Modernism and free verse

Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

POETIC FORMS & GENRES

Modernism and Free Verse


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.


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.


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)


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!'


'IN A STATION OF THE METRO' (POUND)

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.


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.


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.


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)


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:


'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...:


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...


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....


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...


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.


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....


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 -


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

Modernism and free verse

Education

Transcript of Modernism and free verse