Preludes, and Modernist techniqes embeded in it

[sosoa]

can any one answer this question, plz:leaving:

what is the modernist techniques embeded in Preludes’,by T.S. Eliot?
and how does it compare with other modernist texts such as The Second Coming by Yeats??.



Preludes

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

[sosoa]

why no one answer me??

[Alexander III]

The technique he is using is "anaphora", it is the use of evocative images which mingle the the new and modern with the old and timless, it is the play of these contrasts which creates the effect of "anaphora upon the reader.

It compares with other modernist texts in that he is following the iambic tradition which was established by the modernists as a reaction to the meterless verse of the victorians. Yeats second coming uses the same iambic meter and so do most english modernist poems.

[cafolini]

I look at modernism as starting in the rennaissance and ending in the first half of the 20th century.
If you were to tell me that Whitman was the last modernist in poetry and perhaps counterpoint it to Ruben Dario in the Spanish arena, I would probably have to agree. But Elliot, for example, had no monopoly at all in modernism and was by far more of a postmodernist poet. His friend Gertrude Stein was by far the most postmodern of that generation wrongly called the lost generation.
Yeats, of course, was another end tail of modernism.

[sosoa]

Many Thanks to all of u

[JBI]

Does anyone read Poe thickly in these verses like I do?

I can't help but read Poe every time I read this poem, it is so Poe-ish that it is almost ridiculous. I think the real modernist concern is the nostalgia brought on by the tone of displeasure. The anxiety feels quite like a Poe narrator's demented mentality.


Anyway, the major concern with time as meaningless pursuit is the major modernist element - read something like Walter Benjamin for your footnotes, or read the book Invisible Communities. It feels like the coffee drinking newspaper reading world of rowdy modernist early 20th century disgust. There is a hidden sense of nostalgia there which doesn't get expressed well until the conclusion in Four Quartets.
It's a shame that modernism is coming back into fashion - I was hoping that poetry would phase itself back into modernism from its post-modern nonsense, but instead we have American verse authors these days all rethinking their T. S. Eliot thickly.

[mortalterror]

Thickly, JBI?

[JBI]

Thickly, JBI?

In the sense of being block-headed. Eliot is a good poet and all, but as a ground to return to, he is far too hypocritical and depressing. I would have preferred the movement (in both prose and verse mind you) to have rebounded to something less conservative in the old world British sense, and more powerfully American and interesting like the Romantic Robert Frost or the more explosive forces found in the new international scope of American peripheries - the United States is very much the scholarly country of the world, in terms of the force of translation and scholarship it produces - huge population, huge output. But that the rebound is to this monotonous *****ing at modern life is just annoying - the lost Pastoral and the yearning for it are interesting, the post-modern *****ing about the meaninglessness of everything was cute at the beginning, but the rebound is just not creative. Neo-modernism is the post-post-modern, and I would call that thick.