Poemas modernismo 2018, Apuntes de Idioma Inglés

¡Descarga Poemas modernismo 2018 y más Apuntes en PDF de Idioma Inglés solo en Docsity! The Hollow Men – T.S. Eliot - Post-war context - Free verse - Setting: desert - Brokenness is connected with the idea of fragmentation in Modernist poetry. - Kingdom: Heaven - Spiritual and physical paralysis; lack of motion. - The poem is also fragmented in the sense that it is difficult to find a connection between the stanzas. - Repetitions in the poem are important, connected with praying. - Distinction between the “here” where the hollow men are, and the “there” where the kingdom (Heaven) is; the hollow men lived in a limbo. - Objective correlative - Desolation, paralysis - References to spirituality: they seem to follow the otherworldly journey of spiritually dead. - Moral/Physical paralysis - The hollow men fail to transform their motions into actions, conception to creation, desire to fulfilment - The title of the poem has a connection with the romance “The Hollow Land” by William Morris, and with the poem “The Broken Men” by Kipling, and also with Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” - Mistah Kurtz: a character in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." - A penny for the Old Guy: a cry of English children on the streets on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, when they carry straw effigies of Guy Fawkes and beg for money for fireworks to celebrate the day. Fawkes was a traitor who attempted with conspirators to blow up both houses of Parliament in 1605; the "gunpowder plot" failed - In the first section of the poem, a bunch of Hollow Men are leaning together like scarecrows. Everything about them is dry, including their voices and their bodies. Everything they say and do is meaningless. - They exist in a state like Hell; they live in a sort of limbo. - The first four sections of ‘The Hollow Men’ describe the situation of the titular men, dwelling in the ‘dead land’ (recalling the waste land of Eliot’s earlier poem) and desert space, ‘cactus land’ (again, shades of The Waste Land here), in a sort of twilight world between ‘death and dying’. There is a ‘tumid river’ which might be interpreted as an allusion to the River Styx, the river across which the dead were ferried to Hades. - The fifth and final section of ‘The Hollow Men’ is a little different: it begins with a song suggesting a dance around the aforementioned cactus (‘round the prickly pear’) at the ungodly hour of five in the morning. The speaker describes how a "shadow" has paralyzed all of their activities, so they are unable to act, create, respond, or even exist. He tries quoting expressions that begin "Life is very long" and "For Thine is the Kingdom," but these, too, break off into fragments. In the final lines, the "Mulberry Bush" song turns into a song about the end of the world. You might expect the world to end with a huge, bright explosion, but for the Hollow Men, the world ends with a sad and quiet "whimper." - The poem begins with two epigraphs alluding to two examples of "Hollow Men," one from fiction, the other from history. Then we are introduced to the main characters: a group of scarecrows leaning together. These Hollow Men narrate the poem in a chorus. They lament their condition: their bodies paralyzed, their language meaningless. On the other side of a mythical river, dead ancestors see and judge the men. One of the Hollow Men relates his fear of meeting the judging eyes of the dead while he is sleeping. They attempt to pray, but fail. In a desert valley on the bank of an overflowing river under dying stars, the Hollow Men waver between religious faith and despair. They dance around a cactus reciting a perverse version of a child’s nursery rhyme. Then in an antiphonic parody of a Christian worship service, a priest speaks and a congregation answers. The Shadow of death paralyzes all action and the language of the chorus disintegrates as they attempt to recite the Lord’s Prayer. The poem and the world ends an anticlimactic whimper. - Failure is a major theme in "The Hollow Men." Eliot collects examples of failure in the figures of Kurtz and Fawkes, who both failed at living an anarchic life. He also explores it under other subthemes: paralysis, or a failure of will; impotence, or a failure to procreate; malaise, or a failure of imagination; and amorality, or a failure of faith. Failure is also something "The Hollow Men" demonstrates poetically: the syntax breaks up and the voices in the poem, become unable to complete a prayer. The ritual of reciting poetry fails; language itself fragments and fails. The poem ends with the world ending, another failure, and it ends poorly, in the embarrassing sound of a whimper. - Faith is explored in "The Hollow Men" through contrasts. First, there’s the contrast between the Hollow Men themselves, who are paralyzed by amorality, and those who have crossed the river into the afterlife with “direct eyes,” representing faith and moral clarity. Then, there’s a contrast between the arid desert, the “dead land” of faithlessness, and the dream state in sleep, where the narrator has access to a distant, fading world of faith, represented by the figures of the wind singing, the tree swinging, and the fading star. The poem intensifies with expressions of religious desire, and a simultaneous opposing resurgence of despair. Prayers are directed to a broken stone; the vision of the Christian “perpetual star, Multifoliate rose” becomes “The hope only/Of empty men.” The final word, whimper, describes a sound, expressing the paradox of praying for salvation without enough faith to form a word. In a Station of the Metro – Ezra Pound clothing the housewife is wearing, it is presumable that the speaker might be able to see some of the housewife’s naked body. This certainly sexualizes the housewife and could be the reason as to why the speaker is focused on this woman so intently. - The word choice of “negligee” adds to the idea of invisibility because in French, negligée literally means “neglected”. Williams could have chosen to use the word “lingerie” instead, however this additional description of the housewife complements the working theme of the poem. - The next line of this poem changes the setting because instead of picturing this woman maybe through a window or an open door, the speaker explains that she is, “behind / the wooden walls of her husband’s house,” (2-3). The audience now knows that the speaker cannot visibly see the woman, but that he/she is picturing her in their head. This line conveys that the speaker is aware of the housewife’s routine in the morning and could possibly have history with her. Another interesting artistic choice that Williams makes in the line mentioned above is referring to the house as “her husband’s”. There is a tone of possessiveness and almost a paternalistic-like quality that arises from this sentence due to the fact that the housewife’s only descriptor is “young”. - The last line in the first stanza is a sentence all by itself. Williams may have done this to place extra emphasis on this line which reads, “I pass solitary in my car.” This line is where the speaker is interjected into the narrative and is introduced as a character in this poem. - In the second stanza, the attention is turned back to the housewife when, “Then again she comes to the curb / to call the ice-man, fish-man…” (5-6). The audience is able to picture the housewife coming out of her home in her most likely see-through negligee and calling to these random men. Since the speaker never adds what the woman calls out to these men for, he allows them to infer what she wants through the details provided in the poem. - The question at hand, though, is what is she saying? Could she be calling out to them for the specific service they provide, is she merely saying hello, or could she be calling out to them for the attention that she does not receive from her husband? Williams is certainly putting emphasis on the fact that both of these people are men and since this could be a routine that the housewife does often, she must have or is building some sort of relationship with them whether it is friendly or romantic. - It is also interesting that in the next lines she, “…stands / shy, uncorseted, tucking in / stray strands of hair,” (6-8). The speaker seems to be describing the housewife in a very vulnerable state. - Similar to the first stanza, the speaker of the poem inserts himself in the last part of this stanza although he doesn’t separate himself in a completely different sentence. Although the speaker doesn’t explicitly judge the housewife, he/she, “…compare[s] her / to a fallen leaf.” (8-9). Williams could have used this metaphor to convey how the housewife seems to be out of place and rejected. When a leaf falls from a tree, it is no longer together with all of the other leaves, it hits the ground—an unfamiliar substance, and dies because it no longer has the complex system of the tree to give it life. This leaf has gone from being carried above the rest of the world, to having no support and at the lowest point on earth. This could potentially parallel to the lonely situation of the young housewife and the reason why she calls out to these various men. - The last stanza of the poem is vastly different from the previous two because it focuses solely on the speaker of the poem and his actions rather than on the housewife. The speaker explains that, “The noiseless wheels of [his] car / rush with a crackling sound over /dried leaves as [he] bow[s] and pass[es] smiling,” (10-12). The intriguing part of this stanza is that the wheels of the speaker’s car are only “noiseless” until it passes over the leaves in the road. The repetition of leaves in this poem is very important because first the speaker compared the housewife to a leaf and then out of nowhere the audience pictures the speaker running over leaves. Williams could have included this to foreshadow the future of the housewife and explain the true intentions of the speaker in this poem. It is mysterious that after all of the description of the housewife, Williams ends this poem with the speaker smiling as her passes her. - As a result, Williams uses repetition, manipulates diction, and controls the sentence structure to convey what he wants you to focus upon at any given moment. The audience could infer a multitude of different outcomes from this poem and that is what makes Williams such a talented poet. He does not directly reveal the plot behind the story he started to uncover, however he describes many related details that lead the mind on a certain train of thought. The Red Wheelbarrow - William Carlos Williams’s poem titled “The Red Wheelbarrow” paints a picture of a wheelbarrow outside in the rain. It is composed of just sixteen words that are divided equally into four stanzas. - The author uses fundamental words that even a child could understand. Williams, however, managed to produce much complexity regardless of the shortness and simplicity of his work. The conciseness of the poem initially leaves the audience with a great deal of ambiguity as to what the author was trying to express. - The form of the poem is also its meaning. This may seem confusing, but by the end of the poem the image of the wheelbarrow is seen as the actual poem, as in a painting when one sees an image of an apple, the apple represents an actual object in reality, but since it is part of a painting the apple also becomes the actual piece of art. These lines are also important because they introduce the idea that "so much depends upon" the wheelbarrow. - The vivid word "red" lights up the scene. Notice that the monosyllable words in line 3 elongates the line, putting an unusual pause between the word "wheel" and "barrow." This has the effect of breaking the image down to its most basic parts. The reader feels as though he or she were scrutinizing each part of the scene. Using the sentence as a painter uses line and colour, Williams breaks up the words in order to see the object more closely. - Here the word "glazed" evokes another painterly image. Just as the reader is beginning to notice the wheelbarrow through a closer perspective, the rain transforms it as well, giving it a newer, fresher look. This new vision of the image is what Williams is aiming for. - Another colour, "white" is used to contrast the earlier "red," and the unusual view of the ordinary wheelbarrow is complete. Williams, in dissecting the image of the wheelbarrow, has also transformed the common definition of a poem. With careful word choice, attention to language, and unusual stanza breaks Williams has turned an ordinary sentence into poetry. This is just to say - In the first stanza, the narrator-writer of a memorandum asserts that he has eaten plums that were in the icebox. In the second stanza, the narrator addresses “you” and acknowledges that the reader of the note was probably saving the plums for breakfast. In the first line of the third and last stanza, the narrator-writer asks for forgiveness and then expresses his relish of the plums. - It’s a satire poem about a man eating a plum that was someone else's and then apologizing for it. Even though the subject is so simple and the poem is short, this poem still has poetic devices and meaning. A symbol used in this poem are the plums: "I have eaten/the plums/that were in/the icebox" (1-4).Even though the word "plums" is only used once in the poem, every line after refers to them. The plums weren't supposed to be eaten until breakfast: "and which you were probably saving for breakfast" (5-8). So the plums symbolize premature death of an object or person. Within the few lines of this poem, Williams still manages to set the setting through the poem by two words: plums and ice box. - The event in the poem can be compared with Adam and Eve’s case. They ate the apple and realized things like shame, disease, anger, guile, death, and so on. The experience of the evil only confirmed their knowledge of the good (or the right) and the value of the bliss that God had given them. They realized the value of “Eden” only when they had lost it. We realize the value of ignorance, any possession, happiness, and anything that we have only after we lose it. The knowledge of the dark, guilt and shame gives value or meaning to the bright side of life. Opposites define and validate opposites. - So is the jar a symbol? Of the imagination? Of the power of thought? Is the speaker implying that, by placing a jar, or any object, into a landscape, change has to happen? Out of the chaos of Nature comes a semblance of reason and order. - The jar could be a medium through which we as humans try to understand the natural world we're part of. The more we know, the more the innocence of the environment is corrupted. Gone are bird and bush. The altered state (of mind) evolves. - Anecdote of the Jar can be taken literally but is best served figuratively. Others see in it political issues. From a feminist viewpoint, the jar represents the male ego placed firmly in a female environment, Mother Nature, causing mayhem and possible destruction. Some think the jar a symbol of industrial imperialism, taking over the environment and manipulating the wilderness. Hilda Doolittle Oread - The poem starts out with a command made by a mythical-type figure calling for a sea storm. - Like many of H.D.'s poems, the title of Oread is a major puzzle piece (or clue) to understanding the intention, meaning, and context of the poem. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, an oread is any of the nymphs of mountains and hills in Greek mythology. So in her poem, H.D. is invoking nature, mysticism, and mythology. - The entire poem is a command from a magical nymph to the sea, telling the sea to send crashing waves over the land. Similar figures to the oread in this poem might be the sorcerer Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest and the Weird Sisters in Shakespeare's Macbeth. These characters all use magic to command nature to do their bidding. - H.D. is considered one of the founders and top poets in the Imagist movement, a subset of the Modernist movement, and Oread is one of the most famous examples of Imagist poetry. Simply put, Imagism is a type of poetry that uses very simple language to describe images in a clear and sharp manner. - The Imagist poets wanted to create an image or experience so clearly, by selecting precise words, that readers would feel like they were personally experiencing it; the Imagists wanted readers to feel like they were inside the poem and that they could experience the sensations the poets were attempting to create with all of their senses. - "Oread" is a poem all about the boundary between land and sea. Shorelines and coastlines are always changing. They change daily because of tides, and in the long term because of things like erosion. You can never quite tell where one ends and the other begins, and the Oread of the poem advocates for even less of a distinction between the two. - Imagists aimed at a renewal of language through extreme reduction. In this poem, the reduction is brought to such an extreme that two images are superimposed on each other, depriving the reader of the possibility to determine, which the “primary” one is. The two image domains relevant here are the sea and the forest. The Oread, apparently the speaker of the poem, expresses her wish that the sea unite with the land. But while from the first line it seems clear that the sea is addressed, the second line counters this impression with the "pointed pines" of a forest. The anaphoric link between the first two lines and the use of epistrophe in the second and third lines enhance the connection between the two domains and much the same might be said about the expression "pools of fir" in the last line. Helen - ‘Helen’ by H.D. is a three stanza poem that describes the emotions of the Greek people in regards to Helen of Troy. - In legend, it is said that Helen of Sparta, later Helen of Troy, was the most beautiful woman in Greece. Her parentage is fluid. Sometimes she is said to be the daughter of Zeus and Leda, and sometimes Zeus and Nemesis. When it was time for her to get married suitors came from all over Greece. From among all of these men, Helen’s father chose King Menelaus of Sparta, the younger brother of King Agamemnon of Mycenae. When she got the chance Helen fled from Sparta to Troy where she married one of the sons of King Priam, Paris. This betrayal began the Trojan War in which the Greeks unified against the city in an effort to decimate it, and kill or retrieve Helen. The siege on the city lasted for 10 years and is detailed in Homer’s Iliad. - “Helen” by H.D. tells of the complete and total hatred that the Greek people feel for Helen of Troy after she causes the Trojan war. - The poem begins with the speaker stating that hate is the overwhelming feeling that the Greeks feel for this one woman. They are not capable of experiencing any sort of empathy or understanding for her situation and the impossible non-choices that she faced. The Greeks hate everything that she is, from how she looks to how she stands. - Not only do they fell disdain her appearance, they hate the fact that she is, or ever has been happy. They want her to feel nothing at all. In the last stanza the reader finds out the one way that their hate might be relieved. - This woman, who has been passed around her whole life and sold for her beauty, was born of a God, and was adored for it. All that has now passed and due to her own independent choices, the only way she might not be hated quite so completely, is if she was dead. - Stanza One Throughout this piece the speaker will describe the all-encompassing hatred that the Greek people felt for Helen of Troy. To read more about her story, see “The Story of Helen” above. She begins by stating outright that “All Greece hates” Helen. They don’t just hate her for what she did; they hate her whole bodily form. This representation of hate is immensely different from the general feelings that surround the myth of Helen. She was said to be the most beautiful woman alive, and that men fought to the death for the right to wed her. This obsession has changed to a powerful hatred. The speaker goes into specific details about the parts of Helen they hate they most. These parts correspond with what one might previously have seen as being the most beautiful. They hate her “still eyes” that sit in her “white face.” The beautiful olives- like “lustre” of her skin as well as her “white hands,” are all despised. - Stanza Two In the second stanza the hatred that the Greek people feel for Helen is further expanded on and explained. The speaker states that all of “Greece reviles” the sight of Helen’s smiling face, or more simply, they are disgusted by her happiness, and what should be a beautiful sight. Not only do they despise her a person, they wish her unhappiness. - In the second half of the stanza the speaker elaborates, saying that Helen’s present happiness, and the happiness she might get from remembering the past (both good and bad things) makes them unhappy. They do not want her to experience anything in any way. What they do want becomes clear in the last stanza. - Stanza Three - From the perspective of the Greek people, everything that once was beautiful about Helen is now hateful. They are “unmoved” by the sight of her, “God’s daughter.” The speaker uses this phrase to remind the reader how important of a person this woman is, and how far the Greeks had to come to hate her. - She was, before the tragedy that was Troy occurred, “born of love.” Her life started out full and satisfying and just like the public’s opinion about her, that soon changed. - Once more the speaker describes elements of Helen that should incur love and appreciation. These are all aspects of her physical appearance, surface level charms that initially attracted every man in the world to her. She was attractive to them from her “cool feet” to her “slender… knees.” - These people who have turned on Helen would only be able to regain their love for her if she was dead. Only once she was “white ash amid funeral cypresses,” would they “love…the maid.” Mina Loy Parturition