Modern peotry

Trends of Modern poetry , background amd foreground of modern poetry

1. Umm-e-Rooman Yaqoob
Roll no. 3
B.S (English) 6
th
semester
Modern Poetry
 Modern Poetry:
Modern poetry is the rebellious attitude that flourished between 1900-1930. This movement allowed poets, thinkers
and writers to think for new alternatives. Writers began to write on new concepts. All the new forms of writing were
demolished and new were brought in the society. Modernism is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural
trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. Among the factors that shaped Modernism were the development of modern industrial societies
and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I. Modernism also rejected the certainty of
Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists rejected religious belief.
 Background of Modern Poetry:
The advent of writing enabled scribes and bards from China, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, and Ancient Egypt to write
down odes, Vedas, legends, and myths that had existed in their cultures for thousands of years.
Poetry itself probably dates back to cavemen and the earliest shamans, who chronicled events in picture-stories,
symbols, songs, and tales to chronicle hunts and features of the land on which these people survived. Poetry also
took nomads into altered or supernatural realms.
Since then, people have depicted their inner and outer worlds – and the worlds of their peers, legends and
civilizations – through hundreds or thousands of poetic forms. Like other types of art and music, the evolution of
poetry escalated during fertile creative times and in particularly open societies.
Poets may have created, modified, or used poetic forms, but centuries later these same forms provide a snapshot of
the civilizations from which they emerged. The gorgeous lyrical love poems of Ancient Greece and Rome reflected
cultures open to physical and emotional expression.
So esteemed was poetry that three of the classic nine Muses inspire specific forms of poetry: Calliope (epic poetry),
Erato (love poetry), and Polyrhythmia (sacred poetry). In a culture that routinely mixed poetry, music, and the stage,
two others are close cousins: Euterpe (music) and Melpomene (tragedy).
Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays reflected an Elizabethan era when creativity, expression, and experimentation
ignited England intellectually.
The development of modern poetry is generally seen as having started at the beginning of the 20th century and
extends into the 21st century. Among its major practitioners are Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Anne Carson.
Most of the characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of utterance—rhythm, rhyme, compression, intensity of
feeling, the use of refrains—appear to have come about from efforts to fit words to musical forms. In the European
tradition the earliest surviving poems, the Homeric and Hesiodic epics, identify themselves as poems to be recited or
chanted to a musical accompaniment rather than as pure song. Another interpretation is that rhythm, refrains, and
kennings are essentially paratactic devices that enable the reciter to reconstruct the poem from memory.
In preliterate societies, these forms of poetry were composed for, and sometimes during, performance. There was a
certain degree of fluidity to the exact wording of poems. The introduction of writing fixed the content of a poem to the
version that happened to be written down and survive. Written composition meant poets began to compose for an

2. absent reader. The invention of printing accelerated these trends. Poets were now writing more for the eye than for
the ear.

 Foreground of Modern Poetry:
Foregrounding is used as a major stylistic device by many authors whether that is in plays, novels, short stories or
long poems. One of the most illustrative (if a little brash) examples of the use of foregrounding in the short story genre
is in the story 'The Scarlet Ibis.' In this story, a stricken bird lands in a tree in a family's yard while the people are
having lunch. It is a hot day and gradually the bird slumps, collapses and falls through the branches to the ground in a
heap. It's gangly legs and reddish color foreshadow the manner in which the little disabled son will die (perhaps of
heart failure or exhaustion) later on, his legs and heart similarly depicted.
"The term foregrounding is borrowed from art criticism. Art critics usually distinguish the foreground of a painting from
its background. The foreground is that part of a painting which is in the centre and towards the bottom of the canvas
the items which occur in the foreground of a painting will usually appear large in relation to the rest of the objects."
Foreground is the antonym of background. In a literary text, in order to highlight something or to put special emphasis
on something is the reason of foregrounding. To make a part perceptually prominent, and notable thereby, the
authors take help of foregrounding. Deviations, parallelism, repetition - all these are created to foreground different
certain parts. According to NTC's Dictionary of Literary Terms, calling attention to something (an idea, a character, a
viewpoint) to make it stand out from ordinary by placing it to the foreground is called foregrounding.
For example, look at the following excerpt from e.g. Cummings’ poem:
Pity this busy monster, man unkind,
Not Progress is a comfortable disease.
Here, the poet has created a new word "man unkind" and gone through neologism. This word has been foregrounded
because of the fact that it is Cummings’ own invention. This lexical deviation has emphasized the cruelty or
ruthlessness of modern mankind, and to support the theme of the poem, the poet has broken the normal paradigm of
a verse by not capitalizing the first letters. Thus, through these deviations, he has been able to foreground the feature
of modern humans.
 Trends of Modern Poetry:
Following are the trends present in the modernist society and among the modern writings.
Death of Truth:
The New Criticism ushered in by Pound and Eliot, finding in the admired poetry of the past so much that was no
longer true, declared that truth was not to be looked for in poetry. All that mattered were the words on the page, and
the ingenious skill with which they deployed. The experience of historians was set aside, as was indeed that of
readers of historical romances, both of whom can remain happily suspended between the past and present. What the
New Critics wanted were the unchanging laws of science, and they adopted a language of tensions and psychology
without understanding the issues involved.
Poet as Social Outcast:
The later nineteenth-century poets contended that poetry was not language used to its fullest extent, but an
altogether different way of using language. Poetry could no longer be written in high-minded diction, or perhaps at all
after the horrors of the Second World War. In fact it was the cold efficiency of state organization that had so vastly
increased, but poets did not read history, or perhaps much philosophy, as some hazardous simplifications were made
in identifying man’s true nature with his most elementary.

3. The Decline: Tradition and Innovation :
Many have sincerely felt that in the twentieth century no great poetry was written and none is being written now. As a
critic has put it, there have been many poetic persons in the twentieth century, but no poets. It is said that as
civilization advances poetry declines. Poetry indeed has declined, though it is somewhat debatable if civilization has
advanced. At the beginning of the new century at least, there was no poet of any stature.
Modern Themes:
Modern poetry exercises a great freedom in the choice of themes. Gone are days when it was believed that the job
of the poet was only to create "beauty." T. S. Eliot offers a representative view: "The essential advantage of a poet is
not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness: to see the
boredom and the horror and the glory." He is free to write poems on themes ranging from kings to cabbages and from
the cosmos to a pin's head.
Pessimism:
The two wars and impending danger of a third (and perhaps the last) have cast a gloomy shadow on much of the
poetry of the twentieth century Well has the modern age been called "the age of anxiety." In spite of our material
prosperity we are full of tensions and anxieties which are almost an inseparable feature of modern living. Add to them
the disappearance of religious faith. T. S. Eliot was quite religious but his attitude towaras life as we find itjn such
poems as The Waste Land and 7he HoUowMen. is far from optimistic. To quote a few lines from the latter:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass.
The pessimism of twentieth-century poets is-not of the nature-of the somewhat stylised melancholy of Shelley or what
David Daiches describes as "the Tennysonian elegiac mode with its lingering enjoyment of self-pity." It is more
intellectual and more impersonal.
Romantic Tendency:
Such prosaic social concern is basically inimical to all romantic tendency most modern poets, as we have said earlier,
scorn all romanticism-even the subdued kind of romanticism as in Tennyson. Hume, a major influence on’ Eliot and
others, asserted in his essay "Romanticism and Classicism" in the few Age: "I object to the sloppiness which doesn’t
consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other."
Nature:
Another "romantic tendency to be found in some modern poets is interest in nature. Nature fascinates some poets
because she offers such a wonderful contrast with the hubbub and ugliness of an industrialised and over-
sophisticated age. "In the face of modern industrialism,"' says A. C. Ward, "they [modern poets] solace their souls by
retiring to the country and celebrating the beauties of unspoiled Nature." Such poets as Masefield, Robert Bridges, W.
E. Davies, and Edmund Blunden may not find any mystic significance in mature, but they are, all the same, charmed
by her unsophisticated beauty. Masefield in "Sea-Fever" expresses a strong desire to run away from the dreary life
into "the lonely sea and the sky." Edmund Blunden points his finger lovingly at the little-noticed things of nature.
Davies poetry has the feature of childlike curiosity in the natural objects everybody finds around himself.
Religion and Mysticism:

4. Religion and mysticism also find a place in the work of some poets of the twentieth century. Coventry Patmore and
Francis Thompson, who wrote religious poetry towards the end of the preceding century, seem to have inspired a
number of poets in this century. The name of Mrs. Alice Meynell deserves to be mentioned. In the poetry of the Jesuit
Gerard Manley Hopkins, too, we have something religious now and then. Ralph Hodgson's The Song of Honour is a
notable poem pulsating with religious feelings. Even in the poetry of such poets as Yeats there are mystical strains.
Rejection of the Past:
No doubt the new approaches challenged what poetry had once been, but the new practitioners rewrote history.
Poetry had always been contemporary, they argued, which now meant being direct, personal and American. Great
poetry had in fact been more than that, but the supporters of popular Modernism—William Carlos Williams, the Black
Mountain School, Beat Poets and the San Franciscans—had answers ready. Poetry must be unmediated if sincere,
and the techniques of verse were a handicap to expression. They remembered Pound’s “make it new”, and asserted
that a more democratic age must have a more democratic poetry. Theoretical scaffolding became a necessary part of
contemporary poetry, the more so as the floodgates were soon to be opened in schools and writing classes
throughout the country.
Diction and Metre:
This movement has also revolutionalised the concept of poetic diction and metre. Traditional "poetic diction"
saccharine poeticisms. and even regular metre have been discarded almost completely. As Moody and Lovett point
out, "Imagism did modern poetry a tremendous service by pointing the way to a renovation of the vocabulary of
poetry and the necessity of ridding poetic technique of vague and empty verbiage and dishonest and windy
generalities." Though rhyme has almost completely gone, yet as Daiches puts it, "rhythm freed from the artificial
demands of metrical regularity" is still used. A language with the flow and turns of common speech is mostly
employed. Verse libre (free verse) is the most usual mode of all serious poetry of today. In the twentieth century
many experiments have been made on the technique and diction of poetry. Doughty, for example, as Grierson and
Smith put it, "manhandled" English. The American poet Cummings refused to start every line of his poetry with a
capital letter, and so on. Many of such experiments have been interesting-but interesting only.
Concluding Thoughts:
So arose the present scene, a vast medley of communities, all sharing some beliefs and working practices, and
uniting round common problems, but still competing for attention, status and economic livelihood. Perhaps that is only
natural, and anthropologists often picture communities as successive waves of invaders interbreeding with earlier
peoples but also dispersing them to more difficult terrain, where their gene-drift gradually makes them more
distinctive but also less productive.