Concetti Chiave
- The early Modernist movement, influenced by Imagism and Vorticism, was pioneered by figures like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.
- Yeats, a key figure in the Celtic Revival, combined influences from French symbolists and Modernist styles in works like "Easter 1916".
- Eliot's "The Waste Land" is a central Modernist poem, featuring complex themes and techniques like stream-of-consciousness.
- The Harlem Renaissance, featuring writers like Langston Hughes, highlighted black cultural themes, jazz, and racial issues.
- The second generation of Modernists, including the "Oxford poets," focused more on tradition and social issues, with Auden as a prominent figure.
Between 1900 and 1918 Modernist hints were revealed by the first generation, Ezra Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Hughes. The two movements which influenced Modernism were Imagism, which expressed thoughts in simple images, and Vorticism, which abandoned the traditional language. Both movements started with Ezra Pound who wrote poems like “In a station of the Metro” and “The Garret” in a hard style. Yeats is the most important figure of Celtic Revival and Irish theatre revival, he was influenced by French symbolists and Ezra Pound, indeed he wrote “Easter 1916”, a celebration of Easter Rising, in a clear language and with realistic and symbolical images.
The central modernist poem is Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, based on the myth of the Holy Grail, it’s characterized by modernist features like the presence of past and present, stream-of consciousness technique, various language..