Modernist literature is characterized by a break with traditions of literary subjects, forms, concepts and styles, with the movement associated with new trends in literature given birth in the early twentieth century following World War One, and publication of T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land in 1922.
“The Waste Land” is regarded as one of the most important poems in the English-language of the 20th century and is central to the canon of modernist poetry. The poem does not follow a single narrative or feature a consistent style or structure. Shifting between satire and prophecy, its features are abrupt and unannounced, with changes of narrator, location, and time, that conjure an inharmonious range of cultures and literatures.
On initial publication the poem received mixed responses with some critics finding it obscure while others admired its originality. The years that followed saw the poem established as an important work, and proved to be one of the most influential works of the century. The modernist poetry that followed experiments with new modes of expression, with many ways expressing thoughts and emotions, including images for readers to experience the feelings expressed and embracing the emotions and interpreting intellectually, expressing hidden feelings, such as in the confessional poem.
Modernist poetry falls under four major headings: modern or new experiments in form and style with new themes and word-games, modes of expression with complex open-ended themes and meaning. While traditional poetry limits the collective impact of the world with human appeal, even when poems are romantically personal, modernist poetry embraces a wide range of themes and issues. The modernist poet covers many varied topics such as nature, spiritual, political, satire, humour, love, erotic love, and life’s journey with death’s constant shadow closely following.
Some single modernist poems cover more than one theme at the same time, for example Dylan Thomas’s poem “This Bread I Break” which covers nature, spirituality, and art. The modernist poet never says, as in traditional poems, what is the precise meaning of the poem. That is for the reader to discover as personal experiences and thoughts are focused upon the images being created.
This Bread I Break
This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day or wine at night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape’s joy.
Once in this time wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.
This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.
The modernist movement changed the rules of poetry, in form, style, stanza, and rhythm. There are blank verse poems, pictorial poems, prose, sonnets, lyrical, and monologues. The old metrical rhyme-schemes, traditional symbols, metaphors no longer dominate with each poet making his own rules. Diversity of styles is distinctive of modernist poetry. The modernist poet uses experiences and emotions, often raw and painful, visions, relationships, evoking feelings directly with the heart guiding the composition with language at its richest and most condensed.
Poetry is the language of the heart and soul, that creates images and landscapes, memories that embrace the reader’s mind — and as the old Chinese saying goes that a picture is worth a million words, and so it is with a modernist poem, creating dreams, enhancing memories. There are many styles of poetry and the poet must have a unique voice.
Poetry is the highest of literary achievements, timeless, appealing down the ages, revealing a poet’s struggles and experiences, stresses, joys and passions, navigating the way through life’s journey. Poetry is word paintings, full of colours, bright and dark, creating with words images inspiring and enhancing the imagination and recalling memories of love lost and found.
