How is Preludes by T.S Eliot a modernist poem?

T.S. Eliot's poem, Preludes, like
his The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste
Land, and works by other modernist authors does not shrink from the 19th
century view that certain subjects were 'unsuitable' for literature. Their literary
credo went beyond the orbit of the romantic or pastoral canon and embraced new themes.
One of these was the cityscape, toward which Eliot and others had a decidedly
pessimistic attitude, composed in part of revulsion and fascination. Thus, Eliot's early
poetry is transfixed by the cityscape. Indeed, the arrival of modernism signals the
decisive return of western literature to the cityscape, but wearing an almost
apocalyptic vesture. There are a number of strands in this. One is alienation. No longer
is the individual woven into a web of benefical mutuality. Instead, he or she is lost in
the teeming masses of the city. The cityscape of Eliot's early poems continually
reinforces this social decay, an image repeated in the character of the woman in
Preludes, whose inner self has been corrupted by her sordid life in
the city slums:

The thousand sordid
images
Of which your soul was
constituted;
(Preludes
ll.26-28)

Atomized humanity caught up in the monotony of
city life Eliot further reinforces by the technique of 'disembodied body
parts':

One thinks of all the
hands
That are raising dingy
shades
In a thousand furnished
rooms.
(Preludes, ll.21-23)

Eliot
conceives of the mass of city-dwellers as uncaring, an indifferent multitude, a kind of
human herd:

Or trampled by insistent
feet
At four and five and six
o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing
pipes,
And evening newspapers, and
eyes
Assured of certain
certainties,
The conscience of a blackened
street
Impatient to assume the
world.
(Preludes, ll.41-47)

Another
strand is disgust with the dirt, decay, and desolation of the city. To reveal this Eliot
developed a technique of realism, one that appealed in a rapidfire way to the senses,
where the elements of the city themselves constitute the
poetry:

The burnt out ends of smoky
days [smell/taste]
And now a gusty shower
wraps
The grimy scraps
Of
withered leaves about your feet [touch]
And newspapers
from vacant lots;
The showers beat
[sound]
On broken blinds and chimney-pots
[sight]
(Preludes, ll.4-10)

Still
another strand can be described as apocalyptic or visionary. Here a character catches a
glimpse of another reality beyond the miasmic environment of the
city:

And the light crept up between the
shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters
You had such a
vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
('Preludes'
ll.31-34)

Eliot and other post-war newcomers to the
literary world fashioned a revolutionary diction, where mingled a distaste for the city
with a celebration of it as the true centre of civilization. This literary
accomplishment, founded on an urban imagery, is rightly called
modernism.