Cantos and The Waste Land: Aesthetic Form in Modern Poetry
In the Cantos and The Waste Land, it is clear that a radical transformation was taking place in aesthetic structure; but this transformation has been touched on only peripherally by modern critics. R. P. Blackmur comes closest to the central problem while analyzing what he calls Pound's "anecdotal" method. The special form of the Cantos, Blackmur explains, "is that of the anecdote begun in one place, taken up in one or more other places, and finished, if at all, in still another. This deliberate disconnectedness, this art of a thing continually alluding to itself, continually breaking off short, is the method by which the Cantos tie themselves together. So soon as the reader's mind is concerted with the material of the poem, Mr. Pound deliberately disconcerts it, either by introducing fresh and disjunct material or by reverting to old and, apparently, equally disjunct material."
Blackmur's remarks apply equally well to The Waste Land, where syntactical sequence is given up for a structure depending on the perception of relationships between disconnected word-groups. To be properly understood, these word-groups must be juxtaposed with one another and perceived simultaneously. Only when this is done can they be adequately grasped; for, while they follow one another in time, their meaning does not depend on this temporal relationship. The one difficulty of these poems, which no amount of textual exegesis can wholly overcome, is the internal conflict between the time-logic of language and the space-logic implicit in the modern conception of the nature of poetry.
Aesthetic form in modern poetry, then, is based on a space-logic that demands a complete reorientation in the reader's attitude toward language. Since the primary reference of any word-group is to something inside the poem itself, language in modern poetry is really reflexive. The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time. Instead of the instinctive and immediate reference of words and word-groups to the objects or events they symbolize and the construction of meaning from the sequence of these references, modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity.
It would not be difficult to trace this conception of poetic form
Four years after the publication of the first edition of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Wallace Stevens described a modern aesthetic form which necessarily acted against its own status as a (fixed) form1. "What will [temporarily] suffice" in "Modern Poetry" would replace, as the mind's object, what is--or, perhaps more faithfully to the modernist vision, what used to be. The poem of the motion of the mind in time would replace the poem of permanent meaning.
In today’s modern view, poetry has become more than just paragraphs that rhyme at the end of each sentence. If the reader has an open mind and the ability to read in between the lines, they discover more than they have bargained for. Some poems might have stories of suffering or abuse, while others contain happy times and great joy. Regardless of what the poems contains, all poems display an expression. That very moment when the writer begins his mental journey with that pen and paper is where all feelings are let out. As poetry is continues to be written, the reader begins to see patterns within each poem. On the other hand, poems have nothing at all in common with one another. A good example of this is in two poems by a famous writer by the name of Langston Hughes. A well-known writer that still gets credit today for pomes like “ Theme for English B” and “Let American be American Again.”
Haviland, W., Kilmurray, L., Fedorak, S., & Lee, R. (2013). Cultural Anthropology, 4th Canadian edition. Toronto: Nelson Education.
Riczo, Steven. "Guns, America, and the 21st Century." EBSCO.com. USA Today Magazine, n.d. Web. Mar. 2001.
Stanford, Craig B., John S. Allen, and Susan C. Antón. Exploring Biological Anthropology: The Essentials. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2010. 17. Print.
Light is often a symbol of purity, power, and authority. For this reason, many religions and cults throughout history integrated the idea of light as a defining characteristic of their most important gods. Some ancient religions even developed around the worship of the sun itself. Atenism and an early form of Judaism were two light religions that existed at different times in ancient Egypt. These two belief systems shared many characteristics, such as the importance of light and the presence of a central religious leader, but there were also several key differences in the development and worship practices of Atenism and early Judaism.
Poetry’s role is evaluated according to what extent it mirrors, shapes and is reshaped by historical events. In the mid-19th century, some critics viewed poetry as “an expression of the poet’s personality, a manifestation of the poet’s intuition and of the social and historical context which shaped him” ( Preminger, Warnke, Hardison 511). Analysis of the historical, social, political and cultural events at a certain time helps the reader fully grasp a given work. The historical approach is necessary in order for given allusions to be situated in their social, political and cultural background. In order to escape intentional fallacy, a poet should relate his work to universal
As a result, in the criminal justice system, police officer's physical fitness is being called into question. Th...
Sounds as well as thoughts have relation both between each other and towards that which they represent, and a perception of the order of those relations has always been found connected with a perception of the order of the relations of thoughts. Hence the language of poets have ever affected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound, without which it were not poetry, and which is scarcely less indispensable to the communication of its influence, than the words themselves, without reference to that peculiar order. (Shelley 92)
...actors; examinee attractiveness and test performance was rated as more intelligent and having greater ability to succeed in graduate school, when the examinee was attractive.
In the celebrated poem by American author Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar,” we are driven to examine and understand the many symbolic connotations of “the jar” in its particular placement upon a hill; those of which may potentially coincide with the many interpretations of this world. While “the jar” represents many ideas corresponding to our paradigms of how we perceive our world, the most profound idea to me is the notion of emptiness which parallels the reality of emptiness in the prose “Clay” by James Joyce. The jar is an empty object, unable to give, only enabled to be acknowledged its presence. This is similar to the many depths in which the character Maria in “Clay” feels endlessly vacant to the core of her soul. They are comparable to each other in the lonely concept of emptiness.
Ethnography is “to understand how behaviors reflect the culture of a group” (Leedy & Ormrod, 2010, p. 146). The ethnographer study provides for discovering another person's cultural knowledge. Three general categories of ethnographic design questions include descriptive, structural, and contrast. The goal of these questions typically involves the characteristic or interpretation of human behavior, practices, ideas, and values (Shalinsky, 2006).
In society today, the discipline of anthropology has made a tremendous shift from the practices it employed years ago. Anthropologists of today have a very different focus from their predecessors, who would focus on relating problems of distant peoples to the Western world. In more modern times, their goal has become much more local, in focusing on human problems and issues within the societies they live.
On the most superficial level, the verbal fragments in The Waste Land emphasize the fragmented condition of the world the poem describes. Partly because it was written in the aftermath of World War I, at a time when Europeans’ sense of security as well as the land itself was in shambles, the poem conveys a sense of disillusionment, confusion, and even despair. The poem’s disjointed structure expresses these emotions better than the rigidity and clarity of more orthodox writing. This is evinced by the following from the section "The Burial of the Dead":
Seeking to bring new respect, new theories and philosophies to critical literary scholarship, New Criticism presented critics with a vernacular to isolate and discuss a unified structure of aesthetic quality and apply it to individual works of art. New Criticism is a process of interpretation, a method of reading a text, as much as it is a theoretical endeavor, though. New Critics look for patterns of symbols and metaphors that point toward an underlying sense of unity in form, rhythm, or structure; they expect a work of literature to hang together, to express stability, to cohere. "Poetry... depends upon the set of relationships, the structure, which we call the poem" (Penn Warren 990). The most difficult task of the New Critic is discovering and describing the thematic oppositions within a text which it attempts to transcend or resolve. Irony and ambiguity provide most potent forms of this contextual pressure. The most successful literature, therefore, struggles against the resistances of its own materials, its own structure, attempting to win through "to clarity and passion" (Brooks 805).