T. S. Eliot’s Modernism and Yu Chihwan’s Poetry

Abstract

The definitions of modernism in general revolves around reason-centeredness but literary modernism involves serious revolts against it. The latter was significantly transformed by many later opposing trends, mainly by Romanticism. The complexity of literary modernism was aggravated with T. S. Eliot being its central figure, who experimented with new literary techniques but, ironically enough, wanted to return to the ways and values of the past. This is a critical challenge against the basic principle of modernism, breaking away from the past and concentrating on the present without restrictions from the past. Eliot showed how a poet can record his time with new literary devices including fragmented and non-logical arrangements, presentations of undefinable objects, and non-definite depictions of them; he also adopted techniques such as collage, juxtaposition, and internal monologues which also are meant to show new discoveries and new ways of thinking of his time. This discrepancy between techniques and themes in Eliot features his literature and requires an effort to integrate them on the part of his reader, amplifying the difficultly involved in understanding modernism. This writing is meant to review T. S. Eliot’s modernism in comparison with the poetry of Yu Chihwan, one of Eliot’s Korean contemporaries with focus on treatments of emotion and personality, poetic dictions, and themes, the last of which will be viewed from how keenly aware they were of given historical settings.