The Lost Generation: Post WWI Writers Unit 11: Crisis Years

Important Terms Existentialism – a philosophy based on the idea that people give meaning to their lives through choices and actions. Friedrich Nietzsche (“Knee-che”) – came up with “Superman philosophy.” “God is dead.” Surrealism – artistic movement that focuses on the workings of the unconscious mind

The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise 1. F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby, This Side of Paradise

The sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea 2. Ernest Hemingway The sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea

3. Ezra Pound In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Pound: “Three years ago in Paris I got out of a ‘metro’ train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening…I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation…not in speech, but in little splotches of colour…The ‘one-image poem’ is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a 30-line poem, and destroyed it. Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence.”

http://cleanvideosearch.com/media/action/yt/watch?videoId=CqvhMeZ2PlY 4. T. S. Eliot The Wasteland

“A Game Of Chess” “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? I never know what you are thinking. Think.” I think we are in rats’ alley Where the dead men lost their bones. “What is that noise?” The wind under the door. “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?” Nothing again nothing. “Do You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?” I remember Those are pearls that were his eyes. “Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?” But O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— It’s so elegant So intelligent “What shall I do now? What shall I do? I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow? What shall we ever do?” The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

5. Gertrude Stein A Dog. Chicken A little monkey goes like a donkey that means to say that means to say that more sighs last goes. Leave with it. A little monkey goes like a donkey. Chicken Stick stick call then, stick stick sticking, sticking with a chicken. Sticking in a extra succession, sticking in.

Stein-Picasso Portraits One whom some were certainly following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were certainly following was one who was charming. One whom some were following was one who was completely charming. One whom some were following was one who was certainly completely charming. -Picasso (Lines 1-5)

6. H. D. Hilda Dolittle – poet, novelist, memoirist Patient and friend of Sigmund Freud Was an Imagist like Ezra Pound His muse and protégé