Modern Writers Writing in Response to Modern Aesthetics - Essay Example

Modern Writing in Response to Modern Aesthetics In the late nineteenth century, the organization of social and cultural life shifted severely as a result of increased social mobility with the introduction of the middle class, technical complexity with the advent of complicated machinery, and social diversity as the result of increased colonialisation. These radical changes contributed significantly to the dissolution of the forms of ideology and belief that had sustained society throughout its earlier history. While rationalization and utilitarianism have been respected as ideas, they led to a mode of thinking in which intelligence and culture became underestimated and unappreciated (Eagleton, 1996). As a result, people were being deprived of ways to creatively and positively express their irrational feelings such as fear or desire. However, artists had never relied on existing subjective techniques and embraced the challenge of using objective expression to appeal to man’s rational nature. These artists and writers attempted to make a distinction between high culture and low culture by keeping intelligence and creativity a mainstay of their efforts. At the same time, these artists felt disgust for the traditional aesthetic expressions in literary or art works as a means of revealing the world emerging around them. It was felt that the more traditional forms of art and literature were not capable of meeting the challenges faced in the obvious corruption of political regimes or in the cruel and deadly realities following World War I. They also recognized that existing forms and styles could not allow them to appeal to the modern public. In response, modernists such as T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings and Langston Hughes proposed new and unconventional techniques for poetry such as free verse or new voices. All the complexity and significance of the modernistic idea of style seems to be summed up in T.S. Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land. This poem deals directly with the decline of civilization and the resulting impossibility of recovering meaning in life. In this poem, Eliot alludes to and quotes from various classic works and myths such as Greek mythology, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare and so on, taking a cubist approach in incorporating numerous faces of the same idea (Wollen, 1975). These allusions to various classical works are referred in a seemingly fragmentary form that lends significance to the meaning of the poem as it is in this fragmentary approach that Eliot is able to make a comment on the nature of modern society in general. Rather than focusing on the words of the poem itself, Leavis sees the significance of The Waste Land as residing principally in the disorganization of the poem (1932). By definition, a wasteland denotes an area that has been devastated spiritually, emotionally, physically and culturally. In short, Eliot attempted to reveal the complication involved in the lapse of attention given to mentality and culture in the modern capitalist society. Moreover, Leavis (1932) phrases the modern predicament as a breach of continuity and an uprooting of life as is expected in a wasteland. He insists that a major cause of this uprooting lies in the incessant rapid change that characterizes the Machine Age. An important point brought out regarding Eliot’s poem is its strange disconnection with nature, a statement that could be made of modern society as it made its transition from a mostly agrarian society to an urban society, from the old ways of life to the new. E.E. Cummings attempts a new style of ‘speaking’ in his poetry in an attempt to denote the speech of a public speaker in his poem “Next to of Course God America I”. The speaker fills his words with numerous shameless pulls on patriotic language such as “land of the pilgrims’” in the second lines and “oh say can you see” in the third line. The speech seems to be a rallying cry for fellow countrymen to support the speaker in whatever he is doing as a means of upholding those beliefs that their fathers and grandfathers died for regardless of what area of the country the audience is from. This appeal to a multi-regional audience is made in lines 7 and 8 when he says “by gory by jingo by gee by gosh by gum”, ensuring he’s included the vernacular of every major region of the country as a means of appealing to the ‘common man’ of the modern age. Cummings’ characteristic lack of punctuation in his writing makes this first segment of the poem seem like a breathless utterance of 13 lines total that denotes little meaning other than patriotic appeal and confusing double speak, the typical approach taken by politicians and activists. Whether this seeming incoherence of the speech is intended to be the actual speech of the politician or is instead the elements of the speech heard by the audience is made unclear by the final line of the poem, “He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water”, which suggests that perhaps the speech is being related not from its original source, but instead from a nearby listener. There is a strong element of disconnect in the poem as the politician remains removed from his audience on an ideological level – evidenced by his inability to deliver a comprehensible speech – and as evidenced in his nervousness in giving the speech as he finishes and “drank rapidly a glass of water” as if to wash the lies out of his mouth. Finally, Langston Hughes takes the concept of speech from the allusion to ‘common speech’ one step further and preserves the vernacular of the people themselves in his poem “Mother to Son.” In this poem, Hughes again employs a metaphor to depict a mother as she explains to her son that her own path through life “ain’t been no crystal stair” (2). The path has been scattered with numerous hazards that one would immediately recognize as dangerous within this context, including “splinters, / And boards torn up, / And places with no carpet on the floor” (4-6). This makes one think of sharp pains, sudden instability and lean times such as was often associated with this time period, but still the older woman continued to climb, “And reachin’ landin’s, / And turnin’ corners, / And sometimes goin’ in the dark” (10-12). It isn’t until roughly the last quarter of the poem that it becomes clear that this is a mother trying to encourage her son to continue to struggle for something better: “So, boy, don’t you turn back. Don’t you set down on the steps, / ‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard” (14-16). Although she knows the climb he’s making is not easy, she is telling him that she is able to understand because she has had to follow a difficult path as well. As she illustrates to him the various hardships she’s had to endure as she climbed the stairway of life, she is also letting him know that at the least, he is starting from a higher point than the place where she started. “For I’se still goin’, honey, / I’se still climbin’, / And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” (18-20). By capturing the actual vernacular of the people in poetry such as that presented by Langston Hughes and, to some extent, E.E. Cummings, poets in the modern period were responding to a new aesthetic that valued the understandings of the common man. At the same time, focus on the modes of communication was also taking place in such poems as that presented by E.E. Cummings in his analysis of the nonsense communication style of political leaders. All of these writers worked, like T.S. Eliot, to pull elements of meanings together from a variety of sources, abandoning the traditional symbols and expressions of the past in favor of a new mode of expression, in much the same way cubism and other techniques were affecting the art world. Through these approaches, it can be seen that the new approaches to art were also being observed and reflected in the new approaches to literature throughout the modern period. Works Cited Cummings, E.E. “Next to of Course God America I.” E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1994. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd Ed. Oxford: Blackwells, 1996. Eliot, Thomas. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1963. Hughes, Langston. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Vintage Classics, 1995. Leavis, F.R. New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the Contemporary Situation. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932. Wollen, Peter. “The Two Avant-Gardes.” Readings and Writings. London: Semiotic Counter-Strategies, (1975; 1982). Read More