This document discusses how modernist writers addressed familiarity and foreignness through language. It analyzes T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and poems by Ezra Pound, T.E. Hulme, Richard Aldington, and F.S. Flint. The language of modernism both rejects and incorporates tradition, using minimalism, multiple languages, and allusions alongside stripped-back imagery. Eliot combines the familiar, like spring imagery, with the foreign, like interwoven German. This creates a sense of displacement. The poems explore creating fresh perspectives through brevity and focus on presentation over association. The analysis suggests Eliot's language draws on both familiar tradition and a foreign modern sensibility.

1. ‘His language, so familiar and so foreign…’ (James Joyce). How does
modernist language address familiarity and/or foreignness, and to what
ends?
The language of modernism addresses itself as both foreign and familiar: ‘Modernist poetry involves
recuperations of history ​and​ Futurist and Dada abandonments of tradition; arcane ​and​ demotic
registers of language; elitist ​and​ populist forms of literature ’, both the Imagist poetry explored in1
this essay along with Eliot’s ​The Waste Land​ can be read as familiar and foreign as the language is
set in it’s own modernity. The language on show in the poetry, if one is to look at Pound’s
‘Imagisme’, is concerned with presentation. Pound outlines in ‘A Few Don’t by an Imagiste’ that ‘An
“Image” is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’, and that
‘It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works ’, so we can see2
that following Pound’s words that the writers of Imagism, and Eliot following them, create
intellectual snapshots; the better to do with something succinct and powerful than overly long and
drab. This all touches on minimalism, these writers are creating more with less, and less, and less.
Modernist language sees to be entirely foreign in that it’s writers are writing as a movement instead
of writing from the heart as a Romantic would; the language of modernism is similar to that of the
artistic movements of the time, these writers are an artistic movement.
‘Above the Dock’ by T. E. Hulme compares a simple child’s balloon to the moon. It is this
simplicity that is foreign because it is so stripped back and focused. It is when we look at ‘Autumn’
by Hulme and at the sight of the moon, at this sight of beauty, the narrator ‘but nodded/And round
about were the wistful stars/With white faces like town children. ’ that we are faced with familiar3
1
​Davis, Alex and Lee M. Jenkins ​ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry.​ Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007. pg. 1
2
​Pound, Ezra, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’
3
​Hulme, T.E. ‘Autumn’ ​in, Jones, Peter, ​ed.​ ​Imagist Poetry,​ London: Penguin, Penguin Classics, 2001

2. imagery, yet the simplicity is foreign and recurring. But we are not told about the moon in a way that
Wordsworth would have penned the moon as a great female love, and the children as the blossom
of the love that he might share with this woman, instead Hulme acknowledges the moon and lives
under it: on this, Rebecca Beasley says:
Hulme departs from the traditional treatments of the subject[...]Hulme’s interest is not in the
associations the moon has for us, the moon as an ‘abstract counter’ that means beauty or
love. Instead Hulme wants us to see the moon itself as if for the first time.4
The brevity of the poem creates a fresh image in the reader’s mind. The rejection of the traditional,
the familiar, has been treated in a new and modern way. In seeing the image of the moon and
presenting it in such a way, Hulme creates a foreign atmosphere for the reader; they know what it is,
but it wasn’t what they were expecting and Eliot does this in ​The Waste Land​ as well. Eliot presents
us with spring, but he turns it in the famous opening lines, ‘April is the cruellest month,
breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring
rain ’ and we become alien in our own sense and place of the self within nature. Eliot seems to reject5
the idea in viewing spring with fresh eyes, because he is right, lilacs will come out of the dead
(winter) land, but one would never typically see the season of birth in such a light. The interwoven
trails of German throughout ‘The Burial of the Dead’ are familiar with the narrator, the language is a
part of them, yet it is foreign to the reader. Gareth Reeves says, ‘to translate[...]is to make oneself
deaf to its foreignness, to the fact that if this is the voice of one of the displace, then it must go on
sounding displaced. ’ and this works when applied to translating all the snippets of language that are6
not English. To translate is to lose a sense of waste in the waste land, the reader falls to the power of
4
​Beasley, Rebecca ​Theorists of Modernist Poetry. New York: Routledge, 2007 pg. 37
5
​Rainey, Lawrence, ​ed. ​The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, Yale, Yale University Press, 2006. pg.
57.
6
​Reeves, Gareth. ​T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. pg. 37

3. the foreign. By incorporating multiple languages in ​The Waste Land, Eliot presents the foreign in
amongst the familiar, (images of Spring etc), but because of the language he is also able to create a
sense of displacement.
The figure of woman is strong in the second ‘act’ of ​The Waste Land, ‘A Game of Chess’.
The structure of the poem being in ‘acts’ can be drawn back to Eliot’s interest in the British
music-hall where the acts were ‘announced orally or by placards allowing the audience to read ’. This7
focus on the British music-hall is key in Eliot using the familiar to front his foreign modernist
language. His liking for the key muisc-hall figure Marie Lloyd ran to writing her obituary in ​The Dial
calling out to be one of the greatest music-hall artists, and it’s this reverence that allows Marie Lloyd
to be ‘as present in Eliot’s bones as Virgil, Dante, or Shakespeare ’. ‘A Game of Chess’ sees Eliot8
take this female figure similar to that from Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’ but combines her with
Cleopatra, ‘The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne ’ and the myth of Philomela on line9
one-hundred. These women are foreign and familiar as they are far away, yet they are well known
literary figures. The language is rich in this passage with mentions of ‘marble’ and ‘fruited vines’,
‘The glitter of her jewels’ and ‘satin cases poured in rich profusion;/In vials of ivory and coloured10
glass/Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,/Unguent, powdered, or
liquid—troubled, confused’ , and that latter passage with the perfumes, possibly alluding to the rise11
of synthetic perfumes such as Chanel No.5, is a woman in her seductive parlour. Aldington captures
a woman in a completely different way, a way that isn’t alluding constantly to classical literature, or
even contemporary figures. Instead Aldington creates a snapshot of ‘She’, ‘She has new leaves/After
7
​Sanders, Charles ‘​"The Waste Land:" The Last Minstrel Show?’, ​Journal of Modern Literature, 8 (1), 1980, pg. 30.
8
​Sanders, Charles, ‘The Last Minstrel Show’, pg. 25.
9
​Rainey, Lawrence, ​ed. ​The Annotated Waste Land , pg 59.
10
​ibid
11
​Rainey, Lawrence, ​ed. ​The Annotated Waste Land , pg 60

4. her dead flowers,/Like the little almond tree/Which the frost hurt.’ The reader would not expect12
this as it is far from any sense of Romanticism or even the comfort of the familiar that I have shown
Eliot create in his passage. This woman has been instead embedded in nature, and in that she has
rebirthed herself after her trauma like the ‘frost hurt’. Imagism yet again provides something new
and unthought of, the creative is striving to be different, to really press on that foreign over familiar,
whereas Eliot with his familiar via the foreign sees to, and in Eliot’s own words on Joyce’s ​Ulysses,
‘In using myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ ,13
Eliot therefore cannot clearly address either the familiar or the foreign because he is always looking
backwards to go forwards.
An Imagist poem that puts together a sense of nature and love, but balances the language of
the foreign and familiar is Flint’s ‘November’. One could say that ‘November’ is, as Hulme says of
modern poetry in his Lecture on Modern Poetry, it is a poem that is ‘definitely and finally
introspective’ ; this quote from Hulme is key to looking at the language of the time. Reading14
‘November’ is almost not like reading a poem in the traditional way where the senses are touched,
the reader instead is only touched by sight. Flint gives us a flickering glimmer of images and it
becomes very filmic. ‘November’ is a poem to be looked at with the focus of the first stanza being
‘eyes’. From there we get ‘You were among the apple branches; the sun shone, and it was
November.’ and then we get ‘Sun and apples and laughter/and love/’ finished with ‘And the birds
were singing’ , Flint sees this person in the world around him creating them an eternal being.15
Despite being in ‘November’, a month familiar to the end of autumn where winter is starting to
12
​Aldington, Richard, ‘New Love’, ​in, Jones, Peter, ​ed. ​Imagist Poetry, pg. 53.
13
​Eliot, T. S. ‘“Ulysses”, Order, And Myth’
14
​Hulme, T. E. ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’
15
​Flint, F. S. ‘November’, ​Imagist Poetry, pg 76.

5. happen, there are no signs of decay or of fading, this is visually bright and it ‘resembles sculpture
rather than music; it appeals to the eye rather than to the ear. It has to mould images, a kind of
spiritual clay, into definite shapes.’ ​The Waste Land can be argued as sculpture that is constantly16
re-moulding it’s clay into individual definite shapes. However these definite shapes aren’t in the way
of the new forms of imagism, these shapes are taking this new form of the foreign and are
transmuted by Eliot’s historical sense as his work is ‘characterized by a remarkably close and
self-conscious engagement with writing by others’, so going by this quote from Beasley, one must
think that Eliot’s language can only be familiar.17
A definite shape to the reader of ​The Waste Land is the refrain of ‘HURRY UP PLEASE
ITS TIME’ in the latter end of ‘A Game of Chess’, this figure of the bartender closing the pub is a
musical lilt of the lower class juxtaposed after the high-class of the opening to ‘A Game of Chess’ of
which we discussed earlier. This refrain is far from Eliot’s classical tendencies, but it is more key in
exploring the language of the familiar/foreign because it is so prominent in it’s bold type-face and
drilling repetition calling an end to the night-life section of ​The Waste Land; but Eliot’s inclusion of
this highlights introspection. We go back to the familiar of the music-hall here, Eliot in this refrain,
and in the bursts of song scattered throughout the play like that of ‘O O O O that Shakespeherian
Rag—’ and we see that ‘Eliot utilizes this Joycean double focus to suggest the capacity for the18
mythic to inform and invigorate the contemporary situation, a realization that is achieved in the
poem through the delicate balancing of legendary, literary, and popular aspects of culture.’ . It is19
here where we recognise that Eliot’s language will always be familiar because he incorporates culture
16
​Hulme, T. E. ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’
17
​Beasley, Rebecca ​Theorists of Modernist Poetry, pg. 64.
18
​The Annotated Waste Land , pg 61
19
​Worthen, WIlliam B., ‘Eliot’s Ulysses’, ​Twentieth Century Literature, 27 (2), 1981, pp 174-75

6. so much that ​The Waste ​Land becomes an anthology, yet it is Eliot’s culture so it will always stay
foreign to outsiders. It is in the making of this personal and introspective where the language of
modernism fights the border of familiar/foreign. However, Eliot is more forcefully contemporary
than the Imagists, one can take Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ as the perfect portrait of
modernity as it is what he saw, it is the reaction and it is the after image to the viewing of modern
life, it is the mind’s reflection on the present, yet Eliot is the conscious writer, Eliot in ​The Waste
Land uses song to be that familiar, because what is more modern than being contemporary?
Looking at ‘In a Station of the Metro’ though, we can ask, “why a ‘wet, black bough’ ?”. Can we20
read it in the twenty-first century and see that Pound pre-dated the post-war mindset of ‘the
disintegration of civilization in the modern world’ ? Pound’s language address the situation that he21
was in, he creates a sculpture based on it, he creates a visual representation of society and if we can
acknowledge that, if we can leave with the imprint of the after image on our minds, then Pound’s
language is familiar because we can see what it is, we can know.
The language of modernism is simultaneously foreign and familiar. It is both because the
language relies on personal experience and knowledge. If one is as ‘well read’ as Eliot then one will
be able to explain ​The Waste Land and it’s mythic narrative, if one is a contemporary of Eliot then
one will be able to understand the musical riffs throughout the poem, and if one is familiar with the
artistic movements of the early twentieth century such as Cubism and Dada, then understanding and
knowing how to approach the language of Imagism should come easier than that of the individual
who is only familiar with the language of say the Romantics. In doing this, the language of
modernism does as Hulme says it must, ‘the shell must be broken’ , and it is in us as the reader to22
20
Pound, Ezra,​ ​‘In a Station of the Metro’ ​in, Imagist Poetry, pg 95
21
​Beasley, Rebecca ​Theorists of Modernist Poetry, pg. 80
22
​Hulme, T. E. ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’

7. decide how we feel about the broken shell, whether we are familiar or foreign to it and that is why
‘his language’ is ‘so foreign’, is ‘so familiar’.
WORD COUNT: 2489

8. Bibliography
Beasley, Rebecca ​Theorists of Modernist Poetry. New York: Routledge, 2007
Cauthen, Jr. I. B. ‘Another Webster Allusion in The Waste Land’, ​Modern Language Notes, 73 (7),
1958, pp. 498-499 [Accessed Online] Available from: ​http://www.jstor.org/stable/3043020
Davis, Alex and Lee M. Jenkins ​ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Eliot, T. S. ‘“Ulysses”, Order, And Myth’ [Accessed Online] Available from:
http://people.virginia.edu/~jdk3t/eliotulysses.htm
Hulme, T. E. ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ [Accessed Online] Available from:
https://www.uni-due.de/lyriktheorie/texte/1908_hulme.html
Jones, Peter, ​ed. ​Imagist Poetry, London: Penguin, Penguin Classics, 2001
Pound, Ezra, ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’ [Accessed Online] Available from:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/335
Rainey, Lawrence, ​ed. ​The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, Yale, Yale
University Press, 2006.
Reeves, Gareth. ​T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
Sanders, Charles ‘​"The Waste Land:" The Last Minstrel Show?’, ​Journal of Modern Literature, 8 (1),
1980, pp. 23-38 [Accessed Online] Available from: ​http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831308
Worthen, WIlliam B., ‘Eliot’s Ulysses’, ​Twentieth Century Literature, 27 (2), 1981, pp. 166-177
[Accessed Online] Available from: ​http://www.jstor.org/stable/441137