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The modernist period spans roughly from 1890 to about 1950. It's a period of radical change in society, one might even say of cultural trauma. Rejected are the Romantic idealist claims of the past and the Victorian optimism of progress. They are tried and found wanting for the dilemmas that occur in the 20th century. The voices of modernist poets seem to ask how can poetry keep together the fragments of a fragmented world. How can poetry connect us to other people who
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live in separate lives of this shared World of War, Financial destitution, political turmoil, and human atrocities. And we see the lines of modernist verse becoming like a spanning, like thick cobwebs into the corners of the world. This encyclopedic reach attempts to hold together what is good and present in a unified picture of this meaning of human life in a world that's just so profoundly different from the worlds of any previous era of poetry and the worlds of our
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ancestors and not so distant grandparents and great-grandparents. So, in this lecture. I want to give you a survey of some of the main major themes and formal characteristics of modernist poetry. I found when teaching, that students who came to love poetry by reading modernist verse usually have no trouble with the complexities of voice and the lack of coherent narrative and sequences of action but those like myself, who've come to love poetry through older Styles
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or more formal styles from previous movements can sometimes be put off by what sometimes looks like unnecessary complexity even pretention and a lack of coherence. So I hope to show in this lecture that much modernist poetry even some of the free forms we'll be looking at are intricately regulated precisely regulated by Inner logic Harmony and even sometimes intentional disorder as its own sort of logic. So welcome everyone to our lecture on the Poetry of modernism the second to
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last lecture in our series through the movements of English poetry. You've been going through this series getting a bird's eye view of the entire Canon of English poetry. I'm joined over Zoom by my Patreon supporters who are helping me make the study of poetry accessible to readers outside the university. So thanks to them for supporting my work so I can make these lectures free for you
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all. If you would like to support my work and join the community of fellow readers and Learners, you can find more about my Patreon in the link below and we're all actually going to meet and discuss and share some modernist poems that we all know after this lecture. So for the sake of time I'll only cover four poets in this lecture....William Butler Yates, Wilfred Owen, TS Elliot, and WH
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Auden. And this is going to take us from the late 19th century through the high modernist era Elliot and then finally to the mid 20th century so we're going to cover a lot of ground. so let's begin. The long Arc of the poetic career of the Irish poet WB Yates spans the Victorian era and the early modernist period. His 1886 poem, The Stolen Child, represents his early more romantic more Victorian poetry. It's deeply influenced by Romanticism and his own Irish folk
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culture Yates's early lyrics are more of the past than they are of the late 19th century moment and here are a few stances from this early popular poem. This is The Stolen Child. "Where dips the rocky Highland of Sleuth Wood in the lake, there lies a leafy Island where flapping herons wake The Drowsy water rats; there we've hit our fairy vats, full of berries and of reddest stolen cherries. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand,
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for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand. Where the wave of moonlight glosses the dim gray sands with light, far off by furthest Rosses we foot it all the night, weaving olden dances mingling hands and mingling glances till the moon has taken flight; to and fro we leap and chase the frothy bubbles, while the world is full of troubles and anxious in its sleep. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild with a fairy, hand in hand,
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for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand." The poem holds in contrast Two Worlds. The Mythic and spiritual World of Nature stocked with fruits of the earth and these mythic beings of berries and stolen cherries. It's the scene of sequestered stability the leafy Island surrounded by wood and water and inhabited by this hermetic population of herons suggests a place of profound seclusion. Yet there is some society, the fairies, who in Irish folklore appear as
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somewhat wild if not maniacal in their activities with humans here they act somewhat as agents of human rescue and sequestration theirs is the world of the old order where they weave old and dances mingling hands and mingling glances it's a unified world of communal festivities with each other and the land. Well that's One World. The other world is the one of human society a world where people sleep anxiously under the moon and they wake in the daylight to a world full of weeping
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it's increasingly alluring I think to the modern human being who is upon the threshold of the 20th century to be looking at the enchanted World wistfully. And that refrain come away O human child uh is part of that Allure 20th century as many of you know was a rough time. It begins at the turn of the century. In 1901, Queen Victoria died. In 1914, the first Global War began with World War I and when it was over in 1918, there about 40 million people dead and that includes
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civilians. 40 million people! That's something that hadn't been seen before. And then, you get the same year that the first world war ends 1918, you have the influenza epidemic which kills an estimated 50 million people. In 1929, in America, you get the Great Depression. In 1930, the great slump in the UK. A severe global economic downturn that affected many countries across the world. Again, see this network of the globe being interdependent in both war and economy. And then
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of course in 1939 from 1945 you have the second world war which directly killed an estimated 50 to 56 million people with an additional estimated 19 million deaths somewhat indirect. That's huge!
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You have to think, what is the role of poetry in all this? Critics were asking this and many of them were agreeing with what Theodore Adorno wrote in his 1955 prisms essay. He said to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And Poets had to reckon with what it meant to write poetry now. What kind of poetry perhaps would not be barbaric to write. How do we go on writing and what can it do? These are the questions that the long modernist movement will address. But I want to
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take us back to the first world war with Wilfred Owen. We celebrated his birthday on Patreon with a poetry reading not too long ago and this was one of the poems we read; Dulce et Decorum est.
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The earliest known manuscript of this is dated in October 1917 and it's actually addressed to Wilfred Owen's mother Susan with the note that he said, "Here's a gas poem done yesterday which is not final". That's the early draft 1917. I want to read you this poem and I'll share the screen so you can follow along with this I think that's going to help.
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Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est". Before I read, this was trench warfare. He was a soldier and he wrote this in the trenches. "Bent double like old Beggars under sacks knock kneed coughing like hags we cursed through sludge till on the haunting flares we turned our backs and towards our distant rest began to trudge men marched asleep many had lost their boots but limped on blood-shod all went lame all blind; drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots of gas shells
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dropping softly behind. Gas! Gas! Quick boys! --An ecstasy of fumbling fitting the clumsy helmets just in time but someone still was yelling out and stumbling and floundering like a man in fire or lime. Dim through the Misty pains and thick green light as under a green sea I saw him drowning.
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In all my dreams before my helpless sight he plunges at me guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace behind the wagon that we flung him in and watched the white eyes writhing in his face, his hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; if you could hear at every jolt the blood come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs obscene as cancer bitter as the cud of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues,-- my friend,
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you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate Glory, the old lie: Dolce at Decorum EST pro patria mori.
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The Latin there says it is is sweet and good and right good or Bright To Die For one's country. This is a poem of a major theme for the modernist period disillusionment. In this case the disillusionment of the glorification of War for many modernists and pre-modernists such as Owen, poetry becomes a means of representation. And Robert says in the chat which I'll say here,
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Dulce is actually pronounced "dul-kay" rather than Dulce being Latin and not Italian. Thanks Robert and I will make note of that for people watching this lecture. Sometimes my ecclesiastical Latin gets in the way from the more classical pronunciation which is certainly what Owen is referring to. I believe this quote comes from Horus so thank you. Poetry is a means of representation rather than ideation or escape as we saw perhaps in Keats we see poetry
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taking on a social function in the way that it had for the younger generation of Romantics. Becomes a way of depicting reality. The way it is immediately present. The experience of the reader fulfills that subjective that subjunctive wish here at the end by vicariously causing us to witness and to Pace behind the wagon they flung him. This paragraph here..."bent double like old beggars under sacks". Dehumanizing similes here. The Bs and the harsh consonants throughout echoing
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monosyllabic even in some of these words. Many had lost their boots but limped on blood-shod. Owen is in this tradition of...he likes his Anglo-Saxon modernist style. There's some modernists who are like this. DH Lawrence is another one who will have recourse to the Anglo-Saxon modernist style. Elliot and others in the high modernist period more classical more French, but not Owen. And we see that here. There's something very old English about some of these words,
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bloodshot for example. It's the literation, this monosyllabic tread in this stanza almost lulls us to sleep like the dreary marching of the sleepless men that we hardly notice. What creeps upon us at the precipice of this line of gas shells dropping softly behind it there's something sinisterly beautiful about this first stanza. It's almost romantic. I think of Clymene of Keats' Hyperion talking about the hurried notes that fell one after another yet all at once like pearl beads
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dropping sudden from their string, dropping softly. There's something sweet and romantic about this dropping softly behind like dew until you realize we are awakened. This word comes with the exclamation Gas! The realization dawns upon them gas quick boys! Chemical warfare was just starting, mustard gas was a horrible death and they carried masks with them so whenever you saw the yellow green haze you would have to put it on and there would be a warning and sometimes
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the warnings weren't quick enough but someone still, this word still gets me every time, someone still was yelling out and stumbling floundering like a man in fire or lime the horror of the scene is made more maddening by the Romantic diction and you almost don't notice it but if you separate the words, take any of these words...ecstasy, dim. I think of Coleridge's "dim-glimmering" are the green light, misty panes, the green sea; they almost conjure up a pastoral scene. But we know
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that they're not, obviously, because we're we're taken with the narrative of what's going on here. But the words to my ears sound romantic and then the interval and then the two lines in all my dreams before my helpless sight he plunges at me guttering, choking, drowning. Notice the verb shift here; in all my dreams he plunges and then the infinitive is choking guttering, choking, drowning, possibly two here possibly. And then it begins in the subjunctive mood if in
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some smothering dreams we have the adjective here. It's very intricately intertwined, these stanzas; you could Pace behind the wagon that we flung him in. My friend you would not tell with such high zest to children ardent for some desperate glory the old lie Dulce et Decorum EST Pro Patria mori.
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Some of the formal properties here share similarities with the French ballot style, not to be confused with the ballot. It's a form of medieval and Renaissance French poetry. It's corresponding to a beautiful musical form. It's a 13th century/15th century style of French music. Delicate, light, playful, but the content and I think that this is part of what's going on with the modernist movement. They are borrowing forms and they're repurposing it and in a way they're
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frustrating our aesthetic expectations with the form and with the diction. I mean the use of punctuation, the effect is to break that poetic swing; bitter as the cud of vile, incurable sores, innocent tongues. And there's this dash of silence saying that he's finally leading up to the main construction of the sentence with the subject and verb, you would not tell with such high zest. It's a beautiful poem and it's also just so disturbing and tragic...visceral.
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I want to move also to include this poem by Owen with an identity disc. This was drafted in March 1917, a little before Dulce et Decorum EST was written. Owen received a concussion after a fall in battle and while he was recovering Owen wrote this to his younger brother Colin Owen. And he says to Colin, "Perhaps you will think me clean mad and translated by my knock on the head. How shall I prove that my old form of madness has in no way changed. I will send you my last sonnet
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which I started yesterday. I think I will address it to you." He sends this to his little brother and then he revisited it six months later. It was finalized in September around the same time the previous poem we read. "If ever I dreamed of my dead name high in the heart of London unsurpassed by time forever and the Fugitive, Fame, there seeking a long Sanctuary at last, I better that,
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and recollect with shame how once I longed to hide it from life's heats under those holy cypresses, the same that shade always the quiet place of Keats. Now rather thank I God there is no risk of gravers scoring it with florid screed, but let my death be memoried on this disc, wear it, sweet friend inscribe no date nor deed but may thy heartbeat kiss it night and day until the name grow vague and wear away." Beautiful Sonnet commemorative, very Shakespearean,
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very Keatsian and I want to show you what I mean. This is partly to reveal a bit of of Owen's own conversation with some of his favorite poets. You have fair friend here which I think is recalled in sweet friend in Owen's here's another copy of of Owen's poem on this on the left Shakespeare's 104 on the right. "To me Fair friend you never can be old, for as you were when first your eye I eyed;
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such seems your beauty still three Winters cold have from the forests shook three summer's pride, three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned in process of the seasons have I seen, three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned, since first I saw you fresh which yet are green. Ah, yet doth Beauty, like a dial hand, steal from his figure, and no Pace proceeds so your sweet hue which me think still doth stand hath motion and mine eye may be deceived for fear of which hear
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this thou age unbred a you were born was Beauty's summer dead." The whole issue of Time beauty the passing all of this we know Keats was mentioned in the Sonnet on an identity disc. Here's another poem that I think think is in conversation with this one. John Keat says, "When I have fears that I may cease to be before my pen has glean'ed my teeming brain, before high piled books and charactery, hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain; when I behold, upon the night's
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starr'd face, huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, and think that I may never live to trace their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; and when I feel, fair creature of an hour, that I shall never look upon thee more, never have Relish in the faery power of unreflecting love; - then on the shore of the wide world I stand alone, and think til love in fame to nothingness do sink."
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I mean there is this keen presence in Owen in the trenches that he probably would not make it out and he didn't. Owen was killed in action in November 1918. He survived several battles but this was during of the the crossing of the canal. This is exactly one week tragically, exactly one week, almost the very hour before the signing of the armistice, which put an end to the war. And he was actually promoted to the rank of Lieutenant the day after he died and even more tragic,
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his mother, to whom he was writing poetry, got the telegram informing her of his death on the day of the Armistice. As church bells and Shrewsbury were celebrating by ringing out, she got the telegram it's just absolutely tragic. Now, we have to talk about Elliot, delightful Elliot, happily would I talk about Elliot. If you were able to read one poet of the modernist period it should be without
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a doubt TS Elliot. No other poet influenced so many other Poets of his era. Stanley Kunitz, another poet, said that the decades leading up to World War II, that a reader could scarcely pick up a poem by a young writer without overhearing Elliot somewhere in the background. In the 20s and 30s, one had to follow Elliot in order to win a reputation or an audience and we want to see why. With an example of the Wasteland, I just want to read the first verse paragraph. William Carlos
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Williams, who actually wrote a poem Spring and All it's called, in response to this poem, said that, with the publication of the Wasteland, the bottom had dropped out of everything that he had cared about in poetry. "Now the Wasteland was the great catastrophe of our letters", Williams said, "and I was defeated". I just want to read this to you first and then we'll closely read it.
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"April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding a little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnberger See with a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, and went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, and drank coffee,
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and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, my cousin's, he took me out on a sled, and I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter." You know when you read these lines that you're in a totally new world of poetry. It's obeying different rules from what you've
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experienced if you've read any poetry from the past which we all have. The literary Illusions are woven throughout and this is a key feature of the modernist style. Hunting illusions can be taken too far with Eliot. He then provides his own notes in a later edition of this poem. There's a scene with tarot cards which is a important symbol throughout this this poem. Eliot had actually said, "I actually don't know much about tarot cards." I'm paraphrasing. Eliot says, "I regret
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having sent so many readers on a wild goose chase on uncovering the symbolism". So maybe there's not much symbolism there in the tarot cards which is later in this poem but there's certainly the literary illusions and as Christopher Ricks has said about illusions, "The poem does not require the reader to recognize illusions but it does reward readers who recognize that. And I think that it enhances the pleasure of the readers. It's something that we've read in this
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lecture series already, is Chaucer's beginning of the general prologue, we have it here. Chaucer says, "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, the droghte of March hath perced to the roote, and bathed every veyne in swich licour." There is no sweet liquor here. Lilacs breeding out of the dead. You might think of Walt Whitman and his famous elegy to Abraham Lincoln, after the death
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of Lincoln. "When lilac last in the dard bloomed", there's this American presence there with Whitman of course free verse and Eliot tapping into this. It's all conscious. There's something uneasy about these verbs, almost like Owens' infinitive verbs; reading, mixing, stirring. They subtly imply, not the joyous love making involved in the spring festivities celebrated by Herrick, suggested by
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Chaucer in the general prologue. These verbs convey almost a frightening sense of copulation, diabolical, almost breeding. It's a word that's very clinical, suggest clinical reproduction observed by an impersonal scientific gaze much like Eliot's antiseptic description of the evening sky in Prufrock, when the evening sky is spread out on the table, etherized or anesthetized the modern world, is one that is organized not by human sympathy and posos but by the clinical
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taxonomy of a dispassionate scientist. And we have the complexities of of scientism and scientific progress lasting all throughout the 20th century. As Robert reminds us in the comments here again, the Wasteland was originally titled, "He do the police in different voices" and Robert says, "thank goodness Ezra Pound persuaded him to change it!" Yeah, good to know and also Pound really did a number in his edits on this poem and that's also fun to explore and compare how long this
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poem was before it went to Pound. And yes I do think that's an improvement. By the way, I've just noticed my titles here working not from home this is the Wasteland apologies for that. I'm on a a laptop which is somewhat clumsy for me. Okay, so this is a modern world that's dispassionate the voice seems dispassionate. An the verb suggests some kind of primordial crawling out of life, this new life is writhing out of death dull roots with spring rain. This is the generation perhaps
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of Hamlet's maggots, the sun breeds maggots and a dead dog, I mean have that here breeding, covering, feeding, even when it's description of winter. Of course to mingle memory and desire is its own kind of strange breathing because memory is retrospective while desire is prospective, you look forward. And what you get from the mingling of nostalgia with the object of longing as the past is something that you can't ever get, it's irrevocably gone. And I think this is deeply
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a part of the consciousness of these modernist poets. The weak endings of these three lines are carried on into the next, come to a strong ending in rain, we get that firm stress on rain where the conclusion brings us to not the sunshine of April but its rain and then it's carried over the next three lines here are the first two lines the next three winter kept us warm covering Earth
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in forgetful snow feeding a little life with dried tubers, the verb shifts from "is" to past "kept". You notice that? Winter kept us warm, April is the cruelest month. So this this modulation the verbal modulation we are in Spring remembering the past winter. There's also the introduction of a
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first person plural "us". The introduction of the speaker. We get the sense that this forgetfulness is a blessing, again the desired etherization we saw in Prufrock here remembered fondly in the forgetful snow which unifies all things into this collective white blankness. I have a close reading on Prufrock which if you're interested in Eliot, or you're new to Eliot, it might help you. Then we
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move to summer, summer surprised us, describes the past as well, coming over the Starnberger See. The shower of rain of course the German line. It's mixing different lines here. benar Ka brusen I am not a Russian I'm from Lithuania a real German. But the voice of the poem is ambiguous at times,
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I'm uncertain at least of who is speaking to whom, the poem weaves in different voices through a heteroglossia juxtaposition of utterance, voice. We saw how the metaphysical voice, when we did our lecture on the early 17th century, harmonizes discordance through the contiguity of surprising and opposite words and metaphors. Well, in this poem, in much modernism, there is the colloquy of fragmentation by joining discontinuous actions with these concrete scenes. You'll get really
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frustrated if you're looking for a narrative here. That's part of the experience, the speaker at times is one who identifies as a real German, singular and then it's the voice of Marie. I think possibly the same person but I think not. We could be overhearing what's happening in the hofgarten in the last two lines. There you feel free. And then, I read much of a night and go. Now since we're in the past tense, in these previous lines when you come here, you might think she or the
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speaker would say I read much of the night and go south but it's retrospectively revealed to be in the present or at least suggested it could very well be that this is a past tense read and then it modulates later in the line, I don't think so though. So this is tricky, these are kind of the questions that the poem's fraught with. This is all we'll be reading of the Wasteland. But let me give our first time readers of Eliot some advice. When you read the rest of this poem,
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just read it aloud and see what happens and just go with the flow. And when you're reading many modernists like Eliot, don't seek to find the plot or the narrative or you'll be endlessly frustrated. Sometimes there is narrative. I think the genius of Eliot in most modernist poetry is not how the desperate elements of voice scene and action make up this unified Arc of a story The Genius rather is in its representation of a fragmented world through this interplay of
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voice and perspective and its interpretation of the quality of human life in this new Modern urban and global world. The representation of the world is one of the major characteristics of the high modernist style of the 1920s. The representation of the world through the eyes of the past, whether it's a classical past, whether it's the Romantic past, that it's a critique, this lens is a critique of itself. I mean it really is. It seems like it always is a critique
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to view present contemporary life through the eyes of maybe someone a few generations back and this is what the modernists sometimes are doing. And it remains an interest for many of the later modernist poets such as W. H. Auden. And for our last poet and poem, I'd like to read you Auden's 1952 poem called The Shield of Achilles. We met for Auden's birthday earlier this year for poetry readings. I think I mentioned the shield of Achilles but I don't think it was read by us
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all here. So, I'd like to introduce it now because I think this pairs nicely with what Eliot's doing in the Wasteland, what the whole modernist concept of the world is, and what they're up against. In this poem, The Shield of Achilles, the Shield itself represents the new modern world. It's etched on the shield and it horrifies the viewer. So I'd like to warn viewers in this poem there's a
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mention of sexual violence. I know that, from some of the comments on YouTube, some of the viewers on here are high school students, homeschoolers, and other folks who might not want to read this. It's not explicitly described but it is mentioned so I just mentioned that. So this poem reimagines an important scene from Homer's The Iliad ais's creation of Achilles' Shield. So in the original scene the hero Shield is this microcosmic scene of idyllic joy of the way the world
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should be. In Auden's poem, Thetis, Achilles' mother expects scenes of peace and prosperity. She's looking over Hephaestus' shoulder to see what he's etching on the shield and "peace and prosperity"... that's what should be on a hero's Shield. But Hephaestus depicts instead the bleakness of the modern world with images of cold impersonal people living in a violent urban space. Here's the poem beautifully lyric, too. She looked over his shoulder for Vines
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and olive trees, marbled well-governed cities, and ships upon untamed seas but there on the shining metal his hands had put instead an artificial Wilderness and a sky like lead a plane without a feature bare and brown no blade of grass no sign of neighborhood nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down yet congregated on its blankness stood an unintelligible multitude a million eyes a million
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boots in line without expression waiting for a sign out of the air a voice without a face proved by statistics that some cause was just in tones as dry and level as the place no one was cheered and nothing was disgusted column by column in a cloud of dust they marched away enduring a belief whose logic brought them somewhere else to grief she looked over his shoulder for ritual pities white
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flower garlanded heers libation and sacrifice but there on the shining metal where the altar should have been she saw by his flickering Forge light quite another scene barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot where board officials lounged One cracked a joke and centri sweated the day was hot a crowd of Ordinary Decent folk watched from without and neither moved nor spoke as three pale figures were led forth and bound to three posts driven upright in the ground the mass and
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Majesty of this world all that carries weight and always weighs the same lay in the hands of others they were small and could not hope for help and no help came what their foes liked to do was done their shame was all the worst could wish they lost their pride and died as men before their bodies died she looked over his shoulder for athletes at their games men and women in a dance moving
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their sweet limbs quick quick to music but there on the shining Shield his hands had set no dancing floor but a weed choked field a ragged urchin aimless and alone loitered about that vacancy
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a bird flew up to safety from his well aimed stone that girls are raped that two boys knife a third were axioms to him who'd never heard of any world where promises were kept or one could weep because another wept the thin lipped armorer apesos hobbled away fetus of the shiny breasts cried out in dismay at what the God had wrought to please her son the strong iron hearted mans slain Achilles who would not live long. It's like Owen's trench poetry. Auden's, The Shield of
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Achilles, depicts war at least modern war raft of meaning and glory. Like Eliot's, The Wasteland, Auden's poem views modern life through the lens of ancient mythology, through this classical illusion bringing in poem. Modernist poetry will often inhabit the tensions between the past and present, the ancient and modern worlds, and also the tensions between our aesthetic expectations like Thetis. She has this aesthetic expectation... she's looking over the shield hoping to find
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something and then experiences this aesthetic disappointment and through these contrasts, Auden and many others reflect the shift from the vibrant hopeful world of the past, in this case Homer's epic, to this disillusioned bleak reality of the modern era which portends the downfall of the hero at the end Achilles who would not live long. Even though the voice is detached and personal, which is such a characteristic of Auden, there is something of Thetis in the voice. Her cry of
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dismay breaking out at the sigh of Hephaestus. The shield that he has made is I think the cry that
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modernist poems often accomplish and avoid. They both accomplish and avoid this cry in many ways. The form of poetry takes up this nonverbal atavistic cry of despair at the sight of the modern world through this frustration of aesthetic desire and through this juxtaposition of desperate and conflicting images and even through the colloquy of disconnected scenes and voices. But it also avoids pure non-verbal cry. It avoids it in the sense that it aims to articulate it and I
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think this is why modernist form departs from kind of formal poetry that we see. This poem by Auden is very formal but Eliot will often seek forms, free forms, different kinds of regulating verse but all previous kinds of formal utterance are entirely insufficient we feel for the modernist, so new forms must be introduced. Modernist poetry is not so much a venture of experimentation for the sake of experimentation. They're not just trying to be cute.
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They don't mean to be confusing for the sake of confusing although Eliot can sometimes seem that way. Much modern poetry is rather the outburst of this visceral cry which anxiously seeks habitation in a form that does not exist in the past and must be created through the utterance itself. And we're going to see in our final lecture on postmodern and contemporary poets next week how this has led us to a new moment really in poetry.
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It's not all despair. We saw bleak depictions here but the human voice, the expectation for beauty, is fulfilled in modernist poetry in interesting ways. It's just not fulfilled in the ways that expect. So, thanks everyone on YouTube for watching! Until next time!
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