Modernism Poetry Essay

Shoyam Rishikesh
Assignment
MA (final) English
29th October 2014 The modernist perspective is shaped by the catastrophe of the First World War. The redemption that romantics hope is absent in modernists. While romantics are seekers, modernists are not happy people. The new ways of narrative that modernists attempt stems from the longing and desire for something new. Modernist literature destabilises the reader. They are aware of their surroundings and the reality they live in. So they never drown in one particular emotion. Modernists present a loss of a secure sense of a common world. The public view of what is considerable in human action is altered. Man’s sense of community is lost and this breeds a kind of alienation that produces

The struggle for honest self expression became more urgent and explicit at this period. The most striking fact in literature of this era is the revolution of poetic taste and practice. The poet is no longer the sweet singer whose function was to render in verse and an imagery drawn with great selectivity from nature and self-indulged personal emotion. He is now the explorer of experience who uses language in order to build up rich patterns of meaning unfolded by using abrupt contrasts and eliminating overt statements. The imagery in W.B. Yeats’ poetry gave way to a handling of folklore and themes deriving from his deep sense of a basic dichotomy in the universe. His poems show a new hardness and irony. “Byzantium” haunts the mind and probes emotions as no other English poet had done. The theme of the poem is the attempt to escape from old age and decay by escaping altogether from the world of biological change to the timeless world of art symbolized by Byzantium. The poet subdues the flesh in the spirit, the world of nature is left behind for the glory of changeless metal but even as the hopes for a stable world of love, hope and comfort that does not change, he accepts that art is after all nourished by the very world of growth and change. “Byzantium” turns out to be a poem not only about life and death but also about the balance of art, the

All forms of literary genres go through major explorations in the later part of the twentieth century. The decade of the First World War is also a decade of experimentation and exploration in art form. The difference in private thoughts and public gestures obviously heightens men’s loneliness in a time of war and revolution. With the mainstream institutions and public gestures becoming increasingly meaningless, the individuals couldn’t communicate on a genuine basis. Essentially, the task of the poet of the twentieth century has been to accept that the bases of the world that he lives in is constantly changing and that he lives in a time of dangerous shifting and that he cannot fixate on stability. There may be no similarity in form of the poems of this time but there is a sense of coherence in the use of different styles in language that echoes the right mindsets of the modernists. The readers of modernist literature have to learn to read unfinished or unconnected or chronologically distorted works. But this is the essence of modernism. This use of language by the modernists reflects their states of mind which are disoriented and confused by the lack of communication on a real basis and the chaotic world they live