Read the article and answer questions: The Modernists were responding to a global period of unprecedented change and upheaval. How is this reflected in their work? Taken together, what do these poems seem to be saying about the contemporary world which produced them?

For some time, American literature has been roughly divided for the purpose of study into two periods, with the Civil War marking the dividing line. As time passes, however, this division becomes increasingly impractical. For this survey of recent American literature, we will instead take as our starting point the Modernist movement of the early twentieth century, roughly 100 years ago. One argument in favor of such a starting point is that this was unquestionably a time when the world was changing. While the Civil War was the culmination of tensions that had been testing the United States since the Revolution, the Modernists were responding to entirely new forces which were fundamentally altering their understanding of not just America, but of existence itself. It is very difficult for us today to fully comprehend the impact of these shifts and events, living as we do in a world of continual technological development and the twenty-four hour news cycle. It may be helpful to think of a hypothetical person born in rural America in 1900. Such a person might easily live the first part of her life in a way little different than the way people had been living for centuries, never traveling faster than a horse could run and structuring life around the rhythms of agriculture. If she had a healthy life span, however, she could, before the end of her life, see men walking on the Moon. Never before in the history of the world had so much changed so quickly, and Modernism can be seen as a literary response to these changes. The defining event of the early twentieth century was the first World War, and many Modernist texts respond directly to this conflict. Only a few years before the war began, many people were predicting that new technologies and rationality would lead to an age of universal peace. Instead, the globe erupted in a war of unprecedented brutality and scope. New weapons—machine guns, tanks, airplanes, chemical agents, and so on—escalated death tolls to incredible levels and put civilians in harms’ way as they had rarely been in previous wars. Trench warfare led to periods of months and even years when soldiers died to gain or lose a few feet of territory, making it increasingly difficult to sustain patriotic support. What made the war all the more difficult to bear was that it was almost impossible to explain why the conflict was happening; even today, historians struggle to explain its underlying causes and rationale. There was very much a feeling, in the wake of the war, that civilization had been shaken to its core, if not shattered altogether. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” one of your readings this week, encapsulates this sense perhaps better than any other work. The war was not, however, the only thing threatening a sense of stability and order in the world. A global flu epidemic in 1919 killed millions—more than the war had—and threatened mankind’s faith in medicine. Charles Darwin challenged humanity’s view of the natural world; Albert Einstein told us that the universe operated by completely different laws that we understood or could easily understand; Sigmund Freud argued that we didn’t even know how our own minds worked. New technologies displaced millions of workers and seemingly threatened to displace mankind itself. Increasingly complex economic and communication networks made the world seem smaller, but also more fragile; economic conditions thousands of miles away suddenly had real impact on life here. In sum, humanity in the Victorian era had faith in a number of forces or ideas which seemed to provide order and security in the world—nationalism, science, religion, progress, rationality itself. All of these were undermined in the Modernist era, and the results can be seen in many of the poems we will be reading this week. Not all of these poems address these ideas directly, but taken as a group they share certain characteristics which mark them as being of this time. It is perhaps reductive to put it this way, but much of the literature of the nineteenth century was about how the individual self discovers its place in a fundamentally ordered and coherent world. In much of the literature of the early twentieth century, by contrast—and particularly in many of the poems you will be reading this week—the individual self struggles to understand that has become fundamentally disordered and incoherent.