Critical Analysis of Modernism Poems by Ted Hughes

Modernism Modernism begins with World War I and the Great Depression and is the rejection of tradition. Writers in this time era began to question the authority and tradition that seemed to be the foundation of America. Modernists destroyed the American Dream. The modernist group ask themselves three questions. Who are we?

Modernist literature began between 1915-1935, writers mainly wrote fiction this is because they started to question what the future was going to bring since they were living through both World War. Modernists wrote their stories in first person which made their stories seem like a stream of consciousness, irony and satires. This type of literature was mainly written in English and became well known due to the increase of globalization, which was more about how the people felt about the events going on and how the people were affected in other words it spoke from the inner self of the writer. Many famous writers including Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, and F. Scott Fitzgerald believed that the increase in new technology was leading to the decrease in civilization which was making individuals lonely.

Authors wanted to revolutionize arts and audience worldwide. This was done by the creation of tools that helped excel the “American Dream”. Some of the major authors in this time included T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein (Modernism). There are two different groupings of modernism, which are modernism and post modernism. In the beginning, “early modernists used elements of experimentation, freedom, radicalism, and utopianism” (Modernism). After the war, “post-modernists, however, rebelled against many modernist elements and instead depicted disillusionment and elements of dystopian ideas—dehumanized and fearful lives” (Modernism). Many different historical aspects influenced the upcoming of the modernist movement such as publications of scientific theories, technological inventions that globalized society, Sigmund Freud’s change in the discipline of psychology, new concepts of ethics, morality, and ideals, and artistic movements (Modernism).

Langston Hughes clearly connects with a wide range of audiences through the simplicity that surrounds his poetry. The beauty of this manner in which he wrote his poetry, is that it grasp people by illustrating his narratives of the common lifestyles experienced by the current American generation. His art form expresses certain questionable ideologies of life and exposes to the audience what it takes to fully comprehend what being an American truly means. Each individual poem describes and illustrates the strength and hardships the African American community was experiencing. Through his literature art form of poetry, Hughes was able to convey the common assertions of

A huddle of horns And a tinkle of glass A note Handed down from Marcus to Malcolm To a brother Too bad and too cool to give his name. Sometimes despair Makes the stoops shudder Sometimes there are endless depths of pain Singing a capella on street corners

The validity of an individual’s perspective on the truth regarding situations, events and personalities throughout their lifetime is subjective.

After the affair Plath grew increasingly depressed and eventually committed suicide. He said that “Plaths death was inevitable, she had been on that track most of her life,” but he could not contend with the additional suicide of Wevill in 1969, which he said was “utterly within her power, and it was an outcome of her reaction to Sylvia’s action,” which led to Wevill’s suicide.” These past horrific experiences strongly affected Hughes future relationships and poetry.

Hughes was greatly influenced by the culturally prominent jazz music in Harlem He was drawn to places with live music to brainstorm and write. In his uniquely written poem “The Weary Blues”, Hughes combined black vernacular and blues rhythms, branching out and creating literature that broke the norm.

Modernism is a set of cultural arrays and tendencies of associated cultural movements in a changing society. It is believed to originate from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western civilization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the years following World War1. Modernism involves breaking from the past set of established rules, traditions and conventions in search of new forms of expression and man's functions. New ideas in politics, psychology and philosophical theories are the main factors that led to a search for new modes of expression. Characterized by social change, industrialization, and advance in science and fueled by metropolitans and technological developments.

Modernism was very diverse but had one common purpose: they sought to capture the essence of modern life in both form and content of their work

According to Peter Childs he said, “It is experimental, formally complex, elliptical, contains elements of recreation as well as creation, and tends to associate notions of the artist’s freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre and form, with notions of cultural apocalypse and disaster…” (Childs, 2). This suggests that modernism was a way of revolutionizing the old ways of writing and constructing works. Modernism is the movement leaving tradition behind and forming a new style. Modernism is a term typically associated with the twentieth-century reaction against realism and romanticism. Modernism is believed that the world is created by how we perceive it. We interpret the deeper meaning of the world. Modernism allowed the reader to think outside of the box and stretch boundaries never thought of before. Modernist writing bent the rules and regulations of what was traditional and allowed for ideas to push the seams like never before. There is no such thing as an absolute truth or definition; All things are relative. Hemingway and Eliot used this writing to allow the audience to make their own interpretation of the

Before I explain my take on what "identity" means in Langston Hughes works, I would like explain a little about a man who happened to be one of the most recognizable names in African- American literature, and the struggle he faced – as a writer and mostly as an African American. A brief glimpse into our darkest days and description of his life and about him will help elucidate the background, and his style of writing. Jordan stated African Americans journey and identity in the Americans started on the wrong no “Over a period of more than three centuries, in the slave ships of the Middle Passage and the plantations of the American South, peoples from many nations of what is now called West and Central Africa, brought together under conditions of extreme brutality, reinvented themselves as one people and they renamed themselves ‘African’, ‘Coloured People’ and ‘Negro’. Later, from end of the nineteenth century to the first few decades of the twentieth century, mostly in northern urban centres of the USA, the descendants of the slaves reinvented themselves again, this time as the ‘New Negro’”(848-891).

Throughout the poem, Hughes used different literary devices to tell a story to those who are listening. From the very first line of the poem, the reader is able to gather that

It is no surprise that this poem is written by an African American, specifically Hughes, who was born on February 1, 1902. His father left the family for Mexico when he was young to

What further contributed to the rise of modernism was the First World War, which shell-shocked many. People lost their sense of certainty and it made them change their points of views. It made modernists question civilisation. This is seen in T.S Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland” which questions