1. MODERNISM
A complex movement which started after 1910 and
flourished in the 1920s and 1930s and involved all
forms of art: literature, music, visual arts, cinema.

2. ARTISTS
Joyce,Woolf, Kafka, Musil, Proust,
T.S. Eliot, W.B.Yeats
Picasso, Braque, Balla, Severini, Boccioni, Marinetti

3. COMMON ELEMENTS
·Desire to make a clean break with the traditions which came
before them through
·experimentation in form and style
·attempt to directly represent the workings of the mind and
the unconscious
·modernist works are: fragmentary, relative, favour a
subjective perception of reality.

4. MODERNIST POETRY
·Fragmented in different movements
·Absorbed influences from other countries
·Poets began to see themselves in more international terms.
·FRENCH SYMBOLISM : Paul Verlaine, Stephane Mallarmè
·CHINESE/JAPANESE POETRY:
W.B. Yeats
Ezra Pound

5. THE WAR POETS
WILFRED OWEN (1893-1918)
SIEGFRIED SASSOON(1886-1967)
Gave a realistic account of trench warfare, were critical of
the patriotic appeals
marked a break in the lyrical tradition

6. KEY FIGURES OF MODERNIST POETRY:
Ezra Pound
T.S. Eliot
were not English!
W.B.Yeats
Poetry was no longer something to enjoy or to confort
(Victorian Age) but something necessary to confront
the moral emptiness of the age.

7. IMAGISM
poetic movement started by Ezra Pound
Manifesto 1914
·CONCISE USE OF LANGUAGE AND IMAGERY
·FREE RHYTHM (free verse)
·FREEDOM OF CHOICE IN SUBJECT MATTER
·REVOLT AGAINST ROMANTICISM

8. T.S. ELIOT
·Completely rejected the Romantic idea of the poet as an
individual genius who communicated a deeply felt emotion
through his works.
·For Eliot a work of poetry is made impersonal by the tradition in
which the poet is writing.
·The originality of the poet lays not in his own voice but in the
way he combines and manipulates elements of the old to make
something new and add to the tradition.
·He saw himself working in the broad European tradition

9. A CULTURAL ELITIST:
·The poet's role is that of preserving the cultural tradition from
a barbaric civilization.
·Poetry had to be difficult to render the complexity of modern
life.
·THE WASTE LAND is full of references and quotations from
a wide range of cultures and languages which are often
juxtaposed with scenes from every day life.
·The connections between these are obscure.

10. MODERNISTS
considered the experience of ordinary people as a poor,
fragmented form of experience and often represented
ordinary people's lives in a patronising or condescending
manner.

11. T.S. ELIOT (1888-1965)
·born in Saint Louis, Missouri from a New England family
·studied at Harvard, philosophy at the Sorbonne, Oxford
·settled in England at the outbreak of WWI
·worked as a schoolmaster, bank clerk, literary editor for
Faber and Faber publishing house.
·in 1914 he met Ezra Pound
·1915 he married Vivien Haigh-Wood
·1927 became a British citizen. Entered the Anglican Church
·1948 Nobel Prize for literature
·1957 married his second wife, Valerie Fletcher
·1965 died in London

12. WORKS:
1915 The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufruck
1922 founded the literary journal The Criterion
1922 The Waste Land
AFTER HIS CONVERSION TO THE ANGLICAN CHURCH search for religious certainties:
The Hollow Men 1925
Journey of the Magi 1927
Ash Wednesday 1930
Four Quartets 1935-42

13. VERSE DRAMAS:
1935 Murder in the Cathedral
1939 The family Reunion
express Eliot's christian faith
CHILDREN'S POEMS:
1939 Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
from which the musical Cats 1981 by Antdrew Lloyd Webber
CRITICAL WORKS:
1920 The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
1933 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
1948 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
1957 On Poetry and Poets

14. THE WASTE LAND

15. A MODERNIST WORK:
·It expresses the depression and cinicism of the post war
period.
·SYMBOLS: drought=death; flood=rebirth
·A heap of broken images:no beginning, no end; thoughts appear unfinished;
abrupt shifts; past merges with present; the characters are not clearly defined. CINEMA
TECHNIQUE .

16. THEMES:
· inability to communicate
·sterility
·lack of love
·corruption
·the quest (search for the holy Grail= search for truth)

17. STRUCTURE
·It breaks away from the canons of traditional poetry
·Reminds of Joyce's experimentation in novel
writing(stream of consciousness technique)
·Picasso 's painting
·Strawinsky's music

18. THE MYTHICAL METHOD
WISDOM AND SPIRITUAL EMPTINESS OF
SPIRITUALITY THE PRESENT
OF THE PAST
Modern life can be more deeply interpreted if it is presented
parallel to equivalent models of behaviour from the mythical past.

19. OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE
It is a phrase coined by Eliot himself who
maintained that poetry must be impersonal
and objective
IMAGES are the objective correlative of the emotions they
aim to suggest.
So Eliot didn't describe the emotions but presented the
objects or the actions in a way that produced an emotion
in the reader..for example squalid objects convey the idea of lack of love, apathy,
spiritual death

20. SOURCES
JESSIE WESTON "From Ritual to Romance" 1920:
The Medieval legend of the quest for the Holy Grail tells about a land which is barren because
its king "the fisher king" was wounded and sexually maimed. A Young Knight goes in quest
for the HG and reaches a chapel where the Grail is kept.The land will be restored to fertility
only if the knight asks the meaning of the Grail and of the lance that he sees during a
procession.
JAMES FRAZER " The Golden Bough" 1890-1915
A collection of ancient customs, primitive vegetation myths and fertility rites. In pre-christian
civilizations young men and gods were slain or drowned and then symbolically revived to
fertilize the soil and make the arvest successful (with their blood and strength).

21. STRUCTURE
Five sections:
1) THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
deals with the coming of Spring in a sterile land
2) A GAME OF CHESS
juxtaposes present squalor and past ambiguous splendour
3) THE FIRE SERMON
reinforces the theme of squalor, introduces Tiresias, a greek blind prophet, both
man and woman.
4) DEATH BY WATER
focusing on Phlebas, a drowned phoenician sailor and on the idea of purification.
5) WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
conveying the image of disintegration of Western civilization and suggesting its
possible salvation.Rain will come if man has learned to GIVE, BE MERCIFUL, to
CONTROL himself (in Sanskrit)

22. SYMBOLISM:
Eliot presents the emptiness and sterility of modern life at various levels:
·NATURAL: the land is dry, rocky, polluted and unfruitful.
·SOCIAL:people find it difficult to communicate with each-other (also
symbolized by the quotations from different languages) and are unable to
love.
·SPIRITUAL: people no longuer believe in religious values and in Christ as
the spiritual saviour.So only through rain, love and faith will our waste land
be saved and restored to fertitlity