OUTLINE OF THE ERA 

Historical, Social, & Cultural Highlights of the Modern Era 

1): World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1941-1945)

2) huge changes in industry, technology and cities as compared to the 19th century 

3) the rise in power and influence of international corporations 

4) the rise of transportation, communication, mass (or popular) culture 

5) a belief in the desirability of industrialization, individual political rights, democracy, mass literacy and education, private ownership of the means of production, the scientific method, disbelief in—or at least a questioning of—the existence of God, and the rise of feminism. 

CHARACTERISTICS OF MODERNISM IN LITERATURE

1) uses images and symbols as typical and frequent literary techniques 

2) uses colloquial language rather than formal language 

3) poetry close to a sculpture or a painting 

4) form, style, and technique become as important--if not more so--than content 

5) the intention of writers in the Modern period is to change the way readers see the world and to change our understanding of what language is and does.

EZRA POUND was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He became one of the major figures of modernism, as he was the one who defined and promoted a modernist aesthetic in poetry. He started a crucial exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers and supported and published the work of important writers, such as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and T. S. Eliot. His own contributions to poetry begin with his definition of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry--stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome." His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopaedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.  

Image: an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.

Imagism: Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective; 

To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation; 

As regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.  

 T.S. ELIOT (1888-1965) Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied at Harvard College, the Sorbonne, and Merton College of Oxford University. He studied Sanskrit and Oriental philosophy, which influenced his poetry. He also wrote influential essays and dramas. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917 and immediately established him as a leading modernist poet. His poem The Waste Land published in 1922 is still considered by many to be the most influential poetic work of the twentieth century. He was influenced by the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century (most notably John Donne) and the 19th-century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue).

EDWARD ESTLIN CUMMINGS was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 14, 1894. Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his anti-war convictions. He also travelled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Pablo Picasso, whose work he admired. In his work, Cummings experimented with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, creating new means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for not pressing his work towards further evolution. His poetry was largely popular, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex. 

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Ezra Pound, who significantly influenced his writing. Williams became one of the principal poets of the Imagist movement, though later he became critical of Pound and Eliot, as he felt they were too attached to European culture and traditions. Continuing to experiment with new techniques of meter, Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh—and singularly American—poetic, whose subject matter was cantered on the everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. His major works include Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), the five-volume epic Paterson (1963, 1992), and Imaginations (1970).