Ezra Pound, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, as the "direct opposite" of Wordsworth are part of the vast number of modernists who write in the thematic ironic style of Frye's. Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust are also in this group, who tend to "avoid direct statement" and who are "simply juxtaposing images without making any assertions about their relationship." These writers also regularly ignore conventional punctuation, such as the use of apostrophes. They are "an initiated group aware of a real meaning of behind an ironically baffling exterior." Their texts are fragmented and more difficult to follow than more conventional writers, because plots are thin or hidden, characters sometimes never reveal their inner thoughts, and sentences can often last for pages at a time without a pause or period. The narrator or observer of the text can be unreliable or confused, not actually aiding in telling the tale, but complicating it further.
The ironic writer often writes of a return, the reincarnations of old ideas. Rimbaud's recreation of Promethius or Yeat's Lead and the Swan replacing the dove and the virgin. The ideas concerning apocalypse seeming overwhelming, but at the same time hint at a future renewal. Modern texts, especially, are the most confusing and fragmented out of all of Frye's Modes, but they can also be the most fun for an English major to wade through, then to conquer.
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