The bloody choreography of the First World War made life's absurdity inescapable. For poets, the previous century's romantic voice, which celebrated nature in all its transcendental beauty, could no longer speak to the modern condition. The days of parlor poetry and... [more]

The bloody choreography of the First World War made life's absurdity inescapable. For poets, the previous century's romantic voice, which celebrated nature in all its transcendental beauty, could no longer speak to the modern condition. The days of parlor poetry and sniffing truth through flowers were over: some European towns had lost most of their young men and, in both Europe and America, those who survived the war were literally fragmented -- lacking arms, legs, eyes. The new voice of poetry was also fragmented. Poets no longer offered a window to the absolute; instead, they offered nonlinear narratives and associative lyrics that gave voice to their alienated and nervous sensibilities. Poets such as T.S. Eliot, Lorine Neidecker, and Ezra Pound turned to irony to articulate the irreconcilability of the spirit with the realm of the actual. Irony provided a distance between author and subject that allowed poets to call attention to the work of art itself - art as a construct, and by extension, reality as a construct. Modern compositions became collages: both T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' and William Carlos Williams' 'Patterson' incorporate fragments from real and fictional texts. Pound, Neidecker, Charles Olson, and others, fragmented their poems at the syntactic level, with Pound and Olson interrupting their narratives with the voices of other, ancient speakers. Lyric writers, such as Rilke, Vallejo, Ritsos, and Garcia Lorca, took less academic approaches, and spoke from their spirits in voices that changed gender and century, and that called on ancient gods, traditions, and landscapes. [show less]