modern poetry and free verse - art martini schio poetry officially began with imagism, a movement...

Performer - Culture & LiteratureMarina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,

Margaret Layton © 2013

Modern poetryand free verse

Jonathan Swift

Performer - Culture & Literature

The first decades of the 20th

century a period

of extraordinary originality and

vitality in poetry.

A variety of trends and currents

expressed the nature

of modern experience:

• The Georgian Poets

• The War Poets

• Imagist Poets

• Symbolist Poets

1. Tradition and experimentation

Modern poetry and free verse

Karl Moll, ‘Twilight’, ca 1900. Osterreisches

Gallery, Belvedere (Vienna).

Jonathan Swift


The Georgian poets influenced by the Victorian Romantic

tradition. They were Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), Walter de la Mare

(1873–1956), and Edward Thomas (1878–1917). They:

•employed the conventions of diction;

•felt sympathy for English elements, such as the countryside

as an idyllic place;

•remained indifferent or hostile to the revolution in sensibility

and technique started by the Symbolists.

2. The Georgian Poets Modern poetry and free verse

Walter de la MareRupert Brooke Edward Thomas

Jonathan Swift


3. The War Poets

The War Poets:

• experienced the fighting

• in most cases lost their lives in the conflict

Content of their poetry the horrors of modern warfare

represented in an unconventional, anti-rhetorical way

Aim of their poetry to awaken the conscience of the

readers to the horrors of the war

Language employed violent, everyday

Their poetry a definite move away from the 19th-century

poetic conventions.


Jonathan Swift


Modern poetry officially began with Imagism, a

movement which flourished between 1912 and 1917.

The name ‘Imagiste’ invented by the American poet

Ezra Pound (1885–1972).

4. Imagist PoetsModern poetry and free verse

Jonathan Swift



4. Imagist Poets

The main aesthetic principles of Imagist poets were

•constant use of hard, clear and precise images

•use of a rhythm freed from the artificial demands of

metrical regularity

•choice of any subject matter

•poems, usually short, were the poet’s response to

a scene or object, and contained no moral comment;

•the aim of poetry: to achieve precision,

discipline, dry hardness.

Jonathan Swift


5. Symbolist PoetsModern poetry and free verse

Symbolism a movement started in

France with Charles Baudelaire’s Les

Fleurs du Mal (1857). It influenced the

new poetry.

The style of the Symbolist poets was

characterised by:

•indirect rather than direct

statements

•the use of allusive language and of

the multiple association of words.

Les Fleurs du Mal,

first edition, 1858

Jonathan Swift


5. Symbolist PoetsModern poetry and free verse

The style of the Symbolist poets was characterised by:

•the importance given to the ‘sound’ of words

•the use of quotations from other literatures,

revealing cosmopolitan interests

•the use of free verse

•the possibility for the reader to bring meaning to the

poem

Jonathan Swift


It was T.S. Eliot who developed the new poetic theory and

practice. In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent

(1917), he stated that

6. Symbolist Poets and T. S. Eliot

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an

escape from emotion; it is not the expression of

personality but an escape from personality


Jonathan Swift


According to T.S. Eliot the poet


6. Symbolist Poets and T. S. Eliot

was the explorer of

experience.

used language to

create rich patterns of

meaning that were not

easy for the superficial

reader.

recorded the collapse of Western civilisation and

the culture and spiritual waste of the beginning of

the century.

Jonathan Swift


At the beginning of the 20th century under the influences of

the French Symbolists, such as Stephane Mallarmé

(1842–98), and the American poets Walt Whitman and

Emily Dickinson, many poets:

7. Free verseModern poetry and free verse

• rejected the 19th-century regular metre.

• employed free verse.

Stephane MallarméWalt WhitmanEmily Dickinson

Jonathan Swift


• Absence of the traditional metre

• Lack of regular rhyme scheme

• Use of alliteration and assonance

• Metre and sound determined by a correspondence

between feeling, impression and poetic form and

not by the conventional rules of poetic diction

• The unifying element is the use of the poetic line

• Flexibility of verse line length

7. Free verseModern poetry and free verse

Features of free verse:

modern poetry and free verse - art martini schio poetry officially began with imagism, a movement...

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