Planes, (subway) trains, automobiles and World War I—A dramatic shift in sensibilities ocurred as a result of these factors of modern life.
Images courtesy of American Memory
Subject Areas
History and Social Studies
U.S. History - World War I
Literature and Language Arts
American
British
Poetry
Time Required
1-2 class periods
Skills
close reading of a text
critical analysis and interpretation
comparison and contrast
Modernist poetry often is difficult for students to analyze and understand.
A primary reason students feel a bit disoriented when reading a modernist poem
is that the speaker himself is uncertain about his or her own ontological bearings.
Indeed, the speaker of modernist poems characteristically wrestles with the
fundamental question of “self,” often feeling fragmented and alienated
from the world around him. In other words, a coherent speaker with a clear sense
of himself/herself is hard to find in modernist poetry, often leaving students
confused and “lost.”
This lesson prompts students to think about a poem’s speaker within the
larger context of modernist poetry. First, students will review the role of
the speaker in two poems of the Romanticism and Victorian periods before focusing on the differences
in Wallace Stevens’ modernist “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
Guiding Question
What are several key characteristics of literary modernism?
Learning Objectives
Students will understand the literary context of modernism.
Students will be able to identity a poem’s speaker and understand
its importance.
Students will be able to define and understand in context common poetic
devices.
Students will be able to analyze several modernist poems.
Preparing to Teach This Lesson
Review the lesson plan. Locate and bookmark suggested materials and other
useful websites. Download and print out documents you will use and duplicate
copies as necessary for student viewing.
A good warm-up activity for introducing modernist poetry to secondary students
is to revisit poems of the nineteenth century. Modernism as a literary movement—the
“rallying cry” of which was “Make It New!”—tried
to break from the formal traditions and poetic style of Romantic and Victorian
poetry. One clear difference centers on the poem’s speaker. In the following example from Romantic and Victorian poetry, the “I” of the poem typically is clear and well-grounded,
both in terms of the speaker’s identity and sense of himself and in
terms of his/her relationship to the world around him/her. With this difference
in mind, review with your class at large William Wordsworth’s poem “The
Daffodils” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet
from the Portuguese 43: How Do I Love Thee?”, both available via
the EDSITEment reviewed website American Academy
of Poets.
The Daffodils I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Sonnet 43 from the Portuguese, “How Do I Love Thee?” How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
How would you describe each poet’s language and choice of words
(diction)?
What formal poetic devices can you identify? (rhyme scheme, consistent
stanzas, sonnet)
Now turn to “The Daffodils” poem. Ask students to describe the
speaker’s relationship to the poem’s setting.
Is the speaker clear about what he sees and describes?
Can you as a reader describe the landscape of the poem?
What is the poet’s relationship to nature? How does he feel about
the natural world?
Finally, review “Sonnet 43,” and ask students the following
questions:
What does the speaker think about love? Is she hopeful and optimistic,
or negative and pessimistic?
Would you say the speaker believes in the power of love? Why or why
not?
What is the speaker’s relationship to God?
2. Thirteen Ways of Looking: Introducing Modernist Poetry
When reading Wordsworth and Browning, students most likely felt grounded
and assured when asked to study and interpret the poems. They also probably
sensed the hopefulness and optimism of each poem. Ask students to reconsider
Virginia Woolf’s proclamation that, “human nature underwent a
fundamental change ‘on or about December 1910.’ [From the Academy
of American Poets “The
Modernist Revolution: Make It New”]. For this quotation’s
broader context, refer back to Lesson
One: Introduction to Modernist Poetry.
Ask students to think back to the speaker of the Wordsworth and Browning
poems. Ask students to consider these poems within the context of their small
group findings from Lesson One. Guiding questions include the following:
Compare the setting of “Daffodils” to the city scenes,
factory scenes, and especially the WWI-devastated landscape. What symbolic
differences can you identify?
Wordsworth has faith in his ability to recollect the field of daffodils
as a way of filling his heart with pleasure. How might one’s “inward
eye” have changed in the early 1900s? How might Wordsworth’s
“solitude” have changed?
How would these speakers feel if they lived during the early 1900s?
How might the subject matter of their poems change?
Ask students whether these two Romantic poems “sound” modern?
Why or why not? Remind students of the speaker and “setting” they
identified in Wordsworth’s “The Daffodils.” Re-read “The
Daffodils,” and then read aloud the opening stanza of Wallace Stevens’
poem “Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” [This exercise is meant to give
students a basic sketch of literary modernism; they will analyze modernist
poetry in greater depth and detail in Lesson
Three: “Navigating Modernism with J. Alfred Prufrock”.]
Ask students to first read through the poem, and then use the Thirteen
Ways chart (available as
a PDF or Online Interactive)
to brainstorm the similarities and differences between the Romantic poems
and the Steven’s poem.
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Ask students the following questions:
Does this poem seem to be a poem about nature?
Does a speaker identify himself at the beginning?
Compare this depiction of nature to Wordsworth description of the daffodils?
What are specific differences? Ask students to consider the movement of
the blackbird versus the movement of the daffodils.
Moving through rest of the poem, ask students to describe the general differences
between this poem and “The Daffodils.” Then point out the following
basic differences by stanza; doing so enables you to begin to chart characteristics
of modernist poetry in general. The stanza numbers below correspond to the
stanza numbers for the poem, which is available in full at the EDSITEment
reviewed Academy
of American Poets:
II: Divided Self; Detached Speaker: The speaker
does not have a unified sense of self, and the distinct “I”
continually disappears throughout the poem, detaching himself to the point
at which the poem’s language, not the speaker, takes center stage.
III:Powerless and Alienated: The blackbird has
no clear power/agency; the wind, by contrast, whirls around the blackbird,
creating a sense of futility to the blackbird’s existence. Additionally,
the blackbird is but a “small part” of the silent motions/gestures
of the landscape.
IV: Riddles: Here, the reader is called upon
to decipher meaning from this “riddle” or language puzzle. Meaning
is not handed to the reader easily and clearly; instead, he or she must
play language games as well.
V: Playing with Language: The speaker describes
the beauty of language and demonstrates his own playing with language in the
last two lines.
VI: Desolate World: Even nature (icicles) is “barbaric.” Ambiguity: There is ambiguity in “the mood,” which is
both ”traced in the shadow” (hence, unclear) and explicitly “indecipherable.”
VII: Allusive: Reference to information outside
the poem: “men of Haddam,” a town in Connecticut.
VIII: Analytical: Again, riddle-like language.
IX: Fragmentation: From here on out, the poem becomes
a series of seemingly disconnected vignettes. It is up to the reader to piece
together meaning from these disconnected clips.
X: Description is Secondary: Description takes
a back seat to play with allusive language.
XI: Convoluted: Here, the references to blackbirds
are becoming convoluted, demonstrating the speaker’s preference for
internal musings rather than clear descriptions.
XIII: Meaning through Montage: The poem ends with
continued play with language, and the poems comes full circle to the blackbird
in the snowy mountains. This ending positions the speaker as one who has only
imagined the poem internally via language, as opposed to one who has ventured
concretely in nature. The reader is left with more questions than answers
and is called upon, like the speaker, to attempt to create meaning from the
poem’s fragments. The question is, “Can language convey meaning
after all?”
Assessment
Assessment options include the following exercises:
Ask students to write a typed, two-page analysis of the difference between
the speaker of either the Wordsworth or Browning poem and the Stevens poem.
Read the popular Robert Frost poem “Stopping
by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, from Favorite
Poem Project (a link on the EDSITEment-reviewed Academy
of American Poets). Imagine Wordsworth and Stevens walking through these
same snowy woods together. Considering their poetic voices and adopting each
persona, write a two-page dialogue between the two on the topic “What
is Nature?” You can refer to images in Frost’s poem.
Extending the Lesson
Review and analyze Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote
of a Jar.” Points of consideration: comparison of jar to “bird
or bush,” natural landscape vs. symbol of the jar, speaker, and tone.
Review and analyze William Carlos Williams’ “To
Elsie.” Points of consideration: tone, structure (pace, sentence
length, stanza length, line breaks), symbols/images, and speaker.
Review and analyze Jean Toomer’s “Reapers.”
Points of consideration: setting, image, and symbolism.
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