Impact of Modernism Movement on T.S. Eliot

Literature’s Modernism Movement, which began in the early 1900s and continued into the 1940s, can be defined as the movement away from the characteristics of Victorian literature and into a brand-new, modern mindset. Modernist poetry tended to reflect the tone at the turn of the century. The world was war torn and morally corrupt; perhaps this is best described by T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (Shmoop, “The Waste Land”), which described the barrenness of men's existence. Modernist poetry is also characterized by the sudden break with traditional methods of literature.

This is possibly influenced by the shock of World War I. Poets of the day were concerned for the future of the world and the decline of humanity.

Leaps in technology and scientific research along with unity in change inspired the more optimistic literary works. For example, Ezra Pound’s The Bridge (Pound, “The Bridge”) described the people of the time as being on one side of a bridge, eager to crossover into a new world.

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Not everyone was optimistic about this new age of industrialization, however. Some viewed these new technological devices as physical representation of man’s greed. Through all of this, poets found comfort in being united by their experimentation and individualism; there was cohesion in the fact that everyone was changing together.

Modernism also blanketed a number of other movements. Some of these, such as Dadaism, which is satire regarding the wars of the age (Tate, “Dadaism.”), and Literary Political Objectivism (the promotion of one’s political views through poetry; especially used in the 1930s by members of the Communist Party) centered around politics.

Others focused on finding new themes in poetry. Futurism, which promoted avant-garde poetry and artistic experimentation (“A Painter Brief Guide to Futurism”), was one such movement, along with Imagism. The Imagists wrote short poems of only a few lines, using rich words that conveyed strong images to paint plain scenes (Delmuro, “Imagism”).

They are also known for their use of rhythmic, musically sequential phrases, a style that seemed too playful against the backdrop of the gruesome war and thus cut the movement short. Surrealism was influenced by the works of Sigmund Freud and emphasized dreams and the products of the unconscious mind over logic and reason. Poet William Carlos Williams coined the term objectivism in the 1930s to describe the theory or practice of objective art and literature (Brittanica, “Objectivism”). In this style of poetry, the emphasis is placed on viewing poems as objects to be considered and analyzed in terms of mechanical features. Like in all movements, Modernism inspired a countermovement.

Postmodernism was claimed by the neo-Romantics, who wished to return poetry to what it had been in the Romantic era. Most of these movements utilized free verse. Free verse is defined as “nonmetric, nonrhyming lines that closely follow the natural rhythms of speech.” (“Free Verse”). A common characterization of Modernism is the movement’s disregard for storylines and narrative structure. T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and many similar poems used different perspectives and unreliable narrators. One could regard “The Wasteland” as a literary form of montage, long before film utilized this form. He wrote from the perspective of various characters, using different voices to show the effects of war on different classes and kinds of people. Despite being an epic poem, “The Wasteland” follows no specific storyline (Kaveney, “TS Eliot”). Because of this disregard for narrative structure and the focus on the thoughts and Painter opinions of the characters, it is often uncertain whether or not the narrator is telling the truth.

This is the use of unreliable narrators. In order to reflect the despite experienced the poet, many Modernist poems are written in first person. These poems, such as Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and T.S. Eliot’s The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, utilize the stream of consciousness style (“Stream of Conciousness”). In “Lovesong”, Eliot has the narrator return obsessively to already used phrases to convey a sense of neuroticism. This is a prime example of Modernism’s emphasis on the psychological states of characters. Similarly, The Wasteland’s main focus is on the feelings of the various characters. Specifically, Eliot focused on the character’s search for redemption and spiritual revival in the barren and immoral culture. It also shows that the characters are smart and well-read, which opposed Eliot’s own often alluded to view that the people of his day were undereducated (Kaveney, “TS Eliot”).

Within Modernist poetry, disrupted syntax and unusual sentence structure were frequently used. In Peter Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, modernism is summed up using a quote from Ezra Pound “In short, modernists considered Ezra Pound’s famous injunction, ‘Make It New!’ a professional, almost a sacred obligation.” (North, “The Making of Making it New”) The Wasteland inspired new use of spliced sentences and ideas, disrupted syntax (the disregard for the proper order of words in a phrase or sentence), the use of fragments, and the neglecting of sentence structure rules in favor of creating more pleasant-sounding phrases (Anwar, “Fragmentation”). Perhaps no one was as skilled in these things as e.e. cummings (“Capitalization of Personal Names”). He frequently bent grammatical rules to suit his own purpose. For example, in “anyone lived in a pretty how town”, cummings used the interrogative pronoun “how” as a brand-new adjective.

Modernism’s themes center around the shirking of romantic ideals in favor of more realistic themes (Dugan, “Modernism”). All that had been important to poetry in the Victorian Era was now unimportant. Such themes of imagination, love of nature, and idealizations of family were in juxtaposition to isolation and fear, the common themes of Modernist poetry. Emerging ideas in psychology, philosophy, and politics changed the way writers saw both themselves and the people around them. Unlike in previous eras, Modernism’s emphasis on finding something new promoted the borrowing of themes and concepts from other culture’s literature. Modernist poems often create comparisons to machinery, a direct result of the time period’s rapid industrialization. This particular theme is almost entirely unique to Modernist literature (Gee, “Modernist Literature”).

By opening the door for further experimentation and the changing of the standard by which poems are measured by critics, Modernism forever changed the history of literature. Many poets of the modern day see the similarity between the Modernist poet’s day and our own (Kuiper, “Modernism”). All movements must come to an end. Modernism’s was brought about primarily by World War II. This war brought the minds of many to a more optimistic place than the previous war. The people of English speaking countries rallied together and relied on patriotism, which became a major theme in literature. A new generation of poets emerged, ones who saw the Modernist’s themes of isolation and loneliness not truly reflective of the times.