A century ago the early Modernists, in their mania for the experimental, pushed all the boundaries of poetry.
The traditional verse forms of 19th century poetry were abandoned for a century of free verse. The nostalgic poetry of the Edwardians (Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?) gave way to a poetry of hard edges in the aftermath of the First World War. And not least, Modernist writers learned the discipline of concision and the power of the unsaid.
Concision
It’s a principle of good writing as old as writing itself: Say what you have to say in the fewest words possible. You can comb Homer’s epics for needless words and come up empty. And the insistence on economy of language can be heard in any writer’s workshop today: You don’t need that adjective, it’s redundant!
Ezra Pound upgraded concision to a major tenet of Modernism.
In the same vein Pound admonished writers “to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.”
And Pound followed his own dictum. Starting from a draft of 32 lines, “In a Station of the Metro” was distilled down to a poem of two lines and 14 words:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet black bough.
It was published in the April 1913 issue of Poetry magazine and became the defining poem of the Imagist movement.
The Power of the Unsaid
But Modernist writers did not always stop there. Some went beyond brevity — beyond clarity, precision and economy of language — to withhold critical information the reader needed to fully understand what was going on in the story, to say not enough on purpose.
Hemingway believed that when an author truly knows his subject, he can leave much unsaid in the story. He called this his “Theory of Omission” or his “Iceberg Theory”:
Time and again in his short stories and novels Hemingway uses omission to create a sense of incompletion that engages readers and holds their attention with the sustained irresolution. In his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, the war wound that renders Jake Barnes impotent is unstated but ever-present. In his short story Hills Like White Elephants the word “abortion” never appears even though that is the story’s sole subject.
Although Modernism did not lack for salty admonitions from its colorful apostles on how to write, it was not a tightly codified system of rules or principles such as the French Academy might have recognized. It was more like an eruption of underground energy. The new poetry demanded more of readers, or a new kind of reader. Modernism succeeded because it drew its energy from, and gave expression to, the new — and darker — realities of the 20th century.