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HOLONS AND THE POETRY OF T. S. ELIOT AND E. E. CUMMINGS

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From: AUMLA : Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association
Date: 20060501
Author:Terblanche, Etienne

Modernist Poetry and Wholeness

Modernist poets believed that a dynamic integrity propels experience and being. On the one hand poetry had to register and incorporate the fragmentary nature of modem existence. On the other it had to give rise to a reading experience that makes a whole. Two great exponents of this "holistic" drive of modernist poetry are T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings.

In his 1921 essay, "The Metaphysical Poets," Eliot writes of the intense need that the poet feels to make experience whole.1 In the even more influential 1919 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," he views ...

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