What is Modern Poetry
• Modern poets saw themselves as looking
• Modern poetry in English started in the back to the best practices of poets in
early years of the 20th century with the earlier periods and other cultures. Their
models included ancient Greek literature,
appearance of the Imagists. Chinese and Japanese poetry, Dante and
the medieval Italian philosophical poets
and the English Metaphysical poets.
• In common with many other modernists,
these poets wrote in reaction to the • Much of early modern poetry took the
form of short, compact lyrics. As it
perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, developed longer poems came to the
foreground.
with its emphasis on traditional
formalism and ornate diction.
Modernism is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and
changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western
society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Among the factors that shaped modernism were: the development of modern
industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by reactions of
horror to World War I. Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment
thinking, as well as rejected religious belief.
(cont)
• Modernism, in general, includes the activities and creations of those
who felt the traditional forms of art, architecture, literature, religious
faith, philosophy, social organization, activities of daily life, and even
the sciences, were becoming ill-fitted to their tasks and outdated in the
new economic, social, and political environment of an emerging fully
industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make
it new!" was the touchstone of the movement's approach towards what
it saw as the now obsolete culture of the past.
Imagism
• Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored
precision of imagery and clear, sharp language.
• Imagism has been described as the most influential movement in English poetry since
Pre-Raphaelites.
• As a poetic style it gave Modernism its start in the early 20th century, and is
considered to be the first organized Modernist literary movement in the English
language.
• Imagism is sometimes viewed as 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any
continuous or sustained period of development.
(Cont)
• The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of
much Romantic and Victorian poetry, in contrast to their
contemporaries, the Georgian poets, who were generally content
to work within that tradition.
• Imagism called for a return to what were seen as more Classical
values, such as directness of presentation and economy of
language, as well as a willingness to experiment with non-
traditional verse forms. Imagists use free verse.
(Cont)
• Imagist publications appearing between 1914 and
1917 featured works by many of the most prominent
modernist figures in poetry and other fields.
• The Imagist group was centered in London, with
members from Great Britain, Ireland and the
United States.
• A characteristic feature of Imagism is its attempt to
isolate a single image to reveal its essence.
(Cont)
The origins of Imagism is to be found in two poems by T. E.
Hulme that were published in 1909 by the Poets' Club in
London.
F. S. Flint discusses to reform contemporary poetry through
free verse and the removal of all unnecessary verbiage from
poems.
The American poet Ezra Pound was introduced to this group
and they found that their ideas resembled his.
Main Characteristics of Imagists
• Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective.
• To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
• As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the
metronome.
• Complete freedom of subject matter.
• Free verse was encouraged along with other new rhythms.
• Common speech language was used, and the exact word was always to be used, as opposed
to the almost exact word.
• In setting these criteria for poetry, the Imagists saw themselves as looking backward to the
best practices of pre-Romantic writing. Imagists poets used sharp language and embrace
imagery. Their work, however, was to have a revolutionary impact on English-language
writing for the rest of the 20th century.
“In a Station of the Metro”
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
It is an Imagist poem by Ezra Pound published in 1913 in the literary magazine
Poetry.
The poem contains only fourteen words; it is an early work of Modernist poetry
as it attempts to incorporates the use of visual spacing as a poetic device, and
experimenting with non-traditional verse forms.
The poem typifies Imagism focus on economy of language, precision of imagery.
It is Pound’s written equivalent for the moment of revelation and intense
emotion he felt at the Metro at La Concorde, Paris.
Audio of the poem
'In a Station of the Metro' Ezra Pound poem MOST FAMOUS EXAMPLE OF IMAGISM.mp4
Georgian Movement
• “Georgian” has two implications. First, Georgian poets were those whose
it denotes a specific historical period works appeared in a series of five
anthologies named Georgian Poetry,
and, second, it describes a set of published between 1912 and 1922
literary characteristics associated with by Harold Monro and edited by
a specific group of poets belonging to Edward Marsh, the first volume
that period. The Georgian era spans contained poems written in 1911 and
the reign of George V (1910-1936). 1912. The group included
Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke,
Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence,
• The common features of the poems in Walter de la Mare, Siegfried Sassoon
and John Drinkwater.
these publications were romanticism,
sentimentality and hedonism.
.
Continued
much of the Georgians’ work took inspiration from the countryside
and nature the resulting poetry was diluted and middlebrow
conventional verse of late Romantic character.
“Georgian” came to be a pejorative term, used in a sense not
intended by its pioneers: rooted in its period and looking backward
rather than forward.
Georgian poets aimed at reviving public interest in poetry. But
that could be done only by reviving poetry itself, which was lying
moribund at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Georgians wanted to assert their identity as also to imply that
they were worthy of a rank comparable to that of the great
Victorians before them.
Their aim is to stimulating public interest in poetry; and to stir
the public to buy-and to read-poetry.
Georgian Characteristics:
Consciousness of aesthetic form. This desire for beauty of form and expression draws them
“towards the ideal of a classical and refined inspiration”. This tendency is apparent in
Abercrombie, Hodgson, Graves, etc.
The second tendency is evinced by a far larger group of
Georgians. Rather than seek formal perfection they just try to please and soothe by means of
what Cazamian calls “a vehement effort towards a direct, simple utterance. They look to
familiar, concrete subjects, and to spontaneous language and prosody, for the virtue of those
immediate effusions of which literature at periodic intervals tries to refresh itself.”
THE LISTENERS Walter de la Mare.mp4
• The poem is physically set in a moonlit wood at
nighttime, which helps set the eerie tone of the
poem. The house in the middle of the forest is
no less creepy, described as 'lone,' 'empty,'
'shadowy,' and 'still.' Throughout the poem, the
reader experiences an unnerving chill right
along with the Traveller.
