Modernism In Literature
- Melchior Antoine
- Jul 16
- 11 min read
Updated: Jul 17
Modernism in literature, despite being avant garde, often repurposed and renterpreted classical literary works such as Homer's Odyssey. It was a dominant movement in the period just after World War I, and it arose as a reaction against Victorian standards of literature, which many saw as inadequate to properly represent the modern spirit of the period.
Modernism is defined by a number of factors. This includes the disillusion that was brought about by World War I as a result of its destruction and loss of life; a view that the preceding Victorian era of literature was too optimistic; psychological insights gained through Freudian psychoanalysis; and the impulse to incorporate the spirit of modern industrialization and urbanization into literature.
To give a single definition of modernism in literature is difficult. However, the movement was defined by a strong sense of experimentation. Ezra Pound, an influential figure in modernist poetry and free verse once claimed “Make It New!” as the slogan for modernist literature. We see this sense of experimentation in the major figures of modernist literature and the works they produced.
T.S. Eliot wrote the long poem The Wasteland in 1922, providing a desolate fragmented epic, which was structured in a non-linear fashion with numerous esoteric literary references or allusions to the entire history of Western Literature, starting from the Classical Greek literary tradition to his own time. The poem seemed to suggest the ruins of a Western civilization that was no longer whole.
James Joyce in the same year produced the prose poem Ulysses, a mock epic of the Odyssey, where he employed novel techniques such as stream of consciousness. It resulted in what may well be one of the most unique and experimental novels in the history of literature. Other writers like Virginia Woolf also adopted this stream of consciousness method to come up with novels that did away with the concept of plot and instead followed the peculiar and unique ways that protagonists saw and filtered the world through the lens of their minds.
In this article, I cannot hope to fully cover the breadth and depth of the modernist movement in literature. However, I will focus on how two modernist writers repurposed Classical Greek literary tradition in the quest to forge new meanings in their literature, namely, Hilda Doolittle (or H.D.) and Ezra Pound.
1. Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound was a prominent figure in modernist literature. He was responsible for starting the Imagist movement and was friends with a number of poets and writers who would go on to play a significant role in the history of modernist literature, including T.S. Eliot and Hilda Doolittle, also known as H.D.
He was famous for being both a poet, a critic, and something of a leader in the avant garde regarding modernist poetry. More famously, he played a significant role in editing T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. His poetry is complicated and includes many of the currents of modernist poetry.
Pound’s famous free verse poem “In a Station of the Metro” (published in 1913) is frequently anthologized, and we have taken a look at it previously in the following article — Free Verse: Its Operating Principles & History. But we can benefit from visiting it here once more:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Ezra Pound was part of and a leader of the Imagist movement, a movement in poetry that emphasized conciseness in language and imagery. We see this in the poem in addition to one of the tenets of modernism, a focus on the spirit of urbanization and industrialization.
Faces in a metro station, an urbanized setting, are being compared to flowers, a trope of traditional poetry associated with romance and nature. Pound is more or less announcing that the ugly industrial-urban landscape is as worthy of poetry as traditional subjects from the previous eras of poetry.
Despite the emphasis on “making it new,” which Pound emphasized, the poet saw nothing wrong with leaning back for inspiration into past literary traditions or traditions that were even foreign to the Western world. This included sources as diverse and as varied as classical Greek literature and Chinese poetry.
Even “In a Station at the Metro,” we see something of this. The poem may well be using the metro as a modern and urban analogy for the underworld of classical Greek epic tradition. This is so especially when we consider that in Greek epic tradition, disembodied souls or ghosts are typically described as leaves as Pound describes “these faces in a crowd.”
One of the features — and complaints — of Pound and by extension modernist literature in general is its fragmentary nature. In modernist literary works, there often appears to be no coherent narrative, chronological time order, or structure that is obvious to even an intelligent reader. Very often, we are left with more subtext than directly intelligible text.
To read a work like The Wasteland, for example, would require vast and deep knowledge of several works of Western literature because of the dense classical and literary allusions that the poet relies on. A remarkable example of this phenomenon is Ezra Pound’s massive epic poem known as The Cantos (published in 1925).
Examining modernism in literature through Ezra Pound, Canto I
The Cantos has been described as “the great garbage heap of Modernism, from which anyone could extract a thesis topic” by Garrick Davis. Davis was seeking to express the idea, which by now is growing ever popular, that modernist literature has lost public appeal to a large extent because of its lack of form, structure, and coherence, with Pound’s epic being the embodiment of this. Modernist literature like The Cantos are more likely to attract the attention and study of scholars as opposed to members of the general public.
Let’s look at “Canto I” before passing judgment of Garrick's analysis:
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
. . .
Dark blood flowed in the fosse,
Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides
Of youths and of the old who had borne much;
Souls stained with recent tears, girls tender,
Men many, mauled with bronze lance heads,
Battle spoil, bearing yet dreory arms,
These many crowded about me; . . .
. . . And then Anticlea came.
Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away
And unto Circe.
Venerandam,
In the Cretan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden
Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:
If Canto I is anything to go by, we can say that the epic begins with a bang. We get right into the action, with the first line being “And.” It’s as if we are about to embark on an epic adventure with the hero of the story. There is something sensational and mysterious about jumping into the action in this way, without even knowing who we are watching and listening to.
However, our excitement begins to slowly dissipate as we go through the poem and come close to its end. We begin with the vivid imagery of lines such as “winds from sternward / Bore us out onward with bellying canvas” and the description of Circe as “the trim-coifed goddess.”
The muscular rhythms of the anastrophic and incomplete sentences are also alluring, especially the anastrophe that ends the first stanza: “Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.” We finally learn that we are witnessing Odysseus himself. The poem is a recreation of Book 11 in the original Homeric epic, where Odysseus descends into hell to consult the seer Teresias for advice on how to get back home.
But it differs markedly from the original. If Homer’s Iliad represents the soul of what would become Greek tragedy, then the Odyssey predicts the soul of the modern novel. It has a clear narrative structure, a clear hero with a clearly defined goal, innovative flashbacks used to artfully tell significant parts of the story, and a satisfying narrative arc and climax. All the hallmarks of what we recognize today in the Victorian novel.
The Cantos has none of those things. It is a convoluted and fragmented work that is about everything and nothing. Canto I, in its sensational sense of jumping into the action, is misleading us unwittingly or not. It’s like a movie trailer promising us an action-packed sword and sandal adventure, only to give us an artsy fartsy independent film by a university film student.
The confusion comes to a head with the following lines:
And then Anticlea came.
Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
Anticlea is the mother of Odysseus. Anyone familiar with the original would know that, but who on earth is Andreas Divus? Andreas Divus was a scholar who translated the Odyssey into Latin in 1538. Pound is doing something innovative, even if infuriating for readers expecting a traditional narrative.
He is drawing an analogy between an event in Homer’s Odyssey and his own relationship with the literary texts that he reads and draws inspiration from. Anticlea is Odysseus' dead mother, whom he has to shoo away from the blood sacrifice of a black goat in the process of attracting Teresias, the seer in order to gain advice on the way forward back home.
What does it all mean? Pound seems to be suggesting that the modern poet’s artistic inspiration should not rely too heavily on their own immediate heritage. In that regard, Anticlea the mother is analogous to Andreas Divus the translator who inspired Pound to write in homage to the Odyssey. Just as Odysseus has to look past his own mother to discover the way back home, the modern poet, too, must do the same.
And this is what Pound does with The Cantos. The poem incorporates elements and languages from classical Greek and Roman tradition, Western Literary traditions, and Chinese and Japanese literary traditions. The poem is little more than a catalogue of everything that the poet has ever read.
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2. Hilda Doolittle, "At Ithaca"
Hilda Doolittle, also known as H.D. was an American writer who was the protégé of Ezra Pound and shared with him just as deep an interest in the Greek classics. She was by no means the only modernist poet with this inclination. Using the poetry of Pound, as we saw in “Canto I,” we can say that modernist literature is obsessed with the idea of creating new meanings and interpretations from the literature of the past.
For whatever reason, several modernist writers relied on classical Greek literature for their new perspectives. One of the more important and experimental modernist literary works of the early 1920s was James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is the Romanized version of the name Odysseus.
The book is made up of “episodes,” each of which is named after characters in Homer’s original epic. In short, it’s a mock epic of Homer, where Odysseus’ epic adventures are recast as one day in the ordinary — and often sordid and dissolute — lives of contemporary Dubliners, in which nothing happens as in The Cantos.
One of the more captivating parts of the novel is the last chapter, where we are presented with the internal monologue or stream of consciousness of Molly Bloom, wife of the main character Leopold Bloom. If Leopold Bloom is the quotidian version of Odysseus, then Molly Bloom is his Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus.
We find out earlier in the novel that Molly is cheating on Bloom. So much for being his Penelope, who remained loyal to Odysseus for twenty years as a small army of aggressive suitors sort her hand in marriage in the absence of her husband. We actually end up learning that Molly cheats on Bloom just to inspire him to fight for her, just as Odysseus has to fight and kill off his rival suitors in Homer’s epic.
And thus voila, Joyce gets to justify his analogy between Molly and Penelope. Hilda Doolittle in her poem “At Ithaca” (published in 1924) does something similar yet different, with less of Joyce’s irony. Whereas Joyce uses loose anecdotes and parallels to justify the analogy between his modern characters and characters from Greek epic tradition, H.D. travels back in time and occupies the perspective of Penelope herself speaking directly through her in a dramatic monologue. Here is the first stanza of the poem:
Over and back,
the long waves crawl
and track the sand with foam;
night darkens and the sea
takes on that desperate tone
of dark that wives put on
when all their love is done.
Over and back,
the tangled thread falls slack . . .
Penelope, as mentioned earlier, was able to remain loyal to Odysseus for twenty years even as a coterie of aggressive suitors. One of the strategies she used to achieve this was to convince the suitors that she would choose a husband from among them after completing a burial shroud for her husband, only to secretly undo it just before finishing it.
H.D. suggests the repetitive nature of weaving and unweaving the shroud by describing the action of the waves on the seashore of Ithaca where Penelope resides with the first line “Over and back.” This repetition is emphasized by the internal rhyme with back / track. We also learn that the waiting and boredom of doing and undoing the burial shroud is taking a toll on her love for Odysseus. The sea is described as taking on the dark tone "that wives put on / when all their love is done."
The second stanza repeats the first line, but this time shows us Penelope weaving the shroud. Penelope is contemplating allowing the shroud to be completed and not undoing her weaving, but she remembers the romantic prowess of her husband Odysseus and changes her mind.
Here is the last stanza of the poem:
But each time that I see
my work so beautifully
inwoven and would keep
the picture and the whole,
Athene steels my soul.
Slanting across my brain,
I see as shafts of rain
his chariot and his shafts,
I see the arrows fall,
I see the lord who moves
like Hector lord of love,
I see him matched with fair
bright rivals, and I see
those lesser rivals flee.
This is a sexy stanza bulging with phallic imagery (e.g., “shafts of rain” and “arrows fall”) that is part of a wider metaphor that transforms martial or military prowess into sexual or romantic prowess. The military combat between the Greek and Trojan champions is portrayed as a polyamorous love contest for Penelope, who gets to experience which of the men are the most skilled in lovemaking before making a choice.
There is a blurring of time and space on two levels here. The Trojan War, which involved combat between Greeks and Trojans outside the walls of Troy, and which occurred about twenty years before Odysseus returns, is being merged with the future strife between Odysseus and the Greek suitors eating him out of house and home in Ithaca, Greece.
The second level includes the blurring of time and perspective between Penelope, who lives in Ancient Greece, and H.D. herself, who lives in the present in the United States and Western Europe variously. One could go so far as to say that Penelope herself is a metaphor for the poet and her preference for a particular lover whom she can never turn away from.
H.D. is Penelope and her lover, Odysseus. The poem shows a feminist perspective, with H.D. allowing Penelope to express herself with a level of subversive sensuality, which is missing in the original Homer. In addition, just as in the case of Ezra Pound, we see classical Greek epic figures being interpreted and repurposed into personal metaphor for a modernist author.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, July 16). Modernism In Literature. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/modernism-in-literature |
