Introduction
It has been said that difficulty is an essential feature of modernist poetry, that modernist poets set out to describe a complex world in deliberately dense and ambiguous terms and that this leads them to charges of elitism and obscurity.
Before we consider this charge, it may be worthwhile to look at some of the factors that brought modernist poetry in English into existence. Most citics would agree that modern poetry started with Charles Baudelaire who influenced Rimbaud and Mallarme. This then crossed the Channel in about 1908 and was promulgated by T E Hulme, Ezra Pound and T S Eliot.
The first decade of the 20th century saw radical progress in many fields, Freud and Einstein were busy overturning long held beliefs and theories. Technology had brought us the motor car, the telephone and the aeroplane - continuous progress appeared to be the order of the day.
In the arts things were also changing rapidly with the advent of cubism and Schoenberg's radical challenge to classical music.
In brief, there was an enthusiasm for all things new and Pound was the main protagonist for 'newness' in poetry.
Modernist Manifestoes
Hulme was the first to put forward a manifesto for modernism. He was concerned about the inadequacy of mentally ordering reality into static units when it is our intuition that produces a more accurate and dynamic picture of the world in motion. Hulme therefore felt that poetry was best placed (being more intuitive) to reflect reality provided it shed some of its own constraints. Hulme's thinking on this was heavily influenced by the works of Henri Bergson, a French philosopher.
Hulme's 'A Lecture on Modern Poetry' given in 1908 identified two central elements for this 'new poetry;
- free verse, which Hulme saw as being particularly suited to modern life and our awareness of it;
- the image, Hulme imagined a poetry which would consist entirely of images, one on each line.
Hulme also made a claim for the privileged position of poetry, observing that the image is perfectly suited to verse but becomes degraded in prose.
Modernist poetry: the verdict.
Bergson's view of the inadequacy of 'conventional' language to express how things really are experienced gave modernist poets permission to be both innovative and difficult. Eliot further justified the difficulty of his work by pointing out -
"Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning."
The Wasteland is the central poem of modern poetry, it is impossible to overstate the strength of its influence on everything that has been written since. The poem is discussed in detail elsewhere but it is almost universally agreed that it is brilliant and difficult. With one poem Eliot changed all the rules for writing poetry in English and this great piece of work was informed by the modernist principles of Hulme and Pound (who edited the poem prior to publication).
Two of our most difficult contemporary poets (Prynne and Hill) are often referred to as 'late' modernists. This isn't particularly helpful but it does indicate that both are concerned with the constraints of language and take a keen interest in expressing the struggle with words in their work.
The article on post-modernism discusses the end of modernism generally and the criticisms made by Lyotard and others but it cannot be denied that in The Wasteland and The Cantos modernism produced the two most important English poems in the 20th century.
Modernist poetry can be both elitist and obscure but good modernist work is never obscure for the sake of obscurity and its elitism does not exclude the attentive reader. Bad modernist poets will use both obscurity and erudite allusion to disguise the fact that they don't have very much to say.