Questions on Modernist Poetry

Questions on Modernism
Rajiv C Krishnan


These are questions that I have set for the LIT110 Modernist Poetry course over the many years that I have been teaching it. I have also included questions arising from MPhil and PhD courses that I have taught on the same subject: they are usually marked with an asterisk. Most questions have emerged from small research projects undertaken by students as part of their course completion requirements. You can use these questions in several ways. You can use some of them as a key to read difficult poems, authors or issues. You can use them to see the kind of work that gets done on this course, the major engagements, themes and issues that were discussed and pondered upon by my students and me during the course. You can use them also as points of departure for your own work, or as a model for the kind of research problems you might want to set up for yourself to explore and resolve. This compendium of questions functions as a database of the student engagements that have defined and sustained the LIT110 course. In the coming years, your own questions will figure here too! Use it whichever way you like! And of course, you are welcome to ignore it too! There are no risks involved!

If you find it hard understanding what the questions are asking you to think about, don’t panic. Stay tuned, and things will sort themselves out as the course gets under way. They are meant to stimulate thought, not necessarily to proffer or elicit definite, determinate answers. So the best thing to do with a difficult question is to take it to a fellow course mate and talk it over. Senior students who have done the course in the past are usually more than willing to help you: they are an invisible but tangible part of how this course does its work. And there is always the possibility of a tutorial session with Rajiv if you need it.


1 The Modernist text is post-Romantic in its problematization of the figure of the author, in the difficult and enhanced role that it assigns to its reader, and in its self-reflexive relationship to itself. Discuss.

2 In her poem “The Jerboa,” Marianne Moore sharply distinguishes between imperial power, which imprisons, controls and exploits, and artistic desire, for which representation is not yet possession, and having too much is not yet abundance.

3 In effecting the move from the passive and impressionist literalism of Imagism to the active and interventionist expressivity of Vorticism, the influence of the works and ideas of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was paramount for Pound.

4 In Hilda Doolittle’s Sea Garden, the conjunction of her Imagist concreteness of presentation, her Hellenic themes, and the skewed vision of landscapes submerged under the sea create a strangely distant but powerful sense of psychological drama in which the personal and the impersonal speak with the same voice.

5 In Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein’s abstractionist language, while laying emphasis on representation as constituting a distinct order of reality, also enables ordinary objects to appear in dispensations that are inaccessible to naming.

6 The poems that William Carlos Williams wrote around the time of the First World War show a critical assimilation of the principles of Imagism as well as a growing awareness of the ongoing revolution in the visual arts.

7 Marianne Moore’s very Modernist search for a balance between the natural and the willed, the imaginary and the real comes home in her animals, which provide subjects as well as models for her art in the way they nest desire within design and the graceful within the practical.

8 The development of Ezra Pound’s poetics may be described as directed by the quest for a self-certifying representational practice: his discovery of Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese written character was serendipitous; but his acceptance of it as his ars poetica was disastrously uncritical.

9 Pound’s first Canto stages a struggle for attention that is depicted as the domination of the past by a resolute and creative present. Discuss.

10 In their themes as well as in their aesthetic values, the poems of William Carlos Williams derive from his engagement with the artistic avant-garde of New York.

11 In her poem “The Jerboa,” Marianne Moore sharply distinguishes between imperial power, which imprisons, controls and exploits, and artistic desire, for which representation is not yet possession, and having too much is not yet abundance.

12 Ezra Pound’s appeal to origins and beginnings in the first Canto foregrounds his conviction that the Modernist project of cultural rejuvenation cannot be accomplished without taking lessons and advice from the past.

13 Wallace Stevens’ Harmonium poems constantly evoke the possibility of a repetition that does not seek to avoid difference: the task of bearing reference is therefore able to celebrate the freedom of the imagination.

14 “[Marianne] Moore’s world is both its opaque, substantial, unrepeatable self and a natural resource for allegories of poetry. Characteristically, her poems are at the same time descriptions of reality and representations of imaginative activity.” (Bonnie Costello). Discuss.

15 The formal heterogeneity of William Carlos Williams’ 1923 volume Spring and All is an intrinsic part of his attempt to defend and legitimize the role of the imagination in Modernist art and poetry.

16 “The unpractised reader, picking up H.D.’s Sea-Garden and reading it casually, might suppose it was all about flowers and rocks and waves and Greek myths, when it is really about the soul . . . .” (John Gould Fletcher).

17 In “The Jerboa,” Marianne Moore sounds a warning against succumbing to the lure of practices that culminate in man’s subjugation of nature: the functioning of the artistic imagination is not inconsistent with the exercise, experience and bestowal of freedom.

18 The Modernist problematization of representation is haunted by the fear of ekphrasis: in consequence, the Modernist text is self-reflexive, but pines for semiotic transparency, and desires, but falls short of openness.

19 In Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein’s language revisits objects from everyday life, but transforms the occasion into a subtle and radical celebration of the female subject and body.

20 In Tender Buttons (1914), Stein’s objects inhabit a world in which identity is superseded by difference, objects by representations, and attention by distraction. Discuss.

21 The poems of William Carlos Williams explicitly as well as implicitly declare allegiance to a concreteness of experience that is prior to the intervention of thought and interpretation, and thereby reverse and invert the dominant and Platonist epistemology of the West.

22 Williams’s poetry favours objects untouched by ideas and poetic practices that resist tradition: but within these very stances lie implicit but significant moral choices and commitments. Discuss.

23 In Spring and All (1923) Williams turns the topos of spring into an opportunity for launching an aggressive critique of the Modernism represented by Pound and Eliot: to unpack the differences between Williams and Eliot is to recognize two very different strains of Modernism, one more or less democratic and the other more or less aristocratic. Discuss.

24 The formal heterogeneity of William Carlos Williams’ early work Spring and All (1923) signals a disruptiveness that is iconoclastic: but it nevertheless promises and demands new beginnings for the artistic imagination.

25 In the Harmonium poems, Wallace Stevens oscillates between rapt fascination for a world that is accessible through sensation and is hospitable to the imagination, and canny fear of its anarchic and inviolable independence from human needs and purposes.

26 Marianne Moore’s poems find in the natural world a serendipitous combination of rigours and freedoms that determines as well as describes an art that is both an instance and a part of a possible project of emancipation.

27 The Futurist aesthetic demands a radically performative immediacy of presentation that pulls art in the direction of abstraction while making it welcome the products, processes and obsessions of modernity.

28 It is characteristic of Marianne Moore’s poetic practice that in describing the tropical landscape of her seaside town in “The Steeple-Jack,” her nouns and colours take on a tropic dimension that is nevertheless insistently concrete.

29 *Examine the thesis that the Modernist experimentation with form displays a paradoxical tendency to remember wholes while presenting fragments, to interrupt freedom with the nostalgia for method, to find inscribed in representation a history of representation, and to attribute normative historical value to individual enterprise and experience, and that it proceeds from an ekphrastic fear, which is the fear of literalism and the fear of loss, both of memory and of meaning.

30 *Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos represents the culmination of his incarnatory aesthetics. Its unique significance lies in the fact that it dovetails the religious, aesthetic and economic dimensions of his work within a problematic of representation for which the mystery of the Eucharist functions both as a definitive metaphor and as a luminous detail. Discuss.

31 *Modernism, despite its stridently anti-Romantic polemics, continued to be fascinated by the specifically Romantic problematization of representation in its preoccupation with questions of agency and self-reflexivity, and in its valorization of the individual self as the authentic and liberating source of originary experiences. Discuss.

32 *The influence of abstract art on Wallace Stevens’s work was not limited to the influence of specific works, artists or movements on specific poems: it enabled him to reconceptualize the relationship between art and aesthetics, between the artist and the work of art, and between the viewer/reader and the task of interpretation. The result was an art that attempted not to borrow concreteness from extra-linguistic experience, and an aesthetic that privileged a radically performative and self-reflexive mode of presentation. Discuss.

33 Modernism begins a process of aesthetic self-reflection that Postmodernism can only repeat with greater intensity and sincerity; Postmodernism begins an era of self-reflexivity that Modernism can only be seen to avoid or subvert. How do these twentieth century movements anticipate and cancel each other?

34 Modernism depletes the world not of objects but of representations of objects; Postmodernism exhausts the avenues not of representations but of objects of consciousness. Discuss.

35 Objects in the poetry of Rilke are the enviable shadows of experiences that challenge
art into transcendence.

36 Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘thing-poems’ (Ding-Gedichte) inaugurated a very important and paradoxical preoccupation of the Modernists when they found in physical objects models both of what may be possessed and of what transcends the possessor-possessed dialectic. In his poems we watch things become poems and poems become things. Discuss.

37 Ashbery’s poems exploit the pathos of a world that is only ever experienced and accessible to consciousness through words and as words. Discuss.

38 Theodor Adorno’s account, in Aesthetic Theory, of the relationship between art and society seeks to free art from all forms of tutelage without freeing it from social responsibility. Discuss.

39 Modernism begins a process of aesthetic self-reflection that Postmodernism can only repeat with greater intensity and sincerity; Postmodernism begins an era of self-reflexivity that Modernism can only be seen to avoid or subvert. How do these twentieth century movements anticipate and cancel each other?

40 Modernism’s break with the mimetic impulse in Western art is fraught with ideological consequences that reverberate in typical Postmodern stances. Discuss.

41 The characteristic features of Modernism self-consciously reflect the structures and experiences of modernity. But it would be wrong to treat it as a simple reflection of its times and troubles, for it also constitutes a resolute and sometimes combative response to the products and processes of modernity. Discuss.

42 Ezra Pound’s ideogrammic method ascribes to details and particulars a luminosity that stops short of narrative, but nevertheless implies narrative: thus, sensuous affect and elements of form become metonymic indices of order, coherence and meaning. But this methodology is flawed by its inability to account for historical difference, referential opacity and conflicts in interpretation. Discuss.

43 Through their use of Greek and Egyptian myths in describing emotions, and their presentation of known objects and landscapes as transformed underwater growths and seascapes, HD’s poems exhibit an ambivalence towards the real world that seeks altered modes of human agency. Discuss.

44 In demanding from their readers a competence and commitment that had to be proved through encounter with radically terminal forms of reference and representation, Modernist poems in effect created the (reader-) subjects for whom they might then become objects as well as models of attention and agency. Discuss.

45 Modernism presents a wide range of responses to the protocols of attention and interpretation that transform immediate concrete sensation into secondary intellectual abstraction: Pound’s poetics, hinging as it does, on the possibility of a transparent continuity between experience and expression, ‘inverts’ Platonism without exploring the possibility of an alternative epistemology of difference and distraction. Discuss.

46 Modernist avant-garde art was anti-humanist and abstract before the First World War; the experience of the advance guard in the firing line dehumanised and rendered unrecognisable the human body experiencing war; trench warfare, shell shock, and military censorship all too readily fell in with an aesthetic of disruption, fragmentation and incompleteness. Modernism met in the Great War its own double: the figural came back as the literal, and the pastoral as tragedy. Discuss.

47 Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus reserve for art a plenitude of being that becomes an ontological substitute for a spiritual life. As a giving, art gives life back to itself in the uncertainty and the wonder of the gift that it itself is. Discuss.

48 Eliot, despite his stridently anti-Romantic polemics, continued to be fascinated by the specifically Romantic problematization of representation in his preoccupation with questions of agency and self-reflexivity, and in his valorisation of the individual self—albeit embedded in and transforming tradition—as the authentic and liberating source of authentic experience. Discuss.

49 In Eliot’s poetry, form reflects content: his tropes thematize alienation, while his treatment of anomie takes the form of metonymic images and presentations. The result is a poetics of adequacy and a politics of conformity. Discuss.

50 By describing natural processes and objects under the aspect of artifice, Marianne Moore introduces a tension between art and life that creates contexts for discovering the apparently self-certifying foundations of thought and experience. However, this cross between the mechanistic and the imaginative privileges being and identity, and fails adequately to account for process and difference. Discuss.

51 In ‘modernizing’ his verse under the influence of Ezra Pound, Yeats was in effect changing its content and imagery without changing its formal emphases and routines: reactionary Modernism took the cue and often incorporated the revolutionary form of the new art without addressing its substantive concerns, thus reifying change and making it an end in itself. Discuss.

52 Eliot’s theory of artistic objectivity and impersonality transfers agency from the human subject to the aesthetic object, and thereby privileges tradition as the ultimate arbitrator in human life. Time, change and difference are domesticated and rendered subservient to memory, form and identity. Discuss.

53 Gertrude Stein’s writings function within an intransitive mode of discourse that discovers modernity as difference and discontinuity rather than as the persistence of identity and coherence. This is what distinguishes her work so starkly from that of the male Modernists. Discuss.

54 Aesthetic self-reflexivity in Stevens is an outcome of his notion of a fully autonomous and therefore free and freeing art. Discuss.

55 In its valorisation of particulars and concrete images, in its problematization of
metaphor, and in its reversal of Platonism, radical Modernism seems set upon overcoming metaphysics. But more often than not, it ends up arguing a case for a more ‘natural’ (and therefore binding) metaphysics—one rooted in unique but normative particulars and ‘facts.’ Discuss.

56 Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons attempts the difficult (perhaps impossible) task of affirming existence as radically removed from memory and resemblance. The result is a poetics that prefers process to product, becoming to being, means to ends, and openings to closures. Discuss.

57 The Modernist poets hold back from metaphor—taken as implying an explicit metaphysics—only to succumb to a metonymic presentational strategy that activates the desire and the search for implicit metaphysical wholes. Discuss.

58 The characteristic features of avant-garde Modernist poetry and art movements self-consciously reflect the structures and experiences of modernity. But it would be wrong to treat it as a simple reflection of its times and troubles, for it also constitutes a resolute and sometimes combative response to the products and processes of modernity. Discuss.

59 Modernist poetry, by its valorization of difference, raises questions about being and knowing that find clear echoes in the work of Heidegger. Explore the ways in which this connection can be established in the themes and preoccupations that engage the work of Wallace Stevens.

60 Repetition in Stevens’s Harmonium functions both as an instance of difference and autonomy and as a reminder of structure and belonging. Discuss.

61 Stevens’s poems find in music the idea of an imaginatively self-sufficient and truly abstract art because it can dispense with the mimetic imperative completely: music therefore represents the peril that they must avoid in order to keep being poems, as well as the model that they must follow in order to keep being imaginative. Discuss.

62 In his 1923 volume Spring and All, William Carlos Williams takes up the challenge of encountering modernity without rendering the artistic imagination subservient to the past as Eliot and Pound had done. Discuss.

63 In tone as well as in values, Marianne Moore’s poems work out a ‘middle path’ that avoids the extremes of gaudy ornament and bland generalization. Explore the ways in which the figure of the Buddha and Buddhism may have influenced this move.

64 In Sea Garden, Hilda Doolittle’s images and the words used to present those images centre around the theme of violation and breakage: what emerges is an aesthetic of rupture for which the rapturous apprehension of physical sensation is as much to be avoided as the mindless reduction of experience to generalization. Discuss.

65 Stevens’s poems are an elegiac reminder of the essential unknowability of the world to which our senses refer us: the employment of the imagination is therefore duty as well as destiny. The one philosopher who haunts the Harmonium poems and whose words sometimes directly appear in them is Kant. Discuss.

66 Modernist poems raise ontological issues only to reduce them to problems of epistemology and representation. Discuss.

67 Marianne Moore’s poems find in art modes of being and knowing, giving and having, that can be both an instance and a part of a possible project of emancipation. Discuss.

68 Modernist poems negotiate a distance between poet and society that grants the poet an autonomous and therefore critical social value. Discuss.

69 Explicate the Modernist notion of impersonality in art as it evolves from Yeats’s theory of the mask to Eliot’s doctrine of the dialectic of tradition and the individual talent.

70 In what ways does Stein’s artistic practice in Tender Buttons constitute a critique of Western metaphysics?

71 Write a critical evaluation of the influence of the ideas of the New York avant-garde artistic scene upon Williams’s Spring and All.

72 Stevens was too Romantic to be a Modernist and too Modernist to be a Romantic. Explore this thesis through a reading of the Harmonium poems.

73 The Modernist valorisation of concreteness in poetry is a consequence of the desire to achieve radical particularity of reference and presentational immediacy. Discuss.

74 Eliot’s enunciation of his theory of impersonality unfolds through stages that make submission to the authority of orthodoxy and tradition seem desirable, necessary and even inevitable. Discuss.

75 By frustrating the attempts of its reader to derive determinate meanings, Stein’s Tender Buttons forces her to discover and generate complex networks of reference and suggestion within the text that seem to dispense with the need for any permanent or global centre. Discuss.

76 What traces of the influence of William James do you find in the artistic practices that Stein employs in Tender Buttons?

77 The difficulties that Modernist texts offer their readers in effect transform the relationship between the reader, the author and the text in ways that demand active readers but also curtail freedom of interpretation. Discuss.

78 The experience of the First World War had important effects upon the Modernist use and understanding of poetic forms (like the epic, the heroic poem, the lyric and the pastoral), as also upon its thematizations (of love, the seasons, women, and the individual). Discuss.

79 The crisis of representation in Modernism is the artistic counterpart of a crisis of subjectivity. Discuss.

80 What points of similarity do you find between Heidegger’s philosophical project and the concerns and artistic practices of the Modernist poets that you have studied?

81 What parallels do you find between the techniques of psychoanalysis developed by Freud and the new kinds of texts and reading strategies generated by the Modernists?

82 Write a critical account of the ways in which scientific developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transform the world that the Modernists write about or represent.

83 What connections do you find between the ideas explored by Heidegger in Being and Time and the themes and concerns addressed in the poems you have studied?

84 In what ways is it possible to characterize Modernism as a response to the global phenomenon of modernity?

85 Modernist avant-garde art was anti-humanist and abstract before the First World War; the experience of the advance guard in the firing line dehumanised and rendered unrecognisable the human body experiencing war; trench warfare, shell shock, and military censorship all too readily fell in with an aesthetic of disruption, fragmentation and incompleteness. Modernism met in the Great War its own double: the figural came back as the literal, and the pastoral as tragedy. Discuss.

86 In what ways do Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism differ in their conceptions of their readers and viewers?

87 How did the development of abstract art in the Modernist era affect the writing, presentation and reading of poetry?

88 In attempting to go beyond the given and accept the aleatory and contingent moment of human experience, Dadaism and Surrealism were able to raise fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of art as a social institution. Discuss.

89 The self-referential turn in Modernist art had a profound influence upon the structure and conception of William Carlos Williams's poems. Discuss.

90 Colour functions in Marianne Moore's poems not just as a secondary attribute of objects, but often as the very conduct of being and existential expression. Discuss.

91 Starting with the work of his own father, modern art had a deep and abiding influence upon the poems of WB Yeats. Discuss.

92 The antithesis between tradition and modernity provides much of the power and thematic urgency of Yeats's poems. Discuss.

93 It is when Yeats begins directly to address the politics and conflicts of his times that his poetry gains its resolute modernity. Discuss.

94 Music is the primary and most favoured metaphor for characterisations of the imagination and its productions in Stevens's Harmonium. It is for these poems the model of an abstract art, which is independent of the need to achieve external reference, but is itself the object as well as sign of its own self-reference. Discuss.

95 In Harmonium, Stevens tries out various lyric voices and stances, exploring the possibility of writing within an aesthetic of abstraction. Discuss.

96 In his early poems, Pound explores an aesthetic of transcendence and embodiment that draw eclectically upon several mystical traditions of contemplation. Discuss.

97 Gertrude Stein's use of negatives in Tender Buttons is part of a pervasive critique of patriarchy that is implicit in the work as a whole. Discuss.

98 Stein's experiments in Tender Buttons serve, through disruptions, to foreground the most basic assumptions upon which acts of representation and communication in general are premised. Discuss.

99 In Modernism's emphasis upon the autonomy of art and the autotelic nature of artistic production, we encounter an attempt to counter the commodification of art that regimes of mass production made inevitable in the age of modernity. Discuss.

100 The urban locale supplies both the problems as well as models for the new and experimental forms that inform Modernist works. Discuss.

101 The crisis of authority in Modernism reflects, parallels and responds to the crisis in imperium that is in turn a consequence of the legitimation crises sponsored by modernity. Discuss.

102 Through his study of Eastern thought, Eliot was not only able to work into his poems a critical perspective on the decadence and spiritual bankruptcy of Western civilization, but also to indicate the ways in which regeneration might become possible. Discuss.

103 In an age criss-crossed by doom and despair, Buddhism provided a corrective perspective, generating the possibility of moral values and aesthetic perspectives that survive the onslaughts of nihilism and solipsism. Discuss.

104 Repetition functions as the guarantee as well as the paradoxical defeat of individuality, conferring as well as withdrawing agency: consequently, the Modernist text is forced self-reflexively to remember and represent the history of representation while engaged in ‘making it new.’ Discuss.

105 The despair of Eliot’s The Waste Land is the despair of a tottering patriarchy, face to face with the history of its own violence, and stoutly resisting its self-destruction through reactionary projects of renewal and regeneration. Discuss.

106 The Modernist body, like its textual counterpart, in trying to come to terms with its own materiality, its subservience to metaphysical regimes for its experience of wholeness, and its essential fragmentariness, is forced to generate models of self-sufficiency that militate against traditional, social certifications of being. Discuss.

107 In defending the human subject against its reduction to mere sensory residue of sensory experiences, the Romantics valorised human subjectivity, only to discover in its represented objects nothing much more than reflections of itself. How do the Modernists respond to this dilemma?

108 The Modernist use of the fragment continues and extends Romantic anxieties about the status of human identity, which is experienced as embedded in history: history as a narrative of revolutions and ruptures therefore makes disjunction and fragmentation the fate, not merely of Modernist art and literature, but also of the human subject. Discuss.

109 In science, the Modernists found models of method, economy and focus, and Modernist poetics is consequently never too far from scientific allusion and example. Discuss.

110 In themes as well as technique, Eliot’s work takes the developments in the visual arts, particularly Cubism, to their literary extremes. Discuss.

111 Hilda Doolittle’s Sea Garden is an attempt to reconcile the revelation—made possible by the emerging practices and theoretical insights of psychoanalysis—of the psyche as operating through a sediment of personal as well as public symbols and archetypes, and the Imagist injunction to achieve an unmediated, direct representation of objects. Discuss.

112 Underlying the iconoclastic energies that animate the experimentalism of William Carlos Williams’s 1923 volume Spring and All is a creative engagement with the works and ideas of the Dadaists. Discuss.

113 Dramatized in the difficult relationships that obtain between the fragments that comprise the Modernist work is a panorama of human relationships, viewed under the optic of an inexorable and unrelenting modernity. Discuss.

114 Metaphors of blindness—and sensory deprivation generally—often serve to indicate the breakdown in understanding that may be said to characterize life in the era of instrumental reason. Discuss.

115 The move towards objectivity in Modernism is also a move from the singular, homogeneous and unified interiority of the subject to a multiplicitous, heterogeneous and fragmented external world, and the devices of fragmentation and multiple perspectives can then be understood as comprising the objective moment of Modernism. The experience of the world as discordant and multiple therefore reverberates in the reader’s experience of encountering the polysemous Modernist text.

116 In Sea Garden, Hilda Doolittle’s images and the words used to present those images centre around the theme of violation and breakage: what emerges is an aesthetic of rupture for which the rapturous apprehension of physical sensation is as much to be avoided as the mindless reduction of experience to generalization. Discuss.

117 Though Pound’s poetics often advocate the classical notion of the impersonal author, Pound’s poetry itself resists the subordination of individual human agency and creativity to the demands of the forces of tradition and history. Discuss.

118 The anti-realist modes of representation used by avant-garde artists like Gertrude Stein and Picasso not only aim at a more accurate and objective representation of the world, but also try to produce objects that resist traditional ways of seeing and understanding. Discuss.

119 The Modernist street is a metaphor for the fate of subjectivity in the age of mass production: the privacy of consciousness is forced into a threatening public space through the experience of being analyzed into and reduced to its constituent fragments, and of being evacuated of individuality through the experience of anomie, manic terror and alienation. Discuss.

120 Modernism oscillates between acquiescing to the forces of a combative, Darwinian version of linear progress that rejects the possibility of returns, and proposing a cyclical model of existence that affirms the possibility of new and pristine beginnings. Discuss.

121 Despite their stylistic dissimilarities, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams are all equally concerned with exploring the interface between the scientific-encyclopaedic way of dealing with objects and representation on the one hand, and a subjective, idiosyncratic, and creative approach on the other. Discuss.

122 The Modernist emphasis on sound rather than meaning is an indication of its desire for a self-certifying, autotelic status for art. Discuss

123 Eliot’s adoption of Christian eschatological time in his later works conflicts with his use of Bergson’s concept of real duration. Discuss.

124 William Carlos Williams’s poem on the red wheelbarrow sets out to function from within an aesthetic of particularity and concreteness, but finally points to the inevitability of metaphysical generalizations.

125 Wallace Stevens’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar” is a cautionary parable of what happens to art when it succumbs to the lures of commodification.

126 Gertrude Stein’s poem “A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass” is less about seeing or representing a carafe than about seeing and representation themselves.

127 Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is an expression of and a response to the inauthentic and hollow ways in which human beings relate to each other, to art, and to the world of objects in the modern world.