1st blog

Key elements to modernism are experimentation, anti-realism, individualism and a emphasis on the cerebral rather than the emotive aspects of poetry.  In about 1910, inventions such as the automobile and the airplane revolutionized the way in which the world communicated.  New ideas and artistic thought produced movements such as cubism, constructivism, futurism, acmeism and imagism greatly influenced modernist poetry.  Key players included Yeats, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams.

It is always interesting to observe how the contraints of one time period can, like squeezing a sponge, produce antithesis drops of thought, philosophy and activity.  When these drops accumulate to forma a puddle a synthesis is born.  It is this formula that leads to the great philosophical and artistic movement and revolutions.

My brain enjoys observing these larger phenomena through smaller representations or archetypes.  One of the most prevalent archetypes for this formula is found in the parent child relationship (father to son, in our culture).  The son will either follow the father or completely rebel, to form a synthesis, rarely does the son lie in the middle.