Problems with Modernism

Abstract

There is general agreement that Yeats’s work altered considerably in the phase which includes In the Seven Woods and Responsibilities and Other Poems. Some critics have judged that at some time in this phase Yeats became a modernist poet. But what do they mean by ‘modernist’? Matei Calinescu finds the first favourable application of the term to literature in Latin America, by Ruben Dari, in 1888.1 He notes the difficulty of establishing the use of the term in anything like its current sense in connection with literature in English, but suggests a little magazine, The Modernist: A Monthly Magazine of Modern Arts and Letters, published in 1919 (though this magazine turns out to be more political than literary),2 and John Crowe Ransom’s ‘The Future of Poetry’, published in The Fugitive: A Journal of Poetry in February 1924. Ransom claims that it is necessary for poetry to recognize modernism, though ‘it is undefined’. He does describe the manifestos of the Imagists as modernist.3 He also refers to ‘the Moderns’, ‘we moderns’ and ‘modern poets’. The Imagists’ ‘modernist manifestos’ are, for Ransom, partly a declaration of what the modern poet should do. But, as John Harwood points out, Calinescu’s understanding of the term ‘modernism’ seems to be conditioned by its use in literary criticism from the 1960s on. The idea of attempting to trace the history of the usage of the term can be overwhelmed by the attempt to trace the origins of ‘a reified construct’ projected from one’s own time, and that it is a construct gets forgotten. The existence of something called ‘modernism’ (which is also what Calinescu means by it) is inferred from a reference to it by someone who says it is ‘undefined’.