Modernism

Modernism is a broadly defined cultural movement (or series of movements) that took hold in the late 19th century and reached its peak on the eve of World War I. It grew out of the philosophical, scientific, political, and ideological shifts that followed the Industrial Revolution, up to World War I, and its aftermath. For artists and writers, the Modernist project was a re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of their predecessors. It evolved from the Romantic rejection of Enlightenment positivism and faith in reason. Modernist writers broke with Romantic virtues and clichés and became self-consciously skeptical of language and its claims on coherence.

Not all recent poetry is "modern.” Modern poetry is open form and free verse, which is quite different from the fixed forms and meters of traditional poetry. A second characteristic is the use of fragmentation, juxtaposition (comparison or connection), and allusion (reference or mention). The most striking characteristic of modernist poetry is the invention and experimentation of new modes of expression.

Traditional poetry had to be limited to subjects of universal significance, general human appeal, etc. even when the poems were romantically personal on the surface. But in modernist poetry, we read poems about all sorts of topics. Modernist poems also tend to be multiple in themes. Some single poems are about many things all at the same time. The poet never fully says, as in traditional poems, what the one and precise meaning of a poem is. That is why the reader has to work with many ‘possible’ themes and meanings in the same poem. So, in modernist poetry, the meaning of a poem is the ‘differing’ interpretation of different readers.

Modernist poets have violated all the known conventions and established rules of the past. In the form, style, stanza, rhythm and other technical devices of poetry, old traditions have been demolished and new experiments are tested: blank verse poems, pictorial poems, remixed rhythms, and so on. The old metrical systems, rhyme-schemes, and traditional symbols and metaphors are no longer dominating. Each poet makes his own rules. The multiplicity of styles is a characteristic of modernist poetry.