Download - Modernism and free verse
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POETIC FORMS & GENRES
Modernism and Free Verse
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THE 'MODERN PERIOD' IN LITERATURE
Abrams identifies this as dating from c. 1914 onwards.
'Modernism' the cultural and intellectual movement refers to particular progressive forms, techniques and ideas which emerged in the decades before 1914.
Modernist authors include James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
Stravinsky (musician); Picasso (Painter) Not all art or literature produced during the
modern period is modernist.
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MODERNISM Jeffrey Wainwright:
Modernism: In literature and the other arts, a loose,
experimental movement in the twentieth century which
sought to break with preceding styles. In poetry, modernism
made formal challenges to such long-standing features as the
verse-line, rhyme and stanza, initiating 'Free verse'. Also
conventional narrative coherence was sometimes replaced by
jump-cut juxtaposition of incidents without clear time-
sequence or conclusion. Further, the assumed single speaking
'I' dissolves into a more elusive voice or voices, sometimes
seemingly speaking from the unconscious as well as conscious
mind, or from a characterised voice or persona.
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BACKGROUND TO MODERNISM
Break up of the old order and the old society Industrialization and urbanization Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution Karl Marx's critique of Capitalism Sigmund Freud's theory of the Unconscious. First World War (1914-1918) European and transnational movement (US)
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IMAGIST POETRY 'the starting point of modern poetry'
(T.S.Eliot) Generally regarded as the first Modernist
poetic movement. Favoured precision of imagery; rejected
sentiment and discursiveness. Rejected the traditional forms of poetry. 'To Break the Pentameter, that was the first
heave' (Ezra Pound) 'Make it New!'
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'IN A STATION OF THE METRO' (POUND)
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.
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ASPECTS OF LITERARY MODERNISM Self-consciousness, experimentation New techniques such as the Stream of
Consciousness Fragmentation in structuring literary works Lack of a single authoritative viewpoint. Could be replaced by unreliable narrator or
multiple points of view. Fragmentation in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land;
Ezra Pound's Cantos.
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THE WASTE LAND (T.S. ELIOT, 1922)
One of the most important poems of the 20th century
Tonal shifts include: satire, prophecy, elegy Jumps between places, voices, times and
register.
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VOICES IN PT 1 INCLUDE: Memoir of Countess Marie Larisch The Bible (Old Testament) John Donne's religious writing Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (Libretto) Tarot Card reading Baudelaire Dante Elizabethan dramatist John Webster 'These fragments have I shored against my
ruin' (Eliot)
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FREE VERSE Also known as 'open form' or 'vers libre' Lineated but not organised by meter or any
other strict patterning device Most free verse has irregular line lengths
and lacks rhyme Remember: don't confuse free verse with
blank verse! Blank verse is unrhyming iambic pentameter.
It can help to think of broad different categories of free verse:
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'FREE BLANK VERSE' Critic Philip Hobsbaum devised this term: it
refers to free verse that has echoes of traditional iambic pentameter. Much of T.S. Eliot's poetry is a good example...:
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FROM GERONTION (T.S. ELIOT)After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon...
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LONG LINE The long lyrical line of some free verse
poetry can be traced back to the authorized version of the Bible (1611). From the Song of Songs:
Behold thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast
dove's eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats,
that appear from mount Gilead.
Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; wherof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them.
Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely;
Thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks.
Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury,
whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men....
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FROM WALT WHITMAN 'SONG OF MYSELF' (1855)I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself
to you, And you must not be abased to the other.
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice...
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers...
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FROM 'SNAKE' (D.H. LAWRENCE, 1923)
Someone was before me at my water-trough,And I, like a second comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment, And stooped and drank a little more,Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
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FROM 'HOWL'(ALLEN GINSBERG, 1955)
Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the
machinery of night...who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the
scholars of war,who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning
their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise
Alley....
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Minimal lines used by US poet William Carlos Williams (and others) : 'I didn't go in for long lines'
Of death
the barber
the barber
talked to me
cutting my
life with
sleep to trim
my hair -
it's just
a moment
he said, we die
every night -
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E.E. CUMMINGS, 'PORTRAIT' Bufallo Bill’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what I want to know is
how do you like your blueyed boy
Mister Death