From fragment to form: The search for meaning in modernist poetic experimentation

Abstract

This study intends to contrast the differences in the manner in which Eliot intertextualizes, Pound becomes exact and Yeats symbolically reinvents the answers to cultural disintegration. Based on the New Critical principles, the research paper examines how unity is developed by paradox, ambiguity, and structural tension demonstrating the collective effort by all poets to find unity in the wake of the modern turmoil. With close textual analysis founded on the New Criticism, the study compares representative works by Eliot, Pound and Yeats; The waste land, Cantos, and The Tower, respectively. Patterns of fragmentation, mythic structuring, and linguistic experimentation are also traced using aesthetic analysis and thematic comparison and place each poet within larger discourses of modernism. It can be inferred in the analysis that whereas fragmentation takes the form of formal hallmark, it ironically facilitates the process of making new meaning. Eliot is reconstituting unity with allusive complexity, Pound with the assemblage of voices of history, and Yeats with mythological symbolism. Together, their poetic experiments rebuild the aesthetic of modernism, but not out of hopelessness but through re-creation.