Paper Topic:

Modernism and Discontent

Modernism and Discontent

One of the complexities of modern life is the human struggle to reconcile the depression and the loneliness arising out of a spiritual barrenness with the materialist way of industrialized life . Man as a result has been divorced from the spontaneous joys of nature and often leads a mechanical life that has been thrust upon him . T .S . Eliot and W .B .Yeats have dealt with the problem in their own way . Eliot is more concerned with describing the joylessness of modern civilization objectively which makes life something

to be tolerated rather than to be happy with . Yeats with his spiritual bent of mind explores the causes of unhappiness and offers his own observations

In The Hollow Men ' Eliot writes about the hollow men ' and stuffed men ' of modern era . In death 's dream kingdom / Let me also wear / such deliberate disguises (l .30-32 ) and With alien people clutching gods / I shall be glad of another death (l .42-43 ) In The Preludes , he writes of typical modern city dwellers with muddy feet at six o 'clock hurrying to work . He lives a life of mad haste , yet he is not aware what he is living for . In Journey of the Magi ' we get a sordid picture of urban life though he is apparently writing about ancient times : And the cities hostile and town unfriendly / And the villages dirty and charging high prices (l .14-15

W .B .Yeats writes about the spiritual crises of modern man who has not been happy in spite of multiplication of material comforts . In The Wild Swans at Coole ' he contrasts the happy swans with sordid men who watch them with sore heart . I have looked upon those brilliant creatures /And now my heart is sore (l .13-14 ) In The Rose Tree ' he talks symbolically : But where can we draw water .when all the wells are parched away (l .13-15 ) To W .B .Yeats Byzantium ' is a private mythology standing for art , artifice and sophistication in contrast to the materialist world with all its drabness . The world of Sailing to Byzantium ' is caught in that sensual music all neglect / moments of unaging intellect (l .7-8 ) So he dwells on its beauty and compares with the imperfect human world . He makes his mission clear : And Therefore I have sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium (l .15-16 ) Consume my heart away sick with desire (l .21 ) Aldous Huxley also underscored the harmful effect of the industrialized society on the spiritual life of modern man in his essay Time and the Machine

Work Cited

Abrams , M .H . and Greenblatt , Stephen (eds ) The Norton Anthology of English Literature . 7th Ed . New York . W .W .Norton Co . 2001 pp .1580-0584

July 4 , 2008...

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