Thinking activity: modern poems

 ⚫ What makes modern poems "modern" ? Try to find imageries and symbols in these poems .

⚫Modernist poetry in English 

In general, the modernists saw themselves as looking back to the best practices of poets in earlier periods and other cultures. Their models included ancient Greek literature, Chinese and Japanese poetry, the troubadours, Dante and the medieval Italian philosophical poets , and the English Metaphysical poets.

Modernist poetry is a mode of writing that is characterised by two main features. The first is technical innovation in the writing through the extensive use of free verse. The second is a move away from the Romantic idea of an unproblematic poetic 'self' directly addressing an equally unproblematic ideal reader or audience. 

Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagist poets. In common with many other modernists, these poets were writing in reaction to what they saw as the excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional formalism and overly flowery poetic diction. 

⚫10 Very Short Modernist Poems Everyone Should Read :

Modernist poetry is often associated with long poems such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, but modernism was also when poetry went small, thanks in no small part to Imagism, spearheaded by Pound himself. Here are 10 works of modernist poetry which couldn’t be accused of outstaying their welcome – none is longer than twelve lines. 

⚫1. T. E. Hulme, ‘The Embankment‘ (7 lines). 

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,

In a flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.

Now see I

That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy …

So begins this miniature masterpiece of a poem, and one of the first modernist poems written in English. T. E. Hulme was an influential poet and thinker in the first few years of the twentieth century. He left behind only a handful of short poems but he revolutionised the way English poetry approached issues of rhyme, metre, and imagery. 

 

( T.E. Hulme )

⚫2. Joseph Campbell, ‘Darkness‘ (4 lines).

Campbell was an Irish poet writing a similar kind of poetry to Hulme at around the same time, though they were working independently of each other. In a previous post we’ve offered four short poems by Joseph Campbell, including ‘Darkness’ – a very short piece of early modernist poetry. Poetry doesn’t come much more understated than this. 

⚫3. Edward Storer, ‘Image’ (3 lines).

Storer was writing at around the same time as several other early modernist poets on this list, notably T. E. Hulme  and Joseph Campbell, though he started off writing independently of them. He was clearly influenced by Japanese forms such as the haiku, as the following poem demonstrate:

Forsaken lovers,

Burning to a chaste white moon,

Upon strange pyres of loneliness and drought. 

⚫4. Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro‘ (2 lines). 

Along with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound is probably the most famous modernist poet working in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. Pound arrived at this two-line poem after writing a much longer draft which he then cut down, line by line. The poem describes the sight of the crowd of commuters at the Paris Metro station, using a vivid and original image. 

⚫5. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), ‘The Pool‘ (5 lines). 

Hilda Doolittle and Pound both hailed from the US, and it was Pound who gave Doolittle the rebrand ‘H. D.’. They were even an item at one point. Along with Richard Aldington and Pound himself, H. D. was one of the main practitioners of Imagism, the short-lived poetic movement which Pound founded  in 1912. 

⚫6. Richard Aldington, ‘Insouciance‘ (5 lines). 

Aldington and H. D. were husband and wife in the 1910s and 1920s, and Aldington made up the trio of leading Imagists along with his wife and the movement’s founder, Pound. ‘Insouciance’ is about writing poems in the trenches – Aldington, like many men of his generation, saw action at the Western Front during WWI. 

⚫7. T. S. Eliot, ‘Morning at the Window‘ (9 lines). 

T. S. Eliot got his big break on the London literary scene thanks to Ezra Pound, who befriended his fellow expatriate American shortly after Eliot’s arrival in London in 1914. 

This T. S. Eliot 2poem, which we include in our pick of the best poems for morning, was written in London in the same year, shortly after the outbreak of WWI – a context that may lurk behind the poem’s dark, oppressive images of everyday life. It’s an unrhymed poem, but look at the shared syntax of the line endings: ‘in basement kitchens’, ‘of the street’, and so on. 

⚫8. William Carlos Williams, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow‘ (8 lines). 

Perhaps one of the most divisive poems ever written, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ has variously been viewed as the epitome of Imagist practice and as barely ‘poetry’ at all. It first appeared in Williams’s 1923 volume Spring and All, a book which combined free verse with pieces written in prose.

⚫9. Wallace Stevens, ‘Anecdote of the Jar‘ (12 lines). 

First published in 1919, this is one of Stevens’s best-known short poems. It appeared in his first volume of poems and has been baffling critics and readers ever since. 

10. E. E. Cummings, ‘l(a‘ (9 lines). 

This poem appeared in 1958 in Cummings’ collection 95 Poems, so it’s really a late modernist work. Although it’s nine lines long, it only contains four words – cleverly arranged so that ‘a leaf falls’ appears parenthetically within the word ‘loneliness’. Richard S. Kennedy, Cummings’ biographer, called it ‘the most delicately beautiful literary construct that Cummings ever created’. We agree. 

⚫What makes a poet modernist? 

Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagist poets. In common with many other modernists, these poets were writing in reaction to what they saw as the excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional formalism and overly flowery poetic diction. In many respects, their criticism of contemporary poetry echoes what William Wordsworth wrote in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads to instigate the Romantic movement in British poetry over a century earlier. 

click here to know more about modernist poetry.

Modern Poetry contains a “high degree of self-awareness.” This can sometimes appear as irony (I dare say that no century has been so full of irony as the twentieth); other times this self-awareness manifests in references to, and rebellion against, previous literature. 

Here is video about modernist poetry:
      

 

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