First of all, I would like to mention that I’ve always been into growing plants and being in contact with nature. Maybe that is the reason why I realized that although modernist artists lived in the big cities, full of streets, concrete, ashes and smoke emanating from industries, nature has been somehow present in many modernists’ writing. For example the petals and the black bough in Pound’s haiku “In a Station at the Metro”, the countryside in D.H. Lawrence’s novella “The Fox” and the image of a tree in Ezra Pound’s poem “A Girl”.
However,
not only writers have included nature in their work. The American
artist Thomas Hart Benton, who declared himself an enemy of Modernism, in 1944 created
“Homeward Bound”, a painting that represents the struggle between rural life and
industrial progress of those times.
Nevertheless, city and nature are not just two completely opposite sceneries or
images, but they depict also different concepts. The city is home of Prufrocks,
shallowness, labelling, tourists, and people following the crowd and on the
contrary, nature is home of authenticity, freedom and connectedness with our
inner self and with the cosmos. That is why sometimes I feel as D.H Lawrence
felt and I agree with his thought: the closer I get to civilization, the more I
like primitive life.
Now going back to modernists work, why to include nature in their work if modernists were immerse in a place that absolutely lacked of it? Because they were dissenters of their own times, as the essay The Cities mentions "they abhorred the city: the dream of scape from its vice, its immediacy, its sprawl, its pace..." So, in a way, bringing back nature to their work is a way of saying that there is something missing in the city: authenticity and connectedness with our inner self and with the cosmos. Like a metaphor.
To wrap up,
I would like to show you an image that represent the contrast city/nature and
hopefully it makes you reflect about it.
I really enjoyed your piece of writing and I totally tally with D. H. Lawrence thought “the closer I get to civilization, the more I like primitive life.” It is because nature has that “something” that technology cannot replace and that “something” is freshness, authenticity as you said, it is that beauty, which brings you peace and make you thing that you are part of a unique environment. I would like to add a final comment; it is hard for me to read your comments without thinking in the connectedness that Avatars feel with the nature in their planet (from the movie Avatar).
ResponderEliminarPaulina, I couldn’t ignore your post, because I think is directly related to this feeling of hopeless in cities that I can appreciate through modernist poems. And your final image kind of confirms that I am not 100% wrong, because that is what I can see in these cities described for Yeats and Pound, a disconnection with our inner thoughts and emotions. For instance, we as part of a developed society controlled for technology become individualist and little by little we start falling in this system that drains our energy and authenticity. So, in my opinion, we need to be connected with nature as part of our human nature, we are part of it, and we can´t live without this connection, otherwise we are going to start falling in this gyre of darkness directly to our end.
ResponderEliminarPaulina, I really liked your post because I have the same feelings and thoughts that you have expressed here. I totally agree with you when you say that this issue of nature is recurrent in Modernism. From my point of view, poets wanted to show that feeling of longing for the times that have already passed, meaning that people who used to live in the countryside and work on the land, therefore being connected with nature, could find in the countryside a sense of harmony; on the other hand, when the Industrial Revolution started the people had to move to the cities, therefore this sense of harmony was broken and the city became a vortex of energy and also a dehumanized place.
ResponderEliminarTo wrap up, the way I see it is that modern poets talk about nature showing the feeling of longing for the old times.