Poetic Terms Dictionary
Literary Movement

Modernism

Broadly 1890–1945. Influenced by Symbolism, Imagism, and the shock of World War I. Key principles articulated by Pound ('Make it new') and Eliot ('impersonality').

Definition

An early 20th-century movement rejecting Victorian conventions in favour of fragmentation, allusion, irony, and formal experiment.

Example

Eliot's The Waste Land (1922); Pound's Cantos; Yeats's later visionary poetry.

Related Terms