Stephen Spender
THE MODERN AS VISION OF A
WHOLE SITUATION
The confrontation of the past with the present seems to me
the fundamental aim of modernism. The reason why it became so
important was that, in the early stages of the movement, the moderns
wished to express the
whole
experience of modern life.
The feeling that the modern world, even if its values are frag–
mented, nevertheless shares a fate that in being modern is whole,
is important. It results doubtless from contrasting the past as variety
of traditions and the present as the single irremediable event which
is progress. The present is looked upon as a fatal knowledge that has
overtaken the whole of civilization and has broken the line of tradition
with the past. This situation can therefore only be apprehended as a
whole, as tragedy or overwhelming disaster, unless indeed it can be
viewed optimistically.
If
the concept of wholeness is abandoned then at once work
becomes fragmentary, the parts cut off from the whole. This is the
characteristic of futurism that it separates the future finally from the
past. It is also the characteristic of the reaction against modernism,
which accepts the idea that there can only be "minor" fragmented
art. Thus today when certain poets and critics say that they can only
aim at elegance and correctness of form, they reveal that they have
accepted the idea of writing within a fragmentary part of the frag–
mented situation, instead of trying to comprehend the situation itself
in a single vision that restores wholeness to the fragmentation, even
by realizing it as disaster.
Of course, a reaction against the modern movement was in–
evitable, and there is no argument that it should have continued
