Ap English Modernist Poetry

Modernist Poetry

(Comparing and Contrasting Ars Poetica and Poetry) The modernist movement began in the early nineteen hundreds slowly making itself across the US and then eventually worldwide. Rejecting traditional forms and emphasizing bold new forms of expression, This movement revolutionized the arts: music, prose, poetry, paintings, drawings, etc. They all began to be reformed and changed from the traditional art of the past. One of the more traditional of the art forms, poetry was a major rejector of the traditional form by many writers. Poets like Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Archibald Macleish were all ‘modernists’, rejecting the traditional form of poetry, rhyming every other line with proper capitalization and punctuation. The poems by Macleish

Imagery is creating word pictures that appeal to the senses, which is a major comparative of these two poems. Macleish especially uses the simile to create word pictures for the reader, instead of just outright saying what he wants the reader to know. He really involves your use of touch and sight into the whole aura of the poem. Rather than trying to analyze the words, hidden meanings, and what the writer was ‘feeling’ Macleish just uses the work of several similes to create certain images within his poem. “A poem should be wordless, as the flight of birds.” Moore does a similar thing with her piece except hers are more precise and inventive. To compare these works, she does not dabble as much with the similes, but rather with metaphors and personifications still creating imagery. “Hands that can grasp, eyes/ that can dilate, hair that can rise/ if it must,”. These poets use of literary devices expresses the modernist movement taking hold. All of these things come together really reforming the whole tradition idea about how poetry should