Rivai Apin and the modernist aesthetic in Indonesian poetry

The city offered the possibility of new kinds of human solidarity, whether they were new forms of artistic community or the community of popular revolutionary consciousness (Williams 1989:39-43; also Bradbury and McFarlane 1976:96-104). [...]in the midst of a sense of loss, chaos and meaninglessness, the modernist assertion held also to the sense of transition, and acquired a part of its character and sensibility in its suspension between 'creation and- de-creation' (Bradbury and McFarlane 1976:49). 'International' as used here refers to movements across the borders of European and North American nations, where the modernist sense of crisis accompanied the beginning of the end of European imperialism. [...]again in contrast to the way the concept of 'modernity' has been studied and understood, there has been little artempt to describe modernism as an aesthetic tendency that manifested itself also in non-European garb. In Indonesia, the rupture with the past was total, and the humanist ideal was unsullied by disillusionment with any of its earlier social or aesthetic enactments. [...]whereas European modernism 'leads to the inevitable subversion of traditional humanism' (Eysteinsson 1990:25), its Indonesian counterpart embraced the humanist conviction as something new, with what appears in retrospect as an innocent, if not to say naive, faith in the idea of world citizenship and common humanity. [...]there were always two dimensions of Indonesian modernism, the inner quest for subjective truth and the outer comntment to the nation.