The Modernist Period: Imagism, Lost Generation, and Harlem Renaissance
What this domain tests
1910–1945: modernism in verse and prose, the Lost Generation, the Harlem Renaissance, the Southern Renaissance, and Depression-era writing. Expect questions on technique - fragmentation, allusion, stream of consciousness - and on the manifestos and little magazines that promoted them.
Core rules and concepts
- Imagism: Pound's three principles - direct treatment of the thing, no word that does not contribute, and rhythm in the musical phrase rather than the metronome.
- Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) and The Waste Land (1922) rely on allusion and abrupt juxtaposition; "Hamlet and His Problems" names the objective correlative.
- Frost: North of Boston (1914) keeps meter and rhyme while using conversational New England speech - "Mending Wall," "Birches," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."
- Contemporaries: Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar," Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow," H.D., cummings, Moore, Hart Crane.
- Fiction: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), narrated by Nick Carraway; Hemingway's iceberg theory and The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929); Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930).
- Harlem Renaissance: Hughes's The Weary Blues (1926), McKay's "If We Must Die," Toomer's Cane (1923), Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
- Drama and the Depression: O'Neill, Wilder's Our Town (1938), Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Wright's Native Son (1940).
Worked example
Consider Pound's "In a Station of the Metro": "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough." Step 1: count the images - there are exactly two. Step 2: note the missing connective; no "like" or "as" signals the comparison. Step 3: note the effect; the reader supplies the resemblance, so the emotion is carried by the picture rather than stated. Step 4: conclude that the poem is imagist doctrine performed; compression and juxtaposition replace statement and meter.
Traps that cost marks
- Calling Frost a free-verse modernist; he was a formalist skeptical of the experimental mode.
- Reading "The Road Not Taken" as straightforward advice about nonconformity; it is ironic about retrospective narration.
- Mixing up the four sections of The Sound and the Fury, which move from Benjy's 1928 present to Quentin's 1910 day and Jason's 1928 day before a 1928 Easter Sunday.
- Treating the Harlem Renaissance as a single style rather than a range from McKay's sonnets to Toomer's experimental prose.
- Attributing The Waste Land to Pound; he edited it heavily but Eliot wrote it.