There are two concepts that can be confused with each other which are modernity and modernism. The first one is a historical process that starts with the Renaissance but the second is a movement that is a criticism of the first one. Modernism is a re-examination of every aspect of modernity. Modernism creates a dialogue with tradition through recapitulation.
In Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, we read a prose poem titled Loss of a Halo. This poem tells the story of a poet who has a halo on his head and walks towards a brothel and when he drops his halo, he does not even turn his head to look at it. This poem clearly shows how poets lose their angelic qualities in the modern world. This particular change in the role of the artist is handled in the poems of one of the most distinct modernist poets, who is William Butler Yeats. We see modernist elements in most of his poetry.
Yeats believed that human history moved like gyres (cycles). When an era is ruled by Primary (reason, intellect) we see the peak of civilizations, and when it is ruled by Antithetical (imagination, feelings); we see chaos, disruption, and war. He indicated that the peaks of civilizations only happened in five hundred years like; 500BC Athens, 500AD Byzantium, 1500 AD Italian Renaissance, and so on. Thus, in his poem he particularly demonstrates his beliefs; for example, he uses the gyre symbol in his poems to imply that things move in cycles and what happens( good or bad) will happen again.
For instance, in his poem titled Saling to Byzantium, he chooses Byzantium as a holy, place to escape. He demonstrates his longing for the past, the past that has been more peaceful and prosperous. Moreover, we see war motifs in the poem like a young man dies in another man’s arms. ‘’Whatever is begotten’’, the values that have created modernity, ‘’born and dies’’, with the chaos and wars of the modern world. ‘’Caught in that sensual music’’, the music of victory; the urge to win, ‘’all neglect monuments of unageing intellect’’ the collective intellect that gave humanity the ways of life of the modern world. In modern literature authors and poets experiment with the type of writings. For example, the poem is written with the technic called stream of consciousness, because in modernist works, artists claim that human beings cannot think one thing at a time.
In parallel with this view, the narrator thinks about how aging is associated with desolation in the modern world; how his body and his poetry juxtaposed each other being mortal and immortal. The irony is that in Modernism, art provides the immortal state that poets have lost when they dropped their halo with the beginning of the modern world. Although the poem is filled with skepticism towards what is real and immortal, the narrator still believes that art is immortal as the mosaics of Byzantium that survived for hundreds of years.
Moreover, we see another experimentation with verse forms, however, Yeats could not break from the tradition thus includes End Rhyme in his poetry that follows the ABABABCC rhyme scheme.
In The Second Coming, the poem opens with a modernist element which is kinesis. The modern world is always in motion and always changing like gyres. ‘’Things fall apart’’, the cultural ties that hold humanity together, ‘’the center’’, the center of humanity which is the ability to sympathy and excepting ‘the other’ as it is; ‘’cannot hold’’. There are many motifs again implying war and chaos with lines like, ‘’The blood-dimmed tide is loosed’’. We see the modernist elements through Yeats’ juxtaposed ideas like ‘’The best’’ losing their beliefs while ‘’the worst are full of passionate intensity’’.
In general, the poem includes a pessimistic view of contemporary life which is another element of modernism. Yeats uses Biblical allusions, like rough beast ‘’Spiritus Mundi’’, a sphinx-like monster creeping slowly which is a perfect metaphor for the Second World War that most men predicted that will come. The Bible indicates that Doomsday will come when the Anti-Christ is born. The narrator implies his birth in the poem with the last line ‘’Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’’.
Moreover, the title is an allusion to the coming back of Jesus Christ. In spiritual beliefs, the prophet comes only when humanity is in chaos and needs him the most. The poem makes apparent to the reader that this contemporary world will see the end, and ‘’Surely, the Second Coming is at hand’’. The effects of wars can be seen in the efforts of modernist artists for they search for other lives, the ones that will not be affected by the cruelties of this world, and will last forever.
In conclusion, the Modernism in Yeats’ poetry could be seen thanks to his usage of symbols and metaphors with simple language. He hides his beliefs, his imagination that has been fueled by his experience; his knowledge of the tradition and the past for only the ones who could understand, and has an individual talent for deep reading.
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