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“The English novelist Virginia Woolf declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about December 1910." The statement testifies to the modern writer's fervent desire to break with the past, rejecting literary traditions that seemed outmoded and diction that seemed too genteel to suit an era of technological breakthroughs and global violence.”
Modernist poetry often is difficult for students to analyze and understand. A primary reason students feel a bit disoriented when reading a modernist poem is that the speaker himself is uncertain about his or her own ontological bearings. Indeed, the speaker of modernist poems characteristically wrestles with the fundamental question of “self,” often feeling fragmented and alienated from the world around him. In other words, a coherent speaker with a clear sense of himself/herself is hard to find in modernist poetry, often leaving students confused and “lost.”
Such ontological feelings of fragmentation and alienation, which often led to a more pessimistic and bleak outlook on life as manifested in representative modernist poems such as T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917), were prompted by fundamental and far-reaching historical, social, cultural, and economic changes in the early 1900s. These changes transformed the world from one that seemed ordered and stable to one that felt futile and chaotic.
Quick and dirty . . . • Check out the poet and the date on the poem before you even read it: • If the poet lived between 1870 and 1930 • And is British or American • THEN: the poem is likely a modernist poem
Part II • An effective way for you to think about the modernist subject and corresponding individual feelings of fragmentation and alienation is to examine avant-garde paintings from the same period.
Can you identify the subject of Duchamp’s painting? Do you have problems identifying the subject? Why or why not? • What adjectives can be used to describe the subject of the painting? • How are time, space, and movement depicted in this painting? • Thinking about the poems you read - does the point of view in the painting more resemble a Romantic or modern sensibility? Why?
