meaning was just as subjective as fashKuenzlienzli 52).

Ezra Pound, however, while emblematic of modernism, valued craftsmanship and appreciated form, as evidenced by poem II in "SelwyneMauberleyerley" in particular. Pound's contemporary, Robert Frost, shared his views on the subject when he said, "Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down." Like Pound, and perhaps even more so, Frost placed great emphasis on rhyme and meter, and the majority of his poetry reflects that.

Frost's poetry represents a different reaction to the societal changes manifested in the wake of the First World War from Pound's. His poems generally evoke the pastoral, and feature an affectionate regard for nature. The speaker is generally homely, versed in the language of lifestyle in rural New England. Awarded four Pulitzer prizes over the course of his career, Frost was a highly celebrated and popular American poet. This was likely due to the apparently innocuous, rustic themes of his poetry, which stood in contrast to the avantagardegarde and overtly dark poetry of his contemporaries.

The tranquil tone and subject matter of Frost's poetry tap into a central desire of an early 20^th century audience: to reclaim the ethos of a simpler, more innocent time. During his lifetime, he faced criticism for what some of his contemporaries considered to be the excessively mild, inoffensive nature of his work, particularly during times of political upheaval and radicalism. Frost was well aware of this critique, and did nothing to explicitly dispel it, acknowledging instead that he preferred the "middle way." In this way, Frost appealed to the honest, average man, the true blue American, and this appeal is what has earned him his legacy as one of America's most oft-quoted poets of all time.

However, Frost's apparent avoidance of the darker, deeper themes of human existence don't indicate an ignorance of them on his part. In fact, Robert Frost was living in England at the time of the outbreak of World War I, where he met and befriended a number of his contemporaries, including Ezra Pound. In 1915, on the threshold of the war, Frost travelled back overseas with his family and settled on a farm in New England. This move, too, seems indicative of his purposeful avoidance of the darker side of human existence.

However, a closer examination of Frost's works reveal a innate understanding of the dark and ugly things that underlie human life. For instance, in his poem, "I Will Sing You One-O," Frost concludes the long poem, seemingly a simple, introspective piece on waking to a clock chime in the early hours of the morning, with a striking passage. In reference to the star upon which the narrative gaze focuses, Frost writes,

It has not changed

To the eye of man

On planets over

Around and under

It in creation

Since man began

To drag down man

And nation natLathemathem 220).

Here, Frost insinuates this apparently innocuous, dream-like poem with a deceptively subtle conclusion: that for all the years since mankind's birth, for all the untold millions that may be killed in wars like the First World War, and for all the nations that may fall, the stars in the sky remain unchanged, and thus unmoved. It is a chilling reminder of humanity's impermanence and infinitesimal significance in the scheme of existence, one seemingly out of keeping with Frost's traditional themes of naturerusticismicism. However, it is merely one example of his subtle nods toward the Modern condition, slipped unseen, like a pill in a sandwich, to the unsuspecting subconscious of his American audience. In this way, Frost's vision of the Modern world is, in fact, the most effective, as it is the most widely-read.

Regardless of their many approaches, the artists and poets of the Modern era acted as the voice for a society all but undone by the deadliest war in recent history. By acting in conjunction with one another to both create and reflect social trends, these prophets of the new world served to usher their societies over the threshold into the new world, one forever changed by the fall of innocence and optimism. In one way or another, the face of the world today has been influenced by their voices, and will never be the same.

SourcLathem

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RaiRaineyawrence. Institutions of Modernism. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1998.