Modern Poetry

After the naturalistic poetry of the British Romanticism, Modern Poetry found its form within the constructs of warfare, social upheaval and industrial evolution. Poets found their works as a means of expressing opinions and making social contribution. No longer was it fitting to simply view the world as a whole, as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but to view the microcosm of life in their work. As James Longenbach states, poetry of the modern age became a means of artistic social commentary. "As art came to seem divorced from the culture at large, the work of the ivory tower rather than the community, artists paradoxically put greater pressure on art to perform substantive social work" (Longenbach 103). T.S. Eliot deconstructed the world of J. Alfred Prufrock in his poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Ezra Pound waged war against warfare in On Being Asked for a War Poem. Poets found their work to be equally artistic and persuasive to social events.

Where the British Romantics wanted to idolizes the natural state of affairs, the Modern poets were determined to show the honesty of their world, often leaving the world of idealized notions of fancy for a harsher, bleaker reality of the new industrialized world. American Wallace Stevens is a fine example. "And it is true that, throughout his career, Stevens returns almost obsessively to a vision of the world that is untouched by human feeling, a world in which the otherness of the world grows not only stark but oddly compelling" (Longenbach 113). Stevens first published a block of war poems, though he was inactive within the First World War; however, he felt compelled to pen works which demonstrated the gravity and harshness of warfare.

As Peter Childs notes, literature during this time was breaking new ground, forging into areas where poets had not ventured into with such brutal and confusing honesty. "Typical aspects to this kind of 'Modernist' writing are radical aesthetics, technical experimentation, spatial or rhythmic rather than chronological form, self-conscious reflexiveness, skepticism towards the idea of centered human subject, and a sustained inquiry into the uncertainty of reality" (Childs, 18). In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Eliot examines the deconstructive nature of reality by juxtaposing the idea of a love poem with a grim subject. Eliot explores the notion of decay and self-reflection within the poem: "Do I dare/Disturb the universe?/In a minute there is time/For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." (Eliot, 45-48). Much like his contemporaries, Eliot uses his work as a means of commenting on the impending doom of life and death, social upheaval and identity loss.

Much like the poets of the Modernist period, the novelists saw fit to use their works as a means of expressing the growing social and philosophical concern of the human condition. Henry James used the fledging psychological science to illuminate his ghost story The Turn of the Screw. Gertrude Stein peppered her novel Three Lives with racial, gender and social inequalities, all through the eyes of three women in the Baltimore area. James Joyce offered the political and religious drama A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a view into the Modern Irish family and the tension that religion and politics places at the family dinner table. D.H. Lawrence's own self-awareness brought to life his characters in Women in Love and gave them the opportunity to explore the human condition through love relationships. Each of them focused their own beliefs and opinions on their works, giving the audience characters of confusion and intrigue, which further pushed the envelope of the Modernist principle: just how real is reality? Childs explains the Modernist movement as the artists saw it: "Each presented a different way of viewing reality. In fiction new writers spearheaded a rejection of several of the fundamentals of classic realism, such as: a dependable narrator; the depiction of a fixed stable self; history as a progressive linear process; bourgeois politics, which advocated reform not radical change; the typing up of all narrative strands, or 'closure'" (Childs 22). Modernist writers threw out the rules and created their own, by allowing the audience to sit uncomfortably in a reality which was ever present, while impressing the needs of social reform. They allowed the audience to think for their selves; instead of offering a linear package, neatly tied up in idealistic hope and romantic notions.

Modernist poetry manages to artistically demonstrate the need for social reform. Longenbach finishes his essay with a thought on the legacy of Modernism. "Fifty years from now, whatever postmodern modern will appear to have been, it will not have been other than what modern poetry wished or found it necessary to become" (Longenbach 125-6). Just as Romanticism paved the way for the Modernist movement, so has Modernism opened the door for postmodern poetry and the movements which follow. Modernism kicked down the door of idealism and natural reference, allowing the surrealistic sunlight of the nineteenth century to radiate through literature. Writers seized the opportunity to pull back the blinds of romanticism and show the dirty, albeit intriguing, daily life of modern man.
WORKS CITED

Childs, Peter. Modernism. Routledge Abingdon, Oxon, 2000.

Eliot, T.S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Reading About the World, Volume 2. Paul Brians, Mary Gallwey, Douglas Hughes, Azfar Hussain, Richard Law, Michael Myers, Michael Neville, Roger Schlesinger, Alice Spitzer, and Susan Swan, Ed. Harcourt Brace College Publishing, San Diego, California,1998.

Longenbach, James. "Modern Poetry". The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Michael Levenson, Ed. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, United