The present study challenges the image of pessimism associated with modernist poetry. By exploring the poetry of T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound using Ernst Bloch’s principle of hope, it...Show moreThe present study challenges the image of pessimism associated with modernist poetry. By exploring the poetry of T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound using Ernst Bloch’s principle of hope, it becomes apparent how, for all three poets as well as for Bloch, language is bestowed with a foundational faith. Hope manifests itself in a desire to overcome the waste land’s teleological void in Eliot, to come to terms with the totalitarian inescapability of death in Yeats, and, in Pound, to articulate absolute essence.Show less
