1. Modern poetry and free verse Performer - Culture & Literature
Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2013

2. 1. Tradition and experimentation
Modern poetry and free verse
1. Tradition and experimentation
The first decades of the 20th century  a period
of extraordinary originality and vitality in poetry.
A variety of trends and currents expressed the nature
of modern experience:
The Georgian Poets
The War Poets
Imagist Poets
Symbolist Poets
Karl Moll, ‘Twilight’, ca Osterreisches Gallery, Belvedere (Vienna).
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3. Modern poetry and free verse
2. The Georgian Poets
The Georgian poets  influenced by the Victorian Romantic tradition. They were Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), and Edward Thomas (1878–1917). They:
employed the conventions of diction;
felt sympathy for English elements, such as the countryside as an idyllic place;
remained indifferent or hostile to the revolution in sensibility and technique started by the Symbolists.
Rupert Brooke
Walter de la Mare
Edward Thomas
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4. 3. The War Poets The War Poets: experienced the fighting
Modern poetry and free verse
3. The War Poets
The War Poets:
experienced the fighting
in most cases lost their lives in the conflict
Content of their poetry  the horrors of modern warfare represented in an unconventional, anti-rhetorical way
Aim of their poetry  to awaken the conscience of the readers to the horrors of the war
Language employed  violent, everyday
Their poetry  a definite move away from the 19th-century poetic conventions.
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5. Modern poetry and free verse
4. Imagist Poets
Modern poetry officially began with Imagism, a movement which flourished between 1912 and 1917.
The name ‘Imagiste’ invented by the American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972). 
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6. 4. Imagist Poets The main aesthetic principles of Imagist poets were
Modern poetry and free verse
4. Imagist Poets
The main aesthetic principles of Imagist poets were
constant use of hard, clear and precise images
use of a rhythm freed from the artificial demands of metrical regularity
choice of any subject matter
poems, usually short, were the poet’s response to a scene or object, and contained no moral comment;
the aim of poetry: to achieve precision, discipline, dry hardness.
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7. Modern poetry and free verse
5. Symbolist Poets
Symbolism  a movement started in France with Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). It influenced the new poetry.
The style of the Symbolist poets was characterised by:
indirect rather than direct statements
the use of allusive language and of the multiple association of words.
Les Fleurs du Mal, first edition, 1858
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8. Modern poetry and free verse
5. Symbolist Poets
The style of the Symbolist poets was characterised by:
the importance given to the ‘sound’ of words
the use of quotations from other literatures, revealing cosmopolitan interests
the use of free verse
the possibility for the reader to bring meaning to the poem
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9. 6. Symbolist Poets and T. S. Eliot
Modern poetry and free verse
6. Symbolist Poets and T. S. Eliot
It was T.S. Eliot who developed the new poetic theory and practice. In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent (1917), he stated that
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality
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10. was the explorer of experience.
Modern poetry and free verse
6. Symbolist Poets and T. S. Eliot
According to T.S. Eliot the poet
was the explorer of experience.
used language to create rich patterns of meaning that were not easy for the superficial reader.
recorded the collapse of Western civilisation and the culture and spiritual waste of the beginning of the century.
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11. Modern poetry and free verse
At the beginning of the 20th century under the influences of the French Symbolists, such as Stephane Mallarmé (1842–98), and the American poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, many poets:
rejected the 19th-century regular metre.
employed free verse.
Emily Dickinson
Walt Whitman
Stephane Mallarmé
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12. Features of free verse:
Modern poetry and free verse
7. Free verse
Features of free verse:
Absence of the traditional metre
Lack of regular rhyme scheme
Use of alliteration and assonance
Metre and sound determined by a correspondence between feeling, impression and poetic form and not by the conventional rules of poetic diction
The unifying element is the use of the poetic line
Flexibility of verse line length
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