What’s His Problem?

I believe J. Alfred Prufrock's problem is that he is aging and growing old, and he is thinking out all these insecurities he has at social functions. The women that speak of Michelangelo are those who he only associated himself with - perhaps, the high class women. But since he is aging, he is falling out of their circle and failing to meet their elitist standards. He is very vain and perhaps he used to be a good looking fellow, but now, failing to meet his friends' standards. He is about to join one of their social functions again the smell and such are reminiscent of his younger days. He is a very self conscious fellow, and sometimes he wished that he was just something so low that it's unnoticeable - maybe from the start he never wanted to be a part of these social functions anyway.

Poetry’s Social Function

I disagree with this assertion. I do not believe poetry has any benefit to society or anything whatsoever other than to prevaricate a first impression that they're smart or something. They do make great topics, but to me I don't think they're actually contributing anything. Sure, it has some value in terms of history but actually I don't think it benefits literature directly. I think poetry, the way its written, is pointless. I believe there are more efficient ways to tell a story than to actually have to use obscure and abstract forms of writing. Poetry to me is kind of pointless because of the fact that it tries to provoke you to think about all the possible endings - but if I'm reading something, I'd rather read something striaghtforward.

War and Economics

I don't see any similarities simply because of the fact that the two are the same thing. Because history is ongoing, then the two are the same. To compare I would need two different things but I am unable to do so. But for the sake of this topic, I will treat them as different things. I do not believe anything has changed. First of all, our economy is the same as it was. The conditions are completely different then and now. In twenty years, historians will judge our time period as the time when art went stagnant (whatever art is) and people had lost their attention span. Everything is handed to us, that we refuse the right to create and believe it is the right that things should be handed to us. Historians will judge humans at this period (when all humans flourish / had flourished) as being useless. The useless period is what I believe.

No Ideas But In Things

Poems are written about meaningless things. To me, they're just meaningless pieces of writing into an abstract form that is completely incomprehensible to any logical person (strictly adhering to the fact of logic and no wiggle room to understand anything that is not logical) because everything is so vague itself, even if the idea was something of meaning (that is a subjective matter). To be honest, I do not understand poetry. It sounds nice but if someone wanted to (by the wise words of T.S. Eliot) "improve upon the English language" then why don't you say it in a form that people can straightforwardly understand? Is it cool to be abstract and write things that doesn't really have a concrete answer? People may ask why you need everything spoonfed to you (in the subject of information) but why shouldn't it? I'm reading something after all, aren't I? I do not get poems. I do not like them, they are nothing but a mere form of entertainment for me. That is simply my opinion of poems.

Historical Influences

I think the most familiar events with the movement probably were the radio and then the photographs of World War 2. I am familiar with both because I see these on a regular basis. First of all, the radio: our internet is basically radio waves travelling back and forth (wifi internet that is) and also when I get in the car I listen to the radio. A lot of things are powered by radio waves. Another are the photographs because I could understand how they are influential to us today. It gives us an image of how terrible warfare is. Warfare is terrible because it costs human lives for things that are trivial to us in daily life but only matter to politicians. Perhaps the Jews getting killed by the Holocaust was not just something politicians argue about, but does not affect me personally. I believe war is not a good thing. But it is inevitable because humans will have conflicts. I had an idea that humans will only progress forward if we unite, but warfare tears us apart.

Social Influences – Entertainment

Entertainment in the past probably was just the radio, some newspapers, and the nickel theater. I would have loved to enjoy the lavish entertainments of the past, live a life like a classy gentleman, start the day off with a cigar and end the night in my classy car and watch a movie with a monocle dangling off of my eye whilst my arm wrapped around a girl in a dress. With silk gloves or whatever they were called, and fall asleep. It would be a great way to live, and not have been spoiled by the technology of today. The technology today, we are never satisfied - entertainment wise. We are always seeking new forms of entertainment, with the bare and most ethereal form of entertainment twisted and changed into something and so many different forms that we can't even recognize entertainment anymore. Entertainment now is an amorphous thing that takes on many different forms, many sports are all the same. Everything is the same.

Make It New

What Ezra Pound means by new art is for art to be innovative and original. Art shouldn't be an exact or close to exact replica of something that's already been done. That's just redoing what's already been done. Art in a sense can be compared to inventing something. If you're going to invent something, why would you reinvent something that's already been invented? You would want to invent something that's totally new and original and serves to a different function rather than provide the same benefits. To the viewer of art, art should provide and evoke a different feeling from a different perspective to the person rather than to evoke the same feeling. A person would just look at a picture of the previous painting than to see some crappy replica. That is what Ezra pound means. Perhaps he also means for poets to break away from the restrictions set upon poets by following the strict and rigid format that they have been following for a long time: the sonnet format, etc. I think poets should be more innovative rather than to just keep following the same format over and over again.

Modernism

It looks as if modernism focuses more on the modern era such as looking at things from a more realistic point of view compared to the previous movements. Romanticism was really impractical compared to other movements. It focused on things such as impulse, but who really would operate on impulse? I think, sorry to be blunt, but I think the other movements were stupid. If a person really would exist outside in the woods with some superhero bayonet and a machete that had the heart of a child and went out to slay sabertooth tigers, that's just unrealistic. Thank god for the modernists. They brought humanity back to the realm of dignity and gave us art that made us look at our modernization in a totally different way. I think this is great. I love modernism.