Category: Other Modernist Figures

Oswald Spengler

by Annie Pfeifer Spengler’s Context and Milieu Oswald Spengler, the German historian and author of the seminal, two-volume work, Decline of the West or Der Untergang des Abendlandes, was born in 1880 to a conservative, petit bourgeois German family. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1904, after having initially failed his doctoral thesis on Heraclitus… Continue Reading Oswald Spengler

The Metropolis and Mental Life

by Matthew Wilsey Although Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” is a short work, its impact has been profound. Georg Simmel was born on March 1, 1858 in what is now the middle of downtown Berlin.[1] Simmel’s proximity to the metropolis was certainly consequential, as the effects of such an upbringing are reflected in… Continue Reading The Metropolis and Mental Life

Six Characters in Search of an Author

by Pericles Lewis When the lights come up on Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), the first thing the audience sees is a bare stage, with no scenery and only a few folding tables and chairs scattered about. A stage-hand is starting to build a set, but the stage manager interrupts… Continue Reading Six Characters in Search of an Author

The Renaissance

1 Reading Pater for his ideas is like reading Wordsworth for his philosophy; what ideas he does have he took from others who expressed them better.1 His principal merit is style. His prose effectively impersonates the emotional center of his thought: the ecstasy to be felt before certain works of art, which then presents a… Continue Reading The Renaissance

Walter Pater

by Elyse Graham 1. Born in a slum in the East End of London in 1839, Walter Pater was the son of a professional family barely hanging on to the middle class.^1 When Pater was two, his father, a general practitioner, died suddenly of a brain hemmorhage. His uncle, who shared the family’s medical practice… Continue Reading Walter Pater

Wilfred Owen and Christianity

by Andrew Gates The fateful morning of November 4, 1918 condemned to the ranks of a hiccough what might have been a revolution in English poetry. Yet, although the poetic career of Wilfred Owen was cut abruptly short, his legacy echoes not only through the English canon, but above all through the humanitarian—and Christian—ideas that… Continue Reading Wilfred Owen and Christianity

Poems (Wilfred Owen)

by Nathan Suhr-Sytsma Born in 1893 in Oswestry, England, near the Welsh border, Wilfred Owen was killed in battle on Nov. 4, 1918, a week before the First World War ended. He was twenty-five years old. An aspiring poet since his teens, in the last two years of his life Owen produced some of the… Continue Reading Poems (Wilfred Owen)