American Modernism Research Paper

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Modern Despair Most of the characteristics of the American Literary Modernism movement explained in the American Modernism video are present in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Alan Ginsberg’s Howl. The three characteristics from that video found in these artists’ works that really represent the movement are the “self-conscious break from traditional styles, to express new sensibilities of their time”, “questioning the rationality of mankind, and the mistrust of institutions of power such as government and religion” and a “sense of disillusion, cynicism”. The first feature illustrated in both poems is the obvious and purposely done rupture from conventional styles. Eliot and Ginsberg show in their poetry that they …show more content…
The disorderly, unruly structure of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Howl compels the reader to truly enter the allegedly disturbed mind of the characters and feel their animosity and hopeless anguish. In T.S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, questions “Do I dare?”, “how should I presume?”, “Shall I part my hair behind?” even simple pragmatic questions such as “Do I dare to eat a peach?” stay equivocal and unanswered. Love feels cheap and ugly in “restless nights in one-night cheap hotels”, food is nauseating in “sawdust restaurants”, the atmosphere is filled with “yellow fog” and “yellow smoke”, perceived as unpleasant animals with “muzzle” and “lick(ing…) tongue”. The future is bleak and violent as “There will be time to murder” followed by “time yet for a hundred indecisions”. The narrator feels trapped as he is imagining there will be a time “When (he is) pinned and wriggling on the wall”. Even at the end of the poem, he has no hope as he believes that “I do not think that (the mermaids) will sing to me” and he will perish like the last words of the poem predict “we drown.” Alan Ginsberg‘s poem is more cynical and not apologetic to it as he describes his friends being “destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked”, ”hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking”, “hallucinating” (…) “among the scholars of war”, “expelled from the academies for crazy”, drinking “ turpentine” “jumping down the stoops off fire escapes” until they are “butchered out of their own bodies”. The first part of Howl is a cry of despair, full of grandiose distress and digression, faced with the incomprehensible world accessible to his generation. The second part of Howl is the reason, the explanation of the author’s cynicism, his sickness has a name: “Moloch”! All of the unhappiness of his generation comes from
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