Citation: LIM LEE CHING (2009-02-02). Modernism and violence in the poetry of W.B.Yeats, Wallace Stevens and W.H. Auden. ScholarBank@NUS Repository.
Abstract: Both Modernism and violence emerge from issues of excess, and these serve as an aesthetic and intellectual context for the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens and W.H. Auden. Violence, as the exercise of excessive force in order to effect change, occupies a significant place in such a consideration. The three poets' lyrical articulation are attempts to respond appropriately to, as well as to understand the quality of, Modernism and the violence to which it is bound. While the three poets are neither agents of excess nor change, they are nonetheless sensitive to their inextricable relationship to the violent context on which their work resides. The three poets, practitioners of literary Modernism, attempt to articulate their testimonial engagement with the ascendant violence by correspondence with the troubling consequences of mass destruction: dislocation, fragmentation, uncertainty; all of these have rendered traditional ordering systems severely problematic.