Constructing a New Stage: The Re-Formation of the Romantic in Wallace Steven's "Of Modern Poetry" and T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Abstract

Alyssa‘s essay points to a central issue in understanding modernism: its vexed relationship with romanticism, and its constant, nervous attempts to delineate the boundaries of that relationship, particularly by claiming for itself a radical newness. While, as she points out, much modernist critical writing stated an implacable opposition to some central romantic tenets, that purported opposition was always a lot less clear – and more interesting – in the poetry. Newness, as she suggests, is never pure, and is always most interesting when it is murky.

-Dr. Leonard Diepeveen