Make It New

Ezra Pound

Make It New

http://nyti.ms/1GXbEPx

Stepping into the literary 20th century

MARK DOTY: Whenever I return to this poem I always have the sensation of being in a New York subway, the car doors opening, and suddenly there’s a scene framed by the doors. Then, snap, they close again. Similarly, this poem speeds by us, a flash, a moment of perception is all we have. And because this is such a profoundly compressed poem it would serve us well to pay close attention to what happens to us as we read it. What are the visual images, the sensory associations that come up as you read this poem?

W.B Yeats

T.S. Elliot

W.H Auden

'be mindful in due time of my pain'.

Then dived he back into that fire which refines them, Dante's Purgatorio (XXVI, 147–148)

http://www.openculture.com/2012/07/ts_eliot_reads_his_modernist_masterpieces.html

http://www.yeatsvision.com/geometry.html

Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of Icarus, Oil-tempera, 29 inches x 44 inches. Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.

An American-British poet and literary critic, author of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) won numerous awards and honours in his lifetime, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. His early and experimental poetical works depict a bleak and barren soullessness, often in spare yet finely crafted modern verse. Another of his famous and oft-quoted works, The Waste Land (1922) deals with dark and haunting themes of individual consciousness and spiritual desolation against the decline of civilisation. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness comes to mind as Eliot innovatively rejects traditional Romantic ideals through allusion and symbolism. From the first line, to the last, we can intuit the dramatic scope and evolution of Eliot's own life in the Biblical, cultural, historical, and literary references that helped shape one of the 20th century's most profound figures in literature.

While at Oxford, Auden became familiar with modernist poetry, particularly that of T. S. Eliot, and he became a central member of a group of writers that included Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice, a collective variously labeled the “Oxford Group” or the “Auden Generation.” In 1928 Auden’s first book, Poems, was privately printed by Spender. During the same year, Eliot accepted Auden’s verse play Paid on Both Sides: A Charade for publication in his magazine Criterion. After graduating from Oxford Auden lived for over a year in Berlin before returning to England to become a teacher.

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865, the son of a well-known Irish painter,

John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo and in London. He returned to Dublin at the

age of fifteen to continue his education and study painting, but quickly discovered he preferred poetry.

Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement

against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to

promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage.

Mina Loy

D.H. Lawrence

James Joyce

Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. He is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he utilized. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters. Joyce's fictional universe centres on Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there;

An English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works, among other things, represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, some of the issues Lawrence explores are emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile which he called his "savage pilgrimage".[1] At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, "The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation."[2] Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel.

Mina Loy, born Mina Gertrude Löwry (27 December 1882 – 25 September 1966), was a British artist, poet, playwright, novelist, futurist, actress, Christian Scientist, feminist, model, nurse, designer of lamps, and bohemian. She was one of the last of the first generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia and Yvor Winters, among others.

Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

"usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles"