The Modernist tendency expressed itself as anti-representationalism in painting, free verse in poetry, stream-of-consciousness narrative in the novel, just to make a few examples. Most critics agree that the peak of the Modernist period was the first quarter of the twentieth century, but some place it as early as the 1890s, as did Frank Kermode in a famous study aptly entitled
The Sense of an Ending. One cannot date exactly the beginning of "modern" culture in America, but surely it was decried in quite exalted terms as early as 1871, in Walt Whitman's prophetic Democratic Vistas : "America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, and all-surrounding and kosmical, as she is herself. It must in no respect ignore science and the modern. It must bend its vision toward the future, more than the past." "Science and the modern" were firmly linked in Whitman's forward-looking vision in a union that expressed the post-Civil War optimism of American civilization. Surprisingly, Whitman's quest for an art that would favorably compare with science and the modern had virtually no followers until the first decades of the twentieth century, when a group of artists began to create a visual and literary culture that reflected and responded to the extraordinary transformations of American society under the impact of the machine.
