lecture9：美国现代诗歌的兴起.docVIP

Lecture Nine: Modern Poetry During the first decades of the 20th century, modernism became an international tendency against positivism and representational art in art literature. It is assumed that modernism was the consequence of the transformation of society brought about by industrialism and technology in the course of the 19th century. The essence of modernism was a break with the past, and it also fostered a belief in art and literature as an avenue to self-fulfillment. It included a wide range of artistic expressions such as symbolism, impressionism, post-impressionism, futurism, constructivism, imagism, vorticism, expressionism, dada, and surrealism. 1. Modernism dramatized discontinuity (a sense of disjunction) and imminent severance from the past while making determined efforts to use the past, its values and artistic forms by incorporating them in new literary production. 2. Modernists had a sense of fragmentation in social communities and the fragmentation within the individual himself. 3. The distinctive feature of literary modernism was its strong and conscious break with traditional forms, perceptions and techniques of expression, and its great concern with language and all aspects of its medium. Imagism: Major feature: Imagism was only one of the new techniques of writing poetry that was part of the modernist period and it was one of the most essential techniques. 1. With a spirit of revolt against conventions, imagism was anti-romantic and anti-Victorian. 2. Imagism produced free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern. The rhythm was composed as if the poet were making a musical phrase. 3. In a sense, imagism was equivalent to naturalism in fiction. Imagism in poetry came from the same basis as naturalism in fiction. 4. Imagism tried to record objective observations of an object or a situation without interpretation or comment by poet. The most outstanding figures of the movement were Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell and Hilda Doolittle. Pound champione