What change did modernism bring to literature?
In poetry, Modernism began to reject the use of iambic pentameter and other artificial rhythms. Ezra Pound famously said, “To break the pentameter, that was the first heave.” Contemporary critics argued that eliminating strict form would take the challenge out of writing poetry and thus degrade it as an art form. As a response to this, Modernist poetry is often very “difficult”–it often relies heavily on allusion, metaphor, etc. Other characteristics of Modernist poetry is the rejection of poetic diction, the use of foreign/ancient language, and the tendency to write much longer poems than had previously been seen. In both poetry and prose fiction Modernism attempts to use art to find meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. It is important to remember that in the Modernist era the widespread rejection of religion was a relatively new idea among intellectuals and that the atrocities of modern warfare–as exhibited in World War I–even made the idea of secular humanism seem impossibl
