Introduction+-+Modernism+-+Origins+and+Directions

__**//“Modernism: Origins and Directions”//**__

This anthology of poems has been compiled for a Year 11 Advanced English class who have a passion for the subject of English and are highly capable students. The anthology presents a poetic ‘timeline’ focused around the era of Modernism (1910 - 1940), to show student’s where and why the movement began, and where it has ended up. The anthology has been structured in this way to show students that literary movements do not exist in isolation; indeed, that they are always born of the movement which directly precedes their own. So whilst Modernism was born of the Romantic period in literary history, neomodernism or ‘post’ modernism happened as a result of the Modernist period in literature and art.

The twelve poems selected have been spread equally across the three eras. The four poems from the romantic period have been chosen because they contain strong images of romantic ideals such as nature, love, beauty and Heaven. //‘Strange fits of passion have I known’// and //So we’ll go no more a roving’// have as their central image the moon or stars. Women were often compared to the moon, love was paralleled to the stars, and we see an interesting play on this in Eliot's //'The Hollow Men'//, which repetitively describes stars as 'fading' and 'dying'. Here we see an example of the transition from idyllic romanticism to more cynical modernism.

After //‘The Hollow Men’// are three more modernist poems: //‘Lullaby’// by W.H. Auden, //'In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'// by Thomas Hardy and //‘The Ship of Death’// by D.H. Lawrence. These three poems have been selected so that students are able to visualise the key concepts of the modernist movement; cynicism, pessimism and the revolt against modernity and the machine. Modernist poetry experiments with perspective, voice, imagery and tradition. //‘The Hollow Men‘// explores the disillusionment with the future of mankind; it expresses disdain and hopelessness, creating images of empty men stuffed with straw, and dead lands under fading stars. “//This is the way the world ends / not with a bang but a whimper”.//

The poems selected for the neo/post modern section of the anthology begin with Allen Ginsberg’s //‘Howl’//, one of the Beat era’s signature poems. It explores the same issues found in //‘The Hollow Men’// but is far more experimental with its form, language and structure. It is a stream of consciousness poem rich with imagery: “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”. //‘For Emily (Dickinson)’, ‘The Language’// and //‘Raw with Love’// are free verse poems that use language experimentally and break with the ‘tradition’ of Romantic and Modernist poetry; for though modernism sought to criticize the romantic form of poetry it was still rich in tradition and often sought to be purposefully difficult. Neomodernism then, seeks to do away with tradition and meld poetry in with popular culture, easy for the masses to access.