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Chapter 5 Modernism (2)
T. S. Eliot
Stevenson
Williams
Assignments Define the term modernism List the thematic characteristics modernism Tell T. S. Eliot’s artistic features What are the symbols in W. C. Williams’ Spring
and All List the themes of W. C. Williams’ Spring and A
ll and find lines from the poem to support the themes each
Answer the first two question on page 183 from the Selected Readings
Contents Modernism High-modernism Post-modernism T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
and Spring and all by William Carlos Williams
Modernism As a literary term Overview Characteristics of Modernity/Modern
ism
*Formal/Stylistic characteristics
*Thematic characteristics
As a literary term
Modernism, as a literary style, emerged after WWI, beginning in Europe and then progressing into American literature by the late 1920s. After the First World War many people questioned the chaos and the insanity of it all. The world’s “universal truths” and trust in authority figures began to crumble, and Modernism as a literary movement was a response to the destruction of these beliefs.
Overview *Modernist literature can be viewed
largely in terms of its formal, stylistic and semantic movement away from Romanticism, examining subject matter that is traditionally mundane--a prime example being The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot.
Romanticism stressed the subjectivity of experience, Modernist writers were more acutely conscious of the objectivity of their surroundings. In Modernism the object is: the language doesn't mean it is. This is a shift from an epistemological aesthetic to an ontological aesthetic or, in simpler terms, a shift from a knowledge-based aesthetic to a being-based aesthetic. This shift is central to Modernism. Archibald MacLeish, for instance, said, "A poem should not mean / But be."
*Modernist literature often features a marked pessimism, a clear rejection of the optimism apparent in Victorian literature. In fact, "a common motif in Modernist fiction is that of an alienated individual--a dysfunctional individual trying in vain to make sense of a predominantly urban and fragmented society." But the questioning spirit of modernism could also be seen, less elegaically, as part of a necessary search for ways to make a new sense of a broken world.
*Modernist literature often moves beyond the limitations of the Realist novel with a concern for larger factors such as social or historical change. This is prominent in "stream of consciousness" writing. Examples can be seen in Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens and Mrs Dalloway, James Joyce's Ulysses, Katherine Porter's Flowering Judas, Jean Toomer's Cane, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and others.
*Modernism as a literary movement is seen, in large part, as a reaction to the emergence of city life as a central force in society.
Characteristics of Modernity/Modernism
*Formal/Stylistic characteristics
*Thematic characteristics
*Formal/Stylistic characteristics
Free indirect speech
Stream of consciousness
Juxtaposition of characters
Wide use of classical allusions
Figure of speech
Inter-textuality
Personification
Hyperbole
Parataxis
Comparison
Quotation
Pun
Satire
Irony
Antiphrasis
Unconventional use of metaphor
Symbolic representation
Psychoanalysis
Discontinuous narrative
Meta-narrative
Multiple narrative points of view
Thematic characteristics
*Breakdown of social norms
*Realistic embodiment of social meanings
*Separation of meanings and senses from the context
*Despairing individual behaviors in the face of an unmanageable future
*Sense of spiritual loneliness
*Sense of alienation
*Sense of frustration
*Sense of disillusionment
*Rejection of the history
*Rejection of the outdated social system
*Objection of the traditional thoughts and the traditional moralities
*Objection of the religious thoughts
*Substitution of a mythical past
As a liyerary school, it came about around the end of WWII, though not actually studied as a form until the mid 1980s. The characteristics are the same as modernism except postmodernism is more playful or celebratory regarding the world's "insanity." The idea being, okay, the world is chaotic, there are no universal truths, lets see what we can do with that. Examples of postmodern works include:
Anais Nin's Under a Glass Bell (1944), William Gass's In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987).
Both modernism and postmodernism may have all or some of the above characteristics; it isn’t required that all of the traits are used in order for a piece to be classified as modernist writing. The key characteristics are usually fragmentation, loss, distrust of authority, and the lack of universal truths.
*High modernism is a particular instance of modernism, coined towards the end of modernism. "High modernism", presumably is meant to specify the most characteristic, developed, consistent, or florid manifestation of modernism. The term is used in literature, criticism, music and the visual arts.
In one sense, "high modernism" is closely associated with anthropologist and political scientist James C. Scott, who uses the phrase in a pejorative sense. Scott and his followers use the phrase with an implied criticism of modernism as austerely minimalist and excessively rationalist or bureaucratic combined with a sense of hubris in its claims about the inevitability of progress, or its claim to embody progress.
In literature
The term "high modernism" as used in literary criticism generally lacks the pejorative connotations it has in other contexts. High literary modernism, on the contrary, is generally used to describe a subgenre of literary modernism, and generally encompasses works published between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second.
Regardless of the specific year it was produced, high modernism is characterized primarily by a complete and unambiguous embrace of what Andreas Huyssen calls the "Great Divide." That is, it believes that there is a clear distinction between capital-A. Art and mass culture, and it places itself firmly on the side of Art and in opposition to popular or mass culture. (Postmodernism, according to Huyssen, may be defined precisely by its rejection of this distinction.)
Lists of canonical high modernists often include:
James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound ,Virginia Woolf ,E. M. Forster, Marcel Proust, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway
Gertrude Stein and Joseph Conrad (most of whose work predates the generally accepted time-frame of high literary modernism).
Whatever the literary schools are, they all belong to modernism.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Outline Life (p172) His major works (p173-174) His theories about literature (His “the im
personal theory” of poetry or “objective correlative” )
The basic themes of his criticism Understanding of his The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock. And The Waste Land (p183)
V. His artistic features
His theories about literature
T. S. Eliot claimed himself a `classiest’ in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion'.
*His “the impersonal theory” of poetry or “objective correlative”
→Emphasizes the relation of a poem to the poems by other authors and suggests “the conception of poetry as a living whole of all poetry that has ever been written.”
→Focuses on the relation of the poem and its author.
→Impressions and experiences important for the man may take no place in the poetry.
→The relevance of a poem may be ascribed, not to its reflection of the author's personality, but to the fact that the author's mind is a finely perfected medium in which varied feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.
→ “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." Eliot saw that in this depersonalization the art approaches science.
→Defined the objective correlative as a way of expressing emotion by finding "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion."
→The objective correlative makes a poem intellectually and emotionally intelligible to the reader by presenting concrete circumstances that evoke an abstract emotion. For an example of the technique in action, consider the opening stanza of his The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
→"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality
The basic themes of his criticism
*The relationship between tradition and individual talent;
*The relation between the past, the present and the future.
His artistic features
→Fresh visual imagery
→Flexible tone and highly expressive rhythm
→Full of quotations and allusions
→Images and symbols seem disconnected
→Lines in a number of foreign languages, lack of narrative structure compounded by startling juxtapositions,
→A sense of aloofness from the ordinary sensory universe of day-to-day living.
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
Outline Life His literary ideas Williams’ poetic method Experiencing Spring and all by Willi
am Carlos Williams
His literary ideas
Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations and correspondence, often associated with modernism and Imagism. Williams won the Pulitzer Prize in May of 1963.
→As a young man Williams stayed true to imagist style and principles and his early poems, such as The Red Wheelbarrow,etc. are similarly laconic and focused on things in the world rather than abstractions. However, as he grew older Williams distanced himself from the imagist ideas he had helped to establish with Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, whom he ultimately rejected as being "too European."
→ (This break came on the heels of a brief collaboration with Pound on T.S. Eliot’s epic poem The Waste Land, which he derided as baroque and obscure. Eliot's poem, despite its genius, seemed to him years later a "great catastrophe to our letters," a work of stylistic brilliance and the learning, yet profoundly pessimistic its description of modern culture as a "waste land." Imagism, to Williams, had focused so intently on images and things that it had lost its human audience.)
→Williams disliked Ezra Pound's and especially T. S. Eliot's frequent use of allusions to foreign languages and Classical sources, as in Eliot's The Waste Land.
→Williams most famously summarized his poetic method in the phrase "No ideas but in things"
→He advocated that poets leave aside traditional poetic forms and unnecessary literary allusions, and try to see the world as it is.
→Williams drew his themes from what he called "the local."
→He sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture.
→Williams tried to invent an entirely fresh form, an American form of poetry whose subject matter was centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people.
→Finding beauty in the commonplace was the goal of Williams' poetry throughout his life, and while as a young man he wrote about common things, as he matured he came to write uncommon thoughts with common words. The ordinary, the local, becomes reinvigorated through the light of the poetic imagination,
Williams’ poetic method
It is probably best summarized by the phrase “No ideas but in things,” which is taken from his 1944 poem A Sort of Song. Williams strongly advocated that poets abandon traditional forms and unnecessary literary allusions and attempt to seethe world directly and reflect that in their writing.
Spring and all
Outline Introduction Brief Summary Line-by-line understanding Themes Literary device (technique)
Introduction
In a lot of ways, Spring and All is a classic William Carlos Williams poem: short, beautiful, and filled with simple images. It focuses on making each moment as clear and sharp as possible. He’s discovering poetry in the world around him, in daily experience. He’s inventing a style that doesn’t need fancy words or references to history in order to make its point or to amaze reader with its beauty.
(But, before starting thinking that he’s all about plants and fruit and simple pretty words, we should know where this poem comes from. It is part of a much longer book called Spring and All, which is CRAZY. It’s a mix of poems, prose, and all kinds of ideas about the imagination, writing, history, and so on. The chapters are out of order, and the sentences stop midway. In a lot of ways, it sounds like a rant.)
Eventually, the book makes a kind of weird sense, but it takes a lot of work to get there. Luckily, Williams’s genius also comes in bite-sized pieces, like this poem. The bottom line? It’s easy to read – and that’s how it’s supposed to be – but there’s a lot behind it, and a lot going on under the surface.
Brief Summary
Someone has stopped by the side of a road that leads to a hospital, and he or she is looking at the landscape. This person (the speaker of the poem) begins by describing the scene: the dead plants that cover everything at the end of winter. Then, the poem shifts, and the speaker describes the coming of spring, imagining how new life will emerge from this landscape as it begins to wake up.
Line-by-line summary Section I (lines 1-8)
*Line 1: By the road to the contagious hospital
(Get out the highlighters for this first line, because it’s really important.)
The phrase "By the road" begins to set the scene. It doesn’t tell us exactly where we are, but it makes it easy to imagine the speaker traveling, moving from Point A to Point B, and stopping to look out over the landscape described in the poem.
*The last two words in the line make a much bigger difference; this road leads to the "contagious hospital." (That phrase sounds like bad news, a place you already don’t want to go.)
*The word "contagious" sets the mood for the poem, so bear with us as we dig into the background just a little.
*It seems important to know that Williams earned his living as a doctor. We can’t know if this poem is about an experience he had, but he definitely would have been familiar with hospitals.
*The difference between an open field and a hospital ward might seem clear to us, but it would have been very real for Williams. At the time that the poem was written, infectious disease was still a big deal in America, and one needed separate spaces to confine anyone with a disease like smallpox.
Just keep in mind that the word "contagious" makes the image of the hospital even more intense. It’s a place you really don’t want to end up in – maybe even as a doctor.
*Lines 2-4:
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
Immediately, the road and the hospital disappear, and the sentence continues with a description of the clouds.
→(Thinking of your standard clouds, you might imagine a sort of cheerful, fluffy thing in the sky.
Here’s is not these clouds. There’s nothing scary about them exactly, but nothing comforting either.)
*These clouds don’t "drift" or "float" – they "surge." These clouds rush into the poem, filled with power, hurried along by the wind.
*Where some clouds might be a comforting, even white, these are "blue-mottled." the sentence ends with "a cold wind."
This is definitely a poem that’s designed to make reader practically taste every word, to feel how cold that wind is, to imagine that hospital looming in the distance.
*Bottom line, this starts out on a pretty bleak note. Not miserable, necessarily, just a cold, blustery and not-too-welcoming sky.
*Lines 5-8:
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen
patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees
→It tells that things don’t get a lot happier here.
→For the first time, plants, brown and dry, are seen as well as mud, dirty water, etc.
→However, what is brought before the eyes is a "waste," as the speaker puts it: an empty space, without any life that the eye can see.
→Check out the sneaky way that he ties together the pieces of this poem. In the sixth line, weeds are "standing and fallen." Then, in the seventh, "patches of standing water" is seen.
→As a common sense, weeds and water don’t "stand" in the same way, but the repetition of that word fits those two lines together like puzzle pieces. So, even if the landscape isn’t exactly pretty, it does "rhyme" in a way.
→Also, the next line includes the word "tall" which sounds a lot like "fallen."
Section II (lines 9-15)*Lines 9-13: All along the road the reddish purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy stuff of bushes and small trees with dead, brown leaves under them leafless vines- More fun with dead plants. →Around the edges, Williams does start to breathe
some life into the scene. Some new colors do appear – reddish and purplish – but, for the most part, we’re still up close and personal with dry, brown leaves and trees.
*Lines 14-15: Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches- →Then, just as one might be getting tired of this st
uff… WHAM. The poem shifts, and one catches the first glimpse of spring.
→Spring doesn’t happen right away; in fact, it sort of sneaks into the line, appearing in the distance.
→At first, one can’t even tell it’s there. The landscape still seems "lifeless," just like the vines in line 13 were "leafless."
→But, something has changed, and Williams wants the reader to look more closely. Spring is there, waiting for us to see it.
*Even though there aren’t any real characters in this poem, spring is introduced as if it has a personality. Like some creature waking up, it is "sluggish" and "dazed."
*This is the first sign of life, and it’s also the first thing Williams treats like a living being.
*He’s not going to beat the reader over the head with it, but this is a big moment. The entire book is called "Spring and All," and now… here’s spring.
Section III (lines 16-23)*Lines 16-19: They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter. All about them the cold, familiar wind-→Now that we’ve had a line or two to get used to sp
ring, here come more new things. The next section tells us that other things are approaching, too.
→"They enter," Williams tells us, but who are they? He only tells us a few things: they’re naked and cold, and, well, they’re entering.
*It’s a little bit of a mystery, and it forces us to guess, to look for clues, and to read more closely. We know that they are different from "sluggish" spring, but we have to wait to learn more.
*Williams could just say who they are from the beginning, but he teases us a little. He wants to make his poems clear, but maybe not always too easy.
*Do you see how the image of these plants coming into the world might make us think of human babies being born? This is called personification, and he uses it in a few spots in the poem. It’s one of a lot of ways that he twists together the human and the natural worlds, and suggests that they’re really just aspects of the same thing.
See how he brings back that cold wind from the fourth line?
*Lines 20-23:
Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wild carrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf
→Now, things start to pick up speed, and Williams solves our mini-mystery.
→It looks like "they" are the new plants that poke up through the dead leaves, although he never quite comes out and says so.
*Things get clearer, as spring takes hold.
*Do you feel how the mood of the poem changes? After the groggy feeling of winter, things are beginning to thaw, to pop out and change.
*For example, look at the word "quickens." Here, it means "comes back to life," but it also hints at the way the world speeds up in spring. Even the sound of the word is fast and lively, the opposite of the "sluggish" feeling the poem talked about a minute ago.
*Things are about to change, and, when they do, it will move fast.
Section IV (lines 24-27)*Lines 24-27 But now the stark dignity of entrance-Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken But… we’re not quite in spring yet. The poem gets
ahead of itself. *This poem isn’t about things actually happening – i
t’s about things beginning to happen. The word "entrance" is really a key here. We’re just setting the stage for spring, not actually watching the play that’s about to start.
*If Williams speeded things up in the last few lines, now he slows them down again.
→We’re back at the beginning point, in a way, but something has changed. Down at the roots, things are waking up. We’re looking for things to happen on the surface, but the real changes are going on underground.
*As you probably noticed, nothing much actually happens in this poem. But, things are about to happen. Basically, the "spring" that Williams talks about isn’t just happening in the poem. "By the road to the contagious hospital" was written at a big moment in history, a turning point for art, poetry, etc. WWI was just over, the world had changed, and people were looking for a way to talk, think, and write about the modern world.
→Williams knew a lot about this – he was friends with tons of these "Modernist" artists, and he was finding his own way to deal with these questions. Lucky for us, he wrote simple, beautiful poems that are actually fun to read. Contrast to some of his friends, Ezra Pound, for example, he made it a lot harder on themselves and on their readers.
Themes Man and the Natural World Mortality Transformation
*Man and the Natural World
This is the big theme. Now, this could have been a poem just about nature, and for the most part, it is. But, someone is watching this nature, and someone is talking about it. Williams drives this point home hard by starting us out with the road and the hospital. Those two places are major symbols of the human world. They cut through the landscape and shut it out. In order for this poem to happen, the speaker and the reader have to step out of these human spaces and pay real attention to the natural environment.
→Quotes & Thoughts on Man and the Natural World
By the road to the contagious hospital (line 1)
Thought: This is about nature. So, why is this important theme and not just a quick reference? The fact is that it is a big clue. Williams uses this line to set up different two worlds. On the one hand, we have nature, with its fields, trees, grass, etc. On the other hand, we have the world of hospitals and roads, and, therefore, also the world of jobs, cars, responsibilities, etc.
*Mortality Death opens this poem in a big way. It’s hard to t
hink about a contagious hospital without thinking about the possibility of death. If that wasn’t enough, the landscape turns out to be dead, too. Check out the "dried weeds, standing and fallen," and the "dead, brown leaves." Ultimately, the whole world we see in this poem is "lifeless in appearance." That last word is a key, though. While a disease might make you really dead, the land only "appears dead." The payoff in the poem, the heartwarming conclusion, is that this isn’t the scary kind of death, but the kind that leads to rebirth.
→Quotes & Thoughts on Mortality (Lines 1, 4-6)
small trees with dead brown leaves under them leafless vines (lines 11-13)
Thought: Dead stuff. Since Williams repeats himself a bit here, we can guess he’s sending us a message. He really wants us to soak up this idea of a dead landscape. He wants us to see and feel how lifeless winter can be. He even uses a word, "leafless," that sounds really similar to "lifeless." If we really feel all of the weight of death at the beginning, then the turn towards life hits us even harder.
*Transformation Transformations are a major way Williams a
pproaches nature in this poem. What he describes is "just" the changing of the seasons, but he makes it into a really big event. The world is changing, transforming itself from brown to green, from dead to living, from cold and windy to calm and warm. As Williams puts it: "the profound change has come upon them." It’s the big shift in the poem, so it’s definitely worth underlining here.(answer to question 2 on p193)
→Quotes & Thoughts on Transformation (lines 20-21, 25-26)
sluggish dazed spring approaches (lines 14-15)
Thought: This is the beginning of the change. Up to this point, everything has been lifeless and still. Nothing has changed in the landscape. Now, something new is coming. The transformation doesn’t happen all at once. Williams points out that spring is still sluggish (talk about a word that sounds like what it means!), but things are waking up.
Literary device (technique) Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay Form and Meter Speaker Point of View About the title
Literary device (technique) Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay *Spring As you might have guessed from the title, Spring i
s a pretty important part of this poem. Eventually, it emerges as a kind of weird main character, taking on almost human characteristics as it changes the world of the poem.
(Lines 14-15: Our first glimpse of spring. When it shows up, it is described as being "sluggish and dazed." These words usually apply to humans, and, when they are used to describe an object or an idea like spring, that’s called personification.
Line 25: Here’s a point that Williams fills in a little bit in other places in the book "Spring and All." The "profound change" of spring’s arrival is a metaphor for the changes that are sweeping over the whole world in the early 20th Century. World War I is over; people are producing new and exciting art and philosophy, and starting to see some new prosperity. In a general sense, spring has always been a symbol of new beginnings, but Williams definitely has some specific things to say about his moment in history.)
*Plants
The poem is chock full of plants, both the dead old ones that Winter has left behind, and the new ones that are emerging with spring.
(Lines 9-13: This is a pretty long description of dead plants, especially for a poem this short. This tips us off to the importance of these plants as an image of cold and lifeless winter. More generally, they are symbols of the death that must come before rebirth and new possibility.
Line 16-18: These new plants are compared to human babies, another use of personification).
*The Hospital
The man-made objects that open the poem have a big influence on the way we look at the nature scenes that follow. The hospital becomes a kind of lens that changes the way we see the world in the poem.
(Line 1: The image of the contagious hospital puts us (just for a moment) in a completely human world. Everything that follows is natural, but here, for just a second, we’re stuck in a place of disease, with its white sheets and the smell of disinfectant. ) Williams is too sly to tell us exactly
what the hospital means, but, sitting where it does, we can be sure that this isn’t just a random location.
Then again, if we’re going to make a deal out of the hospital, it wouldn’t be fair to leave out the road. It’s not as exciting as a "contagious hospital," but it’s a pretty important symbol, especially in America. In so many books and movies, it stands for freedom and possibility. On the other hand, roads can also make us think of danger, loneliness, and the violation of nature.)
*Form and Meter: Free Verse This poem doesn’t have a regular meter, an
d the lines don’t rhyme. This is "free verse." Williams wasn’t real interested in the fancy traditions of poetry, and he was working hard to avoid getting stuck in old ways of doing things. He needed a poetic style that was modern, unpretentious, and direct, and that’s pretty much what he got in his poem. The choice of words, the arrangement of the lines, and the use of images in this poem are all very precise, and designed to create specific effects.
*Speaker Point of View
Our speaker is someone who stops by the side of a road, looking at the landscape in late winter and telling us about it. But we don’t know much else. Now, we always make a point of saying that the speaker is a fictional character, a creation of the author, rather than the author himself. Even if the poem is autobiographical, the speaker is still a made-up version of the author.
In this case though, we know that Williams was a doctor, and so it seems convenient that this character would be headed to a hospital.
*About the title
This poem was the first in the book "Spring and All," and the only title Williams gave it was "I" People who needed a way to refer to this poem just called it by its first line: "By the road to the contagious hospital. As the poem became more popular, it got pulled out of the book it was published in, and started to be printed as a stand-alone poem. In some cases, the book’s title was slapped onto the poem.
If the poem is called "Spring and All," then we may not be so surprised when spring finally appears in the middle. If the poem has no title except the first line, maybe the appearance of spring will feel like more of a change.
In the summary for line 1 (above), we talked about how the contagious hospital looms over the poem, so maybe we have a sense of how it works as a title.
The "Spring" part makes a lot of sense, but how about the "and All?" If we look at it from one side, these two words provide the little bit of mystery and extra complication that Williams loves. His poems focus on basic ideas and simple images, but they approach them in a way that forces you to think a little more about their meaning. Adding the "and All" gives your imagination some space to play, to think of new and different possibilities.
---- The end
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