In its international and cross-cultural evolution, the modernist movement brought the most notable achievements in the poetry genre. Through their fragmented mode by semantic scrambling, the modernist poems seek to embody an indestructible unity of language and art. In order to elucidate the significance of that «essential» form in capitalistic times, A Flowering Word applies C. S. Peirce's semiotic theory to the principal works of three contemporary writers: Stéphane Mallarmé's late sonnets, T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, and the Japanese prefeminist poet, Yosano Akiko's Tangled Hair.