Significance Between High and Low Brow Modernism

The idea of aesthetics and literary form, in a modernist frame of criticism, usually refers to the commonly employed methods of fragmentation, prose poetry, and the intentional blurring of the lines between what is read as a short story and what is read as poetic verse. One obvious example would be T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland; a poem traditionally viewed as a holistically modernist innovation to the prototypical poetic paradigms of the time. However, there is an important, distinct divide between Eliot's kind of modernism - which sought to showcase and give praise to the author's educational background - and what other modernist writers of his era sought to interpret modernism as; such as Steinbeck, who wrote what we now call "middle" or "low brow" modernism. 

This difference in high and low modernism constitutes not only a change in the voice of the text, but an inevitable metamorphosis on the page in terms of line length, line breaks, purposefully placed vernacular, and overall structure of any given modernist text. A great example of this would be to contrast The Wasteland against Linton Kwesi Johnson's "Inglan is a Bitch", a modernistic innovation we have come to call 'dub poetry'. Parallels can be drawn by simply examining each text against their author's social and economic environments, and the respective innovations therein; Eliot drew inspirations from the learned classical literature he was trained of, while Johnson instead drew guidance from the rich musical culture he in which was immersed.

Such a shift in literary form over the centuries of what scholars call the modernist movement is critical to what many writers today have implemented into their own writing voices. Authors like Joyce, Eliot, Auden, and others, paved the way for countless experimental moves taken not only by contemporary professionals, but by amateurs like myself and my classmates. Modernity shows its influence in many of the student's works who claim Hemingway or Fitzgerald as inspirations. I know that these are American writers, and not British, but if I've learned anything by taking the two survey classes in the same semester it's that modernism was shared between the British and Americans in a lot of ways. Overall, it's this change in literary form that obscures lines and brings new questions for the reader when interpreting a text - and it's all thanks to time, culture, and the non-stop human nature of evolving.