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World War I
The Great War was a great influencer that sparked a sure movement towards Modernism. -
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Eliot narrates "Prufrock" using the stream-of-consciousness technique. The poem is a dramatic inner monologue of a man with feelings of isolation and inability to make decisions or take action. It is representative of the modern individual and modern disillusionment. -
Virginia Woolf's Modern Fiction
Woolf wrote this essay to explain modern fiction, the new fiction. It also acts as a guide for writers of modern fiction. She indicates that modernist writers must write what they feel and not what society or publishers want them to write. -
James Joyce’s Ulysses
Joyce works modernism into the episodes of Homer's epic the Odyssey. The writing is fragmentary and disjointed, to be parallel to the way of life during the time following WWI, also known as the "Great War." -
Ezra Pound’s “Make it New”
Pound's book of essays culminate in his ideas of how to make literature "new" and truly modern.
Read a quick NY Times article about Pound here (https://www.nytimes.com/1972/11/02/archives/pounds-battle-cry-make-it-new.html). -
E.E. Cummings’ “i carry your heart with me”
Cummings' work is particularly modernist and "new" because of how he uses words distinctly and really works the punctuation, spacing, and capitalization.
Listen to e.e. cummings read his own poem "i carry your heart with me" here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4Qb9XmHXX4).
