Characteristics of High Modernist Verse

Randall Jerry, A Note on Poetry (1946), Includes the Following Elements:

• "[v]ery interesting language, a great emphasis on connotation;
• "texture"; extreme intensity;
• forced emotion--violence;
• a good deal of obscurity on sensation, perceptual nuances;
• emphasis on details, on the part rather than on the whole;
• experimental or novel qualities of some sort;
• a tendency toward external formlessness…;
• an extremely personal style--refine your singularities;
• lack of restraint--all tendencies are forced to their limits;
• there is a good deal of emphasis on the unconscious, dream structure, the thoroughly subjective;
• the poet's attitudes are usually anti-scientific, anti-common-sense, anti-public--he is, essentially, removed;
• poetry is primarily lyric, intensive--the few long poems are aggregations of lyric details;
• poems usually have, not a logical, but the more or less associational structure of dramatic monologue."

The Imagists Defined Their Movement This Way:

• Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective;
• To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;
• As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

While T.S. Eliot in The Sacred Wood understood modern poetry to have a kind of objectivism:

"The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such as when external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the motion is immediately evoked."

Joseph Frank in "Spatial Form in Modern Literature" Stresses the Following Non-Narrative Quality to Modern Poetry:

"If the chief value of an image was its capacity to present an intellectual and emotional complex simultaneously, linking images in a sequence would clearly destroy most of their efficacy. Or was the poem itself one vast image, whose individual components were to be apprehended as a unity? But then it would be necessary to undermine the inherent consecutiveness of language, frustrating the reader's normal expectation of a sequence and forcing him to perceive the elements of the poem as juxtaposed in space rather than unrolling in time."

In Addition, One Can Include Some of the Following:

1. distrust of the Romantic, uncomplicated, unified self;
2. stress on the immediacy of image and symbol; the "surface" of the poem matters most;
3. an attempt to picture a fragmented world with some resolution or explanation via the aesthetic form;
4. stress on the college as a mediating form for the long poem.

[also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_poetry_in_English for a discussion of Modern Poetry in English.]