Modernism, “The Waste Land,” and “Howl” “Poetry is news which stays news.” –Ezra Pound 1. Modernism Eric Kaufmann on modernism: ‘‘a great secular movement of cultural individualism which swept high art and culture after 1880 and percolated down the social scale to liberalize attitudes in the 1960s”

Contrastive juxtaposition vs. logical linkage “high” formalism and “low” popular content interaction alogical free association Psychological realism: into another’s mind

2. T.S. Eliot and “The Waste Land” Born 1888, in St. Louis, U.S.A.; died, 1965, in London; studied at Harvard and Oxford; won Nobel Prize in 1948

Like cities: fragmented, disorienting, various dictions, noises, and tones Collage, juxtaposition “Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.”

3. Allen Ginsberg and “Howl” “At 14 I was an introvert, an atheist, a communist, and a Jew, and I still wanted to be president of the United States.”

Ginsberg: born, 1926, in New Jersey, U.S.A.; died, 1997, New York City; studied at Columbia University

Became friends with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs in New York

Atomic bomb, communism , Soviet Union worries in the U.S.

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (conformity)

Romanticized lawlessness

New York State Psychiatric Institute: Carl Solomon

October, 1955: reads part of “Howl” in San Francisco Part 1: capitalism represses the visionary impulse “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, ” “the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,” Part 2: Moloch, a modern industrial state’s oppressiveness “Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and creak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!”

Part 3: Carl Solomon, archetype of suffering “I’m with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep”

4 . Similarities after major wars both captured a mood: alienation; rebelling against conformity innovative, liberating techniques long lives outriders: parallel to the mainstream culture

“in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea- journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night”