Modernist poetry Essay

Modernist poetry tends to break many of the grammatical constructiond rules of songs published previously. Walt Whitmans When I hear the Learnd astronomer, buffalo bill by e. e. cummings, and Mirror by Sylvia Plath are definitely very opposite poems in subject. However, what they share is a late view of poetry. They all(prenominal) break the mold in subject and especially structure. In cummings buffalo bill, cummings breaks the mold both in structure and in syntax. His lack of punctuation and capitalization are unique to his own style.Cummings chinkms to compare himself to post horse Cody in that Buffalo Bill was really a facade. He rode a watersmooth silver stallion, which means that he didnt really ride a stallion at all. He uses the word defunct in rather a mocking way, since it is not the way we would talk almost someone who died. And yet, at the same time, there is worship in the poem. However, the poet himself has been tricked by the daring farce of Bill Cody. This sen se of mocking fraud is the chief way this poem is similar to the others.Although cummings way to get to this similarity is very different from the other poets. He relies on word choice like defunct and mocking statements such as fair haired boy. The tone of both these choices is very irreverent. In Plaths Mirror, the reader feels as though Plath is writing personally or confessionally. Here is this woman typefaceing in the mirror, seeing the girl slowly be replaced by an older woman and not enjoying this transformation at all. The tone is not irreverent at all, but the image of a terrible fish at the end is very jarring.Plath plays on the fairy tale of looking into a mirror and asking for the truth. But instead of getting the fairy-tale truth, she gets the real truth. If she wants to see how young she looks, she should ask the moonlight or candlelight that hides her flaws and wrinkles. Whereas cummings poem takes a mocking look at legendary Buffalo Bill, Plaths poem takes a mocki ng look at a mirror as a truth teller. Plath breaks the mold in being a confessional poet and talking about a woman aging in a completely new way.The last poem entitled When I Heard the Learnd Astronomer in some ways mocks another kind of person/object with legendary status. He mocks the vagary that education can tell us all that we need to know. Like the Transcendentalists before him, Whitman believed that we should use our own experiences to tell us what is true in the world. While his tone does not mock, it does certainly refute the idea that by following the learned people, we will know and understand all that we need to.Even though the proofs, columns and figures were before him, he chose to wander out by himself to find the answers. Whitman breaks the mold for his time period by favoring experiential learning over books and academic learning. The true beauty of the night sky is not in listening and understanding everything about it it is in the beauty and wonder of the night sky. In trying to quantify nature, we kill its wonder. All three poets tell us something unique and refute some old way of looking at things.For cummings, it is a new look at legendary figure Buffalo Bill Cody, who really wasnt what he was heralded as being. For Plath, it is the old fairy tale like Mirror Mirror on the wall Plath allows us to look at aging as what it truly isgaining wrinkles and getting closer to death. For Whitman, it is allowing us to look at nature in a more mystical and pleasing way rather than trying to qualify and quantify it. All three poets shock us in some way.