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Crisis, a la Shmoop. The twentieth century didn't start out so

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great. Russia wentÉ redÉ and bid a fond farewell to the tsar and his family.

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After the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire got shot, Europe lost its collective mind

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and millions of people ended up dead.

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Twenty-five percent of the global population caught a really nasty case of the flu.

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Heck, the Titanic was slayed by an iceberg. With so many crazy things happening, people

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felt like they were living amidst an ongoing crisis. Writers of the age responded to this

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in differentÉ sometimes opposingÉ ways.

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The American poet Ezra Pound, for example, didn't like the language in which poetry was

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written at the time. Way too many adjectives.

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He decided to start the Imagism movement, the goal of which was to create an extremely

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specific...

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...yep, you guessed it...

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...image in the reader's mind. Pound sought clarity in poetry. He wanted

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to strip away past conventions, romanticism and rhetoric, and abstraction.

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Pound also may have come up with Imagism as a marketing gimmick to help his friend Hilda

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Doolittle...

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...no relation to Eliza or Doctor...

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...get her work published in Europe. It must have worked, because here we are one hundred

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years later, still talking about how very important Imagism was to twentieth century

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poetry. Pound may have wanted poetry to be hard and

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polished, but the author Virginia Woolf believed the writing of the time should be more diffusedÉ

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sort of like a spider web of different human perspectives.

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For Woolf, one of the worst symptoms of the crisis of Modernism was the loneliness of

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modern life.

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And we figure she knew all about loneliness, given that she killed herself in 1941 by going

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for a very permanent swim in the local river. Of course, loneliness and that sense of crisis

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that helped define Modernist writing weren't the only feelings Woolf thought people needed

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to overcome.

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The prudishness associated with the late nineteenth century was still alive and very well in Woolf's

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day.

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So, not only was the world going to hell in a handbasket, but folks were supposed to be

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very proper and moral...

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...and never, ever, ever, ever talk about sex.

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With that combo in play, no wonder Woolf thought that her writing should help readers feel

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more connected to one another; that her purpose should be to reach out and touch someone...

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...through literature, Virginia. Through literature. Pound and Woolf were two very different writers,

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with two very different viewpoints of the Modernist movement.

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Some prefer Pound's method of annihilating innocent adjectives...

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...others dig Woolf's more lyrical prose.

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Too bad Woolf went for a swim without end and Pound decided to add Italian fascism to

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his repertoire of crazy.

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