Modernist poets reacted against the standards of Victorian poetry, which often utilized established poetic forms, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets, or elaborate rhyme schemes, like Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott." Victorian poetry often also included a moral component. Modernist poets reacted against these conventions, creating alternative structures and goals for their poetry. For poets living in the Modernist era, Victorian styles no longer seemed adequate to express the concerns of a world in which technological change was dramatic, and violence was prevalent on a global scale.
One technique Modernist poets used to express their sense of fragmentation was collage. According to scholar Marjorie Perloff, the word "collage" comes from the French "cooler" which means "to paste." The term is derived from art collages that are often literally pasted together from parts of different objects. Modernist poets like Marianne Moore and T.S. Eliot utilized a verbal form of collage by placing quotes from diverse sources into their poems. For instance, Marianne Moore's poetry is full of quotes from newspapers and science books.
Imagism is a type of poetry that was initially advocated by Ezra Pound. According to M.H. Abrams, imagist poetry was often written in free verse instead of more conventional verse forms and used common speech rather than elevated poetic language. Imagists borrowed techniques from Japanese haiku, and one of the main goals of an imagist poet was to achieve precision. For instance, one of Ezra Pound's famous imagist poems, "In a Station of the Metro," is only two lines long:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Modernist poets like W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot drew on the innovative work of French Symbolists like Rimbaud and Baudelaire. According to Baudelaire, the doctrine of Symbolism was that "everything, form, movement, number, color, perfume, in the spiritual as well as in the natural world, is significative, reciprocal, converse, correspondent." Symbols, according to the French Symbolists, were to be suggestive but not didactic. Modernist poets utilized symbolism in their poems to create a sense of mystery and connection but also to express their sense of living in a fragmented world. For example, in "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot utilizes religious and esoteric symbols to create a poetic world that is disordered and without religious or spiritual clarity.