Contemporary British and American Poetry
             Postmodernism is hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of areas of study including art, music, film, literature, communications, fashion and technology. Postmodernism followed modernism, which is the movement in visual arts, music, literature, and drama which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made, consumed, and what it should mean. In the period of "high modernism," from around 1910 to 1930 the major figures in modernism literature helped radically to redefine what poetry and fiction could be and do; figures like T. S. Eliot, Pound, Kafka, and Stevens are considered the founders of twentieth century modernism.
             Postmodernism, like modernism follows most of the same ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing imitation, parody, irony, and playfulness. Postmodernism art and thought favor reflectivity and self – consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity, ambiguity, simultaneity, and emphasis on the destructured dehumanized subject.
             While postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history an example of this being T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" which presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning, which have been lost in most of modern life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism in contrast doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation or incoherence but rather celebrates that. Three American postmodern poets who demonstrate this celebration of fragmentation and dehuminzation are Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, a...