LITERATURE QUESTIONS
MODERN POETRY AND POETICS
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Question
[CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
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Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
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Ezra Pound’s “Cantos”
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T.S. Eliot’s “A Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
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T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”
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Detailed explanation-1: -Eliot (1888-1965) is synonymous with modernism. Everything about his poetry bespeaks high modernism: its use of myth to undergird and order atomized modern experience; its collage-like juxtaposition of different voices, traditions, and discourses; and its focus on form as the carrier of meaning.
Detailed explanation-2: -The Waste Land embodies other common themes of the modern literary tradition, such as the disjoint nature of time, the role of culture versus nationality, and the desire to find universality in a period of political unrest.
Detailed explanation-3: -The Waste Land is also characteristic of modernist poetry in that it contains both lyric and epic elements. Modernism continued the tendency, begun in romanticism, to prize lyric highly, but many modernist poets also sought to write in the traditionally highest form, epic.
Detailed explanation-4: -Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that most of all led him to being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: “Burnt Norton” (1936), “East Coker” (1940), “The Dry Salvages” (1941) and “Little Gidding” (1942).