260819: Cosmopoetics
Modern poets have been thought of & distinguished many ways, but the way that I like to think of them: either optimists or pessimists, either panegyrists or doomsayers of their modern Age.
The pessimists see a center that cannot hold, and a world falling apart. This is their reading of the bloody birth-pangs of the 20th century and WWI. Eliot's Waste Land is all rock, no water. The roots (of tradition, continuity) have been cut, and withered—parts strewn, isolated and severed from their animating, sanctifying source. The world is incoherent and fragmented nightmare. Sense cannot be made of it.
Hart Crane writes his long poem, The Bridge, a decade later, as a direct rebuttal. His bridge is a symbol of modern connectivity, and the way modern technology bridges chasms and voids, linking up the world. This is a vision he picks up directly from Walt Whitman in the late 19th century. Whitman (like Emerson before him) looked at the telegraph and the intercontinental railroad and realized that technology was leading us to what HG Wells would later term "the abolition of distance." It would bring us together, stitch us together into unified One. This, Whitman said, was God's plan from the first: all the world networked & spanned. Cosmic consciousness is surprisingly old: popular by the 19th, if not 18th, century. Poets like Whitman were well versed in the ecological and evolutionary theories of their time, which often pointed toward such a world-picture.
This is to say nothing of the techno-revelries of Futurists' poetry, or the doom-prophet of Inhumanism, Robinson Jeffers. (Jeffers, for his part, recognized that America had long "dreamed of unifying the world"— but judged it as having only unified the world against it.) More can be said of them later; for now I think, the pattern is clear.
So: the modernist poets of the 1920s anticipate the current battle between dark and light futurisms, which plays out both within the hyper-schismatic accelerationist movement, as well as the neo-Teilhardian worldviews blossoming up in the Catholic Church and Santa Fe complexity sciences. Crane's Whitmanian vision in particular link Judeo-Christian values to science: Christlike virtues such as grace and universal brotherhood are expressions of the bridging power which will lead us to oneness; they are perhaps greater or at least equally necessary parts of the cosmos' evolution. Malick, in his filmography, presents this vision explicitly in Tree of Life, Thin Red Line, and Voyage Through Time. (And, no doubt, in his end-of-life film on the life of Christ.)
Complexification is perhaps the dominant religious-scientific cosmology of our time: it is on the the rise in Catholicism, geology, blogosphere, new age, complexity sciences.
But whether we understand the Universe as trending toward an increase in entropy, or an increase in complexity, matters a whole lot.
There is probably a taoist paradox latent. Complexity always consists of simultaneous integration & differentiation; separation & connection work in lockstep.