FInal Exam: The Individual and Society

Losing the Trees in the Forest

The individual is lost in an industrialized world.  Such is the cry of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.  Through their poetry, Pound, Eliot and Stevens show that, when society becomes highly industrialized and turns from nature, the individuals can easily get lost in the shuffle, and this outcome is not good for either the individual or the society in which he or she lives.

“In a Station of the Metro” illustrates Ezra Pound’s belief that individuals are easily lost in modern society.  In juxtaposing a crowd of people in a metro with the petals on a cherry blossom, he emphasizes the ephemeral nature of society’s outer veneer.  Their faces are an “apparition” (Pound), not entirely there.  The title of the poem divulges the setting of this crowd: it is packed into a station of the metro, one of the many advances made during the industrialization period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Not only is an industrialized society nothing but so much smoke and mirrors, but it makes the individuals living in such a society nothing but ghostly afterimages of themselves, and Pound illustrates that effect by describing only the “apparition of these faces” as opposed to the faces themselves (Pound).  In contrast, the white petals of a cherry blossom on the wet, black bark of their home bough are very concrete images.  In that respect, Pound shows that it is much better to live without industry, where people can be people, than it is to live in an industrialized society where people are no more than ghosts, or possibly worse (though Pound does not expound on such a possibility)—numbers.

Later, T. S. Eliot, in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” warns that society has created a hell for itself, and cannot survive long without change.  J. Alfred Prufrock himself will not change.  Instead, he asks questions, but does not “dare/Disturb the universe” (Eliot).  Prufrock does not act, only warns.  In addition, Prufrock’s finicky style and self-conscious food choices, such as wondering if he should “eat a peach” (Eliot), which would dribble over his shirt, show that society has tried to control too much.  Indeed, with industrialization has come things such as mustard gas, “The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes” (Eliot), which were the height of technology during the industrial revolution in the early twentieth century.  These technologies are seductive, “[sliding] along the street/Rubbing [their backs] upon the window-panes” (Eliot), and ultimately becoming tools with which humanity murders itself.  Unlike Pound’s poem, however, Eliot’s holds some hope, although if no action is taken soon, that hope will fade and die.  J. Alfred Prufrock is meant as a character whose behavior should warn society of the problems creeping upon it, and there is hope that society will not “drown” in its own humanity (Eliot).  Individuals in society wish to be left alone to their deep thoughts, but Ezra Pound, in the example he has made of J. Alfred Prufrock shows that this is a bad idea—people need to act, because with so much change in seductively dangerous directions, there is too much chance that there will not be a society for much longer.

Wallace Stevens, in his poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” seems to share Pound’s and Eliot’s idea that industrialism is unnatural, and that society would be the better for rejecting it.  The unnamed “she” in the poem creates her own reality, she is “the maker of the song she sang” (Stevens).  Reality does not exist until this unnamed protagonist interacts with the natural world, as it is “her voice that made/The sky acutest at its vanishing” (Stevens).  Stevens also laments that humanity has turned from nature and “Toward the town” (Stevens), and wonders to the fictional Ramon Fernandez why people “rage to order words of the sea” and create “ghostlier demarcations” of the real world in industry (Stevens), forcing people into crowds and away from the natural order of things.  This industrialization and crowding makes it more difficult for people to be the makers of their own songs—to be themselves.  Instead, they are forced to conform and to work inside in order to survive, isolated from nature.

The individual is not naturally sublimated, and according to Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, when unnatural technologies seduce individuals to give up their identity, society suffers.

Works Cited

Eliot, T. S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Anthology of American Literature. By George L. McMichael, J. S. Leonard, and Shelley Fisher. Fishkin. Tenth ed. Vol. II. Boston: Longman, 2011. 1359-1363. Print.

Pound, Ezra. "In a Station of the Metro." Anthology of American Literature. By George L. McMichael, J. S. Leonard, and Shelley Fisher. Fishkin. Tenth ed. Vol. II. Boston: Longman, 2011. 1353. Print.

Stevens, Wallace. "The Idea of Order at Key West." Anthology of American Literature. By George L. McMichael, J. S. Leonard, and Shelley Fisher. Fishkin. Tenth ed. Vol. II. Boston: Longman, 2011. 1448-449. Print.