Modernism/Poetry

• Forces
• Science (Darwin, Einstein, etc) & technology
• Psychology (freud)
• History (Marxism 
• Urbanization
• Lit movements of realism and naturalism
• New aesthetics redefining the understanding & representation of physical world
• A sense of the shrinking significance of the individual which imparts a sense of powerlessness & diminishing sense of the value of individual life
• Heisenberg & Dohr - Quantum mechanics, exploration of our unstable world ( can't measure both position & velocity of atom simultaneously) which (in combination with Darwin, Einstein, & Freud) called reality itself in question
• What is true & real?
• This affected the arts very much
• Shift from Victorian, Omniscient narrator (3rd person) to a subjective, individual narrator who doesn't have a full grasp on the world, as historically the narrator in literature had.
• Left with imperfect, human perspective, which is very much reflected in the modernistic Arts
• Modern British Literature
• "Beyond the Pale" breaking down literary conventions
• T.S. Eliot - "making all things new" not making things new
• Probing nervous quality in exploring ultimate questions - Is there a God? Is it possible to connect with others
• Form reflects content
• In Media Res
• Imagism: more in fewer words
• Readers get inside characters brain
• alienation - we can never really get to know someone else
• Technology
• Urban/city - being surrounded by people but not connecting
• Fragmentation
• Making it difficult - opposite Victorian pedagogy
• Multidimensional - different POV's
• Turned inward - self-reverential & cannibalistic (beginnings of meta narrative
• Individual psyche/stream of conscience
• Lack of definitive endings
• Return of the repressed - woman, working class, religious, ethics, and sexual perspectives