Shared Modernities: Transatlantic Dialogues in Poetry and Literary Aesthetics

Abstract

This paper explores the idea of “shared modernities” by examining how transatlantic exchanges between Europe and the United States shaped modernist poetry and literary aesthetics in the early twentieth century. Rather than viewing modernism as a set of isolated national movements, the study positions it as a dynamic dialogue across the Atlantic, where poets, ideas, and forms circulated and cross-pollinated. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound illustrate Anglo-American collaboration, with Pound’s imagist discipline and Eliot’s mythic method drawing equally on European symbolism and American innovation. W.B. Yeats’s blending of Irish cultural nationalism with modernist experimentation resonates with Langston Hughes’s Harlem Renaissance poetry, which negotiated race, modernity, and internationalism. Meanwhile, Wallace Stevens’s philosophical verse reflects both American pragmatism and affinities with European aesthetic traditions. Movements such as Imagism, Symbolism, and the Harlem Renaissance are treated not as discrete phenomena but as interconnected currents that challenged conventional form through free verse, fragmentation, and new mythologies. By focusing on both continuities and tensions—cosmopolitan vs. national voices, tradition vs. innovation, individual vs. collective identity—the paper demonstrates that modernism was neither purely European nor American but a shared transatlantic phenomenon. Ultimately, this comparative approach highlights literature as a global conversation where modernist aesthetics emerged through exchange, borrowing, and creative transformation, producing a poetic modernity that was at once local, national, and transnational.