JOLLY DAYS

Modernism

Randall Jarrell on modernism:

Modernist poetry…appears to be and is generally considered to be a violent break with romanticism; it is actually I believe, an extension of romanticism, an end product in which most of the tendencies of romanticism have been carried to their limits. Romanticism…is necessarily a process of extension…it presupposes a constant experimentalism, the indefinite attainment of “originality,” primarily by the novel extrapolation of previously exploited processes. (Neoclassicism…is a static system.)

Discussions of modernism, of neoclassicism, seem almost quaint in our time of adolescent irony and “anything goes, nothing lasts”. But movements in art are cyclical and what Jarrell notes will swing back our way soon.