One of the duties of poetry, in this view, is to pay attention to ordinary people, the "men of the time and Critic Mark Halliday notes that, especially in comparison with other Stevens work, "Of Modern Poetry" gives a definite "encouragement concerning interpersonal relationships. On a basic, etymological level, "sympathy" means "feeling-together," and thus is perhaps the best way to describe the experience Stevens hopes audiences will have, in which they feel and sense each other together through their humanity: critic David Walker calls it "imaginative sympathy.
According to Stevens, part of poetry's job, as much as it needs to give audiences emotional clarity and meaning, is to be honest and realistic about the world, not false or escapist.
This is first done by acknowledging that the "theatre" of poetry has changed, and one cannot successfully appease readers with old-fashioned verses. Moreover, poetry "has to think about war"—especially the two World Wars that had occurred since the Modernists started writing poetry—and be pragmatic about that evil and darkness. He also read other parts of the novel in manuscript and corresponded with Joyce about it.
The Waste Land is composed of many voices, not always distinguishable from one another. The following passage relates a conversation between a neurotic woman and a laconic man. Why do you never speak? A moment of ragtime music breaks in before the neurotic woman threatens to rush out into the street. The maid relates her own conversation with Lil. Another ominous voice or the same one? The section makes use of at least seven voices: the initial narrator, the nightingale, the neurotic woman, her companion, the gramophone, the maid, and the barkeeper.
Among the mix of voices are those of popular culture. The use of so many voices in this kind of collage allows the poet to distance himself from any single statement. Eliot appears nowhere, but his fingerprints are on everything. Is the poet himself speaking the lines describing the room, or is this merely a pastiche of Renaissance drama? Who is issuing the warnings about closing time? When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid.
This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.
Impersonality did not mean his poetry avoided emotion. Paradoxically, by trying several personae on, and not identifying himself with any one persona, Eliot manages to achieve a kind of impersonality.
Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The background suggests one undercurrent of the dialogue between men and women in The Waste Land.
Instead of a life-giving act of love, sex occurs in the poem as seduction or rape, leading to abortion. The resulting cacophony suggests the impossibility of a truly unified understanding of the poem, even if Eliot hoped that all the voices could be subsumed in that of Tiresias.
The Waste Land could not have been written without the assault on the English poetic tradition undertaken by Ezra Pound and the imagists. The most obvious way in which The Waste Land differs from most of the poetry of the nineteenth century, and from more recent poets like Kipling or even Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon, is in its play with and partial rejection of traditional meter, rhyme, and stanza form.
Parts of the poem are written in free verse. Eliot was an American-born British poet who is often considered one of the most influential poets of the 20 th century. His poems enforced what he felt was a necessary shift away from the dreaminess of Romanticism. There was no longer a need to limit writers to one nationality. This poem is an internal monologue and is narrated using a stream of consciousness. Another of his famous poems is The Waste Land More on Eliot can be found in the American literature intros.
Irish writer W. Yeats was another significant figure in Modernist poetry. His publication of Easter showed this change in attitude.
This poem was written as a response to the Easter Rebellion, when thousands of Irish Republicans were killed for their support of an Ireland independent of Great Britain.
Aside from these two poets, W. Auden also reached prominence during the Modernist period. He is famous for writing poetry on a variety of subjects like love, politics, culture, psychology, and religion. Like Yeats he discusses the historical failures of people involved in the conflict, but looks ahead to potential reconciliation in the future. He asks for complete silence while he mourns. Fiction during this time shifted from the focus of man in his social circle to man as an isolated individual.
This change emphasized the thought processes and unconscious impulses of man. Although this became an emerging trend, there were still writers who adhered to the traditional themes of social class.
One writer who encompassed both Victorian and Modernist ideals was E. While many of his works discussed class and hierarchy in social status, he also displayed an interest in individual values. English women began agitating in earnest for the right to vote in , and the flappers of the Jazz Age began smoking and drinking alcohol in public.
Women were allowed to attend school, and women who could afford it continued their education at those universities that began accepting women in the early twentieth century. Modernist writers created gay and lesbian characters and re-imagined masculinity and femininity as characteristics people could assume or shrug off rather than as absolute identities dictated by society.
Eliot simultaneously lauded the end of the Victorian era and expressed concern about the freedoms inherent in the modern age. The latter portrays rape, prostitution, a conversation about abortion, and other incidences of nonreproductive sexuality. With Tiresias, Eliot creates a character that embodies wholeness, represented by the two genders coming together in one body.
0コメント