Introduction to Modernism and free verse, with twentieth century examples.

1. Poetic forms & genres Modernism and Free Verse Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

3. 'Modernism' the cultural and intellectual movement refers to particular progressive forms, techniques and ideas which emerged in the decades before 1914.

4. Modernist authors include James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

5. Stravinsky (musician); Picasso (Painter)

6. Not all art or literature produced during the modern period is modernist. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

9. Industrialization and urbanization

10. Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution

11. Karl Marx's critique of Capitalism

12. Sigmund Freud's theory of the Unconscious.

13. First World War (1914-1918)

14. European and transnational movement (US)Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

16. Generally regarded as the first Modernist poetic movement.

17. Favoured precision of imagery; rejected sentiment and discursiveness.

18. Rejected the traditional forms of poetry.

19. 'To Break the Pentameter, that was the first heave' (Ezra Pound)

20. 'Make it New!'Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

21. 'In a Station of the Metro' (Pound) The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

23. New techniques such as the Stream of Consciousness

24. Fragmentation in structuring literary works

25. Lack of a single authoritative viewpoint.

26. Could be replaced by unreliable narrator or multiple points of view.

27. Fragmentation in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land; Ezra Pound's Cantos. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

29. Tonal shifts include: satire, prophecy, elegy

30. Jumps between places, voices, times and register.Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

32. The Bible (Old Testament)

33. John Donne's religious writing

34. Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (Libretto)

35. Tarot Card reading

36. Baudelaire

37. Dante

38. Elizabethan dramatist John Webster

39. 'These fragments have I shored against my ruin' (Eliot)Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

41. Lineated but not organised by meter or any other strict patterning device

42. Most free verse has irregular line lengths and lacks rhyme

43. Remember: don't confuse free verse with blank verse! Blank verse is unrhyming iambic pentameter.

44. It can help to think of broad different categories of free verse:Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

46. From Gerontion (T.S. Eliot) After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late What's not believed in, or if still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon... Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

48. From Walt Whitman 'Song of Myself' (1855) I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other. Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice...Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers... Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

49. From 'Snake'(D.H. Lawrence, 1923) Someone was before me at my water-trough,And I, like a second comer, waiting. He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment, And stooped and drank a little more,Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking. Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

50. From 'Howl'(Allen Ginsberg, 1955) Angelheadedhipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley.... Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres

52. e.e. cummings, 'portrait' Bufallo Bill’s defunct who used to ride a watersmooth-silver stallion and break onetwothreefourfivepigeonsjustlikethat Jesus he was a handsome man and what I want to know is how do you like your blueyed boy Mister Death Sarah Law Poetic Forms & Genres