Modernist Poetry Flashcards
Grade 12 · English · Flashcards
12 flashcards on the key poets, movements, and techniques of modernist poetry.
Flashcards
- Modernism (poetry)
- Early 20th-century literary movement rejecting Victorian convention, embracing fragmentation, free verse, and the representation of fractured consciousness.
- Imagism
- Pound's movement: precise concrete images, direct treatment, rejection of ornament and abstraction.
- Free verse
- Poetry without regular meter or rhyme — the dominant form of modernist poetry.
- Objective correlative
- Eliot's principle of using objects and events to evoke emotion without naming it directly.
- Fragmentation
- Deliberate breaking of narrative, syntax, or form to represent a fractured modern consciousness.
- The Waste Land
- T.S. Eliot's 1922 masterpiece — fragmented, multilingual, depicting post-WWI spiritual desolation.
- Dramatic monologue
- A poem narrated by a character (not the poet) who reveals their psychology while addressing a silent listener.
- Allusion
- Reference to another text or myth — modernist poets compress layers of meaning through dense allusive networks.
- Stream of consciousness
- Technique mimicking the continuous, associative flow of thought — used in modernist poetry and prose.
- Wilfred Owen
- WWI poet whose work ('Dulce et Decorum Est,' 'Anthem for Doomed Youth') demolished the myth of glorious death in war.
- Gyres (Yeats)
- Yeats's cyclical historical model — interlocking spirals representing recurring civilizational phases, central to 'The Second Coming.'
- e.e. cummings
- American modernist poet who dismantled typography and punctuation as formal poetic elements, making the poem's visual appearance part of its meaning.
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