The poem becomes a medium that expresses the essential history of the culture.
The Waste Land raises a problem students have with modernism generally: that so many twentieth-century poets make extensive use of classical allusions or interweave references to Renaissance painters or quote writers in languages other than English.Īlthough Eliot presents a "waste land" as his variation on the "diminished thing" that symbolizes human personality and culture in the modern world, his answer to the oven bird's question is not to make something (entirely) new or to show Stevens's snow man confronting "the nothing that is not there" and inventing a "supreme fiction" but rather to surrender the individual personality of the poet. "The Oven Bird" deserves an important place in our discussion, because Frost's other poems, his essay "The Figure a Poem Makes," many other works of literature by modern writers, and even the concept of modernism itself seem contained and articulated in the poem's last two lines: "The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing." The bird and the poet ask questions that express the central modernist theme: How do we confront a world in which reality is subject to agreement or lacks referentiality altogether? How do we express the experience of fragmentation in personal and political life? How do we live with the increasing awareness of our own mortality-whether we face the prospect of human death (as the speaker does in "Home Burial"), the death or absence of God, or mere disappointment at our own powerlessness?įind images in the poem that serve as Eliot's "objective correlative" for Prufrock's particular emotions and for the state of feeling in the modern world (as Eliot saw it). Like Cather, Frost retains elements of realism, and like her, he portrays moments in which his speaker's changes in perception are central to his poetry. It may be tempting to debate whether My Ántonia or "The Sculptor's Funeral" reflects Cather's "true" feelings on her upbringing in Nebraska (she moved to New York City in 1906 and lived there the rest of her life), but it would ultimately be more productive to discuss how both the novel and the story depict a tension between the city and the country, the East and the West, and how those tensions play out in the lives of specific individuals (such as Henry Merrick and Jim Burden) whose sense of what it is to be an American is complicated by their experiences in geographically and culturally distant sections of the nation.
The romance of the prairies that is on display in My Ántonia is, if not completely absent, significantly muted in "The Sculptor's Funeral," replaced instead with a sense of disdain for the provincial manners of rural life. In other words, see her as a key figure in the creation of a modernist pastoral, a mode that countenanced everything that Pound and Eliot saw and spoke of, but presented those moods and perceptions on the American Great Plains rather than in the context of the city. Or mix of realism and literary naturalism that might include Hamlin Garland, Ole Rolvaag, Sinclair Lewis, and so on, perhaps all the way up to Larry McMurtry.Ī major drawback of above: situating Cather in this way eclipses the possibility that she is a writer who understood the broader literary and cultural contexts of her time, that her work responds-not flamboyantly, perhaps, but deeply-to the high modernism. Continuation of a realist tradition that rolls back through Sarah Orne Jewett and William Dean Howells and forward through one of Cather's popular contemporaries, Laura Ingalls Wilder?
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