Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Parallel Lines

Einstein was said, "Everything is relative." One of the main overarching themes I took from the manifestos and forms for this week was the theme that two things which seem completely unrelated do indeed have common ground when viewed side by side.

For instance, Pound's ingenious poem, "In a Station of the Metro," presents the reader with two distinct images. However, one can't help but relate these images of the apparitions and petals to one another because of their positioning in the work. If Pound placed a few more stanzas between the lines, the image the reader has in his or her head would most likely be different. Therefore, the meaning of the poem would be altered.

Another theme I took away from the selections is the push to bring man into an equal bond with his creations. For instance, Marinetti uses personification to show the relationship between man and man's inventions. He intentionally uses images such as, "bridges that stride rivers like giant gymnasts", "deep-chested locomotives", and "steamers that sniff the horizon" to create a more intimate bond between these man-made machines.

Although the period of Modernism resulted from a fractured and broken world, it seems as if the poets and writers of the time were attempting to create a new order from the chaos. The poets were looking at the splintered world and, as Ezra Pound put it, using it as an opportunity to "make it new."

1 comment:

  1. Mike, your mention of Einstein here is spot on. Einstein's theory of relativity was one of the major changes of thinking about reality that led modernists to also rethink the artist's relationship to reality. Einstein's theory was revolutionary; it asked us to conceive time and space in different ways; and that concepts of tall and short, for example, were merely relative. So, in the end here, you're absolutely right, in that many modernists were trying to produce a new order, a new way of thinking about the world. I also love your observations here about Marinetti. You have lots of ideas for your first paper here already.

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