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Submitted by prishka on March 30, 2007
Category: English
Words: 1437 | Pages: 6
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Modernist writers like T.S. Eliot tended to live and write in the capital cities of Great Britain and Europe, using the city as a source of inspiration, a research tool, and a setting for his literature. City living encouraged the formation of literary coteries, which in turn encouraged development of new styles of writing to meet modern needs. Modernism is a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early 20th century (worldbook)and the Modernists refused to accept the nineteenth-century notion that certain subjects were 'unsuitable' for literature.
Their credo, 'make it new', inspired them to search for new subject matter, and new forms of language, which would allow them to express their view of the modern world. For example, T. S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions. Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation. The Modernist view of the city lean towards a pessimistic sense of urban failure, and a feeling of mixed fascination and revulsion is discernible in Eliot's poems.
However, it must be remembered that this interpretation of the city is "written by, and for, a metropolitan intelligentsia," who shared an ambivalence towards city life, and who were using the city in a literary experiment designed to find new forms of expression for the modern age.
For the Modernists, the failure of communication is one element in the fragmentation of communities that the city encourages. Inherent in their notion of the city is a "view of life as irretrievably isolated." This alienation of the conscious individual among the unthinking masses is seen as responsible for the sordid loneliness of city life, as is the breakdown of family relationships, religion and morality. Eliot suggests that humans find it hard to...
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