Question

Give an account of High Modernism in either English or American poetry. How were the High Modernists different from the Post Modernist poets?

Answer 1

"Modernism" is that idea that human's are really great and smart and we are just getting greater and smarter. Humans have created Technology and Science which will allow is to do nearly anything and know nearly everything. We have tonnes of potential. Our minds are able to fit everything in to structures that make sense and figure everything out.
Modernism is a general term for the movement encompassing art, literature, architecture, music, etc. starting around 1850 and lasting for about a century. It's very vague, and there's a lot of debate about who might or might not be modernist. Is Henrik Ibsen modernist? How about Samuel Beckett? No one really knows. They both have modernist tendencies. "High Modernism" is considered the full expression of the modernist movement, and is generally limited to those artists and authors whose work is unambigiously modernist. People like Piet Mondrian, James Joyce, Arnold Schönberg, etc. You could say that many modernists cultivated the notion of an artistic-literary priesthood, which was opposed to the dominant culture, intent on forming some kind of formal and conceptual revolution. High modernism is pretty much that idea; a new priesthood. It's a little like the difference between high and low churches.

Hart Crane's impact on the modernist movement and on American culture is difficult to interpret. He certainly helped to legitimize homosexuality within the modernist avant-garde (he was not alone in this). I think that his most important achievement is as a counterpoint to T.S. Elliot; without Hart Crane, Elliot's "The Wasteland" would be the uncontested poetic narrative of the modernist movement. Crane's epic, "The Bridge," is enormously important, in that it offers a different perspective on the same cultural moment. Hart Crane's vision is ultimately richer than Elliot's, I think, but also more difficult.