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Description:
Modernism was meant to solve the world's problems, but some authors—Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound, for example—had a few crises of their own.
Transcript
- 00:04
Crisis, a la Shmoop. The twentieth century didn't start out so
- 00:08
great. Russia wentÉ redÉ and bid a fond farewell to the tsar and his family.
- 00:17
After the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire got shot, Europe lost its collective mind
- 00:24
and millions of people ended up dead.
- 00:27
Twenty-five percent of the global population caught a really nasty case of the flu.
Full Transcript
- 00:30
Heck, the Titanic was slayed by an iceberg. With so many crazy things happening, people
- 00:37
felt like they were living amidst an ongoing crisis. Writers of the age responded to this
- 00:42
in differentÉ sometimes opposingÉ ways.
- 00:45
The American poet Ezra Pound, for example, didn't like the language in which poetry was
- 00:50
written at the time. Way too many adjectives.
- 00:56
He decided to start the Imagism movement, the goal of which was to create an extremely
- 01:01
specific...
- 01:03
...yep, you guessed it...
- 01:04
...image in the reader's mind. Pound sought clarity in poetry. He wanted
- 01:09
to strip away past conventions, romanticism and rhetoric, and abstraction.
- 01:13
Pound also may have come up with Imagism as a marketing gimmick to help his friend Hilda
- 01:18
Doolittle...
- 01:18
...no relation to Eliza or Doctor...
- 01:24
...get her work published in Europe. It must have worked, because here we are one hundred
- 01:29
years later, still talking about how very important Imagism was to twentieth century
- 01:34
poetry. Pound may have wanted poetry to be hard and
- 01:37
polished, but the author Virginia Woolf believed the writing of the time should be more diffusedÉ
- 01:46
sort of like a spider web of different human perspectives.
- 01:51
For Woolf, one of the worst symptoms of the crisis of Modernism was the loneliness of
- 01:56
modern life.
- 01:57
And we figure she knew all about loneliness, given that she killed herself in 1941 by going
- 02:03
for a very permanent swim in the local river. Of course, loneliness and that sense of crisis
- 02:11
that helped define Modernist writing weren't the only feelings Woolf thought people needed
- 02:15
to overcome.
- 02:21
The prudishness associated with the late nineteenth century was still alive and very well in Woolf's
- 02:28
day.
- 02:29
So, not only was the world going to hell in a handbasket, but folks were supposed to be
- 02:34
very proper and moral...
- 02:35
...and never, ever, ever, ever talk about sex.
- 02:43
With that combo in play, no wonder Woolf thought that her writing should help readers feel
- 02:46
more connected to one another; that her purpose should be to reach out and touch someone...
- 02:53
...through literature, Virginia. Through literature. Pound and Woolf were two very different writers,
- 03:01
with two very different viewpoints of the Modernist movement.
- 03:04
Some prefer Pound's method of annihilating innocent adjectives...
- 03:08
...others dig Woolf's more lyrical prose.
- 03:10
Too bad Woolf went for a swim without end and Pound decided to add Italian fascism to
- 03:15
his repertoire of crazy.
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