In The Beginning: The Modernest Movement

• The Modernist Movement involved rejection of conventional literary traditions. Began loosely around 1910.

       Poets found conventional literature and uses of language unable to deal with the violence and technology of the changing world.

       The movement gives rise, later, to the idea that world is in fact always changing: language must constantly change with it.

• Ezra Pound says "Make it new!"

Some modernist poets include Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Gertrude Stein.

Second Coming 

       by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Modernist poetry greatly concerned with the idea that

THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD

poetry and literature before was concerned with expressing that "one meaning," or "one truth," and believed there was a center to all things—a place where it all comes together. Modernists reject this, and Yeat's poem is a great example of this rejection.

These new ideas are to be played with and expanded upon in the coming centuries. The modernist movement signifies the very first *aware* inklings of zen in poetry.

Information on The Modernist Movement


The Second Coming