Modernist Poetry and Mixed Feelings
Some of the most common themes of Modernism, which spanned from about the early 1900’s to the 1940’s, have stayed with our culture far into our own day and age. The literary movement known as Modernism can be defined as “the one art that responds to the scenarios of our chaos” (Bradbury and McFarlane 27). Spanning across the time in which World War I, World War II, the Great Depression, the rise of Marxism, and the thoughts of Freud all became prevalent, Modernist writers wrote poetry and literature in response to the craziness and evolution of the world around them. This article will spoil poems and endings of stories from Modernist authors.
One of the themes that I think has stuck with our culture is a sense of ambiguity. A sense of uncertainty has claimed our youth and has become a reality for adults across the globe.
Modernist authors used short stories, poetry, and the books that they would write to explore this sense of unity and see how it affected our society. We have become a culture immune to certain things and feelings. One of the things that I have certainly felt is a sense of ambiguity and uncertainness as I walk through life. Modernist writings leave readers in a state of uncertainty, you feel the ambiguity the author is facing and his struggles with this world.
One of my favorite short stories from Modernist author James Joyce, known as one of the pillars of Modernist literature for his writing of the epic Ulysses, comes from his collection of short stories within Dubliners. The last story within the collection is titled “The Dead” and it delves into the idea that often as people, we can become so self-focused that we ignore the trials and painful memories that someone else might be facing.
The main perspective told throughout the story is of a man who is self-focused who takes his wife to a party. What he fails to realize is how his wife feels at the party, and after leaving for their hotel room, he is intent on having a good night full of sex and pleasure with her. What he comes to learn, only from her telling him, is that one of the songs at the party brought to her memory a former love interest that had died and it was a painful memory. The story ends with his sobering realization that there might be no words to console her, only a brief thought of death and the meaning of life as someone truly loved come upon him.
The story ends with a couple lines that bring about this idea that he has found himself apart from a self-fulfilling pleasure and that he can now dwell on death and her experience of it, “[h]is own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world… His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead” (Joyce 152). The reality of death and the seriousness of such an idea (Joyce felt this having experienced the world’s collapse into war and death) is enough to shock someone out of their own universe and into a state of uncertainty about the world and their place within it.
One of the reasons I like this story is my own experience of this feeling. As a teenager, my older brother died. As a teenager, my kid cousin drowned. As a teenager going into my twenties, my grandpa lost all of his memory of me and my mother and his wife and died not knowing who was a part of his family. In a world in which I’ve seen death up close and personal, I’ve questioned my very existence. Seeing death up close and personal has made me uncertain of where I’m at and what I’m doing in life.
I question where I’m at and I use my writing and other aspects of my being to help me look at my life and this crazy world and make some sort of sense out of it. I use humor as a defense mechanism to push off the thoughts that make me so skeptical of who I am and what I’m doing in life. I use jokes and my own poetry to deflect those thoughts away from my head for one more night. But in the end, with what I’ve faced and seen, I can’t escape how I react to the chaos which I have seen.
One of the things that our culture today has become less and less aware of is how we react to and see others. We, including me definitely, jump too quickly into a game of judging others and seeking our own pleasure within this world, where if we truly see the chaos of this world and think about it, we might drift into this state of ambiguity willingly and love others better as we understand their own sense of uncertainty. I think that we are all uncertain in some aspect, but we don’t often accept that we might have that feeling until we’re shocked into facing it.
One reaction to this growing sense of uncertainty that spread during the 1900’s and today’s culture was a sort of longing for peace. A typical want among most or all Modernist authors was of a new age, we had become so desolate and war-torn, that we have been in need of a reset. We have need of some sort of escape from these feelings.
Hilda Doolittle, better known as H.D., sought to understand her own uncertainty and the ambiguity that she faced, not by seeking a painful experience. Rather, she became envious of those who no longer had to deal with uncertainty and emotions,
“I envy you your chance of death / how I envy you this” (1–2).
In writing of being envy of death, I relate. I personally believe in a Christian worldview and I believe that when we die, we are immediately in the presence of God as believers. II Corinthians 5:8 suggests that when we pass from the physical world, we are present with the Lord. Life in Heaven is free from suffering, Revelation 21:4 (taken from ESV Bible) reads,
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.
Life in Heaven sounds nice. It sounds peaceful. Both H.D. and myself are not expressing that we don’t want to continue living, but we are envious of those who pass on as they get to reach peace sooner. The apostle Paul related to this truth as he wrote “[t]o live is Christ, to die is gain” (Phil. 1:21 ESV Bible). As time goes on and uncertainty becomes an increasing presence in my life, I find myself reacting by becoming more and more envious of what is to come.
One of the sad reactions that we also see within this period is that of rejection of God and acceptance of pure chaos. Wallace Stevens became famous for his poetry only after the age of 40, but one of his answers to the chaos of life was that God is dead and we are left to make sense of the world and the uncertainty that we face through imagination and poetry. In no somber tone, he wrote,
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable. (Sunday Morning 110–113).
In accepting that we are in chaos, it’s as if we were stuck on an island with no escape. We would be free and alone on that island, but we would have to sort through the chaos and ambiguity of this world using our own power of imagination.
The sad reality of this perspective of the world is that it is your own power that can save you, it is your own poetry that helps you make sense of the world. Whatever manner you choose to pursue a meaning to the ambiguity you face or will come to face if awakened to it, uncertainty is a reality.
I’m in my senior year of college, about to move on into a world of job searching and seeking my place in society. Memories of those who have passed on in my life make me question my path and existence. Anxieties concerning the future and the chaos around me lead me to ponder where my life is headed.
References:
Doolittle, Hilda. (2003). Sunday Morning. In The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Vol. 1, pp. 398). poem, W.W. Norton & Company.
Joyce, James. (1991). The Dead. In Dubliners (p. 152). short stories, Dover Publications.
McFarlane, James and Malcolm Bradbury. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930.
Sproul, R. C. (2015). In The Reformation Study Bible: English standard version. Reformation Trust.
Stevens, Wallace. (2003). Sunday Morning. In The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Vol. 1, pp. 240). poem, W.W. Norton & Company.
