Modernism and Poetry
This will be my last post on "Modernism", even though I have not discussed anything about the death of God (part of Modernism). I have posted these particular writings because I think it is very important for people to choose wisely how they give explanation of this word, "Modernism". I believe, just as there was some pressing need for humanity to come to grips with the enormity of the destruction of life and property during both World War I and World War II of which humankind was discovered to be capable of, there is also some pressing need today to recognize the emptiness and hollowness of a culture based on consumerism, greed, instant gratification, and the rapidity of the changing masses' belief in popular culture as that which one needs to be in the know about in order to be considered in the know. There is some fearful (to me) wave that sweeps through and declares itself as the 'majority' that this is "in" and that is "out", and if the thing that is considered "out" is mentioned, it's improper to do this. Do not let us become the people watching the naked emperor and declaring "it is good" because it makes us feel part of the group. We all need to be thinking human beings, and people who ask questions.
The following are examples of what was being espoused in the early 1900s as "Modernism":
Joseph T. Shipley's Dictionary of World Literary Terms, as well as other specialized dictionaries or literary encyclopaedia, list the word "Modernism", but appear to be uninterested in the question of when and how "modernism" became a specifically literary or artistic notion. The use of "modernism" in the language of criticism is quite recent, and nothing is more difficult to deal with than recent history. It seems safe to assume that in the English-speaking countries, the terms "modernism" acquired a distinctive literary significance during the first two decades of the 20th-century.
In 1919, The Modernist: A Monthly Magazine of Modern Arts and Letters, was published for a short time. The first issue listed among the contributors such as George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, Hart Crane, Georges Duhamel. None of these contributors offered the magazine anything previously unpublished. In the first issue of the magazine, the foreword made it clear that The Modernist was more concerned with politics than with literature or the arts. Following World War I, the magazine was committed to the cause of progress, revolutionary change, and socialism. The editor, James Waldo Fawcett wrote: "every tradition, every inherited standard has been tested; many laws have been destroyed, many pretences have been abandoned…In the sky of Russia a new star has appeared, a star progressing westward, watched now by the poor and downtrodden of ever land with shining, eager eyes…The very atmosphere is electric with impending revolution, revision and reconstruction in all the affairs of life. The past is dead. Only the present is reality. We dream of the future, but we may not see it yet as it will truly be."
In The Fugitive: A Journal of Poetry, Vol. III, No 1, February, 1924, John Crowe Ransom, a person who created the label of "New Criticism" and became one of the major representatives of this movement, did not attempt to define modernism, but some of the points he made show how modernism was viewed in the early 1920s. Ransom writes: "The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape? And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined…In poetry the Imagists, in our time and place, made a valiant effort to formulate their program. Their modernist manifestos were exciting, their practice was crude…They announced at least two notable principles. In the first place, they declared for honest of theme and accuracy of expression…They conceived the first duty of the Moderns as being to disembarrass poetry of its terrible incubus of piety, in the full classical sense of that term, and they rendered the service. The second principle followed. Emphasizing the newness of the matter,…they were obliged to make their meters more elastic to accommodate their novelties…Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.
As John Crowe Ransom pointed out, against the formlessness involved by the second of these principles, there came a "sweeping reaction". The problem was to take account of the dual role of words in poetry, and "to conclude a logical sequence with their meanings on the one hand, and to realize an objective pattern with the sounds on the other". Ransom was conscious of the fact that the difficulties posed by such a strict poetics were insurmountable and were bound to lead to a situation of crisis. Although the word "crisis" does not occur in his article, this notion is clearly implied, and it is probably more important for the understanding of Ransom's concept of modernism than the actual terms in which he formulates the modern poet's predicament: "But we moderns are impatient and destructive. We forget entirely the enormous technical difficulty of the poetic art, and we examine the meaning of poems with a more and more microscopic analysis: we examine them in fact just as strictly as we examine the meanings of a prose which was composed without any handicap of metrical restrictions; and we do not obtain so readily as our fathers the ecstasy which is the total effect of poetry, the sense of miracle before the union of inner meaning and objective form. Our souls are not, in fact, in the enjoyment of full good health. For no art and no religion is possible until we make allowances…Modern poets are their own severest critics; their own documents, on second reading, have been known to induce in poets a fatal paralysis of the writing digit…The future of poetry is immense? One is not so sure in these days, since it has felt the fatal irritant of Modernism. Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet…The intelligent poet of today is very painfully perched in a position which he cannot indefinitely occupy: vulgarly, he is straddling the fence, and cannot with safety land on either side."
In 1927 Laura Riding and Robert Graves published Survey of Modernist Poetry. They defined "modernist" poetry (as distinct from "modern" poetry in the neutral chronological sense) by its wilful deviation from accepted poetic tradition, by the attempt to "free the poem of many of the traditional habits which prevented it from achieving its full significance". Seen from this point of view, the most outstanding feature of "modernist" poetry is the difficulty it presents to the average reader. Their survey is to a large extent an attempt to explain the "unpopularity of modernist poetry with the plain reader" and to point out the specifically aesthetic reasons for "the divorce of advanced contemporary poetry from the common-sense standards of ordinary intelligence."
Concerning the term "modernism" itself, Riding and Graves seem to take it for granted and as a result do not try to offer an even remotely systematic definition. The main elements for such a definition are there, however, and the reader can bring them together and work out a fairly consistent concept of modernism. The basic opposition between traditional poetry/modernist poetry is stated from the outset. Modernist poetry is also characterized as advanced ("the sophistications of advanced modern poetry", "advanced contemporary poetry"). Modernist poets like e.e. cummings, we are told, are supported by "the pressure of more advanced critical opinion". In one chapter of the book called "Modernist Poetry and Civilization" they bring forth new and helpful terminological clarifications. The authors distinguish between "genuine modernism" and the "vulgar meaning of modernism…which is modern-ness, a keeping-up in poetry with the pace of civilization and intellectual history". In a "perverted sense", modernism can become a sort of anti-traditional "tyranny, increasing contemporary mannerisms in poetry". The sense of modernism can be further perverted, the authors go on to say, by the existence of the middle class - representing "the intelligent plain-man point of view". This middle population…is the prop and advocate of civilization; and the idea of civilization as a steady human progress does not exclude the idea of a modernist, historically forward poetry. A possible rapprochement exists, therefore, between the middle population, to whom poetry is just one of the many instruments of progress, and that type of contemporary poetical writing which advertises itself by its historical progressiveness.
But surely this is false modernism. True modernism is not historically but only aesthetically forward. False modernism, then, is reducible to "faith in history", while genuine modernism is nothing more than "faith in the immediate, the new doings of poems (or poets or poetry) as not necessarily derived from history". But why call such a poetry "modernist"? Riding and Graves fail to give a satisfactory answer to this important question. The fact that the representatives of "new poetry" are called (and call themselves) modernists is more than just a matter of arbitrary preference. Is not the cult of novelty a specific product of the history of modernity? Is not the "purist" creed of some outstanding modernists an attitude toward history and specifically toward modernity? Is not modernism's anti-traditionalism an aesthetic manifestation of the characteristically modern urge for change (an urge that has been historically served by the myth of progress but that can exist outside and sometimes even in direct opposition to that myth)?
The argument of modernism's neutrality with regard to history is unconvincing, as is the opinion of Riding and Graves that the term "modernism" as applied to the innovative trends in the poetry of the 1920s is justified by little more than a subjective preference: "There is indeed, a genuine modernism which is not a part of a 'modernist' programme but a natural and personal manner and attitude in the poet to his work, and which accepts the denomination 'modernist' because it prefers it to other denominations"
At this time, it was too early for a more comprehensive critical synthesis or for a critical assessment of the concept of modernism, and yet opinions were already being formulated. The student of terminology should also consider another aspect of historical semantics that may explain why the development of an independent notion of "modernism" was rather slow in England and in the United States. This comparative slowness was partially due to the evolution of "modern" as both an adjective and a noun. When "modern" ceased to be a synonym for "contemporary", it became capable of performing the basic semantic functions of "modernism", unimpeded by the potentially pejorative or vulgar associations from which the latter term had freed itself only very recently. Thus, a large number of aesthetic theories, insights, and choices, which today we would not hesitate to describe as "modernist", went on being formulated within the broader framework of the idea of "the modern".
(Information for this blog was taken from Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, by Matei Calinescu, Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and West European Studies at Indiana University.)
The following are examples of what was being espoused in the early 1900s as "Modernism":
Joseph T. Shipley's Dictionary of World Literary Terms, as well as other specialized dictionaries or literary encyclopaedia, list the word "Modernism", but appear to be uninterested in the question of when and how "modernism" became a specifically literary or artistic notion. The use of "modernism" in the language of criticism is quite recent, and nothing is more difficult to deal with than recent history. It seems safe to assume that in the English-speaking countries, the terms "modernism" acquired a distinctive literary significance during the first two decades of the 20th-century.
In 1919, The Modernist: A Monthly Magazine of Modern Arts and Letters, was published for a short time. The first issue listed among the contributors such as George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, Hart Crane, Georges Duhamel. None of these contributors offered the magazine anything previously unpublished. In the first issue of the magazine, the foreword made it clear that The Modernist was more concerned with politics than with literature or the arts. Following World War I, the magazine was committed to the cause of progress, revolutionary change, and socialism. The editor, James Waldo Fawcett wrote: "every tradition, every inherited standard has been tested; many laws have been destroyed, many pretences have been abandoned…In the sky of Russia a new star has appeared, a star progressing westward, watched now by the poor and downtrodden of ever land with shining, eager eyes…The very atmosphere is electric with impending revolution, revision and reconstruction in all the affairs of life. The past is dead. Only the present is reality. We dream of the future, but we may not see it yet as it will truly be."
In The Fugitive: A Journal of Poetry, Vol. III, No 1, February, 1924, John Crowe Ransom, a person who created the label of "New Criticism" and became one of the major representatives of this movement, did not attempt to define modernism, but some of the points he made show how modernism was viewed in the early 1920s. Ransom writes: "The arts generally have had to recognize Modernism - how should poetry escape? And yet what is Modernism? It is undefined…In poetry the Imagists, in our time and place, made a valiant effort to formulate their program. Their modernist manifestos were exciting, their practice was crude…They announced at least two notable principles. In the first place, they declared for honest of theme and accuracy of expression…They conceived the first duty of the Moderns as being to disembarrass poetry of its terrible incubus of piety, in the full classical sense of that term, and they rendered the service. The second principle followed. Emphasizing the newness of the matter,…they were obliged to make their meters more elastic to accommodate their novelties…Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.
As John Crowe Ransom pointed out, against the formlessness involved by the second of these principles, there came a "sweeping reaction". The problem was to take account of the dual role of words in poetry, and "to conclude a logical sequence with their meanings on the one hand, and to realize an objective pattern with the sounds on the other". Ransom was conscious of the fact that the difficulties posed by such a strict poetics were insurmountable and were bound to lead to a situation of crisis. Although the word "crisis" does not occur in his article, this notion is clearly implied, and it is probably more important for the understanding of Ransom's concept of modernism than the actual terms in which he formulates the modern poet's predicament: "But we moderns are impatient and destructive. We forget entirely the enormous technical difficulty of the poetic art, and we examine the meaning of poems with a more and more microscopic analysis: we examine them in fact just as strictly as we examine the meanings of a prose which was composed without any handicap of metrical restrictions; and we do not obtain so readily as our fathers the ecstasy which is the total effect of poetry, the sense of miracle before the union of inner meaning and objective form. Our souls are not, in fact, in the enjoyment of full good health. For no art and no religion is possible until we make allowances…Modern poets are their own severest critics; their own documents, on second reading, have been known to induce in poets a fatal paralysis of the writing digit…The future of poetry is immense? One is not so sure in these days, since it has felt the fatal irritant of Modernism. Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet…The intelligent poet of today is very painfully perched in a position which he cannot indefinitely occupy: vulgarly, he is straddling the fence, and cannot with safety land on either side."
In 1927 Laura Riding and Robert Graves published Survey of Modernist Poetry. They defined "modernist" poetry (as distinct from "modern" poetry in the neutral chronological sense) by its wilful deviation from accepted poetic tradition, by the attempt to "free the poem of many of the traditional habits which prevented it from achieving its full significance". Seen from this point of view, the most outstanding feature of "modernist" poetry is the difficulty it presents to the average reader. Their survey is to a large extent an attempt to explain the "unpopularity of modernist poetry with the plain reader" and to point out the specifically aesthetic reasons for "the divorce of advanced contemporary poetry from the common-sense standards of ordinary intelligence."
Concerning the term "modernism" itself, Riding and Graves seem to take it for granted and as a result do not try to offer an even remotely systematic definition. The main elements for such a definition are there, however, and the reader can bring them together and work out a fairly consistent concept of modernism. The basic opposition between traditional poetry/modernist poetry is stated from the outset. Modernist poetry is also characterized as advanced ("the sophistications of advanced modern poetry", "advanced contemporary poetry"). Modernist poets like e.e. cummings, we are told, are supported by "the pressure of more advanced critical opinion". In one chapter of the book called "Modernist Poetry and Civilization" they bring forth new and helpful terminological clarifications. The authors distinguish between "genuine modernism" and the "vulgar meaning of modernism…which is modern-ness, a keeping-up in poetry with the pace of civilization and intellectual history". In a "perverted sense", modernism can become a sort of anti-traditional "tyranny, increasing contemporary mannerisms in poetry". The sense of modernism can be further perverted, the authors go on to say, by the existence of the middle class - representing "the intelligent plain-man point of view". This middle population…is the prop and advocate of civilization; and the idea of civilization as a steady human progress does not exclude the idea of a modernist, historically forward poetry. A possible rapprochement exists, therefore, between the middle population, to whom poetry is just one of the many instruments of progress, and that type of contemporary poetical writing which advertises itself by its historical progressiveness.
But surely this is false modernism. True modernism is not historically but only aesthetically forward. False modernism, then, is reducible to "faith in history", while genuine modernism is nothing more than "faith in the immediate, the new doings of poems (or poets or poetry) as not necessarily derived from history". But why call such a poetry "modernist"? Riding and Graves fail to give a satisfactory answer to this important question. The fact that the representatives of "new poetry" are called (and call themselves) modernists is more than just a matter of arbitrary preference. Is not the cult of novelty a specific product of the history of modernity? Is not the "purist" creed of some outstanding modernists an attitude toward history and specifically toward modernity? Is not modernism's anti-traditionalism an aesthetic manifestation of the characteristically modern urge for change (an urge that has been historically served by the myth of progress but that can exist outside and sometimes even in direct opposition to that myth)?
The argument of modernism's neutrality with regard to history is unconvincing, as is the opinion of Riding and Graves that the term "modernism" as applied to the innovative trends in the poetry of the 1920s is justified by little more than a subjective preference: "There is indeed, a genuine modernism which is not a part of a 'modernist' programme but a natural and personal manner and attitude in the poet to his work, and which accepts the denomination 'modernist' because it prefers it to other denominations"
At this time, it was too early for a more comprehensive critical synthesis or for a critical assessment of the concept of modernism, and yet opinions were already being formulated. The student of terminology should also consider another aspect of historical semantics that may explain why the development of an independent notion of "modernism" was rather slow in England and in the United States. This comparative slowness was partially due to the evolution of "modern" as both an adjective and a noun. When "modern" ceased to be a synonym for "contemporary", it became capable of performing the basic semantic functions of "modernism", unimpeded by the potentially pejorative or vulgar associations from which the latter term had freed itself only very recently. Thus, a large number of aesthetic theories, insights, and choices, which today we would not hesitate to describe as "modernist", went on being formulated within the broader framework of the idea of "the modern".
(Information for this blog was taken from Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, by Matei Calinescu, Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and West European Studies at Indiana University.)
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