Objective Image and Act of Mind in Modern Poetry

Abstract

One major theme in modernism is the desire to wring the neck of rhetoric. The best modern poetry feels compelled both to accept the metonymic mode of discourse and to transcend it to allow for the full play of human consciousness without making consciousness equal interpretation of experience. Both the symbolist mode of Yeats and Eliot and the objectivism of Williams and contemporary poets can be seen as methods for responding to this problem. Symbolism seeks to complement the objective image by reconstituting versions of Idealism’s Absolute Self. The poet achieves a vision of the fullness of human consciousness by meditating on the implications of his own creative act, a process first adumbrated by Flaubert. Williams, on the other hand, particularly in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” brings the full play of consciousness into objective experience by seeking to render the act of mind as a process sharing the palpable physical qualities of things.