Modern life depicted in Modern Poetry.

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“Modern life depicted in Modern Poetry.”

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Department of English

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Abstract

Modernism is a remarkable shift from the traditional forms of writing in English literature. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Robert Frost,  Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney, and Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), Wystan Hugh Auden are some of  important poets in modern period. Moreover, World War I has important role in shattering traditional beliefs. As a result, values, conventions and life style have changed. Moreover, scientific innovation has important role to bring social changes. Many modem  writers have been influenced by the crisis of early  twentieth century society. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to focus on how a few major modern poets have responded to modem life.

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Table of Contents

Introduction------------------------------------------------------------------------------ (page no)

Chapter l: World War I, Modernism and Modern Literature----------------------4

Effect of World War 1 on Traditional Society-----------------------------4

Rise of Modernism----------------------------------------------------------------------6

Chapter 2:  Representation of Early 20th Century Society in Modern Poetry-----8

Chapter3: Depiction of Modern Life in modern Poetry--------------------------10

Depiction of Modern Life in Yeats-----------------------------------------10

Depiction of Modern Life in Eliot-------------------------------------------13

Depiction of Modern Life in Frost------------------------------------------17

Depiction of Modern  Life in Auden------------------------------------20

Conclusion --------------------------------------------------------------------24

Bibliography-------------------------------------------------------------------------25

Appendix-------------------------------------------------------------------------26

Introduction

Modernism  is an important movement, which started from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It is a dramatic shift from the traditional form of writing. According to Barry, modernism is an “earthquake in the arts which brought down much of the structure of pre-twentieth-century practice in music, painting, literature, and architecture.  The center o f the earthquake was in Vienna but it influenced other European countries including England. Even now its shock-waves can be felt somewhere around the world. Modernism is a remarkable change in social values, culture and literature:

The specific features signified by “modernism” (or by the adjectives modernist) vary with the user, but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some o f the traditional bases not only o f Western art, but o f Western culture in general. (Abrams 167) Due to scientific research, the last decade of the nineteenth century experienced “a running controversy  as  to  whether  the  basic  material  of the  universe  behaved like  waves  or particles; a controversy for which there was no direct observation.” (Bell  11) Beside the technological innovations, the catastrophe o f World War I is often blamed for this dramatic shift.

World War I has played an important role in shattering traditional beliefs. In the field o f literature, many changes have taken place. Modern writers are more interested to portray the post-war society in their writings. As traditional beliefs have been shattered  by the  catastrophe o f the  World  War I, many  forbidden  subjects have  been introduced in the field of art. People have preferred realism  instead of romanticism and morality tales.

In  modem  poetry,  one  o f the  important  aspects  is the  use  o f classical  myth  in portraying post-war society. Myth, legend and folklore are not same. Legend  is a fable based on normal human being rather than supernatural being. The protagonist is a normal human being in a legend. For example, the story o f Joan of Arc is a legend. Usually a legend  has  historical  background. On  the  other  hand,  folklore  is  a  fable  based  on supernatural incidents. But the supernatural beings are not gods and goddesses. For example, some stories of  Lilith are folklore.  If the story is about gods and goddesses then it is termed religions. For example, the story of the Greek god Zeus had religious value in ancient time. According to Abrams, “a mythology is a religion  in which we no longer believe.”  But legend, folklore and mythology has important role in controlling social behavior:

Most myths are related to social rituals-set forms and procedures in sacred ceremonies-but anthologists disagree as to whether rituals generated myths or myths generated rituals. (Abrams 170) This dissertation will focus on the depiction o f modem civilization in modem poetry. The first chapter of this paper will briefly discuss the concept o f modernism. The chapter will focus on the consequence o f World War I on traditional society, the rise of modernism and some important aspects o f modem literature. The second chapter will briefly discuss how modem poetry has responded to the early 20th century world.

 The chapter will focus on the representation o f society  in modem  poetry, some  important features  in modem poetry and the importance of mythological elements in modem poetry. The third chapter will focus on the poetry of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Ezra Pound (1885-1927) and Thomas Steams Eliot (1888-1965). This chapter will examine how Yeats, Williams, Pound and Eliot have responded to modem civilization such as mechanization, urbanization, industrialization and secularization in their poetry.

Chapter 1

World War I, Modernism and Modern Literature

Modernism  is the era, which Harold Rosenberg describes as “the tradition of the new.” Modernism evolves due to technological changes in the last quarter of nineteenth century. Due to innovations, the society changes rapidly. Moreover, World War I has  important effect on traditional  society. The social changes made the world  very different from traditional society.

Effect of World War I on Traditional Society

Victorian society was a moralizing society. The society was collectivist rather than individualistic. Women stayed at home rather than working outside the home. Respectability was a strong force in the Victorian era. People had a narrowed mindset in matters o f sexuality. Moreover, society was very much class-based. As a result, morality became an important element in Victorian literature. In contrast to Victorian literature, modem literature was much artistic and realistic. In the modem era, society changed rapidly. Women came outside the home and joined the workforce. They also got suffrage (Women got suffrage in 1918 in England and in 1920 in America). Due to the industrial revolution and urbanization, the labor force increased. Poor people  rowded the overcrowded slums of the big cities.

 They were considered as a “lower order of humanity, and treated as such, valued only as the vast pool of surplus labour on which the social as well as the economy system depended.” (Bullock 61) The international economy expanded  rapidly  during 1870 to 1913 compared  to former  cades.  Society started to sympathize with androgyny and homosexuality. People started to emphasize on the  individual  interest.  Society started  to accept unconventional  people, who had  been rejected in Victorian society:

The wanderer, the loaner, the exile, the restless and rootless and homeless individual were no longer the rejects of self-confident society but rather those who, because they stood outside, were uniquely placed in an age when subjectivity was truth to speak with vision and authority. Perceptibly in the nineties and even more markedly in the early years of the new century, the custody o f life’s integrities began to pass from society to individual - to an individual who necessarily commanded some unique perception of the things of life, who embodied some secret essence which alone gave the world its legitimization. (McFarlane 82) The basic of family life started to weaken through the practice o f individualism.

 Young people started to concentrate on their own personal  interests neglecting prevalent social values. As a consequence, social values started to change. Due to scientific research, people started to lose their faith in their traditional values of love, fidelity and religion. Moreover, many scientific theories opposed many prevalent traditional  values. The final attack on their beliefs was the tremendous violence of World War I. People observed for the first time bombing from airplanes. Violence o f the war was no longer limited to only fighters but reached to the doors o f common people. The tremendous human misery and suffering brought by the war shattered the traditional values:

The Great War which tore Europe apart between 1914 and 1918 was so shattering in its  impact,  so  far-reaching  in  its consequences,  that  it  is profoundly  difficult to recapture what proceeded it - difficult to avoid exaggerating the sense o f the conflict in the pre-war years, difficult not to see them  building up into a general crisis of European society in which a crash, a resolution by force, was inevitable and felt to be inevitable. (Bullock 58) The war affected society severely. It took a lot from human being but returned almost nothing. As a result, modern man was growing up cut off from their culture and tradition. They were known as the ‘lost generation’ as Earnest Hemingway portrays them in The Sun also Rises (1926). Many modem writers describe the modern world as the apocalyptic time.

W.  B Yeats, who observed  both  the  Victorian  era and the  modem  era,  portrayed  the anarchy o f modem time in his poem “The Second Coming”:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence drowned;

The best lack all the conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

(The Second Coming)

The poem describes the nature of modem era and the death o f traditional values. For eats, traditional values are more important than the modem values. Culture and traditional values of the society have been destroyed in modem times. It is often said that apocalypse has already arrived in the modem era:

It (Dada or Surrealism) is the art consequent o f Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty Principal’, of the destruction of civilization and reason  in the First World War, o f the world changed and reinterpreted by Marx, Freud and Darwin, of capitalism and constant industrial acceleration,         o f  existential exposure to  meaninglessness of  absurdity. (Bradbury and McFarlane 27). The war changed human culture completely. Many people had to migrate from one country to another. People growing up during the war period (1914-1919) lost their cultural values. As a result, social values started to degrade rapidly.

Rise of Modernism

The word ‘Modernity’ was first used by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) in the essay named     ‘The            Painter  o f  Modem Life’  in the mid nineteenth            century. He describes “modernity as the fashionable, fleeting and contingent in art, in opposition to the eternal and immutable.” (Childs  14) Modem  life is described as the effect of urbanization and technological advancement on human life:

In relation to Modernism, modernity is considered to describe a way o f living and of experiencing  life which  has arisen  with the changes wrought by  industrialisation, urbanisation and secularisation; its characteristics are disintegration and reformation, fragmentation and rapid change, emphatically and insecurity. It involves certain new understandings o f time and space: speed, mobility, communication, travel, dynamism, chaos and cultural revolution. (Childs 14-15) Beside the technological innovation, modernism also includes the effect o f World War I on human society. Technology has become a curse since World War I for common citizens of many countries as Pound has portrayed in “The Return.”  Observing the sudden violence of the war, young people matured suddenly.           Therefore, modem art becomes different from traditional forms of art. Instead o f writing romanticism (Austen’s Pride and Prejudice) and morality tale (Bronte’s Jane Eyre), people start to focus on real life (Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers).  Many innocent people have suffered due to urbanization and innovations:

Indeed Modernism would seem to be the point at which the idea o f the radical and innovating arts, the experimental, technical, aesthetic  ideal that had been growing forward  from  Romanticism,  reaches  formal crisis - in which  myth,  structure and organization in a  traditional sense collapse, and    not  only for       formal reasons.

(Bradbury and McFarlane 26)

Technology  has  reached  the  common person’s  house.  The lifestyle  of everyone  has changed  rapidly. Along with changing  society, art and  literature also starts to change.People  become  more  prone to come  up with  new  ideas.  The  past  is often  eglected. Tradition  has  lost  its control on  the human  soul.  People started to  believe, only what science allowed them to believe: Modernity, in normal usage, is something that progresses in company with and at the speed o f the years, like the bow-wave of a ship; last year’s modem is not this year’s. (Bradbury and McFarlane 22) Modem people often deny conventions o f former times. The impact o f scientific revolution  is not limited within the field of science. It starts to influence every fiber o f human life.

Many of the scientific theories ran counter to traditional beliefs. As a result, people started to move away from social conventions: The term ‘Modernism’ can hardly be taken in the former sense; for in any working definition of it we shall have to see in it a quality of abstraction and highly conscious artifice, taking us behind familiar reality, breaking away from familiar functions of language and conventions of form. (Bradbury and McFarlane 24) Modernism includes everything that breaks the ground rules o f the Victorian era. People start to think outside the boundary. Therefore, the movement of modernism  becomes a turning point in English Literature.

Chapter 2

Representation of Early 20th Century Society in Modern Poetry

In modem poetry, one of the significant features is representation of social changes due to  technological innovations  and  violence  of  World      War I. Modern man is  not  traditionalist. They  often  oppose  old values  and  old  customs. They  are  much more

interested in material comfort rather than spiritual comfort. As a result, material success

becomes the only goal o f the modern  man although  it may be achieved  in illicit ways.

Many poets of the modern era have portrayed these aspects o f modem man in their poetry: The world in which modern poetry grew up was the world o f high bourgeois culture, the heir o f all the ages, and possessed of the technical resources to become fully aware o f its inheritance. (Hough 316)

Not only do social values change but also the style of writing changes. People prefer to

read realistic forms o f writing. They love to read everyday language instead of elevated

language.  Romanticisms  and  morals are  ignored  in the modern  era.  Modern  man  also ignores folklore and religious myths. Modern poetry is influenced by these hanging social values: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (written by Ezra Pound) is at times a moving elegy for the world o f artistic and social possibility that the war seemed to obliterate; Pound looks back with  a delicate combination      of  affection        and irony at earlier vanguard movements  in arts  ...      nothing their  inadequacies  but excoriating  the  culture that rejected their energies. (Longenbach 117-118)

Eliot’s The Waste Land is the best example of portrayal o f modern society.           The Waste

Land portrays that modern people are more associated with material profit.  Modern poetry       also includes         realism but artistic   presentation  of  human life. Romanticism is often denied in modern poetry. Modern poetry only deals with the reality of human life, rather than the imagination. There may be imagination but it is connected with the reality of human psychology, sufferings, happiness or emotions. For example, Pound has used romanticisms in “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”.

But the poem describes the effect of urbanization and industrialization on village life.  According to Childs, Romanticism  was rejected  as  metaphysical,  indulgent,  sentimental,  mannered  and overemotional, and its view of reality as inherently mysterious, while life for the new poets was to be glimpsed in definite visual flashes or images. Modern poetry shifts from the conventional form of writing. Modern poetry often observes the effect o f World War I on every sphere of society including the field of literature. It often uses metaphysical elements, which is comparable to those John Donne (1572-1631) used in sixteenth century (His poems also contain irregular rhymes and meters). The role of power is not new in the modern era. Many former writers could see that political power is strong enough to abolish traditional values and religious beliefs. Political leaders are often able to manipulate religion and social culture.

 In modem era. World War I becomes a strong force to abolish the traditional beliefs, creating the ‘lost generation’: A comparison with  Wordsworth is inevitable, for modern poetry’s response to the First World War plays out a drama that was enacted by romantic poetry’s response to the  French  Revolution.  As  the  utopian  dreams  inspired  by  the  Revolution  were demolished by the Reign of Terror, Wordsworth (like many of his contemporaries) lost faith in the power of political action to effect social change; the result was (as M.H. Abrams and Jerome McGann  have demonstrated  in different ways) that  poets looked to         poetry to carry the burden of  spiritual and cultural enlightenment. (Longenbach 109) Modern poets often have the tendency to use myths in their poetry.  For example, Yeats has borrowed elements from the Greek myth in “Leda and the Swan” in order to portray power relationship. Modem people do not believe in their religion and traditional values. They consider that romanticisms and morals are utopian ideas that cannot be achieved in reality. Therefore, they often ignore  their  traditional beliefs            and focus on material profits.

According to Hough, Classical culture has lost its unique authority; there is no ecumenical religion; the psychologists and anthropologists have revealed systems of symbolism anterior to the accepted cultural structures. (316) Modern writers often try to relate the disaster of modern times with the disasters of former times. Sometimes, they suggest that modern people should not forget their past because it is not easy to ignore their past: Where Eliot’s long historical perspective creates a powerful sense of the inescapable presence of the traditions embodied in the mind of Europe, against which the present is evaluated, Crane’s (American Poet, Hart Crane:  1899-1932) wilful mythologizing presses  what  o f the  past  can  be  made  to  work  into  the  service  o f an  eclectic imagination that celebrates the untrammelled future. (Hyde 345) Modern poetry often portrays the features of modern life. It often observes the effect of World War I on human mind, crisis in human relationship and crisis in religious beliefs and traditional beliefs.

Chapter 3

Depiction of Modern Civilization in Modern Poetry

William Butler  Yeats  (1865-1939), William  Carlos Williams  (1883-1963),  Ezra pound (1885-1927) and Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) are four important poets in the modern period. They have depicted modern civilization in their poetry.

Depiction of Civilization in Yeats

William Butler  Yeats portrays  the  nature  of  modern civilization in  his  poetry. Through  mythological elements and  historical events, Yeats portrays the importance of tradition in human life: The assumption of presence  in the peasant world  is related to the  idea that rural people are closer to nature than their urban  neighbors and  the writer’s job  is to recover  their  original  plentitude.  Thus  the  literature  becomes  an act  of mythic recovery. (Hirsch 882) Modern people think that mythology has nothing to do with modem society. It does not bring material comfort. As a result, Yeats has uses mythological elements in his poetry in order to restore myth. But, he creates his own style: Yeats would remake his style over and over again throughout his career, but his pristine  syntax,  fulfilling  the  formal  demands  of the  poem  effortlessly,  would remain constant. (Longenbach 105)

He has used old mythology but has given a new meaning and a modem aspect so that it can be used in describing the modern times. His attempt to use classical elements in modern poetry is meant to resurrect old myths and blend them with history. In the poem “The Man and the Echo” the speaker tries to gain spirituality. He prays to God to purify his soul. But he is unable to communicate with God because he does not know where to seek God. He goes to pray in Knocknarea in County Sligo. According to Heaney, “this rock face does not issue any message from the gods.” (Heaney 96) As a result, the speaker finds nothing but the echo of his own words: The echo marks the limits of the mind’s operations even as it calls the mind forth to its utmost exertions, and the strenuousness of this dialectic issues in a poem that is asshadowed by death  as Larkin’s  (English poet, Philip Larkin: 1922-1985) “Aubade,” but is far more vital and undaunted.

“The Man and the Echo” tries to make  sense  of historical  existence  within  a  bloodstained  natural  world  and  an indifferent universe. (Heaney 96) The speaker goes to revive his religious and historical sense in his old age. But he does not have any guide to show his way to purification. But he is still searching for his answer. But the speaker finds a hint from the echo. Echo says “(I)ie down and die”, suggesting that there is no possibility o f purification. The next echo suggests that his time of purification is lost “into the night”. According to Heaney, in his old age Yeats was searching for historical events in Ireland. In the poem “The Second Coming”, Yeats portrays the post-war situation. He has used mythological elements in the poem. The title reminds the reader of the return of Jesus Christ at the time o f anarchy. The title o f the poem suggests that modem time is apocalyptic time. But Yeats has not suggested the title for Jesus Christ: If we hold rigidly to the notion that only the poet’s full mental experience can give the adequate symbol for the idea the title suggests, then we must not call up some conventional painting o f Christ in a glory.

 No; we must pronounce the words “The Second Coming!” and follow precisely Yeats’s own experience when he writes: I began to imagine, as always at my left side just out o f the range o f the sight, a brazen winged beast that I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction. (Stauffer 229) He has suggested the title for a cycle of history. Yeats borrows the figure o f the Sphinx from the Theban play, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. The sphinx stands for destruction. The poem depicts the anarchy of modem civilization. The poem suggests the destruction of the former world as the consequence of the World War I. Yeats  uses  historical  elements  in  his  two  poems  “Sailing  to  Byzantium”  and “Byzantium”. At the very beginning of the poem “Sailing to Byzantium”, the speaker says that it “is no country for old men.”

The country has become the realm o f young people. The tradition is becoming dead. Therefore, the speaker is going to the country of dead people, who are more important than the living people. According to Jeffares, He is old, and, besides being worried over his future career as a poet, is probably envious of the fervour of human lovers. With his revision comes his desire for some degree of secrecy, and his wish to crystallize his thought on a more general plane. The statement above is a comment on the original draft of “Sailing to Byzantium” which was preserved by Mrs. Yeats. According to Stauffer, Yeats has used “water imagery for youth and life” (Stauffer240) and “fire, stone, and metal imagery for age and intellect and art, seeing himself standing in the great church of Sancta Sophia in Constantinople, with its mosaic saint on the walls” (Stauffer240):

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters o f my soul.

(Sailing to Byzantium)

In the post-war society, the poet feels alienated. Therefore, he wishes to sail to the country of dead people, Byzantium. Therefore, he chooses the historical place  Byzantium as an ideal land: Yeats, in fact, selected material from his general impression of historical Byzantium which was most concerned with his own situation. The marble stair, the jetty and the Cathedral were  not  essential;  they  added nothing to the poet’s  account of his problem; as symbols they were more suited to the less directly subjective ‘Byzantium’. (Jeffares 47-48) The speaker considers the new generation as a “dying generation” who have forgotten their past. For the speaker, dead people in Byzantium are more important than the living people. He wishes to live in the “holy city of Byzantium” to achieve eternity.

wishes to turn himself into a “golden bough to sing”. The bird imagery reminds the reader of Keats’s “Ode to  a Nightingale”, where  the  speaker goes  into  his  reverie  through  the  song of nightingale. The  poem  “Byzantium”  refers to the  city of Byzantium.  Now  the  speaker  has reached the city of Byzantium. He will achieve his eternity here. According to Jeffares, Yeats has collected most of his information about Byzantium from The Age o f Justinian and Theodora by W. G. Holmes. At the beginning of the poem “Byzantium”, Yeats has given us a description of Byzantium through “great cathedral gong”. The description of Byzantium  city aims to restore the tradition of the Byzantium that modern  people has forgotten. Later in the poem he talks about the dead people from Byzantium, who are more important than the living people. According to Yeats, modern people are living a dead life with a dead soul: 1call it death-in-life and life-in-death. (Byzantium) However, modern people are living a dead life, killing their souls. But people of Byzantium are dead but still alive. The bird and the tree are used as the symbols of eternity that are not free from the disadvantages of the natural bird. Natural bird and tree can decay and die gradually. Therefore, the speaker wishes to turn the bird in “golden handiwork” and the tree into “golden bough”. Moreover, the songs of the bird and the fruit of the tree are something that can  achieve  eternity.  In the  same  way,  a  human  being’s creativity  can  give  him eternity. Unfortunately, modern people are more interested in material comfort. The poem has reference o f the post-war situation of Irish society. Ireland is colonized by England. Here, the Greek god Zeus becomes symbol of the colonizer. It also suggests that England is a powerful country that is strong enough to colonize Ireland.

 On the other hand, Leda, a human being becomes the symbol for Ireland. The illustration suggests that Ireland lacks the ability to resist being colonized as Leda lacks ability to prevent being violated: In other words, Yeats questions the limits o f poetic thinking to transform and resist the violence o f material reality. By emphasizing the brutal violence o f the rape, he deviates from the tradition of idealizing Leda and Z eus’s union.  In general  in the poetry, Yeats  looks for ways to resist England’s colonizing of Ireland,  but he is acutely aware that his language is sim ultaneously an agent o f his oppression, as well as a mode of resistance. Leda’s lack o f clear resistance to the swan’s rape illustrates the impossibility of resistance without complicity. (Neigh 153)

Not only does the colonization o f Ireland occur, but also the national identity o f Ireland is destroyed. The poem also suggests that after being violated by Zeus, Leda is not the same. In the same way, Ireland is not the same as it used to be: For Yeats, the drop forms a moment to imagine other modes of being before he hits the  ground and must  take  on  the fiction  of his  national Irish identity  to  fight colonialism . The drop  is where new collective occurs between  identification  and identity, between desiring the other and falling away from that other, as a separate being. The drop becomes a way to imagine the excess produced by the process of identification that does not “fit” into one’s identity. (Neigh 153) Neigh  also  says  that  Yeats  raises  questions  about  the  ethics  of self and  other  in  the relationship between Leda and Zeus: “Zeus is both colonizer and patriarch, while Leda is both feminine other and colonized.” (Neigh 155)

Depiction of Civilization in Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot portrays the crisis o f human relationship in the modern world in his poetry.  Eliot uses many classical  elem ents  in his poetry, which  is one of the major features in modern poetry. According to Harmon, The fact may be that a poet is  part  of the normative magical and  religious organization of a primitive society and that his functions-to entertain, memorialize, decorate, conjure, and educate-ecumenism caressingly unimportant  as  civilization grows and branches. (802) However, the style o f his poetry is different from the classical  form of writing. He uses images  in  his  poetry  but  he  is  not  an  imagist. His  poetry  gives  features  of modern civilization. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred  Prufrock” focuses on city life. According to Harmon,  Prufrock  characterizes  a  modem man living  in  some European  or  American society. According to Oser, the poem “records his altered social and emotional responses to his ative surroundings as well as an accom panying shift from moral to aesthetic concerns.” The epigraph o f the poem is about Guido da Montefeltro. Montefeltro was condemned to the eighth circle o f Hell for giving false counsel to Pope Boniface VIII. According to Schneider, The Love Song is more than a retreat from love, however; it is the portrait o f a man in Hell, though until this truth is clearly realized, the hell appears to be merely the trivial one o f the self-conscious individual in a sterile society. Prufrock does not analyze himself, we are not led into peripheral guessing in Freudian or other terms about what may be wrong with him: and we simply come to know directly what it feels like to be Prufrock. (1104) The epigraph indicates that Prufrock compares city life with the life in hell.

The poem has allusion from the classical literature, historical events and myth, in order to portray the post-war society: The social images are lightly ironic, but these extreme ones are not: they form a pattern of which the two main components are objective correlatives for a self­ divided state and a state of paralysis or stagnation. (Schneider 1104) Laurence Perrine and Johan Schimanskr identify some references in the poem. The phrase “time  for all the works and days of hands” refers to the long poem  by the Greek  poet  Hesiod. The poem is about agricultural           life. Eliot compares  the city life with the agricultural  life. Usually, city life gives us a colorful and  luxurious image.  But very few country people realize that the city life may be as dull as country life. The poem also has the reference from Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night

: I know the voices

dying  with a dying fall

 (The Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock)

City people are cut-off from their nature. As a result, they are living a dead life. The poem

also  refers to Oscar W ilde’s play Salome. The speaker compares him self with John  the

Baptist:

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;

(The Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock)

But Prufrock is not a prophet or reformer. He only represents a modem man, who silently

observes the crisis o f modem times. But he wants a reformation that ends the crisis. Later,

Eliot has taken the element from M arvell’s “To his Coy M istress” :

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

(The Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock)

The line indicates that the modern people are not inquisitive as renaissance people were.

They do not want to explore but want it explored. The poem also has biblical element:

... “ I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”--

(The Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock)

The  poem  “The  Love  Songs of J.  Alfred  Prufrock” portrays the crisis of modern civilization. According to Childs, the poem also is an example of “crisis of discourse” (101) in modern poetry. He also says that Prufrcok has failed to find right words to express his “intense feelings of inadequacy.” (101) Eliot’s The Waste Land focuses on the crisis of human relationship in modern  land. The four chapters o f the poem, “THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD”, “A GAME OF CHESS”, “THE FIRE SERM ON” and “DEATH BY W ATER” refer to the four elements black bile (earth), air (phlegm), red  bile (fire), and water (blood), respectively.  It was traditionally believed that human being is made of these four elements.

Moreover, Eliot has used a lot of myths in the poem: Using mythology and  pre- to early  modern  culture, from  the Fisher King and the Holy Grail through to Dante and Shakespeare, Eliot creates a form in the poem which aims  both  to master  the  content  and  to patch together  all  the many scraps  of experience contained in the five parts. The epigraph is from a myth based work named Satyricon. The myth is about a woman, a Sibyl, who grows but never dies. The epigraph  is dedicated  to the culture of a society, which changes over time but never dies. The title “THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD” “develops the them e of the attractiveness o f death” (Brooks  187). The speaker describes the modern waste land as “stony rubbish” where “dead tree gives no shelter” . Madame Sosostris is not interested in the true meaning of the tarot card. She is only interested in earning money, which she earns through false reading of Tarot cards: But the symbols of the Tarot pack are still unchanged. The various characters are still inscribed on the cards, and she is reading in reality, though she does not know it, the fortune of the protagonist. She finds that his card is that o f the drowned Phoenician Sailor, so she warns him against death by water, -not realizing any more than do the other inhabitants o f the modern waste land that the way into life may be by death itself. (Brooks 189) The “ Unreal City” refers to the city from Baudelaire’s “The Seven Old M en”.

According to Brooks, the phrase may indicate fusion o f dream and reality in modem  life. The image of the planting corpse in the garden and Mylae, the First Punic War refers to the massacre of World  War I. In the  World  War I, not only have people died  but also their beliefs and tradition have been shattered. The chapter “THE GAME OF CHESS” deals with human relationship in modern times. Chess game is considered a game o f sexes portraying power relationship. The title also refers to one o f the four elements, air. It is believed that intelligence comes from air. The  section  deals  with  two  women.  The  first  woman  is compared  to  Cleopatra  from Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra:

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

(The Waste Land)

“The change o f Philomel, by the barbarous king” refers to O vid’s Metamorphoses. Eliot has related Philomel with the woman  in the “burnished throne” . It indicates that there is

something disappointing about this woman. According to Brooks, If it is a commentary on how the waste land became waste, it also repeats the theme of the death which is the door to life-the them e o f the dying god. The raped woman becomes transformed through suffering into the nightingale; through the violation comes the “ inviolable voice.” (Brooks 193) The  relationship  between  Lil and  her husband  Albert  portrays another aspect o f human relationship. Lil’s friend advises her to make herself look good in order to give “good tim e” to Albert. The relationship between Lil and her husband Albert is not deep. This can be a commentary  on  the  modem marriage  system .  Although,  people  get  married  and  have children, they do so as rituals.

The  next section  “THE  FIRE  SERMON” deals  with lust of human  being.  The section refers to one of the elements, fire. The physical love becomes a m atter of physical impulse or sinful pleasure. Eliot starts with nature imagery but gives a vision of polluted and barren nature. The image o f river does not give any reproductive or fruitful impaction but polluted  image. The relationship between the speaker and  Mr. Eugenides is fruitless. The relationship between the typist and the clerk also portrays the human lust rather than love. The couple are not interested in family but an individual life. Moreover, Tiresias plays an important role in the poem. He knows the past, present and future. He has the experience of being man and woman. As a result, he can understand modern man and woman and can relate the past, present and future: But in the note on Tiresias, who appears in line 218 of the poem, Eliot implies that the poem  is at the same time an exposition of the state of mind of an individual: “Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not only wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, two sexes meets in Teiresias.” (Foster 569)  The reference to the relationship between Elizabeth and Leicester also portrays a fruitless relationship. Elizabeth did not get married because she did not want to share her power with an other. 

It also portrays human  lust for power. The last section o f this chapter portrays sexual violation, which is another aspect o f human lust. The section  “DEATH  BY  WATER” symbolizes the resurrection o f the powers of nature. In the first line o f the section, Eliot portrays the sacrifice o f the fertility god. But in the next stanza he gives a hint o f the reincarnation o f the fertility god. According to Brooks, Some specific connections can be made, however. The drowned Phoenician Sailor recalls the drowned god o f the fertility cults. Miss Weston tells that each year at Alexandria an effigy of the head o f the god was thrown into the water as a symbol of the death o f the powers o f nature, and that this head was carried by the current to By bolls where it was taken out of the water and exhibited as a symbol o f the reborn god. (200) The  modern  world is  waste  land  where  “crops  do  not  grow,  and  the  animals  cannot reproduce.” (Brooks          185)  Modern  man  has to  sacrifice  the  fertility  god  so  that  it can reincarnate in order to revive productivity. Eliot  tries  to  give  probable  solutions  to  end  the  crisis  o f the  modem world in “ WHAT THE THUNDER SAID .”

In the first section, he finds no hope o f resurrection. He refers to the death o f Jesus Christ. Then, he tells about the problem o f the modern life. Human soul is suffering everyday but body is surviving. But survival is not the main m otif o f life. People, who had lived a short life but had been able make an impression on an other, are still living. However, modem man will be dead with the death o f their body. They will not be remembered after their life. To end the crisis o f the modem land the speaker gives three solutions from Sanskrit: Datta (give), Dayadhvam (sympathy), and Damyata (control). These three solutions deal  with the spiritual aspect, which  modern  people are missing. These three solutions are able to bring peace on modem land. Eliot depicts the role o f time in modern land in his Four Quartets.

The poem depicts that the modern people cannot be detached from their past. In his Four Quartets he finds some  hope o f resurrection. According to  Melaney, the poem  demonstrates “how  public events are hard to separate from  the history o f literature.” (151)  Eliot has borrowed the epigraph from ancient cosmology: Eliot employs ancient cosmology as a framing device and uses two fragments from Heraclitus as the poem ’s epigraph. (Melaney 153) The Epigraph underscores the distinction between the people who accept that the order of universe is common to all and the people who deny it. Modern  civilization is  detached from  the  former  civilizations  by  the  violence  of warfare. The  use o f traditional  elements  in poetry  is an attempt to  reunite the classical civilization  with  the  modern  civilization.

 Eliot’s poems show  that  modern  world  is not alienated from the former world but modern land is the result o f historical event. According to Harmon, For Eliot, the struggle to reach or rediscover such unification, which is supposed to be common to primitive comm unities and to teach member of such communities, is a problem  for the poet as an individual, for the poet as a member of a continuing  culture informed by tradition, and for the culture itself as it relates to its member, its history, and its neighbors. (Harmon 803) Eliot has portrayed the crisis o f modern world but his aim is to end of modern crisis. Yeats, Williams, Pound and Eliot have been responded by modern civilization. They  poems portray the nature of  modern society. These four writers have broken the conventional  form  o f writing.  But they  have  not abandoned  their tradition,  history  and culture.

Depiction of Civilization in Frost:

In spite of the Pastoral element predominant in Frost’s poems, he is still a modern poet because his poetry has been endowed with the awareness of the problems of man living in the modern world dominated by Science and Technology. However, he was a contemporary and friend to such modernist greats as Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. But as a modern poet Frost is different from other modern poets.

While modernist poetry is sometimes associated with an elitist culture that takes poetry away from the general public through experimental forms and esoteric references, Frost’s is a modern poet in his rural, working-class persona, his traditional, metered voice and use of colloquial phrases, as well as the mundane subjects of most of his poems.

The major modern themes

                                          

The modern elements of his poetry are those of capitalism, the self-centeredness of the modern man, the bored existence, isolation, dilemma, and symbolism.

Two major poems

The poems that seemed to me most striking modern in nature are The Death of the Hired Man and Home Burial. The two poems are similar in nature that in both of them there is a conflict between the husband and the wife. Here the husbands represent a view of life which is very antithetical to wives’. In the former poem there are three characters: Warren, Mary and Silas. Warren, the domineering husband represent the capitalism ,Mary, the cowed wife is a foil to her husband and Silas represent the lot of the millions of the workers who are the victims of the modern capitalistic society .Like Silas there are millions of the workers around the globe who toil and toil ,but remain unrewarded and die an unlamented death.

Thus the central figure of the poem is Silas, whose death the poem records. The character of Silas is very pathetic and sympathy arousing. Silas in his old age, helpless and useless, is a pathetic decrepit figure alienated from the world, with no shelter over his head and with no home to go to. His self respect makes him feel ‘ashamed to please his brother’ and as a result he is also isolated from his rich banker brother. It is true that Warren has some accusations against Silas that he left the farm during the busy days. But in this case Warren also can’t fully understand Silas’s character. Why did he leave? He left for ht higher wages. It shows that Silas was very poorly paid for his labor. So, Warren does not find any fault in his own capitalistic manner by which he tried to buy the labor of Silas in return of the little wages. In this way he represents the capitalist society of the modern world.

The poem Home Burial is also based on a modern theme namely the self-centeredness. Here the over-wrought wife is a foil to the practical husband. They hold two diametrically opposite views of life. The wife ,under the burden of the grief over the death of her first new-born ,can’t forget that her husband himself dug the grave of their own child in their little grave-yard and himself buried him there. But to the husband, it seems a normal act that he should have dug the grave of his own son. He has come to accept the death of his son as an accident whose grief can be submerged beneath the everyday existence of life.

In order to make his wife accept the accident the husband gives some arguments. He says-

No, from the time when one is sick to death

One is alone and he dies more alone.

Friends make pretence of following to the grave

But before one is in it, their mind is turned.

Thus the husband speaks out the selfish nature of the modern men who even betray with the dead. All human sympathy is gone and it has been replaced by selfishness. In this way the poem is a modern domestic epic, which exposes some modern crises to our eyes.

Mending Wall

The poem Mending Wall is also very modern in its approach. The poem is based on the modern theme of isolation. Modern men built boundaries and made themselves isolated from each other. Frost’s metaphysical treatment of this physical and psychological isolation is also an evidence of his modernity. In “Mending Walls”, Frost juxtaposes the two opposite aspects of the theme of the poem and then leaves it to the reader to draw his own conclusion. The conservative farmer says:

Good fences make good neighbor

and the modern radical farmer says:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

But the question remains unsolved. And it is up to the readers if they will keep the wall or pull down it.

Modern approach to Nature

It is true that Frost’s poetry abounds in pastures and plains, mountains and rivers, woods and gardens, groves and bowers, fruits and flowers, and seeds and birds. But his approach to nature and this natural phenomenon are different from the Romantics and is very realistic and modern in nature. His retreat to the country side is not the romantic escape from the harsh, unpleasant realities of modern life. The rural world, the world of nature into which he withdraws, is not a world of dreams ,a pleasant fanciful Arcadia ,but harsher and more demanding than the urban world. Unlike Romantics he has taken notice of both the bright and dark aspects of nature as we see in his poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time”. Beneath the apparently beautiful calm there is lurking turmoil and storms:

Be glad of water, but don’t forget

The lurking frost in the earth beneath

In fact the world of nature in Frost’s poetry is not a world of dream. It is much more harsh, horrible and hostile than the modern urban world. Hence his experience of the pastoral technique to comment on the human issue of modern world his realistic treatment of Nature, his employment of symbolic and metaphysical techniques and the projection of the awareness of human problems of the modern society in his poetry justly entitle him to be looked up to as modern poet.

Problems of Modern life

In fact, Frost’s poetry portrays the disintegration of values in modern life and the disillusionment of the modern man in symbolical and metaphysical terms as much as the poetry of great, modern poets does, because most of his poems deal with persons suffering from loneliness and frustration, regrets and disillusionment which are known as modern disease. In “An old Man’s Winter Night”, the old man is lonely, completely alienated from the society, likeness, the tiredness of the farmer due to over work in “Apple-Picking” and as a result of it his yielding to sleep:

For I have too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of great harvest I myself desired.

The Poem The Road Not Taken also deals with the dilemma of the modern mind. The poem depicts the confusion which prevails in modern life. The modern man does not know which way to go and it is difficult for him to make a choice. He is confused and his life does not have a clear purpose. The speaker in the poem represents the modern man, who habitually wastes energy in regretting any choice made, but belatedly and wishfully sighs over the attractive alternative which he rejected:

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Symbolism

The symbolic technique followed by Frost is also very modern in nature. The poems that are rich in symbolic meaning are Mending Wall, The Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods by Snowy Evening, Birches etc. Mending Wall is a symbolic poem in which he describes an anecdote typical of the conservative approach of the rural people in New England, but it has the universal symbolic implication. The poem Stopping By woods on a Snowy Evening is also full of symbols. The poem symbolically expresses the conflict which everyone feels between the demands of the practical life and a desire to escape into the land of reverie. The closing stanza of the poem is especially symbolic. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

“The Road Not Taken” symbolizes the universal problem of making a choice of invisible barriers built up in the minds of the people which alienate them from one another mentally and emotionally thought they live together or as neighbors in the society. Similarly the Birch trees in “Birches” symbolize man’s desire to seek escape from the harsh suffering man to undergo in this world.

Critics have a difference of opinion over considering him a modern poet. Frost is a pastoral poet – poet of pastures and plains, mountains and rivers, woods and gardens, groves and bowers, fruits and flowers, and seeds and birds. They do not treat such characteristically modern subjects as ‘the boredom implicit in sensuality’, ‘the consciousness of neuroses’ and ‘the feeling of damnation’. But the recent critical conversations have resuscitated a little noted argument from the late seventies in favor of viewing Frost as modernist.

While Frost does not place the whole course of Western history into doubt or experiment with innovative formal structure and with the position of the reader – characteristics of the work of other modernist poets -- he does tend toward a critique of the increasing alienation of modern life, as well as foster a sense of the visual that is so important to some groups of modernists like the imagists (who favorably reviewed Frost’s work).

According to J.F.Lynen the use of the pastoral technique by Frost in his poems, does not mean that the poet seeks an escape from the harsh realities of modern life. He argues that it provides him with a point of view. Frost uses pastoral technique only to evaluate and comment on the modern lifestyle. His pastoralism thus registers a protest against the disintegration of values in the modern society and here he is one with great poets of the modern age like T.S.Eliot, Yeats and Hopkins.

Depiction of Civilization in Auden:

Wysten Hugh Auden is remembered as one of the best American poets of the 20th century. Even much before the time that the World War II broke out, Auden was engaged in highlighting various loopholes in the political systems of the world which engendered flaws in the social apparatus as well as the economic paraphernalia of any country. This article carries out an exegesis into some of the ideas in W.H. Auden’s poetry, based on his social analysis of the world.

The “Oxford Coterie “of young poets that included Stephen Spenders and W.H. Auden together catalyzed the process of introducing themes that are now archetypal to the modernist poetry of the 20th century. One sees Auden’s poetry as beautiful and at times surreal on a normative vision, but upon a deeper level of study, his poetry unravels its underlying explanations to the problems that the world is confronted with. Not only does Auden talk about the social and political problems but the problems of identity, reclamation of space, and the herculean difficulties associated with war-affected nations that breathe perpetual pessimism and existential crises.

At Oxford in the late 1920s, Auden read the work of Eliot and was inspired majorly by the latter. Auden’s earliest verse was also influenced by Thomas Hardy and Wilfred Owens. His poems are fragmented, hinging on substantial images and colloquial concerns to convey Auden’s political and psychological fears. In the 1930s his poems mirrored his travels as well as his obsession with the work of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Journey to War, written with Christopher Isherwood, a regular collaborator, featured short sonnets and a verse interpretation. The famous Spain, dealing with the Spanish Civil War, is from this period.

One of the chief factors that sets Auden different from his lot is his ability to explain matters and topics of sheer intellect with use of the simplest linguistic facility, easily graspable and pragmatically structured. A terse description to define Auden as a poet could be taken from one of his own very brief poems, Epitaph on a Tyrant: Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets The More Loving Oneis a poem by Auden that talks about him looking up at the stars and while examining these, it can be understood that the poet makes significant allusions.

The “stars” in the poem could allude to the ruling hierarchy, the upper tiers that rule over masses. It is a substantial interpretation to the poem that the poet hinges his idea upon; Auden, being the social analyst that he was, through this poem placed emphasis on the discordance between the government tiers and the ordinary masses—drawing people’s attention towards the asymmetrical society—the widening of the gyre between the bases and the superstructures. It is this ever-widening gap between the proletariat and the bourgeois class that engenders a social conflict between the two, which ultimately becomes a cause of the struggle that the proletariat class undergoes in order to eventually bring a revolution. The poet refers to himself as the more loving entity, a kind of proverbial glue that would keep the bases together by forging unity of purpose. This particular notion is inclined towards critiquing capitalism in which cleavages are formed within a society, If equal affection there cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

The Marxist idea in the poem is brought under perspective by highlighting what apitalism is capable of doing to a society, creating factions and divisions within it and polarizing it to a lethal extent. It is this idea that is mirrored in the tone of the third stanza: Admirer as I think I am Of stars that do not give a damn I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day When the working classes and middle classes of a country feel alienated and realize that they have been brutally left on their own, downtrodden and disenfranchised, they stop relying on their elected representatives, the ones that they bestowed their trust upon—their so-called support-systems and the ones that they admired. This paves way for a pro-Marxist ideology to set in, which for the most part, is a revolution brought about by the toiling bases. The poem is partly pessimistic and partly optimistic. The pessimistic part of the poem manifests itself in the last stanza whereby the poet says, Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky It needs to be understood that the poet here is trying to establish the idea that all ‘big stars’ that one admires and deems as his savior and protector are petty in themselves, their shine is transient and short-lived, which is why one should be prepared to open his eyes to witness an empty sky. The empty sky could allude to a society without social hierarchies and class structures. The optimistic approach, however, is closely linked to the very idea of a silver silhouette seen being engendered by an impeccable belief in revolution which would dissolve the anxieties and pressures endured by the working class. Auden is famous for highlighting contemporary issues that were prevalent under totalitarianism under the veneer of lyrical pieces of beauty.

In The Unknown Citizen, Auden describes an individual who is robed off his individuality in such a way that he has been displayed as an entity recognizable by the various external agencies that keep a track of his life: For in everything he did he served the greater Community. Except for the War till the day he retired He worked in a factory and never got fired, But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc. Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views, For his Union reports that he paid his dues One could argue over the nature of the title of this poem, it is essential to bear in mind the reality that the readership is made to imbibe by the poet rightly pointing out that an individual is nothing but a cog in the social machinery—and this mechanical existence fosters nothing evolutionary, rather paves way for a life punctuated by stagnation. As the individual grows older he becomes emotionally sterilized, transposed into a robot. What the poet means to willfully state is the abstract notion that any individual, towards the later years of his life in any society, does not remain the person he was born as.

The Press are convinced that he brought a paper every day  And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way  The names of all the agencies begin with capitalized letters, this shows that the poet is hinting at the idea that in societies, from a bird’s eye view, the individual himself coupled with all his obstinate pursuits of individuality, is dwarfed by the system that runs the society and affects the major stakeholders. The major stakeholders could be the mega institutions, institutionalized norms and major private owners in the managerial, working apparatus of any country. This again makes the idea of Marxism very prominent in Auden’s work as it is inexorably this very situation that results in demarcations and cornering of individuals who are constructive citizens of the society, demeaned and dwarfed by the big fishes in the game who not only use their well-established image and infrastructure to crush these individuals but also use art, religion and politics to exert their influence. Was he happy? Was he free? The question is absurd.

The absurdity about the question arises straight from the time when one looks up at the title of the poem, The Unknown Citizen, ideally the citizen is the state’s responsibility but in the poem, Auden explains how the state treats the citizen as nothing more than a duty that needs to be kept a check upon with the help of a few external sources- ensuring the veritable happiness of the citizen has never been on the state’s list of priorities. In his poem, In Time of War, Auden gives an in-depth analysis of the complete process of proto-industrial capitalism. He talks about the various aspects of capitalism affecting the natural fabric of any country which is responsible for instilling unity within individuals. In the Engines bear them through the sky: they’re free And isolated like the very rich;/ Here war is simple like a monument: A telephone is speaking to a man; Flags on a map assert that troops were sent; A boy brings milk in bowls.

There is a plan  For living men in terror of their lives, Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,  And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,  And, unlike an idea, can die too soon. The effects of capitalism as we see it, the machines and the mechanical devices are what have reduced the ‘human” in man. Man has become a prey to dejection feeling strangulated by man-made social orders, the poet describes how war is itself the biggest of human follies and the biggest of human failures in essence. It is important to note here that Auden relates war and the “journey to war” directly with the idea of capitalism. Marxism, being a binary to capitalism, is what Auden, socially, propagates in this poem. The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, being the hallmark of an asymmetrical society is what Auden has carried out a spoken battle against. But ideas can be true although men die/  Requires their skill; will ever see how flying  Is the creation of ideas they hate, Auden points out here that the valiant skill with the art of soldering is what the higher authorities require from the individuals, the citizens, but the ideas dwelling within these mindsets might be true, Auden throws light at the fact that it is easier to see men dying in a war but an ideology cannot be buried so plainly.

 The perplexity of war is what Auden has talked about as failure and a futile exercise but at the same time the motivation that these men have, that provides the impetus for such an exercise in the first place, is what bears significance in Auden’s eyes and it is this motivation that Auden defends and revels in. The poet says that it is this motivation that would make the people actualize their true potential as veritable individuals, cognizant of the fact that they should not waste their energies on activities like war, but ought to channelize their energies to bring essential changes to the very system that creates room for war. In a nutshell, Auden worked not only as a beautiful poet but as one whose poetry did not do away with creating an impeccable balance between reasonable excess and required reality, beautiful in its form, yet practical and poignant in its message.

Conclusion

Modernism is one of the major movements in twentieth century literature. It registers dramatic breakdown of conventions. World War I had great and probably everlasting effect on traditional society. Modernism  dares to explore those areas, which  was forbidden for conventional society: M odernist writing "plunges’ the reader into a confusing and difficult mental landscape which  cannot  be  immediately  understood  but  which  must  be  moved  through  and mapped by the reader in order to understand its limits and meanings. (Childs 4) For many readers, modernism  is difficult to understand. It has violated or is still violating  all forms  of limitation   imposed by victorian or   traditional  society. 

The  present  crisis brought by the catastrophe o f World War I is not reparable: Crisis  is inevitably the central  term  o f art  in discussions o f this turbulent cultural moment. Overused as it has been, it still glows with justification.  This century had scarcely grown  used to its own name, before it learned the twentieth  would  be the epoch      of crisis,  real  and manufactured,  physical  and            metaphysical, material and symbolic. (Levenson 4) However, many modern writers hope for the better. Many writers believed that if we could resurrect the former beliefs then modem land could be saved from the crisis. Unfortunately, after the World War II writers  become hopeless  because the War  has shattered the traditional beliefs permanently.

 

Bibliography

1.   Brooks, Jr Cleanth.“The Waste Land: An Analysis” . The Waste Land. Ed.   

   Michael North. New York: W.W Norton & Company, 2001

2.       Childs, Peter. Modernism. London: Routledge, 2002

3.      Hirschberg, Stuart. “Art as the Looking Glass o f Civilzation in W. B. Yeats’s ‘Under Ben Bulben’” . Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review. 71 .284( Winter, 1982): 399-404

4.      Jeffares,  A. Norman.  “The  Byzantium   Poems  o f W.B  Yeats” . The Review of English Studies. 22.85 (January, 1946): 44-52

5.      Levenson, Michael, “ Introduction”. The Cambridge Companion To Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999

6.      Longenbach, James. “Modern  poetry”. The Cambridge Companion To Modernism. Ed. Michael Levenson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999

7.      Malaney,  William   D.  “T.S  Eliot’s  Poetics  o f Self:  Responding  “Four  Quartets” . Alif: Journal o f Comparative Poetics. 22: 14 8 - 168

8.      Mathews, Steven. T.S Eliot’s Chapman: “ M etaphysical” Poetry and beyond''. Journal o f Oser, Lee. “Charlotte Eliot and “The Love Song o f J. Alfred Prufrock”” . 94.2(November, 1996): 190-200

9.      Stauffer, Donald A. “ W. B .Yeats and the Medium o f Poetry”. ELH. 3(September,  1948): 227-246

10.   Weitz,   Morris. “T.S Eliot: Time as a Model of Salvation”. The  Sewanee  Review. 60.1(January-M arch, 1952): 48-64

Appendixes

A.          “The specific features signified by “modernism” (or by the adjectives modernist) vary with the user, but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some o f the traditional bases not only o f Western art, but o f Western culture in general.” -  M. H. Abrams ( English Romantic Poets: modern essays in criticism (1960)  p. 167)

B.           “In relation to Modernism, modernity is considered to describe a way o f living and of experiencing  life which  has arisen  with the changes wrought by  industrialisation, urbanisation and secularisation; its characteristics are disintegration and reformation, fragmentation and rapid change, emphatically and insecurity. It involves certain new understandings o f time and space: speed, mobility, communication, travel, dynamism, chaos and cultural revolution.”  (Childs 14-15)

C.     Indeed Modernism would seem to be the point at which the idea o f the radical and innovating arts, the experimental, technical, aesthetic  ideal that had been growing forward  from  Romanticism,  reaches  formal crisis - in which  myth,  structure and organization in a  traditional sense collapse, and not only for formal            reasons. (Bradbury and McFarlane - Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930 )