5.2 Modernist Poetry

Notes

Modernist poets compressed language and trusted images over explanation.

• Imagism (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams): clear, concrete images, no wasted words. Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" (1913) is two lines: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough."
• Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" (1923) begins "so much depends / upon" a simple red wheelbarrow, and finds importance in an everyday object.
• T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) uses fragments, shifting voices and allusions to portray a spiritually empty postwar world.
• Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" (1916) uses plain speech and a traditional form but is often misread: the speaker admits the two roads were "really about the same," so the poem is more about how we tell our choices later.
• Worked example: Pound compares faces in a crowd to petals on a branch, without any word of explanation.