'Modern', 'Modernist', 'Modernism'--and 'Modernity'

Back in the 20th century, just about any anthology of modern British and American poetry would have included several poems, at least, by T.S. Eliot--whose actual output was remarkably small for an indisputably major poet. "Preludes" would have been among them. Why were these poems modern but not, say, those of Tennyson or Browning or for that matter any other Victorian poet? Why is Matisse modern but not Burne-Jones? Why is Hemingway modern but not Trollop--or Dickens? Or Henry James?

The word 'modern', in those days or decades shortly before or immediately after WW I, conferred upon its literary or artistic or musical (never scientific) objects a certain distinction, an allure, that was and still remains elusive, hard to explain, even controversial. The word clearly meant something more than 'contemporary', but what?

The various revolutions that had been simmering throughout the 19th century all exploded--literally--in the 20th. A lot of artists and writers thought that revolutionary times demanded radical stylistic as well as intellectual changes. All of this is and has always been obvious; the connection between style and content (to put it crudely) is rarely obvious. It's easy to say that Eliot's purposes in "Preludes" require a style that dulls or deadens affect but it is not easy to show how that works--or to justify claims about Eliot's purposes. And when a writer invests his own political or spiritual aspirations in his work--as Eliot notoriously does--literary criticism begins to make severe demands of the critic.

Allow me to hazard a generalization here: 20th century writers and artists who were or became self-consciously modern are modernists; modernism is what you get when modernists are reacting to modernity.

[Thomas Banks remarks: One thought on the tag "Modernist-" it's a desceptively fluid label, to be sure; I was reading Montaigne the other night and he refers to Bocaccio, Froisart and others who preceded him by a couple of hundred years as "Moderns." Ergo, he conceived of himself as being "Postmodern."
To which I reply: 'modern' in the 16th c. generally meant post-medieval. But when Rosalind in As You Like It uses the word, it seems to mean 'modish.']

And what about 'post-modernism'? That's what you call yourself when you longer know or care anything about modernism but suspect that it was a movement dominated by white, conservative, or reactonary males (which is partly true) and you know you don't want to have anything to do with THAT, but you've got to call yourself something that shows you've got a grip on history.