The modernist movement appears as a reaction against the mayor movement of that

time, the late romanticism. It was an international movement in which figures like
Joyce, Woolf or Kafka should be highlighted. This essay will deal with the modernist
American poetry, focusing in its main characteristics through three of its mayor writers
as T.S Eliot, Erza Pound and William Carlos Williams. In doing so, a distinction
between modernist poetry will be introduced, being one highly allusive and academic
and the other much more informal, but full of images. Thus, it should be differentiated
between these two kinds of modernist poetry, considering one as allusive poetry and the
other one as imagist poetry.
The allusive poetry presents a new concept of poet who, in Eliots words, is considered
as a catalyst. Eliot compares the process of creation of a poem with a process of
chemical reaction in which the catalyst is highly fundamental, thought his presence is
not visible in the final result. Thats should be also the case of the poet, whose presence
shouldnt be visible in the poem. Therefore, the poet makes a continuous self-sacrifice
because he tries to avoid his presence constantly from the poem, making in objective
and impersonal. This detachment of the poet is clearly a reaction against the previous
movement, Romanticism, in which the I of the poet plays a very important role in the
poem, which is considered a spontaneous overflow of emotions recollected in
tranquility (Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads).
On the other hand, tradition plays a fundamental role. The poet has to be aware of what
has been written before of him and therefore, he must have a historical sense as to
discriminate which of the past writers is still important in the present. In doing so,
poetry becomes universal because it is created by a mixture of different cultures.
However, it implies that both the poet and the reader should be cultivate in order to
understand this kind of poetry, which is full of allusions to past events, books, etc
In this way, this poetry becomes an academic kind of poetry in which the poet becomes
a scholar. This is the poetry written by T.S Eliot in works such as The love song of J.
Alfred Prufock or his masterpiece, The Waste Land, poem dedicated to Erza Pound and
to which he even had to provide some notes himself because of the vast number of
allusions that can be found in it, from Dantes Divine Comedy to The Canterbury tales.
Some poems written by Erza Pound can also be considered as allusive, as it is the case
of The Cantos.
However, Erza Pound is much more famous for other poems, such as In a station of the
metro, which is considered one of the best examples of Imagism. The main aim of
Imagism is to obtain clarity of expression through the use of visual images. Therefore, it
has been argued by many scholars that Modernism is nothing more than a development
of Symbolism, in which the image and the symbol play a fundamental role. The idea is
to write a poem in which an image is presented but at the same time this image can be
understood as a symbol, which goes beyond the physical impression that the poem
conveys. However, the presence of this symbol should not difficult the understanding
of the poem to those readers who do not see the symbol as such and who only see the
image. In order to obtain this, Pound defends simplicity in poetry through the use of a

concise, concrete and economic language, but which at the same time should be
suggestive for the reader to go beyond the image and understand the symbol. Eliot was
influenced also by these ideas in his poems and, although The Waste Land has been
considered mainly an allusive poem, it must be said that there are also many images
during the poem, what makes it even more complex.
The ideas of Pound influenced another important modernist poet, William Carlos
Williams. Following Pounds example, he also writes using images but there are some
important differences between William Carlos Williams and Pound and, especially,
Eliot, to whom he criticizes openly for having returned poetry to academics. For
William Carlos Williams, poetry should not be cosmopolitan, universal and
international as Pound and Eliot try to, rather something mucho more local. Therefore,
he highlights the americanness of his poetry by using a language similar to the one
used in daily life, what he calls American speech. This American speech is
achieved through the use of plain language and free verse, totally different to the iambic
pentameters and blank verse employed by Eliot in The Waste Land, in which even the
language is more difficult than the one used by William Carlos Williams.
However, one of the main characteristics to stress on William Carlos Williams is that
he tries to invent a completely fresh (and singularly American) kind of poetry, by using
concrete and specific references. This kind of poetry is entirely different to the highly
allusive and traditionalist one attempted by Eliot and Pound, in which the references are
also much more abstract than those presented by William Carlos Williams. Moreover,
the subject matter of his poems was centered on the everyday circumstances of life and
the lives of common people, which goes also against the academic and cultural topics
Pound and Eliot deal with.
Taking all this into account, there must be made a distinction between William Carlos
Williams, Erza Pound and T.S Eliot, being the first one a strongly advocate of a local,
concrete and everyday-like kind of poetry whereas the other two are much more
inclined to an abstract, elusive and universal kind of poetry. However the differences,
all of them are members of the modernist movement since all of them employ
techniques like the use of images and their poetry arise from the feeling of
disillusionment after the WW1.