Poetry Historical Context

This Study Guide consists of approximately 36 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Poetry.

Poetry Historical Context

This Study Guide consists of approximately 36 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Poetry.
This section contains 620 words
(approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Poetry Study Guide

In 1919, when the first version of "Poetry" was published in the journal Others, people were still figuratively—and some literally—shell-shocked from World War I, which ended the preceding year. In literature, poets and novelists experimented with form and subject matter, trying to craft work that embodied the uncertainty, fear, and anxiety that consumed people. T. S. Eliot's poems in his collections Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1920), and The Wasteland (1922) accomplished this through use of fragmentation, allusion, irony, myth, and symbolism. Ezra Pound, an important influence on many modernist poets, exhorted poets to "make it new" and claimed the image as the cornerstone of his poetics. In addition to publishing and translating works such as The Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (1920), and Personae (1926), Pound mentored numerous writers including Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and James Joyce, and supported new...

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This section contains 620 words
(approx. 2 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Poetry Study Guide
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Gale
Poetry from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.