Tag: essays

Emotion in Disguise: What Modernist Poetry Really Feels

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ESSAY – JAVA & VERSE

How Teaching, Trauma, and Innovation Keep Modernism Alive Today

When I lectured on poetry, I always felt that the material used wasn’t keeping pace with the times. Poetry has evolved—radically, beautifully—but the way we teach it? Not so much.

The curriculum often clings to rigid categories, ignoring the electric shift in voice, form, and identity that defines our current generation of poets. Modernism, in particular, gets framed as cold and impenetrable, when in truth, it’s full of feeling—just coded, fragmented, and refracted through the chaos of its age. This essay is my attempt to reframe that lens, to show that even when modernist poets claimed to escape emotion, they were actually inventing new ways to express it.

Modernism in Poetry: Emotion in Disguise

Once upon a time, poetry was in love with itself. It rhymed, it sighed, it danced through rose gardens under the moonlight.

Then came Modernism, and poetry had a breakdown. Or maybe a breakthrough. Either way, it stopped pretending everything made sense.

Modernist poetry emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a fiery rejection of Victorian sentimentality and Romantic melodrama. The old poetic order collapsed under the weight of war, industrial chaos, and deep existential dread. Modernist poets didn’t just shift gears—they set fire to the vehicle and walked away from the wreckage.

World War I turned landscapes into graveyards and ideals into ruins. Suddenly, poetry couldn’t afford to be polite. The genteel, pastoral verses of the past felt dishonest in a world haunted by gas masks, shellshock, and trench mud. Poets had to find a new language for a new kind of grief—and modernism answered the call.

Their rallying cry? Make it new. But that didn’t mean shinier or simpler. It meant fragmented, disjointed, allusive, ambiguous, and unapologetically difficult. It meant challenging readers to confront reality as it was: broken, unstable, and brutally honest.

Emotion in the Age of Irony

T.S. Eliot, one of modernism’s high priests, famously argued for poetic “impersonality”—an escape from emotion rather than an outpouring of it. In essays like “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” he promoted a poetry that transformed feelings into universal truths through rigorous craft.

But let’s be honest: Eliot’s work is emotionally loaded. The Waste Land practically sweats anxiety, loss, and spiritual exhaustion. It’s just wearing a very intellectual trench coat. Consider the lines:

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

That’s not emotionless—that’s terror, disillusionment, and existential dread, crystallized in a single line.

Modernist poets didn’t stop feeling. They just stopped making it obvious.

Emotion didn’t leave the building; it ducked behind fragmented syntax, layered allusions, and shifting perspectives. If Romantic poets sobbed openly, Modernists cried in code. Virginia Woolf said it best: “On or about December 1910, human character changed.” The form had to follow.

The Poet’s New Job Description

So, is the poet still supposed to express their feelings?

Yes—but not necessarily in the way previous generations understood it. The modernist poet became less of a lyrical confessor and more of a curator of chaos, a mapmaker of mental and social disintegration.

They still responded to the world—they just didn’t trust language to carry raw emotion without distortion. The job wasn’t to simply say, “I feel,” but to build structures that evoke feeling in the reader through complexity.

Take Ezra Pound’s imagism, for example. The emotions are there, but compressed into precise images—a few words with the density of granite. In “In a Station of the Metro,” he writes:

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.”

In just 14 words, he delivers a fleeting, haunted image of urban life—emotion without explanation.

Or H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), whose poetry strips myth to its emotional core, blending trauma and transcendence through crystal-cut language. Her poem “Oread” demands:

“Whirl up, sea— / Whirl your pointed pines, / Splash your great pines / On our rocks.”

The natural world becomes charged with urgency and erotic force. It’s minimalist, but the emotion crackles.

Enter the Outsiders: Ethnic Voices Redefine the Game

Jean Toomer, author of Cane, masterfully blended poetic and narrative modes to explore race, memory, and identity in modernist form. His lines from the vignette “November Cotton Flower” are both lyrical and piercing:

“But cotton flowers bloomed as the snow fell. / The same thing happened every year, but / It was just as strange to him now as then.”

Toomer’s work drifts between prose and poetry, reality and myth, reflecting the fragmented self of the early 20th-century Black experience.

Another haunting moment comes from the poem “Georgia Dusk,” where Toomer captures the tension between cultural memory and modern displacement:

“A feast of moon and men and barking hounds, / An orgy for some genius of the South / With blood-hot eyes and chicken-lust and Dixie / Moonlight…”

This excerpt seethes with layered imagery—ritual, violence, beauty, and longing—all compressed into a snapshot of Southern Black life distorted by history and myth.

Nella Larsen, and others grappled with identity, dual consciousness, and racial experience using all the modernist tools—fragmentation, symbolism, free indirect discourse.

  • Asian American poets like Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartmann merged Eastern poetic tradition with Western modernist aesthetics, expressing alienation and cultural negotiation in radically new forms. Hartmann’s haiku and Noguchi’s lyrical innovations brought introspective nuance to the movement.
  • Latin American writers associated with Modernismo, like Rubén Darío and José Martí, were remixing lyricism and experiment before Anglo-American poets caught up. Darío’s poetic voice declared a rebellion against colonial linguistic norms while experimenting with form:

“Youth, divine treasure, / you go and will not return.”

These voices challenged the notion that modernism was an elite, Eurocentric experiment. They showed that fragmented identities, complex cultural legacies, and emotional nuance weren’t just compatible with modernism—they were its heart.

Why It Still Matters

Today’s poets are still echoing the modernist ethos—whether consciously or not. Ocean Vuong’s fragmented lyricism, Claudia Rankine’s hybrid forms, and Terrance Hayes’ formal innovation all carry the spirit of modernism into the 21st century. These writers play with structure, voice, and silence in ways that resonate deeply with modernist experimentation. Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is, in many ways, a modernist epic disguised as memoir, laced with dislocation and myth. Rankine’s Citizen fuses poetry, essay, and visual art—alienating and urgent. Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin reshapes a traditional form into something eerily postmodern, yet deeply modernist in its emotional restraint and coded rage.

As a teacher, I believe reintroducing modernism through this living lineage is essential. If we teach it not as a dusty archive, but as an ongoing conversation—a set of tools that today’s poets still use, twist, and question—it becomes something vibrant. Something urgent. Something real.

Modernism isn’t over. It’s evolved. It continues to whisper—sometimes scream—through the voices of today’s poets, who dismantle and reconstruct identity, form, and meaning with every line they write. That’s not just exciting—it’s a necessary response to our own disjointed world.

So read it. Re-read it. Struggle with it. That’s part of the experience—because poetry, like life, doesn’t hand you answers. It demands your attention, your resilience, your curiosity. It mirrors the way we stumble through grief, joy, contradiction, and complexity. In an age of tweets and filters, poetry—and especially modernist poetry—reminds us how to sit with ambiguity. As Eliot might say, it is the “still point of the turning world”—poetry that stands still while everything else falls apart.

In a world still wrestling with identity crises, global conflict, cultural hybridity, and the failure of institutions, modernist poetry remains weirdly relevant. Its refusal to pretend, its hunger for new forms, and its emotionally guarded yet powerfully resonant core—what we might call “coded vulnerability”—offer something today’s overly curated emotional expressions can’t: authentic complexity.

Dante in Combat Boots: My Journey Through the Divine Comedy

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ESSAY – RANDOM THOUGHTS

The First Encounter – Lost in the Woods (and the Footnotes)

The first time I read The Divine Comedy was sparked by an argument—an intellectual back-and-forth with someone who, as it turned out, didn’t know much about the book. But he was passionate. His conviction was hypnotic. I didn’t buy his analysis, but I understood why he was obsessed.

I picked up the book out of curiosity and a little competitive pride. I didn’t finish it. We got called out on a mission, and you don’t take library books on missions. Fines are one thing—charred pages are another.

Still, even unfinished, it stuck with me. Something about Dante’s voice—strange, serious, deliberate—lingered.

That first attempt, though brief, planted a seed. When I returned to it later, I had more patience, a better dictionary, and no librarian breathing down my neck.

Even then, Inferno was dense. Layers of references. Historical names I barely recognized. Theology deep enough to drown in. I was flipping between footnotes and old library texts like I was defusing a bomb. The nine circles of Hell were vivid, yes—but they felt more like a museum exhibit than a lived experience. I was watching Dante, not walking with him.

It felt like homework. Necessary, maybe. But distant.

Still, something about the structure—the cold logic behind every punishment—got under my skin. Sin wasn’t just bad behavior. It had a shape. A weight. I didn’t have the words for it then, but the idea that justice wasn’t arbitrary began to settle in.

I didn’t love the poem yet. But I was starting to hear it.

Warzones and Infernos – Dante in Combat Boots

When I returned to The Divine Comedy after combat, it hit differently. Dante wasn’t just a poet anymore—he sounded like someone I knew. Maybe even like me.

Inferno started to make more sense. Hell wasn’t about fire and demons—it was about clarity. Brutal, stripped-down moral logic. A world where actions had consequences that couldn’t be bargained with.

In combat, you live in that gray zone between judgment and survival. Right and wrong don’t show up in clean lines. Sometimes you do the right thing, and it haunts you. Sometimes, it felt like there was no God—at least not the one we heard about in Sunday school. We believed in the integrity of what we were doing. We questioned it, sure. But our resolve stayed intact. Sometimes, surviving was all you could do. And that didn’t always feel like redemption.

Dante’s Hell isn’t just punishment—it’s paralysis. People stuck in their choices, their pride, their rage. No growth. No movement. Just a reflection in the worst kind of mirror.

That rang true.

Some turned to a higher power for guidance. We knew—we were fighting for God. But we also knew the limits. We were required to do what was asked of us—but no more. We fought for God. And we had to answer to Him too.

Not just for the people we encountered. Sometimes for what we became.

Purgatorio – The Long Climb Back

Purgatorio doesn’t get the same attention as Inferno. It’s not as dramatic. No fire. No famous sinners frozen in ice. But it’s the part that felt most real to me.

Because after war, after any real descent, what follows isn’t glory—it’s work. Quiet, repetitive, soul-grinding work. That’s Purgatorio.

Dante climbs a mountain, terrace by terrace, confronting the seven deadly sins. Each level is a mirror—less about judgment, more about recognition. It’s not punishment anymore. It’s penance. The difference matters.

After combat, reintegration isn’t just about coming home. It’s about stripping away the armor you lived in. Unpacking things you didn’t have the luxury to process while they were happening—and you don’t have the luxury to process them now. You’re thrust back into your life like nothing happened. You lie to the ones you love to keep them safe, to spare them from the world you know exists but no one is talking about. You keep that secret.

You make a valid attempt to let go of habits that kept you alive but will not help you live. It’s exhausting.

That’s why Purgatorio hit me so hard. I didn’t expect it to. But there’s something deeply honest in the idea that healing doesn’t feel holy. It feels like discipline. Like carrying your own burden up the hill with no end in sight. Some days, you move a little higher. Some days, you just don’t slip backward.

There’s no audience. No headline. Just effort.

And yet—it’s hopeful. The whole mountain is built on the assumption that you can be made whole. That ascent is possible. Redemption is a process, not a prize.

Paradiso – The Light We Try to Name

Paradiso is the hardest part.

Not just to read—but to believe in. It’s abstract, layered with theology and geometry, full of light and music and spheres. Dante is trying to describe the indescribable. He’s chasing God through language; the closer he gets, the less the words hold.

For a long time, I didn’t connect to this part. It felt like too much, too far, too clean.

But after Purgatorio, after the work of climbing, carrying, and unlearning, I started to understand what Paradiso was reaching for—not perfection, not purity, but peace.

And peace—real peace—is foreign when you’ve lived inside chaos. It’s not some cinematic moment of triumph. It’s quieter. It’s the ability to be still, without needing to be numb. It’s presence, not performance. It’s the moment you stop bracing for the next thing to go wrong.

Dante meets Beatrice here—his guide into the divine, his symbol of grace. We all have our Beatrices, if we’re lucky. People who held the line for us when we couldn’t. People who reminded us we weren’t lost forever.

Am I worthy of this grace? Will God forgive me for what I’ve done? I find myself waiting—searching—for that one thing that could wipe away all the havoc of my making. Is that a thing? You know the scales will have an answer.

In the background of all this light, I still imagine the scales. The old ones—Egyptian, Christian, Islamic. The image of your life being weighed. Every choice, every silence. Your hands held out, waiting to see which way it tips.

We fought for God. We made peace with that. But we also knew we’d stand in front of Him one day. And maybe that’s what Paradiso is really about—not escaping judgment, but understanding it. Accepting it. Trusting that there’s a kind of justice that doesn’t crush you, but completes you.

I don’t claim to understand everything Dante saw in Heaven. But I understand the desire to see it.

And that’s something.

Full Circle – Still Listening

I’ve read The Divine Comedy more than once now. Not in a straight line, not as a scholar, but as someone who’s lived with it—left it, returned to it, wrestled with it. And the strange thing is, it keeps changing. Or maybe I do.

What started as a challenge—half a debate, half an ego trip—turned into a mirror. Dante’s journey through Hell, up the mountain, into the light, isn’t just theology or poetry. It’s a blueprint. A map of what it means to go through something, to come back from something, and to wonder if you’re still whole on the other side.

I never read it looking for answers. Not really. But I keep coming back to it for the questions.

Am I worthy of grace? Is peace possible? Can the scales ever truly balance?

I don’t know.

But I’m still listening.

And that’s something too.

Author’s Note:
This was written as a result of a post by alexander87writer. I was going to leave a comment, and just kept writing. My two sentences became this. I’m so extra at times.

The Day I Lost My Courage

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SHORT ESSAY – REFLECTION

I never dreamed I had what it took to become a writer. It was more than the usual self-doubt, more like an evaluation of my skills. My mastery of the language was smattering at best. Writing for myself was the only way to feel the joy I desperately desired. My sketches were rudimentary, but I still enjoyed the process occasionally. However, writing is the thing that gets my motor running, as they say. Even after becoming a widower, I kept writing; I began my first novel within the first month. Over the next three years, I took loss after loss. Though wretched like a tsunami with no quarter, I continued to write.

Despite all this tragedy, I created a poetry show and taught workshops about writing poetry. In many ways, my writing career had begun to take off. Then one day, I felt a little off. It felt different than previous experiences of this sort, so I went to the doctor. I was fully prepared to be told I was suffering from several underlining symptoms of my PTSD. It’s peculiar how once you have a diagnosis of something, it becomes the cause of EVERYTHING that ails you. However, today was different; the physician stated

“although unlikely, but it is probable.”

Really, bro? This is how you’re going to start things off? I screamed in my head but gave a tempered response, “I see; when will the test results return?”

A couple days later, I got the news. A confirmation of something I already knew to be true. The doctor had a lot to say, but the only thing I heard was

~You have Cancer~

He was still talking. Still, I heard nothing. Then, my once-decent vocabulary was reduced to one-syllable words.

“Well damn!”

“Fuck!”

“Okay, Okay”

“Fuck!”

The doctor finally stopped talking and ended the call. There was a numbness that took hold, and I can’t quite remember feeling much after that. It seemed as if this feeling was my permanent state for the next couple of years. Even through everything, I was just numb. I befriended people I would never have and shared things usually kept private.

It was as if I didn’t recognize myself. It was me talking to these strangers and sharing these private things. Something was wrong. It wasn’t just me, for I share the wisdom of their secrets in the lines I write. As if it is my duty or something I can’t quite name or describe, to share what is learned in the space between clarity and confusion.

Even now, years later, I can’t tell what I’ve learned. Perhaps, as I write these lines and others like them, lessons will become clear. It took me years to talk about my experience, years to write, and years to share.

I could talk about this experience forever; perhaps I will share more one day. However, for now, I’ll share my feelings about the news that day. Tell you how it stripped away my courage. Slowly tearing away the essence of my existence. I barely wrote a word after that. Somehow, I felt I’d had this coming. I deserved this fate.

Somedays, I hear the echoes of the haunting memories of that man. I’d love to say I’ve shed its torment and walked around free. That wouldn’t be honest. It took me years to regain my courage. With a bit of luck, I can maintain it. We all know luck is all a person needs if their courage holds.

~thank you for reading~