Modernist literature originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterised by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new".Pound, Ezra, Make it New, Essays, London, 1935 This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of the time. The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century. In Modernist Literature, Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world".
Modernism, Romanticism, Philosophy and Symbol Literary modernism is often summed up in a line from W. B. Yeats: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" (in 'The Second Coming').James Longenbach, for instance, quotes these words and says, 'What line could feel more central to our received notions of modernism?' in his chapter, 'Modern Poetry' in David Holdeman and Ben Levitas, W.B. Yeats in Context, (Cambridge: CUP, 2010), p.327. Longenbach quotes Cynthia Ozik, who said, 'That [i.e. this line], we used to think, was the whole of Modernism.... Now we know better, and also in a way worse. Yeats hardly foresaw how our dissolutions would surpass his own'. See Cynthia Ozick, 'The Muse, Postmodernism and Homeless', New York Times Book Review, 18 January 1987. Modernists often search for a metaphysical 'centre' but experience its collapse. (Postmodernism, by way of contrast, celebrates that collapse, exposing the failure of metaphysics, such as Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of metaphysical claims.)
Philosophically, the collapse of metaphysics can be traced back to the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776), who argued that we never actually perceive one event causing another.On Hume's part in the history of Modernism, see for instance 'Modernism and Postmodernism' in Encyyclopeida.Com at https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/modernism-and-postmodernism We only experience the 'constant conjunction' of events, and do not perceive a metaphysical 'cause'.See The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, ed Ted Honderich. Oxford: OUP, 1995, p.378.
Similarly, Hume argued that we never know the self directly, being blind to our true natures.As the Oxford Companion to Philosophy puts it, 'We have no impression of a simple, identical self, so we can have no idea of any such thing.' The Companion goes on to explain that 'Hume's own view is that mankind is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions' and that Hume 'maintains a steady scepticism about personal identiy' See The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, p.379. As Roderick Chisholm put it, Hume in effect argues that we do not know the self as object, only the self as subject (though Hume does not use the language of subject and object, since this belongs to the later post-Kantian tradition).Chisholm, R., Person and Object: A Metaphysical Study, Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1976. See also Luca Forgione, 'Descartes and Hume on I-Thoughts', Thémata. Revista de Filosofía 57 (2018), 223 Hume himself says, 'For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception'.See A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I.iv, section 6. Hume's scepticism about the self underlies later Modernist explorations of a de-centred self—for instance in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway or The Waves.Maya Kronfeld, 'Spontaneous Form: Four Studies in Consciousness and Philosophical Fiction', p.58. Kronfeld documents the likely source of Woolf's interest in Hume, in the writings of Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, on Hume (pp.70-72). See: https://escholarship.org/content/qt4v62w98x/qt4v62w98x_noSplash_fdca4c31c3abd7c891a77193b08610c7.pdf?t=qhtt74 More generally, if we only 'know' through sensory experience—such as sight, touch and feeling—then we cannot 'know' and neither can we make metaphysical claims.
Thus, modernism can be driven emotionally by the desire for metaphysical truths, while understanding their impossibility. Some modernist novels, for instance, feature characters like Marlow in Heart of Darkness or Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby who believe that they have encountered some great truth about nature or character, truths that the novels themselves treat ironically while offering more mundane explanations.Daphne Erdinast- Vulcan explores Conrad's relation to Modernism, Romanticism and metaphysics in Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: OUP, 1991. David Lynn describes Nick Carraway as "A synthesis of disparate impulses whose roots lie in nineteenth-century Romanticism and Realism[.] Nick's heroism is borne out in his assuming responsibility for Gatsby and in the act of narration." See 'Within and Without: Nick Carraway', in: The Hero's Tale, chapter 4, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989. Similarly, many poems of Wallace Stevens convey a struggle with the sense of nature's significance. These fall under two headings: poems in which the speaker denies that nature has meaning, only for nature to loom up by the end of the poem; and poems in which the speaker claims nature has meaning, only for that meaning to collapse by the end of the poem.
Modernism often rejects nineteenth century realism, if the latter is understood as focusing on the embodiment of meaning within a naturalistic representation. At the same time, some modernists aim at a more 'real' realism, one that is uncentered. Picasso's proto-cubist painting, 'The Poet' of 1911 is decentred, presenting the body from multiple points of view. As the Peggy Guggenheim Collection website puts it, 'Picasso presents multiple views of each object, as if he had moved around it, and synthesizes them into a single compound image'. This avoids the limitations of a single, privileged viewer, and points towards a more objective realism. Similarly, it has been argued that Wallace Stevens's realism "serves a truth that is revealing—not the truth that prevails. It also is a “realism” that recognizes multiple perspectives, multiple truths. Perhaps the snow is not just white; it is also turning black, attuned to the menacing storm in the sky—or it is perhaps purple, surrounding a man with a monarch’s boundless ego."
Modernism, with its sense that 'things fall apart,' can be seen as the apotheosis of romanticism, if romanticism is the (often frustrated) quest for metaphysical truths about character, nature, a higher power and meaning in the world. Modernism often yearns for a romantic or metaphysical centre, but later finds its collapse.
This distinction between modernism and romanticism extends to their respective treatments of 'symbol'. The romantics at times see an essential relation (the 'ground') between the symbol (or the 'vehicle', in I.A. Richards's terms)I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, (Oxford University Press: New York and London, 1936). Technically, Richards applies the terms 'vehicle' and 'tenor' to metaphor rather than symbol. and its 'tenor' (its meaning)—for example in Coleridge's description of nature as 'that eternal language which thy God / Utters'. But while some romantics may have perceived nature and its symbols as God's language, for other romantic theorists it remains inscrutable. As Goethe said, ‘the idea [or meaning] remains eternally and infinitely active and inaccessible in the image’.Quoted by Nicholas Halmi in The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol (Oxford: OUP, 2007), p.1. This was extended in modernist theory which, drawing on its symbolist precursors, often emphasizes the inscrutability and failure of symbol and metaphor. For example, Wallace Stevens seeks and fails to find meaning in nature, even if he at times seems to sense such a meaning. As such, symbolists and modernists at times adopt a mystical approach to suggest a non-rational sense of meaning.
For these reasons, modernist metaphors may be unnatural, as for instance in T.S. Eliot's description of an evening 'spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table'.T.S. Eliot, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock. Seamus Perry notes 'The play between the belated romanticism of an evening 'spread out against the sky' and the incongruous modernity of 'a patient etherised upon a table' in 'A close reading of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', on the British Library's website, https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/a-close-reading-of-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock . Similarly, for many later modernist poets nature is unnaturalized and at times mechanized, as for example in Stephen Oliver's image of the moon busily 'hoisting' itself into consciousness.Stephen Oliver, Cranial Bunker (Canberra: Greywacke Press, 2023), p.27. See Nicholas Reid, 'A Plague on Hipsters', a review in The Landfall Tauraka Review, 1 August 2024, at https://landfallreview.com/a-plague-on-hipsters/, accessed 9 August 2026.
Origins and precursors In the 1880s, increased attention was given to the idea that it was necessary to push aside previous norms entirely, instead of merely revising past knowledge in light of contemporary techniques. The theories of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Ernst Mach (1838–1916) influenced early Modernist literature. Ernst Mach argued that the mind had a fundamental structure, and that subjective experience was based on the interplay of parts of the mind in The Science of Mechanics (1883). Freud's first major work was Studies on Hysteria (with Josef Breuer; 1895). According to Freud, all subjective reality was based on the play of basic drives and instincts, through which the outside world was perceived. As a philosopher of science, Ernst Mach was a major influence on logical positivism, and through his criticism of Isaac Newton, a forerunner of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
Many prior theories about epistemology argued that external and absolute reality could impress itself, as it were, on an individualfor example, John Locke's (1632–1704) empiricism, which saw the mind beginning as a tabula rasa, a blank slate (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690). Freud's description of subjective states, involving an unconscious mind full of primal impulses and counterbalancing self-imposed restrictions, was combined by Carl Jung (1875–1961) with the idea of the collective unconscious, which the conscious mind either fought or embraced. While Charles Darwin's work remade the Aristotelian concept of "man, the animal" in the public mind, Jung suggested that human impulses toward breaking social norms were not the product of childishness or ignorance, but rather derived from the essential nature of the human animal.