Ideals in Modernist Literature: The Chaotic World of a spotless, non controlled and misunderstood mind.

Modernism was born in the cradle of a sense of lost community and civilization and embraced a series of paradoxes and contradictions in its way of rejecting the Victorian trends of how art and all of its manifestations should be mean and consumed. The relation between the inner insecurity experienced in a pro-war environment and the prevailing nihilism (as a direct consequence of the war) set the basis for the aesthetic of experimentation and the loss of the sense of tradition. Certainly, this marriage was never consummated in the wild life that the whole world can offer, but in the cities.

“All great art is born of the metropolis.”

- Ezra Pound

“(Cities were) more than accidental meeting places and crossing points. They were generative environments of the new arts, focal points of intellectual community, indeed of intellectual conflict and tension.”

- (Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (ed), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890 – 1930)

 Indeed, Modernists were driven by the complex life lived in these metropolis of the new world, where very closed and inner groups could actually share their ideas, the so called “art”. Moreover, the impact of living in these mazes of narrow passages overlapped the romantic revival of the Victorian period and coalesced into the horrible, chaotic and futile train of thoughts of the modernist mind. The crisis supported the inner insanity in the authors’ brain, sweeping away the idea of a new hope in times to come:

“The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

- William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming

The overwhelming despair unchained and fed the demons of creation, breaking down the limitations of space and time, the social norms and cultural values of the ancient times: the chaos was conceived as liberation from the past and as a new way to perceive reality and to express the author itself. The stimulation of their creativity and intellect needed the influence of ambiguity, disintegration and reformation, rapid change and ephemera captured in the cold pages of history.

What those pages lacked of was a new sense of reality, so how did an artist immerse into this brand new ideal? This video may be an accurate suggestion of one of the infinite ways they became modernists.