Modern Poetry: An Overview

Modern Poetry presents the modern consciousness in modern idiom. It is a break from the Romantic tradition of thought, feeling and utterance prevalent at the turn of the century. This is brought out starkly in T.S. Eliot's essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent' with its declaration that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality but an escape from personality. This Impersonal theory of poetry differentiates between the man who suffers and the mind which creates. Modern Poetry in assessing the changed dynamics of the machine age, rapid industrialization and advance in technological progress, urbanization, the advent of Darwinism, the impact of Marx, Nietzsche, the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung, Einstein's theory of Relativity, brought about a veritable storm of progress of ideas, and multiple perspectives on the world. In response, when poetry rallies to Ezra Pound's call to make it new, Modern Poetry presents new aesthetics with dazzling innovation of subject and stylistics.