In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), a poem T.S. Eliot had drafted by the age of 23, he adopted the voice of a weary middle-aged man, or indeed a damned soul from Dante’s Inferno. The balding Prufrock finds in an appointment for tea with some fashionable ladies the occasion for existential suffering.… Continue Reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Tag: Pericles Lewis
T.S. Eliot
Biography by Anthony Domestico and Pericles Lewis For many readers, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) is synonymous with modernism. Everything about his poetry bespeaks high modernism: its use of myth to undergird and order atomized modern experience; its collage-like juxtaposition of different voices, traditions, and discourses; and its focus on form as the carrier of meaning. His… Continue Reading T.S. Eliot
Oread
H. D.’s “Oread” (1914) demonstrates some of the qualities of early modernist free verse: Whirl up, sea— Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines On our rocks, Hurl your green over us, Cover us with your pools of fir. In the poem’s central image, pine trees seem to arise like waves from the sea,… Continue Reading Oread
The Secret Agent
by Pericles Lewis Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) explicitly thematizes the transformation of time that Conrad and other modernist novelists explore by departing from strict chronology, making extensive use of flashbacks and foreshadowing, and demonstrating the disjuncture between private and public time. The novel imagines an anarchist plot to blow up Greenwich Observatory, where… Continue Reading The Secret Agent
Heart of Darkness
by Pericles Lewis Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) is an early and important example of modernist experimentation in English fiction. In the voice of his frame narrator, Conrad provides a crucial image for understanding the symbolism of modern literature when he explains that the stories of Marlow, the narrator of most of the novella,… Continue Reading Heart of Darkness