Why Modernism matters More than ever

Ancient Incan amphitheater with circular stone terraces in a desert landscape.

Your Modernist Quick History, Contemporary Relevance, and Reading List

I. Background: The Collapse the Led to Modernism

Although it’s been over a century since the first modernist works came into existence, the feelings we’re having about the world in 2026 and the feelings that writers like Woolf, Kafka, and Lispector were having during and after the first World War are eerily similar. And that’s because the moments that we’re living in are moments where it feels like “things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” as Yeats writes in his 1919 poem, “The Second Coming.”

If you’ve ever tried reading a modernist work––maybe Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar”––you may have found yourself baffled by the fact that the words on the page are all ones you know but the way they come together and the images they create and ideas they conjure feel inordinately difficult. Maybe you felt totally alienated from what you were reading because it stopped making sense. That’s because modernist literature is trying to convey the difficulty of its moment.

The line I alluded to from “The Second Coming” is often referred to when describing modernism. Because it perfectly conveys the general public’s feelings surrounding the historical moment. In 1919, over 20 million people have died. Everyone had lost someone, and they were all reeling from the unprecedented death and destruction that the industrialized machinery of war allowed to happen in WWI.

Before WWI, there existed this Romantic notion of a “glorious war.” War was not just a tragic necessity. Because the propaganda around war championed ideals like honor, patriotism, and heroism in order to get citizens to rally behind a cause and sacrifice their lives for it in battle. Think of Homer’s Iliad. The Iliad depicts war as a means of achieving everlasting fame. Think of Achilles, or Odysseus, or Virgil’s Aeneas. Centuries later and these names are still part of our general cultural vernacular, but if you read the Iliad, or the Odyssey, or the Aeneid, you’ll see that that glory comes at the price of many violent deaths and great loss. However, because ever-lasting fame was so highly exalted, it felt worth it––there was a great sense of pride and lots of norms of reverence and praise given to warriors. That notion endured through times under leaders like Napoleon and Bismark.

Because that was before the revolutionary industrialization in the 19th and 20th century. The industrial revolution brought major advances in technology, including technology like military tanks, tear gas, and machine guns. Trench warfare was horrific for all those involved, and the carnage and resulting loss left people at odds with themselves, their world, and their systems.

Since the late 19th century, philosophy was already breaching on ideas that disrupted the sure stability of our systems of knowledge. In 1899, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, where he introduced the concept of the unconscious, the part of the human psyche that holds repressed thoughts, desires, and memories. Before that, no one had so elaborately investigated the notion that there is a part of ourselves and our minds that we are not in total control over. What was before the surest thing we had, the self that we unavoidably experience every day at every waking moment, collapses into something that we have to dig at it and try to interpret through dreams and other means of analysis.

Around the same time, we also have Friedrich Nietzschetelling us in the Gay Science that “God is dead, and that we killed him… with science.” Nietzsche here is not actually offering an atheistic ideology or really claiming that humans have killed the primordial supernatural being. He’s using this phrase as a metaphor to diagnose the condition of Western civilization. Before, Western society relied on Christianity for its understanding of basically everything: biology, morality, metaphysics. But in an era of industrialization, we started to shift our faith from religion to science.Now, we think that we know better than Christianity. And thus, we’ve killed God as our guiding principle.

So Freud tells us that we can’t know ourselves and Nietzsche tells us we don’t know good from bad. And then history basically proves it to us with the first world war.

Yeats almost directly alludes to Nietzsche in the poem’s premise and illustrates the reality of the end of one era and the beginning of a terrifying new age in the poem’s final lines:

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

“What kind of God has this moment birthed?” Yeats asks. And how can we face it? The world he depicts is one full of fear and anxiety––a world we have not been prepared for by anything in our lives before. And it leaves us both full of dread of facing that rough beast and empty handed to be able to encounter it.

Enter: the literary modernists, a highly self-aware group of writers and artists. They decide that they have to use their literature to fundamentally rethink the world because the ideas and structures we have thus far won’t cut it. The literary movement that came directly before modernism is Romanticism.Both the modernists and the romantics rejected the Enlightenment’s emphasis on realism and faith in reason as the end all be all of life and art. They agreed on the fact that there’s more to life than pure logic and reasoning. But the modernists went much further. Because while the Romantics focused on the inner quest for higher truths about character, nature, God, and meaning through art, they believed that it was something that was achievable. It was the Romantic dream to reach a harmonious state with nature, feeling its sublime beauty and oneness.

According to German Romantic Friedrich Schiller, the capacity to “feel the sublime is one of the most glorious dispositions in human nature.” And Romantic poets consistently tried to depict that attempt and achievement of the Romantic dream. In 1796, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “The Eolian Harp.” In it he uses the image of the wind-struck harp to illustrate the speaker reaching the sublime:

“O! the one Life within us and abroad,

Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,

A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,

Rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere—

Methinks, it should have been impossible

Not to love all things in a world so filled;

Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air

Is Music slumbering on her instrument.”

This desire isn’t unique to Coleridge. Percy Shelley requests the wind to “Make me thy lyre” (Shelley 57); William Wordsworth employs the wind as a symbol for the presence of God, whose spirit brims over with hope and inspiration for the poet as divine vessel (Wordsworth 43).

The modernists grew up consuming that kind of literature, but when they took a look around after the first WW, they realized that it was an illusion to think that we can do that. At least, now we can’t. There was a crisis of representation and utter disillusionment. This “rhythm in all thought, and joyance everywhere,” is hollow and meaningless now. It’s all exalted language distorting the true human experience, all a rigid artifact now that our world is ruptured, now that the center is not holding.

Ezra Pound said “make it new” and he said he wanted to “break the pentameter,” referring to the most common cadence English uses when writing. So, modernists show us that all we have left to do is acknowledge the force of decay that’s brought us here and embrace the moment’s improvisatory energy. And that now that we’re in that dark place, decide that where we are is not a burial, but a planting.

II. How Modernism Resonates Deeply with Today

We are way past the era of the steam engine. We have, in fact, more than a century separating us from the modernists. But, our moment is not dissimilar to that of the modernists when their movement came about.

We are living in a world with:

  • Rapid technological acceleration: Computers, iphones, Billionaires and corporations seeking to replace humans out of a human world with artificial intelligence

  • Information overload and social fragmentation leading to individual crises: Witnessing how seeing how our youngest generations are being raised by robots, IPad babies, teenagers who can’t read and have broken attention spans and who can’t watch a movie without looking at their phones (we’re seeing it most viscerally with them, they are bearing the brunt of it, it’s the most shocking but we all know brothers sisters and parents who are falling prey to the same traps). How media, in turn, is becoming worse and less artistic because it’s catering to that audience. How despite the fact that we are more globally connected than ever, we somehow feel alienated from actual community

  • Political instability and the collapse of institutions causing an exponentially growing distrust in everything, the growing economic gap between the haves and the have-nots, the US being 40 trillion dollars in debt with no way out,people who were supposed to represent the pinnacle of society being revealed as participants in the horrors outlined in the Epstein Files, having to witness the slaughter of innocence on the news every day and disagreeing with the Boomer generation about what is true from where we get our news, that feeling of total impending doom when everything and everyone as we knew them are revealed to be something else. And that totally demoralizing feeling systems we have inherited no longer serve to fully explain our reality.

So while our moments are historically distinct, the feelings they are generating are uncannily similar. Thus, these writers’ concerns with what consciousness feels like in a fractured world is still incredibly urgent and relevant. And in feeling those things, even if they’re feelings of doom and catastrophe, with someone else gives us community.

And modernism feels difficult because it assumes that reality itself is unstable and in order to depict that, literature needs to be chock full of nonlinear narratives, fragmented perception, juxtaposed images, information without hierarchy, etc.

So when you pick up As I Lay Dying or read some more Wallace Stevens, I’m going to venture to say that you’re not going to find yourself feeling like you’re reading a book written 100 years ago. Because it’s not supposed to be an academic exercise. You’re reading about writers living in a broken society, who feel like they’re lacking guiding principles, and who are navigating––through their art!––what it is to ‘be’ in difficult times.

III. Reading suggestions

Modernist Poetry

  • Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker

    Some of my favorites: “Parturition,” “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” “Lunar Baedeker”

  • Ezra Pound, Selected Poems or The Cantos

    Look out for: “In a Station of the Metro,” “A Pact,” “To Whistler, American”

  • Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumousor Collected Poems

    Poems: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Anecdote of the Jar,”

  • William Carlos Williams, Spring and Allor The Red Wheelbarrow & Other Poems

    Some favorites: “To Elsie,” “This is Just to Say,” “The Young Housewife,” “Spring and All,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “A Sort of Song,” and “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”

Short Prose:

Longer Prose:

Ultimate Modernist Challenges: