Modernism: Art & It's Poetic Influence

Futurism & Feminism

Modernism

started in 1914 by

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Otto Dix

Vorticism

Mina Loy:

Active in the futurist movement befor writing her Feminist manifseto

• Cubism
• imagism &realism
• Futurinsm
• Vorticism
• Surealism

W. Lewis

Ezra Pound

The dam Bellona

littered

her eyeless offspring

Kriegsopfer

upon the pavements of Vienna

Sparkling precipitate

the spectral day

involves

the visionless obstacle

this slow blind face

pushing its virginal nonentity

against the light

Pure purposeless eremite

of centripetal sentience

Upon the carnose horologe of the ego

the vibrant tendon index moves not

since the black lightning desecrated

the retinal altar

Void and extinct

this planet of the soul

strains from the craving throat

in static flight upslanting

A downy youth's snout

nozzling the sun

drowned in dumfounded instinct

The Temperaments

"The women who adopt... their sex as a relative impersonality are not yet feminine (Loy 992).

"Der Blinde Junge"

The 'vorticists' enjoyed a life of a year or two,no more they were snuffed out by the Great War (Hickman 293)

Nine adulteries, 12 liaisons, 64 fornications and something approaching a rape

Rest nightly upon the soul of our delicate friendFlorialis,

And yet the man is so quiet and reserved in demeanour

That he passes for both bloodless and sexless.

Bastidides, on the contrary, who both talks and writes of nothing save copulation,

Has become the father of twins,

But he accomplished this feat at some cost;

He had to be four times cuckold.

T.S.Ellot

Surrealism

Dali

"The archetypal surrealist figure is, in poetry the metaphor" (Skaff 170)

Cubism

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? (ll. 122-124)

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ... (ll. 5-10)

Pablo Picasso

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (ll.129-131)

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading

Gertrude Stein

Imagism & Realism

"An Image, in our sense, is real because we know it directly"- Pound

In a Station of the Metro

THE HARD sand breaks,

And the grains of it

Are clear as wine.

Far off over the leagues of it,

The wind, 5

Playing on the wide shore,

Piles little ridges,

And the great waves

Break over it.

But more than the many-foamed ways 10

Of the sea,

I know him

Of the triple path-ways,

Hermes,

Who awaiteth. 15

Dubious,

Facing three ways,

Welcoming wayfarers,

He whom the sea-orchard

Shelters from the west, 20

From the east

Weathers sea-wind;

Fronts the great dunes.

Wind rushes

Over the dunes, 25

And the coarse, salt-crusted grass

Answers.

Heu,

It whips round my ankles!

II

Small is 30

This white stream,

Flowing below ground

From the poplar-shaded hill,

But the water is sweet.

Apples on the small trees 35

Are hard,

Too small,

Too late ripened

By a desperate sun

That struggles through sea-mist. 40

The boughs of the trees

Are twisted

By many bafflings;

Twisted are

The small-leafed boughs. 45

But the shadow of them

Is not the shadow of the mast head

Nor of the torn sails.

Hermes, Hermes,

The great sea foamed, 50

Gnashed its teeth about me;

But you have waited,

Where sea-grass tangles with

Shore-grass.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough - Ezra Pound

"Hermes of the Ways"

The Gross Clinic

Modernism: Art & It's Poetic Influence