thank you for reading.

I , Jaisha Martin have put in a lot of time and effort to create a realistic and enjoyable e-magazine to provide an alternate project for my "American Literature in a nutshell". 


As this project is seen , please take the time out to read and look at this site for your own personal viewing.




please enjoy.
-"the MS team".

poems.

here are a few poems by modernist authors and poets alike :


Jean Toomer , Cane (1923):


Toomer wanted a society that would transcend past race and did not often use the new "black" forms that many authors of that era were using.

Their voices rise...the pine trees are guitars, Strumming, pine-needles fall like sheets of rain... Their voices rise...the chorus of the cane Is caroling a vesper to the stars...(I, 21-24) Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts, Bootleggers in silken shirts, Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs, Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks. (II, 1-4)

Wallace Stevens , Disillusionment of Ten O' Clock (1931):

Stevens often tricks the reader with his works , and often used pop culture as the focus of his subjects.

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.


Ezra Pound In a Station of the Metro (1916):


Pound intrests were universal, the way he often introduced new cultural policies throughout his works.


The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

 enjoy.

-the MS team.

a sit down with Langston Hughes.

Langston Hughes is the considerably the most popular author and poet of the Harlem Renaissance movement, a time period where African Americans were advancing both musically and culturally.
he was a avid force in the movement of the renaissance and is the inspiration behind many authors and cultural movements today.


a bit about Hughes , 

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) One of many talented poets of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s -- in the company of James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and others -- was Langston Hughes. He embraced African- American jazz rhythms and was one of the first black writers to attempt to make a profitable career out of his writing. Hughes incorporated blues, spirituals, colloquial speech, and folkways in his poetry. An influential cultural organizer, Hughes published numerous black anthologies and began black theater groups in Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as New York City. He also wrote effective journalism, creating the character Jesse B. Semple ("simple") to express social commentary.  One of his most beloved poems, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921, 1925), embraces his African -- and universal -- heritage in a grand epic catalogue. The poem suggests that, like the great rivers of the world, African culture will endure and deepen: I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than theflow of human blood in human veins.My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunsetI've known rivers Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
-the MS team.

american drama.

Modernism has allowed different forms of expression to travel through "freely" and be able to tackle topics and situations normally that would have been discussed in private , now put on a public forum.




Drama and Theatre are one of those outlets, theatre in general are both a direct form of Modernism and the after affects , here is a brief overview.

American drama imitated English and European theater until well into the 20th century. Often, plays from England or translated from European languages dominated theater seasons. An inadequate copyright law that failed to protect and promote American dramatists worked against genuinely original drama. So did the "star system," in which actors and actresses, rather than the actual plays, were given most acclaim. Americans flocked to see European actors who toured theaters in the United States. In addition, imported drama, like imported wine, enjoyed higher status than indigenous productions. During the 19th century, melodramas with exemplary democratic figures and clear contrasts between good and evil had been popular. Plays about social problems such as slavery also drew large audiences; sometimes these plays were adaptations of novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin . Not until the 20th century would serious plays attempt aesthetic innovation. Popular culture showed vital developments, however, especially in vaudeville (popular variety theater involving skits, clowning, music, and the like). Minstrel shows, based on African-American music and folkways -- performed by white characters using "blackface" makeup -- also developed original forms and expressions.

to learn more , research Google and Bing.

-the MS team.

conversations,modernly : part three.

today we sat down with William Faulkner about his background and his works. Although it is a short interview , we hope you enjoy and take a look.






MS:good afternoon , how are you Mr.Faulkner ?


Faulkner: fine , thank you.


MS: very well. how did you start writing , what are your inspirations ?


Faulkner:my inspirations were experiences in the place where I grew up and the things I saw and witnessed in the South.


MS:Is that what inspired your book "Light In August" ? 


Faulkner:Not in its entireity but it did have a strong influence on the subject that I wrote about and how it was taboo and not widely discussed as it should have possibly been.




MS:Did your brief stints in Hollywood affect your writing style ?




Faulkner:Somewhat , but it was a good experience for me and how it helped me evolve as a writer and what it meant to survive in the business and how I conducted myself thats why I often write back at my farm home in Oxford , my hometown. 


MS:I agree. Thank you for sitting down with us today , and allowing us to get a little piece of your life and what inspires you.


Faulkner:Thank you for having me.








-the MS team.

F.Scott & Ernest = Together.

at MS , we want to expose you to all things modern. Some have never heard of the two authors below, But that is okay , thats why we have provided a summary of both. F.Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway are one of the two most known authors in American Literature. Though this is true , some are still not educated. 




hopefully this will spark you to learn more about them.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940),  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald's life resembles a fairy tale. During World War I, Fitzgerald enlisted in the U.S. Army and fell in love with a rich and beautiful girl, Zelda Sayre, who lived near Montgomery, Alabama, where he was stationed. Zelda broke off their engagement because he was relatively poor. After he was discharged at war's end, he went to seek his literary fortune in New York City in order to marry her. His first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), became a best- seller, and at 24 they married. Neither of them was able to withstand the stresses of success and fame, and they squandered their money. They moved to France to economize in 1924 and returned seven years later. Zelda became mentally unstable and had to be institutionalized; Fitzgerald himself became an alcoholic and died young as a movie screenwriter. Fitzgerald's secure place in American literature rests primarily on his novel The Great Gatsby (1925), a brilliantly written, economically structured story about the American dream of the self-made man. The protagonist, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, discovers the devastating cost of success in terms of personal fulfillment and love. Other fine works include Tender Is the Night (1934), about a young psychiatrist whose life is doomed by his marriage to an unstable woman, and some stories in the collections Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), and All the Sad Young Men (1926). More than any other writer, Fitzgerald captured the glittering, desperate life of the 1920s; This Side of Paradise was heralded as the voice of modern American youth. His second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), continued his exploration of the self-destructive extravagance of his times. Fitzgerald's special qualities include a dazzling style perfectly suited to his theme of seductive glamour. A famous section from The Great Gatsby masterfully summarizes a long passage of time: "There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars."

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)  Few writers have lived as colorfully as Ernest Hemingway, whose career could have come out of one his adventurous novels. Like Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and many other fine novelists of the 20th century, Hemingway came from the U.S. Midwest. Born in Illinois, Hemingway spent childhood vacations in Michigan on hunting and fishing trips. He volunteered for an ambulance unit in France during World War I, but was wounded and hospitalized for six months. After the war, as a war correspondent based in Paris, he met expatriate American writers Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. Stein, in particular, influenced his spare style. After his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) brought him fame, he covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the fighting in China in the 1940s. On a safari in Africa, he was badly injured when his small plane crashed; still, he continued to enjoy hunting and sport fishing, activities that inspired some of his best work. The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1953; the next year he received the Nobel Prize. Discouraged by a troubled family background, illness, and the belief that he was losing his gift for writing, Hemingway shot himself to death in 1961. Hemingway is arguably the most popular American novelist of this century. His sympathies are basically apolitical and humanistic, and in this sense he is universal. His simple style makes his novels easy to comprehend, and they are often set in exotic surroundings. A believer in the "cult of experience," Hemingway often involved his characters in dangerous situations in order to reveal their inner natures; in his later works, the danger sometimes becomes an occasion for masculine assertion. Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway became a spokesperson for his generation. But instead of painting its fatal glamour as did Fitzgerald, who never fought in World War I, Hemingway wrote of war, death, and the "lost generation" of cynical survivors. His characters are not dreamers but tough bullfighters, soldiers, and athletes. If intellectual, they are deeply scarred and disillusioned. His hallmark is a clean style devoid of unnecessary words. Often he uses understatement: In A Farewell to Arms (1929) the heroine dies in childbirth saying "I'm not a bit afraid. It's just a dirty trick." He once compared his writing to icebergs: "There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows." Hemingway's fine ear for dialogue and exact description shows in his excellent short stories, such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Critical opinion, in fact, generally holds his short stories equal or superior to his novels. His best novels include The Sun Also Rises, about the demoralized life of expatriates after World War I; A Farewell to Arms, about the tragic love affair of an American soldier and an English nurse during the war; For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), set during the Spanish Civil War; and The Old Man and the Sea.

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&

click here.

-the MS team.

three authors you might never knew you were inspired each other.

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) Ezra Pound was one of the most influential American poets of this century. From 1908 to 1920, he resided in London, where he associated with many writers, including William Butler Yeats, for whom he worked as a secretary, and T.S. Eliot, whose Waste Land he drastically edited and improved. He was a link between the United States and Britain, acting as contributing editor to Harriet Monroe's important Chicago magazine Poetry and spearheading the new school of poetry known as Imagism, which advocated a clear, highly visual presentation. After Imagism, he championed various poetic approaches. He eventually moved to Italy, where he became caught up in Italian Fascism. Pound furthered Imagism in letters, essays, and an anthology. In a letter to Monroe in 1915, he argues for a modern-sounding, visual poetry that avoids "clichés and set phrases." In "A Few Don'ts of an Imagiste" (1913), he defined "image" as something that "presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Pound's 1914 anthology of 10 poets, Des Imagistes, offered examples of Imagist poetry by outstanding poets, including William Carlos Williams, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Amy Lowell. Pound's interests and reading were universal. His adaptations and brilliant, if sometimes flawed, translations introduced new literary possibilities from many cultures to modern writers. His life-work was The Cantos, which he wrote and published until his death. They contain brilliant passages, but their allusions to works of literature and art from many eras and cultures make them difficult. Pound's poetry is best known for its clear, visual images, fresh rhythms, and muscular, intelligent, unusual lines, such as, in Canto LXXXI, "The ant's a centaur in his dragon world," or in poems inspired by Japanese haiku, such as "In a Station of the Metro" (1916): The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a well- to-do family with roots in the northeastern United States. He received the best education of any major American writer of his generation at Harvard College, the Sorbonne, and Merton College of Oxford University. He studied Sanskrit and Oriental philosophy, which influenced his poetry. Like his friend Pound, he went to England early and became a towering figure in the literary world there. One of the most respected poets of his day, his modernist, seemingly illogical or abstract iconoclastic poetry had revolutionary impact. He also wrote influential essays and dramas, and championed the importance of literary and social traditions for the modern poet. As a critic, Eliot is best remembered for his formulation of the "objective correlative," which he described, in The Sacred Wood, as a means of expressing emotion through "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events" that would be the "formula" of that particular emotion. Poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) embody this approach, when the ineffectual, elderly Prufrock thinks to himself that he has "measured out his life in coffee spoons," using coffee spoons to reflect a humdrum existence and a wasted lifetime. The famous beginning of Eliot's "Prufrock" invites the reader into tawdry alleys that, like modern life, offer no answers to the questions of life: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question... Oh, do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and make our visit.

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)  William Carlos Williams was a practicing pediatrician throughout his life; he delivered over 2,000 babies and wrote poems on his prescription pads. Williams was a classmate of poets Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, and his early poetry reveals the influence of Imagism. He later went on to champion the use of colloquial speech; his ear for the natural rhythms of American English helped free American poetry from the iambic meter that had dominated English verse since the Renaissance. His sympathy for ordinary working people, children, and everyday events in modern urban settings make his poetry attractive and accessible. "The Red Wheelbarrow" (1923), like a Dutch still life, finds interest and beauty in everyday objects. Williams cultivated a relaxed, natural poetry. In his hands, the poem was not to become a perfect object of art as in Stevens, or the carefully re-created Wordsworthian incident as in Frost. Instead, the poem was to capture an instant of time like an unposed snapshot -- a concept he derived from photographers and artists he met at galleries like Stieglitz's in New York City. Like photographs, his poems often hint at hidden possibilities or attractions, as in "The Young Housewife" (1917). He termed his work "objectivist" to suggest the importance of concrete, visual objects. His work often captured the spontaneous, emotive pattern of experience, and influenced the "Beat" writing of the early 1950s. Like Eliot and Pound, Williams tried his hand at the epic form, but while their epics employ literary allusions directed to a small number of highly educated readers, Williams instead writes for a more general audience. Though he studied abroad, he elected to live in the United States. His epic, Paterson (five vols., 1946-58), celebrates his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, as seen by an autobiographical "Dr. Paterson." In it, Williams juxtaposed lyric passages, prose, letters, autobiography, newspaper accounts, and historical facts. The layout's ample white space suggests the open road theme of American literature and gives a sense of new vistas even open to the poor people who picnic in the public park on Sundays. Like Whitman's persona in Leaves of Grass, Dr. Paterson moves freely among the working people. -late spring,a Sunday afternoon!- and goes by the footpath to the cliff (counting: the proof) himself among others- treads there the same stones on which their feet slip as they climb, paced by their dogs!laughing, calling to each other - Wait for me!

overview , part 2.

 The large cultural wave of Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the United States in the early years of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art as a sharp break from the past, as well as from Western civilization's classical traditions. Modern life seemed radically different from traditional life -- more scientific, faster, more technological, and more mechanized. Modernism embraced these changes. In literature, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) developed an analogue to modern art. A resident of Paris and an art collector (she and her brother Leo purchased works of the artists Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Pablo Picasso, and many others), Stein once explained that she and Picasso were doing the same thing, he in art and she in writing. Using simple, concrete words as counters, she developed an abstract, experimental prose poetry. The childlike quality of Stein's simple vocabulary recalls the bright, primary colors of modern art, while her repetitions echo the repeated shapes of abstract visual compositions. By dislocating grammar and punctuation, she achieved new "abstract" meanings as in her influential collection Tender Buttons (1914), which views objects from different angles, as in a cubist painting: A Table A Table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness. Is it likely that a change. A table means more than a glass even a looking glass is tall.Meaning, in Stein's work, was often subordinated to technique, just as subject was less important than shape in abstract visual art. Subject and technique became inseparable in both the visual and literary art of the period. The idea of form as the equivalent of content, a cornerstone of post-World War II art and literature, crystallized in this period. Technological innovation in the world of factories and machines inspired new attentiveness to technique in the arts. To take one example: Light, particularly electrical light, fascinated modern artists and writers. Posters and advertisements of the period are full of images of floodlit skyscrapers and light rays shooting out from automobile headlights, moviehouses, and watchtowers to illumine a forbidding outer darkness suggesting ignorance and old-fashioned tradition. Photography began to assume the status of a fine art allied with the latest scientific developments. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz opened a salon in New York City, and by 1908 he was showing the latest European works, including pieces by Picasso and other European friends of Gertrude Stein. Stieglitz's salon influenced numerous writers and artists, including William Carlos Williams, who was one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. Williams cultivated a photographic clarity of image; his aesthetic dictum was "no ideas but in things." Vision and viewpoint became an essential aspect of the modernist novel as well. No longer was it sufficient to write a straightforward third-person narrative or (worse yet) use a pointlessly intrusive narrator. The way the story was told became as important as the story itself. Henry James, William Faulkner, and many other American writers experimented with fictional points of view (some are still doing so). James often restricted the information in the novel to what a single character would have known. Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury (1929) breaks up the narrative into four sections, each giving the viewpoint of a different character (including a mentally retarded boy). To analyze such modernist novels and poetry, a school of "new criticism" arose in the United States, with a new critical vocabulary. New critics hunted the "epiphany" (moment in which a character suddenly sees the transcendent truth of a situation, a term derived from a holy saint's appearance to mortals); they "examined" and "clarified" a work, hoping to "shed light" upon it through their "insights."

an overview , part 1.

Many historians have characterized the period between the two world wars as the United States' traumatic "coming of age," despite the fact that U.S. direct involvement was relatively brief (1917-1918) and its casualties many fewer than those of its European allies and foes. John Dos Passos expressed America's postwar disillusionment in the novel Three Soldiers(1921), when he noted that civilization was a "vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression." Shocked and permanently changed, Americans returned to their homeland but could never regain their innocence. Nor could soldiers from rural America easily return to their roots. After experiencing the world, many now yearned for a modern, urban life. New farm machines such as planters, harvesters, and binders had drastically reduced the demand for farm jobs; yet despite their increased productivity, farmers were poor. Crop prices, like urban workers' wages, depended on unrestrained market forces heavily influenced by business interests: Government subsidies for farmers and effective workers' unions had not yet become established. "The chief business of the American people is business," President Calvin Coolidge proclaimed in 1925, and most agreed. In the postwar "Big Boom," business flourished, and the successful prospered beyond their wildest dreams. For the first time, many Americans enrolled in higher education -- in the 1920s college enrollment doubled. The middle-class prospered; Americans began to enjoy the world s highest national average income in this era, and many people purchased the ultimate status symbol -- an automobile. The typical urban American home glowed with electric lights and boasted a radio that connected the house with the outside world, and perhaps a telephone, a camera, a typewriter, or a sewing machine. Like the businessman protagonist of Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt (1922), the average American approved of these machines because they were modern and because most were American inventions and American-made. Americans of the "Roaring Twenties" fell in love with other modern entertainments. Most people went to the movies once a week. Although Prohibition -- a nationwide ban on the production, transport, and sale of alcohol instituted through the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution -- began in 1919, underground "speakeasies" and nightclubs proliferated, featuring jazz music, cocktails, and daring modes of dress and dance. Dancing, moviegoing, automobile touring, and radio were national crazes. American women, in particular, felt liberated. Many had left farms and villages for homefront duty in American cities during World War I, and had become resolutely modern. They cut their hair short ("bobbed"), wore short "flapper" dresses, and gloried in the right to vote assured by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1920. They boldly spoke their mind and took public roles in society. Western youths were rebelling, angry and disillusioned with the savage war, the older generation they held responsible, and difficult postwar economic conditions that, ironically, allowed Americans with dollars -- like writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound -- to live abroad handsomely on very little money. Intellectual currents, particularly Freudian psychology and to a lesser extent Marxism (like the earlier Darwinian theory of evolution), implied a "godless" world view and contributed to the breakdown of traditional values. Americans abroad absorbed these views and brought them back to the United States where they took root, firing the imagination of young writers and artists. William Faulkner, for example, a 20th-century American novelist, employed Freudian elements in all his works, as did virtually all serious American fiction writers after World War I. Despite outward gaiety, modernity, and unparalleled material prosperity, young Americans of the 1920s were "the lost generation" -- so named by literary portraitist Gertrude Stein. Without a stable, traditional structure of values, the individual lost a sense of identity. The secure, supportive family life; the familiar, settled community; the natural and eternal rhythms of nature that guide the planting and harvesting on a farm; the sustaining sense of patriotism; moral values inculcated by religious beliefs and observations -- all seemed undermined by World War I and its aftermath. Numerous novels, notably Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920), evoke the extravagance and disillusionment of the lost generation. In T.S. Eliot's influential long poem The Waste Land (1922), Western civilization is symbolized by a bleak desert in desperate need of rain (spiritual renewal). The world depression of the 1930s affected most of the population of the United States. Workers lost their jobs, and factories shut down; businesses and banks failed; farmers, unable to harvest, transport, or sell their crops, could not pay their debts and lost their farms. Midwestern droughts turned the "breadbasket" of America into a dust bowl. Many farmers left the Midwest for California in search of jobs, as vividly described in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). At the peak of the Depression, one-third of all Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens, shanty towns, and armies of hobos -- unemployed men illegally riding freight trains -- became part of national life. Many saw the Depression as a punishment for sins of excessive materialism and loose living. The dust storms that blackened the midwestern sky, they believed, constituted an Old Testament judgment: the "whirlwind by day and the darkness at noon." The Depression turned the world upside down. The United States had preached a gospel of business in the 1920s; now, many Americans supported a more active role for government in the New Deal programs of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Federal money created jobs in public works, conservation, and rural electrification. Artists and intellectuals were paid to create murals and state handbooks. These remedies helped, but only the industrial build-up of World War II renewed prosperity. After Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, disused shipyards and factories came to bustling life mass- producing ships, airplanes, jeeps, and supplies. War production and experimentation led to new technologies, including the nuclear bomb. Witnessing the first experimental nuclear blast, Robert Oppenheimer, leader of an international team of nuclear scientists, prophetically quoted a Hindu poem: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."

modern connect.

here are the links provided for you to get more of an understanding about modernism and the inspirations behind it.




american literature :site 1.


american modernity:site 2.


this is a video that tells a little bit about modernism and the orgins of it.


hope you enjoy.




-the MS team.

modernism.

what is modernism ? we've told you many times here,but it is something you can never learn too much about,in order to grasp and understand the literature and concepts you have to analyze and understand the broadness of the writing,art,and poetry. it captivates us and makes us think. So for you to think , here are a few links located in the post above for you to enjoy.We hope you will appericate modernist culture as much as we do.






-the MS team.

modern literature , a background story.

Modernist literature is an opening up of the world in all of its forms - theoretically, philosophically, aesthetically, and politically. Before Modernism, the world was thought of in a Realist's fashion - an image in reading of which projects the world in an objective fashion.

Modernist writing, however, takes the reader into a world of unfamiliarity, a deep introspection, a cognitive thought-provoking experience, skepticism of religion, and openness to culture, technology, and innovation. 

the belief in a cyclical time also brings about free will and a cognitive exploration of the subconscious because the reader can climb inside the mind, away from the body and feel free to explore the inner working of one's mind and one's subconscious.

Modernist literature brought about openness in the ways in which authors wrote novel, poetry, and short story.

Politically, Modernist literature questioned and brought to life the changes within society. Life, in the nineteenth-century, took a shift from the country to the city, from the individuality in production to mass production, and from land to factory.

There was a permanent revolutionary shift in development, creation, and the belief in life. With the views of Carl Marx, a shift from capitalism began to take place. Because of the social and economic shifts which took place during this time - electronics, machinery, mass commodity - capitalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie eradicated feudalism and brought momentous forms of communication, transportation, and production. 

Modernist literature encompasses the thematic fingerprints of a rebellious, questioning, disbelieving, meditative, and confident type of form, which was conceived out of a change in the belief of humanity, the mind, a God, and the self brought on by the shift from capitalism to an ever-increasing society of revolutionary changes. 








-the MS team.

conversations,modernly.

today at MS we sat down with poet William Carlos Williams poet who is a physician as well.
we got to speak with him briefly about his life and his works.


a little overview of Williams , 
williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, a community near the city of Paterson.His father, William George Williams was an immigrant, and his mother, Raquel Monsantos was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. He attended a public school in Rutherford until 1896, then was sent to study at Château de Lancy near Geneva, Switzerland, the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, France, for two years and Horace Mann School in New York City.in 1906  he spent the next four years in internships in New York City and in travel and postgraduate studies abroad  at the University of Leipzig where he studied pediatrics.






MS: hello Dr.Williams , how are you today?


Williams:quite fine,thank you.


MS:what started your passion for poetry being that you are in the medical field?


Williams:well i am friends with various artists,authors,and poets through them i learned and understood the true passion of poetry.


MS:interesting.what was your first peice of work and do you remember?


Williams:of course! what writer or anyone in their respectful field of work forget their first time doing something that they learn or studied and loved to do, it was called "Between Walls" I beileve published in 1916.the poem was connected to my work in the hospital and described it in a somewhat vague way. i tried to be as simple but thought provoking as possible since it was my first peice of work.


MS:that is great,the poem here is a team favorite.Do you consider yourself a modernist poet or somewhat of a realist ?


Williams:I beileve you can say that, I try to connect my life experiences to my poems to make them as real for when you read them you can also imagine and realize. I want my readers to know that I do not write simply because I can but , because I love to do it.


MS:We also understand that you wrote a host of short stories , plays and autobiographies etcetera.How did you find time to juggle two extremely demanding careers?


Williams:yes,that is correct. I don't always consider my careers as jobs, its what i do on my spare time,both the medical and writing side. I do not think that I would eventually choose one over the other because they both satisify me.


MS:Are you a big fan of the literature used in other modernist works?




Williams: I wouldn't exactly call myself a big fan,but i do not use it in my work, as far as the classical examples and usage of foreign languages.I use what I call "The Local" meaning that I use and cite examples from the things happening and evolving around me. I dont want to define myself as a classical writer,I feel that i am a more timeless write , not to boast or brag , but i do want my work to be remembered for years to come.




MS:very well, did you beileve that you would garner the success that you did for the "The Red Wheelbarrow"?


Williams:Well, i did have a bit of faith , but you can never be too sure about how someone else views your work from their point of view. I wanted to write about the current times and connect my writings as a purely American experience. I do not like to write about the same thing , time and time again. its okay to change up sometimes.




MS:How do you use your experiences to help connect to the young writers you mentored and possibly others you may have influence that you haven't tutored ?


Williams:I Encouraged them to be as real as possible and write what they felt and connect to soicety and life and what they do. I don't always approve of the forms that some might write in, but I do beileve that every has a voice and want to persue a career in writing. its a truly beautiful thing.




MS:that it is , thank you Mr.Williams for allowing us a peice of your valued time to sit down and talk with us and it is greatly appericated and we here at MS wish success with the continuation of your careers.




Williams:Thank you for asking me too,and same to you as well. keep on writing !






there you have it modernists,one of the greats.
we hoped you have enjoyed reading the interview and if you want to know more about William Carlos Williams click on the link below.


click here.


enjoy.


-the MS team.

black was modern too.

the black arts movement was a cutural moment that was a synonym to modernism. both inherently and overtly political in content, the Black Arts movement was the only American literary movement to advance "social engagement" as a sine qua non of its aesthetic. The movement broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (civil rights) literature and dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black Power.

Although the movement was a cry for blacks to move ahead in American society , it also allowed a gateway for writers of color to become nationally recongized for their works and as well gave them a forum to the world to understand the struggles of the 1960s from before. 

The movement spawned writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, LeRoi Jones,Nikki Giovanni,etc. the culture itself was a birthchild of the modernist genre and how vivid,boldly,and captivating the authors and poets wrote and how they felt.

Modernism was exactly that, it is a movement of free-thinking,new ideas,and freshly written theories.

The Black Arts movement was exactly that ,

here are a few excerpts to understand only a glimpse of what it was all about.

We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

"We real cool. We

Left School. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon."

Knoxville Tennessee by Nikki Giovanni

"I always like summer
Best
you can eat fresh corn
From daddy's garden
And okra
And greens
And cabbage
And lots of
Barbeque
And buttermilk
And homemade ice-cream
At the church picnic
And listen to
Gospel music
Outside
At the church
Homecoming
And go to the mountains with
Your grandmother
And go barefooted
And be warm
All the time
Not only when you go to bed
And sleep"

and if you want to look at more about black arts heres a link for you to enjoy.

click here.

-the MS team.