Postmodernism Poetry Essay Research Paper Contemporary British

Postmodernism Poetry Essay, Research Paper

Contemporary British and American Poetry

Postmodernism is hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of areas of study including art, music, film, literature, communications, fashion and technology. Postmodernism followed modernism, which is the movement in visual arts, music, literature, and drama which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made, consumed, and what it should mean. In the period of high modernism, from around 1910 to 1930 the major figures in modernism literature helped radically to redefine what poetry and fiction could be and do; figures like T. S. Eliot, Pound, Kafka, and Stevens are considered the founders of twentieth century modernism.

Postmodernism, like modernism follows most of the same ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing imitation, parody, irony, and playfulness. Postmodernism art and thought favor reflectivity and self consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity, ambiguity, simultaneity, and emphasis on the destructured dehumanized subject.

While postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history an example of this being T. S. Eliot s The Waste Land which presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning, which have been lost in most of modern life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism in contrast doesn t lament the idea of fragmentation or incoherence but rather celebrates that. Three American postmodern poets who demonstrate this celebration of fragmentation and dehuminzation are Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Carolyn Kizer.

Sylvia Plath is a confessional writer that used her feelings to write. Sylvia s writing was greatly affected by her life. At the age of eight her father died due to diabetic complications. She felt deliberately betrayed by her father s death and soon after began writing, using poetry as a fantasy escape and a defense. Another factor affecting Plath and her work was her friendship with Anne Sexton, another confessional poet. Both Plath and Sexton attended Robert Lowell s poetry class. Sylvia committed suicide when she was thirty-one during the same week that her first book of poetry was published. In her poem Stillborn Plath takes a cold scientific view of the loss of a child.

These poems do not live: it s a sad diagnosis.

They grew their toes and fingers well enough,

Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.

If they missed out on walking about like people

It wasn t for any lack of mother love.

Plath makes a connection of having children to writing in these lines; her poems are her children and like any mother she has done all she could for them to help them grow. She connects the power of creation in birth to that of art.

They are not pigs, they are not even fish,

Though they have a piggy and fishy air

It would be better if they were alive, and that s what they were.

But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,

And they stupidly stare, and do not speak of her.

These lines express Plath s ever-present fear of not being recognized for any accomplishment. She would rather her work be judged and fail than not hear any response at all. T.S. Eliot also uses birth and death reference in his works.

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death. There was a Birth, certainly,

We have evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no linger at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

Eliot writes of a birth that is as painful as a death, he states that birth is agony and once the thing is born there is no return to what things once were. This change due to creation is similar to Plath s inability to disconnect for her creations; every new creation for her brings more pain and fear of not being recognized for her work.

Lady Lazarus, another work by Plath has many references to death, and also her suicide attempts. The poem displays a very American situation of a woman discussing very openly her own attempts on her life. She portrays her cycle of suicide describing it as an escape in dealing with life and a way for her to get attention.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I ve a call.

It s easy enough to do in a cell.

It s easy enough to do it and stay put.

It s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

Plath describes dying as an art form or a job. She discusses the matter in an exhibitionist s manner as if the actions were

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