Modern poetry

Introduction

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,” were prompted by fundamental and far-reaching historical, social, cultural, and economic changes in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The rise of cities; profound technological changes in transportation, architecture, and engineering; a rising population that engendered crowds and chaos in public spaces; and a growing sense of mass markets often made individuals feel less individual and more alienated, fragmented, and at a loss in their daily worlds. World War I (WWI), moreover, contributed to a more modern local and world view.

Understanding the context of literary modernism (specifically, modernist poetry) is important for students before they analyze modernist texts themselves. To that end, this three-lesson curriculum unit begins with Lesson One: “Understanding the Context of Modernism Poetry,” followed by Lesson Two: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” which features “warm-up” exercises to give students initial bearings for reading and analyzing modernist poetry. The curriculum unit ends with T.S. Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; this lesson requires students to analyze modernist poetry in more depth and detail. You may extend the unit by teaching additional modernist poets such as Marianne Moore, Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound.

Discussion

As it is stated in Susan Friedman's definition, “art produced after the First WorldWar recorded the emotional aspect of this crisis; despair, hopelessness, paralysis, angst, and asense of meaninglessness, chaos and the fragmentation of material reality.” Being under theseeffects, Eliot resorts to the process of reflecting them in his modernist poetry. The essay willhandle the poems one by one, commenting on their title and certain lines along with their fragmented structure and the significance of this fragmented structure.To begin with, even the title “The Waste Land” suggests Eliot's despair anddisillusionment. If we regard the title as a metaphor for life, we can understand that hisapproach to life is a pessimistic one with despair and hopelessness. The quote at the beginningof the poem taken from Petronius'

Satyricon reflects Sibyl's desperate psychology becauseshe wants to die. This allusion to a mythological figure's will of death is noteworthy becausethe poetic persona's psychology is similar to Sibyl. Moreover, the subtitle, referring to theAnglican burial service, “I- The Burial of the Dead” adds more to the gloomy atmosphere of the poem. Eliot opens his poem by calling April “the cruelest month” because it creates ...