Good “It Took Dominion Everywhere.    Literature Review Example

Introduction

In this paper modernist poetry is analyzed. Modernism as a cultural period is considered to be a multinational movement which meant re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of the past.  It is important to mention what is modernist poetry. This is considered to be a poetry mainly written by poets of North America and Europe between 1890 and 1950. It emerged as a result of technical revolution, inventions and World War I. Poets of this period made emphasis on personal view of the world, memories and emotions of the poet, culture of modern society.
Modernist poetry is rather difficult to understand and what is more to analyze as it causes different associations and emotions for each reader. Poems of two famous poets will be analyzed, these are Wallance Stevens’ “Anecdote of Jar” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow”.
Stevens won a Pulizer Prize for Poetry but spent almost whole his life working as an executive for an insurance company. In one of his poems “Anecdote of the Jar” he talks about a Jar “gray and bare” placed in Tennessee. The Jar is described as an enormous and big object, which can rule the wilderness “It made the slovenly wilderness surround that hill”. The poem is written in simple language, with minimum epithets. The author uses inversion “And round it was, upon a hill”, hyperbole “The jar was round upon the ground  and tall and of a port in air”. The Jar is described as alive creature, it influences nature :

The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,   
Like nothing else in Tennessee.”
The poem begins and ends with the name of US state Tennessee. The poem can be considered as an ironic critique of Romanticism which used mixture of consciousness and nature, perception of the world through the nature and expression emotions in nature. Stevens uses word “slovently” with “wilderness” changes traditional meaning of the expression to more positive. The Jar may take “domination” and it took it, but the nature cannot give life energy to the Jar.
The second poem to be analyzed is “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. It consists of thirteen parts that tell a different story about a Blackbird.
Here we can see the contrast of mighty snowwhite mountains and a small eye of Blackbird. White vs Black, Big vs Small, Motionless vs Moving

“Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.”
Here author implicitly says that Blackbirds are very different, they are compared with minds. We can also see compares himself with a tree and each bird is a mind.
In the third part, the Blackbird is compared with a leaf on the wind, as it falls down in autumn, the bird “ The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds”. This process poet called “pantomime”.

“A man and a woman

Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.”
The Blackbird is a common bird that sits on wires and branches, we see it every day and even do not pay attention. It became a part of our life. The author wants us to ffel that a bird is also a part of us. Through repetition of words and lines poet makes us believe that a blackbird and we “are one”.
Whistling bird is compared with inflections and if it is silent, it is just a innuendoes. In this part Srevens uses comparison that makes reader to think what is better, to know, to see, or just to guess and imagine.

“I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.”
This verse is the most metaphorical and symbolical. Icicles are like a “barbaric glass” not civilized, the shadow of Blackbird creates “mood”, and it is described as “an indecipherable cause”
We often do not see what is around us, we want something special, extraordinary, “golden”, but will not make us happy for sure, moreover it can make us suffer and feel miserable as we may understand that we will never get “golden birds”. Stevens says “

“Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?”
The black bird is a part of what we know as it is a part of our evevryday life.
In this part the writer uses oxymoron “the edge of one of many circles”. Bird makes impossible possible when it disappears.
Unusual word combinations as “bawds of euphony” and “cry out sharply”. Poet wants to say that watching flying blackbirds is very unusual and interesting scene.
Here poet shows the story of a man who travelled in “Glass coach” to Connecticut. “Once, a fear pierced him” as he thought he has seen blackbirds. In this part blackbirds are compared with shadow. We not always notice these birds, but they are somewhere near us.
As the water flows, the Blackbird always flies. There are verbs that express motion “moving”, “flying” which creates real feeling of movement.

“The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying”
The last part is very metaphorical. The first line “It was evening all afternoon” creates dull picture, next two lines “It was snowing and it was going to snow” make scene of cold, dark winter with snowfalls, white snowflakes falling down. Small blackbirds are opposed to white snow.
William Carlos Williams was an American modernist writer, who worked as pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine. R. Jarrell said that Williams produces descriptions of what he sees in a very detailed manner, with feeling of freshness and clarity. Writer’s aim was to show the difference between European and American modernism. In this paper poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” will be analyzed.
The poem is presented as one sentence divided into several lines. It is verse free. Opening lines say “so much depends upon” and this sets the mood for the whole poem. So much depends on details in our life. Here much depends on the Wheelbarrow. The author represents real object in real life. He describes it in very realistic and fresh manner. Reading next lines you can clearly imagine this Wheelbarrow “glazed with rain water”, reflecting light and contrasting White Chickens. In the poem Wheelbarrow becomes a piece of art as the poem is a piece of art and it describes a Wheelbarrow, so an everyday objects seems something special. First two lines are something like introduction as they state that "so much depends upon" the wheelbarrow. In next two lines the object, Wheelbarrow, is introduced. The adjective “red” makes the scene more colorful, more bright. Interesting is that in these two lines the word Wheelbarrow is divided and the line 3 is elongated by monosyllable words.

In next two lines we can see how the writer uses assonance Which is common literary device for poetry.

Here the word "glazed" calls for another feeling of reality and creates picture of the poem. In these two lines the reader can come closer to the Wheelbarrow, see more details.
The last two lines give description of alive objects – chickens, which are contrasted to wheelbarrow. Alive objects vs not alive, red vs white.
In “The Red Wheelbarrow” Williams broke understanding of the poem, he made one sentence into a poem, a piece of art.

Conclusions

Both poets are describing objects in their poems. The Jar, a Blackbird, the red Wheelbarrow. Both of them went beyond common understanding of the poem, they put more into description of these objects. The Jar is huge and rules the nature, the Blackbird is depicted as a part of our life, compared and contrasted with other objects and the Wheelbarrow is literally painted with all shadows and colors and is said to be very important.
All features of modernist poetry are found in poems, but each is very special. “Blackbird” consists of 13 snapshots with different ideas, and “Wheelbarrow” is a single sentence divided into several lines.

References

Stevens Wallance, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174503
Stevens Wallance, “Anecdote of the Jar”.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174503
Williams William Carlos, “”The Red Wheelbarrow”.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/178804