Reading Notes W13: Modern Poetry, Part A

Modern Poetry (507-508)

  • romanticism aspired William Wordsworth to speak in the "real language of men" (507)
  • a century later, romantic reveries about natural beauty or the soul had become just another set of poetic cliches
  • French poets, Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarme, saw the late 19th century symbolism as an overwrought kind of romanticism in which personal vision counted for more than precision and formal innovation (507)
  • William Butler Yeats and Constantine Cavafy stress the power of what Yeats called "masterful images"
  • both poets found inspiration in the storehouse of images associated with myth and legend to create complex personal mythologies that enriched their poems
  • Rainer Maria Rilke and T.S. Eliot incorporated elements of ancient myth in their poetry
  • their aim was to achieve impersonal objectivity
  •  Rilke became known for his "object poems"
  • Eliot used complex metrical play and surprising rhymes to revitalize the resources of English verse 
  • both were influenced by Ezra Pound
  • Aime Cesaire, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz were all influenced by surrealism's quest for political, erotic, and spiritual liberation (508)
  • the three of them came from the developing or colonized world and spent times in Paris
  • Federico Garcia Lorca befriended the early surrealists and shared their experimental attitude in his plays
  • his use of repetition and rhetorical techniques intended to move an audience shares something with the work with Neruda
  • modernist poetry has been rejected by some critics as elitist 

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