One prevailing belief about modernist poetry is that it has no structure, that it's abandoned entirely the often-restrictive forms governing meter and rhyme, such as the sonnet with its rigid iambic pentameter and Shakespearean rhyme pattern. Indeed, many modernist poets do write without (apparent) structure, but very often, it's not as free-form and spontaneous as it seems.
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Before about the early part of the 20th century, poetry tended to be fairly formalistic, with a defined meter and rhyme scheme or written in a specific received pattern such as the sonnet. Even Romantic poets, of all people, tended to adhere to these relatively rigid structures.
What massively changed poetry, prose, architecture, music, and art was the advent of the modern age following WWI, a devastating and bloody war that essentially caused an entire generation of people in western Europe and elsewhere to question the validity of the structures and received truths they had been raised with, including those philosophical or religious or artistic truths that they'd previously seen as immutable. Essentially, poets faced a world in which these structures seemed at best hollow and meaningless, at least many of them. Many of them felt that there was a need to "make it new" altogether, while others felt that it was crucial to re-examine older texts and choose what still worked. In everything, though, the form followed the function. For many poets such as Eliot, if a poem needed to rhyme to serve the larger meaning, it did. Poets such as Eliot also made use of other, less visible methods of structuring a poem--often to the point where it seems structureless, but isn't. Exoskeleton vs. Endoskeleton One comparison that can be made here with older vs. modern poetic structures is that of an exoskeleton vs. an endoskeleton. An exoskleton provides structure to the insect, a hard carapace whose shape is very visible from outside. For example, it's easy to see even from a distance that a poem is a haiku or a sonnet. However, a modern poem is more like the endoskeleton, the hidden structure inside us that we don't see, but which is preventing us from being blobs. It gives us shape and form, even though our individual bodies each look different from a distance. Similarly, a modern poem will often have what I'm calling a "secret structure," one dependent less on rigid form and more on links and logical progression between ideas. "Prufrock" is a great place to start. |
The poem initially appears to be written almost at random, as a series of interior thoughts, a stream of consciousness that's akin to tapping into someone else's interior monologue as they're walking down a street. As such, the poem has a kind of randomness, a spontaneous, unstructured feel.
But look closer. Let's take a minute to examine this section:
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The more we examine this section, the more we realize that Eliot has made a series of very explicit, very clear connections between and among ideas here. How does he do it? Four big ways:
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In this example below, I've highlighted places where we see these linkages. For now, I've just highlighted repetitions:
For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room, So how should I presume? |
And here, I've highlighted the end rhymes:
For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room, So how should I presume? |
And here are the prepositions that continue the sentences and link phrases to phrases:
For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room, So how should I presume? Aaaaand just for funsies, here's the whole thing, including the conjunction "So." For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room, So how should I presume? |
For a quick formative or summative assignment, students could be given a random passage from "Prufrock" and be asked to analyze it for repetition, rhyme, prepositions, conjunctions, or other means of connection in the section, working either together or independently.
As a more complex assignment, students could be asked to discuss WHY those ideas were linked, WHY Eliot chose to link this series of ideas together, or (if you are examining the poem as a whole), what linkages across the whole poem play into and reveal the meaning of the work as a whole. |