OSCAR WILDE

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

Oscar Wilde was one of the most successful playwrights of his day but he was also a complex person full of contradictions. Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, the son of a distinguished surgeon and a nationalist poetess. He went to Trinity College in Dublin and then to Magdalen College in Oxford. After graduating he was forced to earn a living and moved to London, where his fellow Irishmen Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats were settled. Wilde established himself as lecturer and a writer for periodicals but foremost as a spokesperson for the aesthetic movement whose credo was “art for art’s sake.” In 1882 he visited America on a successful lecture tour where he claimed that “to disagree with three fourths of all England on all points of view is one of the first elements of sanity” (Norton 1720). He married in 1884 and had two sons. He wrote three volumes of short fiction with little success but excelled as a critic of literature and of society in essays like “The Decay of Lying” (1889), “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1890) and “The Critic as Artist” (1890). His only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) created a sensation but his most outstanding success came as a writer of society comedies staged in London between 1892 and 1895, including Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. However, in 1895, after having a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, he was accused of homosexuality and was sentenced to prison with hard labour for two years. In prison he wrote the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and his prose confession and critique of himself, De Profundis (1905). When he was released, in 1897, he was a ruined man, divorced and declared a bankrupt. He went into exile to France, where he lived under an assumed name until his death in 1900.

The duality of Wilde is fascinating as well as confusing. He was a man of numerous identities and his position in society was ambivalent. He was at the same time a colonized Irishman and a socialite, a husband and a homosexual, a successful playwright accepted in high society and a socialist. He was “the Anglo-Irishman with Nationalist sympathies; the Protestant with life-long Catholic leanings” (Holland 3). As a dandy he dressed in colourful costumes in contrast to the sober black suits of the Late Victorian middle classes and yet he was admitted to good society because of his charismatic manners and witty conversation. As a spokesperson for the “aesthetes,” who revolted against the earnestness of Victorian ideals and enjoyed mocking middle-class opinions, Wilde challenged and shocked his audience by using sensational imagery, hyperbole, dandyism and decadence. In his own life and in his art he criticized society; he “criticized his audience while he entertained it” (Peter Hall, Guardian), and like a jester he was allowed to do so. But when he was arrested he went from fool to martyr, from comic to tragic. He became a mere Irishman and commoner who had dared to have had “an intimate relationship with the son of a peer of the realm” (Cave vii). Three days before he died, when asked about his life, Wilde said: “Some said my life was a lie but I always knew it to be the truth; for like the truth it was rarely pure and never simple”

The last line echoes one of the characters in Wilde’s most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest – A Trivial Comedy for Serious People (1895), a play very much concerned with double identities and the question of what is true. My thesis is that Wilde, in this play, employed the well-established Late Victorian concept of double identity as well as a dualistic theme, revealed in the language and in the strategies of lying, in order to exploit the hypocrisy of society. In The Importance of Being Earnest, there are two principal male characters, Jack and Algy, who have invented aliases that enable them to lead a double life. The dualistic theme is not only displayed in the characters’ use of double identities but in the language of the play and the play as a whole. The name Ernest is a pun and the dialogue is full of contradictions, misunderstandings and lies which are true and vice versa: the characters say one thing and mean something else and are sometimes more truthful when they actually are lying. What does the theme of double identity and dualistic language convey? What is true and what is false? Why all these paradoxes? Why lie? In this essay I will show that in The Importance of Being Earnest the notion of double identity and duality is connected to the language and the lying and reveals a society of double standards of morality and turn out to be a deconstruction of Victorian moral and social values. I will also argue that the duality, the double identities and the lying might be explained partly in a colonial context. Since Wilde was Irish and a covert homosexual, he represented a despised ‘other’. Through his studies, reading Classics at Oxford, Wilde was granted access to the privileged though. He could thereby be regarded as a part-time outsider. Peter Raby asserts in “Wilde’s comedies of Society” that Wilde used this position to portrait and expose English society, a society that still ruled a large part of the world, and that he imitated Englishness as “a subtle form of insult”

In The Importance of Being Earnest, there is an obsession with names, and especially with the name of Ernest. Griffith states in Writing Essays about Literature that playwrights usually keep their characters simple enough for the audience to understand during the course of a performance and therefore often use stock characters and give them names to indicate their traits (Griffith 93). Investigating the characters’ names and their possible connotations can therefore add to the understanding of the characters and their identity. To name something is to give it an identity, which is particularly interesting in a play so utterly concerned with identity. Moreover many of the characters lead double lives or at least have a secret past, i.e. a double identity.

John Worthing, called Jack, is the protagonist of the play. Jack has a country estate in Hertfordshire where he is the Justice of Peace. He is a serious, responsible guardian to his adoptive father’s granddaughter Cecily and he stands for all the Victorian values of morality: duty, honour and respectability; “When one is placed in the position of guardian, one has to adopt a very high moral tone on all subjects. It’s one’s duty to do so” (Wilde 301). However, he pretends to have an irresponsible brother, named Ernest, who lives a scandalous life and always gets into trouble, which requires Jack to rush off to London to his assistance; “In order to get up to town I have always pretended to have a younger brother of the name of Ernest, who lives in Albany, and gets into the most dreadful scrapes” (301). Thereby, Jack can disappear for days and do as he likes. In London, Jack goes under the name of Ernest; “My name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country” (300), and can live the life he pretends to disapprove of. He thus uses Ernest, his alter-ego, both as an excuse and a disguise to keep his honourable image intact. Jack does, in fact, not know his real name and who he is for as a baby he was found in a hand-bag in the cloak-room at Victoria Station. Wilde used to incorporate place-names, as well as other material at hand, into his comedies, and the name of Worthing was borrowed from a seaside resort in Sussex where Wilde had spent a holiday while he worked on the play (Raby 143). Worthing had the serious properties apposite to a guardian and a Justice of Peace and the name of John/Jack is traditionally and plain enough as we are to understand from Gwendolen: “there is very little music in the name of Jack… It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations… And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John” (307). John Worthing is accordingly a solid, respectable name, suitable to the protagonist’s position and identity as a Justice of peace, a guardian and a pillar of society. However, his name and identity are not exciting and therefore restrictive. Hence, his invention of Ernest gives him new possibilities.

The name Ernest had previously appeared in one of Wilde’s comedies of society, A Woman of No Importance, in which Mrs Allonby mocks her absent husband Ernest. Russell Jackson admits in his essay “The Importance of Being Earnest” that ‘earnest’ in some circles was a code-word for homosexuals, but claims that it first and foremost had connotations of ‘probity’ and ‘high-mindedness’ and that “The claims that Wilde was writing out his Irishness in the double selves of his protagonists are more convincing than the argument for The Importance of Being Earnest as a specifically gay play” (Jackson 173). In The Importance of being Earnest, the characters are more occupied with the name Ernest than the fact of actually being earnest. Marrying a man called Ernest can be a goal in life; Gwendolen exclaims: “my ideal has always been to love someone of the name of Ernest. There is something in that name that inspires absolute confidence. The moment Algernon first mentioned to me that he had a friend called Ernest, I knew I was destined to love you” (306), and Cecily is of the same opinion “it had always been a girlish dream of mine to love some one whose name was Ernest… There is something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence. I pity any poor married woman whose husband is not called Ernest” (332). At the end of the play Jack has to reconcile his two names and identities and then he finally understands who he really is.

Algernon Moncrieff, Algy, is the other main principal character of the play and he invents an imaginary friend to conceal his double life as well as borrow Jack’s alias Ernest to impose on Cecily. Algernon Moncrieff’s name is Scottish and aristocratic in sound; “It is not at all a bad name. In fact, it is an aristocratic name. Half of the chaps who get in to bankruptcy Court is called Algernon” (332). He is the charming, idle, selfish, witty dandy of the play, Wilde’s alter-ego, just as Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband, Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance and Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray. While the latter two are evil and the two former are good, Algy has no moral convictions other than to live beautifully. To be able to escape dull social obligations: “in order that I can go down into the country whenever I choose” (301), he has invented an imaginary invalid friend called Bunbury who lives in the country and constantly summons Algy to his deathbed. In that way Algy can indulge himself while suggesting seriousness and duty. Further in the play he impersonates Jack’s invented brother, Ernest, to approach Cecily. Consequently, in spite of his high position in the aristocracy, Algy employs Bunbury as an alibi and Ernest as a double character in order to escape society and improve his prospects.

Another example of dualism in the characters’ behaviours is found in Lady Bracknell, Algy’s aunt and Gwendolen’s mother, who sets herself up as guardian of the morality of the society and implying that she is the only reliable source of taste and probity. She is found to be a parvenu, a social climber, and not an aristocrat at all; “When I married Lord Bracknell I had no fortune of any kind. But I never dreamed for a moment of allowing that to stand in my way” (349). Lady Bracknell’s name is derived from a place in Berkshire where Lord Alfred Douglas’s mother had a summer home, which Wilde had visited.

The two young ladies of the play, Gwendolen and Cecily, represent the city and the country and both of them have secret lives. The names of the two young ladies are differentiated in a way that: “Gwendolen Fairfax carries a certain weight and crisp urbanity, appropriate for Lady Bracknell’s daughter”, whereas the name “Cecily Cardew, has a musical lightness about it” (Raby 145). Gwendolen, the sophisticated city lady, leads a ‘double life’ in the sense that she pretends to go to a lecture but instead runs away to Ernest in the country. Cecily Cardew, Jack’s ward, is a natural girl, almost a child of nature and she is just as imaginative, enthusiastic and as capable as Jack and Algy to invent a fantasy life. She lives a ‘double life’ in her diary where she invents a romance and even an engagement to Jack’s wicked brother, Ernest. The diary becomes her fantasy world; “I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life” (318). She even buys herself a ring and writes letters from him, “The three you wrote me after I had broken off the engagement are so beautiful, and so badly spelled, that even now I can hardly read them without crying a little” (331).

Cecily’s governess, Miss Prism, in comparison, has two very different sides: one rigid and prude puritan side where she highly approves of respectability; “As a man sows, so shall he reap” (323), and harshly criticizes people who live for pleasure only, and one more soft romantic side where she talks about having written a novel. What is more, she has romantic feelings for Chasuble, the vicar. Her dark secret is that she confused a baby and a manuscript twenty-eight years ago and placed the baby by mistake in her handbag, which she deposited at Victoria Station. Chasuble, ever so fond of metaphors, calls Miss Prism ‘Egeria’, which is the name of the Roman nymph who taught the Roman king judicial responsibility and self-discipline and her name is as a consequence an epithet for a woman who provides guidance. Yet Miss Prism’s real name is Laeticia, which means ‘joy’ and ‘delight’ and shows that she has two sides, the moralistic guiding governess and the softer romantic self.

In contrast, Canon Chasuble D.D. is aptly and properly named after the ecclesiastical canon and a liturgical vestment; a chasuble is an ornament garment worn by priests. D.D. stands for Doctor of Divinity and he is constantly carrying out christenings; it is as Miss Prism says: “one of the Rector’s most constant duties in this parish” (324). Even Jack and Algy request christenings, and Chasuble can thereby be seen as highly connected to the notion of giving a name. To give a name is to give a definition. There is thus a theme of christenings in the play and when Jack and Algy ask to be christened it is as if they want to go back to childhood and change their identity. To change one’s name and identity is an important concern from a postcolonial point-of-view where one can be almost doomed by a name since a name might reveal your nationality or your otherness: To change one’s name and to gain a new identity is a device to fit in better and to get better prospects. Jack is not allowed to get married when he is Jack Worthing. However, his new identity in the end as Ernest Moncrieff gives him better prospects; a name is therefore of great importance.

Raby argues that Wilde used names in his plays as an act of revenge. In 1894 he was in a dispute with his publishers, Lane and Matthews, so he used their names as the manservant and butler in The Importance of Being Earnest. He relented in the case of Matthews, though, and changed it to Merriman (Raby 145). In the play, even the seemingly unimpeachable Lane turns out to have led a double life when he lets slip that he has been married: “I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young lady” (296). It is, in short, not only the upper-class that is forced to lead a double life; the entire society seems to be constrained to the same device.

Beyond that, Wilde originally wrote a four-act version of the play but it was later to be reduced to three acts and one scene that Wilde himself thought to be one of the funniest was “The excised scene, involving Gribsby”. In that scene ‘Parker and Gribsby, Solicitors’ are announced but only one gentleman is in the hall. He later explains “I am both, sir. Gribsby when I am on unpleasant business, Parker on occasions of a less severe kind” (Wilde 432). In the tree-act version, however, the name of Miss Cardew’s solicitors is Markby, Markby and Markby. The name Markby is borrowed from an old-established firm of London solicitors connected to Wilde’s friend Robert Baldwin Ross, to whom The Importance of being Earnest was dedicated. Wilde tried to create a particular resonance in the selections of names and “Markby conveys an air of respectability, indeed gentility, far removed from the less salubrious solicitors of the four-act version, Gribsby and Parker, in which ‘Gribsby’ has the ring of a particularly ruthless, Dickensian kind of lawyer” (Raby 144). Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson writes in “Biography and the art of lying” that Wilde had an “almost childlike pleasure in the grandeur of historic names: ‘Surely everyone prefers Norfolk, Hamilton and Buckingham to Smith or Jones or Robinson’” (Holland 9), Wilde is supposed to have said. According to Holland this proves Wilde’s fascination with the aristocracy. In brief, the characters’ names are carefully chosen to give the right connotations, and the importance of names is emphasized as a theme in the play. Different names give different possibilities; names can be restrictive but also beneficial, depending on the situation. Since names are connected to identity, a new name can lead to an identity with new possibilities and better prospects. In addition, there are other ways to escape restrictions: by leading a double life or inventing a double identity, i.e. a complement to their selves.

As shown in this chapter, the theme of dualism and complementary character is evident in the play. There are two male principles, Jack and Algy. They argue most of the time, very often about food, and accuse each other of trivial things just like siblings would do and in the end they in fact turn out to be brothers, i.e. complementary, and Jack can exclaim: “Then I have a brother after all. I knew I had a brother! I always said I had a brother” (356). Furthermore, there are two young ladies, Gwendolen and Cecily, who are even more complementary characters since they represent two sides of England. Gwendolen represents the fashionable city and Cecily the natural countryside; both of them reconcile and become sisters, sisters-in-law, but not until “they have called each other a lot of other things first” (314), as Algy so accurately predicted in the first act. These two brothers and two sisters make two couples. Jack escaped to the city and pretended to be Ernest and found his bride and Algy escaped to the country, pretended, just like his brother, to be Ernest and found his bride. Chasuble and Prism also ends up being a couple, reconciling church and education and Lane and Merriman, the perfect butlers add perfectly to the symmetry of the doublings. The only one who is on her own is Lady Bracknell, representing Victorian values and society, “insisting that she is the pinnacle of convention, good form and normality and that others must in consequence behave according to her dictate” (Mighall 430). She tells everyone what to do and stands, as suggested in the stage directions of the first production, in the middle of the stage at the end of the play with the couples grouped symmetrically around her (Cave 429).

The evidence so far suggests that Wilde was, just as the title of the play implies, highly aware of how important a name could be. Each name has a certain ring to it, including connotations, and is a starting-point to one’s position in life. In Victorian society a name could be an advantage point or a doom. Victorian morality was based on, and presumably even inseparable from, colonial and imperialistic morality, i.e. heavily self-righteous. The assumption was that the ruling class are ruling just because they are superior and implicitly good and the others are ruled over because they are inferior and accordingly bad. From our point of view it was a very oppressive morality, which contained a moral control of human behaviour. Hence, to escape the repressive morality, all the characters are compelled to lead a double life or invent a double character. The duplicity of the characters, their fluid identities, becomes a satire over Victorian behaviour as well as a more truthful description of what a human being is. The duality is enhanced by the complementary characters and the doublings but duplicity is also manifested in other aspects of the work, foremost in the language and in the lying.

Compiled By Dr. Asis De

TED HUGHES

‘The Thought-Fox’

Ted Hughes, a leading contemporary British poet appears to explore, through his creative and poetic imagination, the intensity of archaic energies largely in animal world. He is commonly termed “animal poet” as he composed a significant number of animal poems, expressing his strong interest in animal life. While his contemporaries were committed to “the Movement” and kept articulating angst, anger, negation, narcissism, morbidity, and frustration in their verses, Hughes produced elegant poems of versatile animal world. His poems are expressive of archetypal energy and spontaneous vitality though he is sometimes accused of composing verses of violence. In this essay we will analyse a few of his animal poems to underscore his poetic vivacity which essentially connotes a number of relevant issues of human world. Contemporary issues of Britain can of course be located in his poems, but those obviously go beyond his time and visit and revisit many decades ahead of his life. While exploring Hughes’ poems, we will attempt to attend few issues like why he is found interested in violent energy in animal world and how far his violent imagery expresses vibrant vivacity in his poems. Above all, we will focus on the relevance of reading Hughes’ poems in an era of military might, multi-numbered mutilations, unbound terrors, and all-encompassing violence.

Another animal poem “The Thought Fox” in which the primeval violence turns into delicate vivacity and vitality.  “‘The Thought Fox’ is a poem about composing poetry, or rather, about being visited by the muse. Appropriately enough, in Hughes’ case, the muse is an animal, a fox.” .`Once at late night the poet, sitting alone at his desk in his room, was trying to compose a poem on a blank page. He felt something alive nearby jungle apart from the clock ticking gently. That was a starless night with deep darkness deepening the poet’s loneliness, yet he sensed the presence of something “more near”. Then a full shape of a fox was coming into existence gradually, which the poet was figuring out through his sensuous perceptions:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,

A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;

(Hughes, “The Thought-Fox”)

First, the coldness of the fox’s nose is concretised through an image of a fox’s nose “as delicately cold as the dark snow” touching twigs and leaves (Hughes, “The Thought-Fox”, Selected Poems9). Then two eyes appear with seemingly endless movements, and his footprints into the snow are visible. At last, he takes the form of a full shadow of a body, a fox “that is bold to come.” (ibid.). The animal comes so close to the poet that he is able to see only an eye “of widening deepening greenness”. (ibid.). It, however, disappears leaving “a sudden sharp hot stink of fox”. (ibid.). The room remains the same, the sky is still starless, but the blank page is now filled up with printed words.  The window is starless still: the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

(Hughes, “The Thought-Fox”)

The deep dark night is a metaphor for dull, clueless imagination the poet was getting into. There was nothing, no clue in the poet’s mind. Then a feeling of coldness came (the cold touch of a fox’s nose) that provided the central theme to the poet’s imagination. The fox then appeared gradually with footprints implicating signs and words in the form of poetic expressions, which the poet was pouring over on his blank page. The fox then went away leaving a distinctive smell, that is, giving a cutting edge to the poem. The poem was composed; the action was thus complete in a form of art through imagination, idea, language, form, and sensibility. Therefore, the emergence of a fox late at night right in the poet’s room is a symbol of poetic inspiration.

Thus, the fox is the poem, and the poem is the fox. And the last two lines exult in the excitement of poetic creation. “And I suppose,” Ted Hughes has written, “that long after I am gone, as long as a copy of the poem exists, every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out of the darkness and come walking towards them.” “So, you see, in some ways my fox is better than an ordinary fox. It will live forever, it will never suffer from hunger or hounds. I have it with me wherever I go. And I made it. And all through imagining it clearly enough and finding the living words.” (Hughes, Poetry in the Making20-21).

Hughes almost always began his readings with ‘The Thought-Fox’, describing it as ‘my first animal poem’. In fact his first animal poem was ‘The Jaguar’, written in 1954. That Hughes opened both his Selected Poems and his New Selected Poems with ‘The Thought-Fox’ suggests that he thought of it as an overture announcing the central theme of all his subsequent poems.
Obviously it is an animal poem; but it is also, perhaps primarily, something else. The opening words of the poem ‘I imagine’ confirm what we have already been alerted to in the title, that this is not, primarily, a poem about a fox, but a poem about writing a poem, about the kind of thinking which produces poems, or produced them for Hughes at that stage of his career. In 1956, the year after the writing of the poem, Hughes tried to explain this kind of thinking to his wife Sylvia Plath. He tried very hard, very patiently, because it was what he thought she most needed to learn to release her own poetic imagination.
The thing to do in thinking about anything is not to try and get a clear mental picture of it, or a distinct mental concept, with all its details there, vivid in your brain, but to try to look at the actual thing happening in front of you. I find a clear distinction between these two types of thinking about a thing. As soon as I begin
imagining the thing happening in my world, everything comes right. That’s not quite it. It’s as though in the first way of thinking I thought about the thought, taking the thought and forcing it into shape or realness. In the second way it’s more like the process of memory, I think straight to the thing and am not conscious of any mental intervention. … The second way I get the feel, weight, sound, every nuance of atmosphere about a concrete thing. [Letters 52]
This is very similar to the instructions Hughes was later to give to children in Poetry in the Making: Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it,smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic. [18]
In 1957, the year of the publication of ‘The Thought-Fox’ in The Hawk in the Rain, Hughes wrote:
In each poem, besides the principle subject …there is what is not so easy to talk about, even generally, but which is the living and individual element in every poet’s work. What I mean is the way he brings to peace all the feelings and energies which, from all over the body, heart, and brain, send up their champions
onto the battleground of that first subject. The way I do this, as I believe, is by using something like the method of a musical composer. I might say that I turn every combatant into as formal and balanced a figure of melody and rhythm as I can. When all the words are hearing each other clearly, and every stress is feeling
every other stress, and all are contented — the poem is finished. [Faas, The Unaccommodated Universe, 163]
The relevance of this to ‘The Thought-Fox’ is underlined by the resemblance of these closing words ‘the poem is finished’ to the closing words of the ‘The Thought-Fox’, ‘the
page is printed’.
What, then, are the thoughts and memories, the ‘feelings and energies’, which Hughes here tries to articulate through the metaphor of the fox? His experiences of foxes had been so many and so vivid that he had already, when he wrote this poem in 1955,come to regard the fox as his totem. In Poetry in the Making he recalled "An animal I never succeeded in keeping alive is the fox. I was always frustrated:
twice by a farmer, who killed cubs I had caught before I could get to them, and
once by a poultry keeper who freed my cub while his dog waited. [19]
In his story ‘The Deadfall’ Ted goes camping with his older brother Gerald in Crimsworth Dene. In the middle of the night he is woken by a ghostly old lady, who takes him to the deadfall, where he is able to release a fox cub caught by its tail and a hind leg under the edge of the fallen slab. He does not notice until next morning that an adult fox lies dead under the slab. The brothers remove it and bury it. From the loosened earth Ted picks up what he thinks is a white pebble. It is an ivory fox. I asked Hughes if
this had really happened. He said it had, and he still kept the ivory fox. After the move to Mexborough when Ted was eight, he would get up early in order to walk along the Don before school. The river in spate had scooped out great hollows between the tree roots. He found that if he crept up the side of one of these
hollows as quietly as possible, and peeped over into the next, he might see some interesting wildlife. On one occasion, as he crept up one side of such a slope, a fox, unknown to him, was creeping even more stealthily up the other. They reached the top at the same moment, and from a distance of about nine inches, for a split second that seemed an eternity, gazed into each other’s eyes. The presence of the fox, its perfect
selfhood, was so intense that it seemed to enter the boy’s head and dislodge his own more
provisional self.
At the end of Hughes’ second year at Cambridge he was becoming increasingly disillusioned with reading English, which was not, as he had hoped, helping his writing. In the early hours, unable to begin his essay on Dr. Johnson, he went to bed and dreamed that his door opened and across the room towards me came a figure that was at the same time a skinny man and a fox walking erect on its hind legs. It was a fox, but the size of a wolf. As it approached and came into the light I saw that its body and limbs had just now
stepped out of a furnace. Every inch was roasted, smouldering, black-charred, split and bleeding. Its eyes, which were level with mine where I sat, dazzled with the intensity of the pain. It came up until it stood beside me. Then it spread its hand — a human hand as I saw now, but burned and bleeding like the rest of him
— flat down on the blank space of my page. At the same time it said: ‘Stop this — you are destroying us.’ Then as it lifted its hand away I saw the blood-print, like a palmist’s specimen, with all the lines and creases, in wet, glistening blood on the page. [Winter Pollen 9]
The page was, indeed, blood-printed.
Yet another experience which had imprinted itself on Hughes was a scene in an Ingmar Bergman film where a fox crossed an expanse of virgin snow.By recognizing the fox as his totem I meant that Hughes had instinctively recognized it (along with the wolf) as an outward living embodiment of everything within
his own psyche which had been persecuted, injured, imprisoned, either by his culture or by his own rational intellect.
Clearly it was never Hughes’ intention to compress all these images of fox into the poem, rather to let those which were attracted by the theme of the act of writing a poem, come together and cohere. The poet must hunt for what will give his thought  living body, with a life beyond his own. The first words, ‘I imagine’, are his opening of the door, his invocation to ‘something else’ to visit him out of the darkness. At that point
his ego abdicates control. In the words of Neil Roberts ‘Hughes does everything possible to suggest that the agency of creating the poem has passed from the speaker to the fox’
[Ted Hughes: A Literary Life, 21].
What he imagines first is not the fox, but ‘this midnight moment’s forest’. Midnight is the witching time of night, when human consciousness is most exposed to the non-human. Darkness is the subconscious world with all its primeval fears. The other poem Hughes offers in Poetry in the Making as an example of what he is advocating is ‘Pike’. There, again at midnight, his lure is his invitation to the creatures of the deep to enter his world. He is terrified
But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,
Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.
A forest on a starless night is ‘deeper within darkness’, and the unconscious projects its demons and horrors onto the creatures of night, such as bat and owl. Then wolf, which never harms humans, has been so demonized for centuries. The fox has been similarly victimized and persecuted. So the fox in the poem
emerges indistinctly from the forest and falling snow, one step at a time, seeking what cover it can find, lame from some trap it has barely survived. But the forest at midnight is also the time when the stranglehold of culture and rational intellect is at its weakest, can be, with sufficient courage, momentarily shed. The ‘clearing’ made by the poet’s openness and receptivity emboldens the fox to assume its confident, brilliant foxhood, to come about its own business, and to enter in safety its true home, the ‘dark hole of the
head’. It is for this reason that Hughes recommended a ten-minute time-limit for children
to write poems: ‘Animals’ are the subject here, but more important is the idea of headlong,
concentrated improvisation on a set theme. … These artificial limits create a crisis, which rouses the brain’s resources: the compulsion towards haste overthrows the ordinary precautions, flings everything into top gear, and many things that are usually hidden find themselves rushed into the open. Barriers break down, prisoners come out of their cells. [Poetry in the Making 23]
The poet (‘of imagination all compact’) has also been demonized, as a lunatic who lets his fingers move over paper as if they had a life of their own, who willingly enters the darkness to negotiate with ‘whatever happens to be out there’, who rashly opens the self to the not-self and the animal self. Why does he do it? The point is that the monsters which maraud in the unconscious have become monstrous only because of their
imprisonment there. They are actually what Blake called the Energies. Their acceptance and release into the light makes it possible for them to begin to operate creatively. They are necessary to our wholeness. It is only when Prospero breaks the staff of his dominating ego and drowns the book of his rational intellect, frees Ariel from servitude, and acknowledges Caliban (a ‘thing of darkness’) as an essential part of himself, that he
recovers his buried humanity.
Compiled By Dr. Asis De

Acknowledgement  Keith Sagar, ‘The Thought-Fox’, keithsagar@tiscali.co.uk.

EMINENT VICTORIANS

BIOGRAPHY AND STYLE IN EMINENT VICTORIANS

Lytton Strachey, an English biographer, critic and essayist, is best known for his ironic attitude towards the subject of his biographical studies. Strachey’s targets of irony were evangelicalism, liberalism, humanitarianism, education and imperialism. Strachey proposed to write lives with brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant. He is best known for “Eminent Victorians”.  Treating his subject ironically he was fascinated by personality and motive. His aim was to paint a portrait; and through this he led to an ironical caricaturing. He taught biographers a sense of form and of background, and he sharpened their critical insight.

Strachey ironically shows us General Gordon including in his secret passion for fame and becoming a willing instrument not of God but of the extreme imperialist faction of the British Government. The messianic religiosity inspiring Gordon was well known by a weary generation just back from the trenches and sickened by the chauvinism of bishops and journalists declaring that God had been in the trenches on their side.

Strachey said: “My notion is to do a series of short lives of eminent persons of that kind. It might be entertaining if properly pulled off. But if will take a very long time.”

Some of the eminent persons were to be admired while others like Manning were to be exposed ironically. To Ottoline Morrell he wrote: “I am … beginning a new experiment in the way of a short condensed biography of Cardinal Manning – written from a slightly cynical point of view.”

The impact of ‘Eminent Victorians’ on literary circles was tremendous. The world was weary of big guns and big phrases, and Strachey’s witty polemic was especially attractive to the younger generation. In his preface, which was a manifesto for 20th century biographers, Strachey wrote: “Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process.”

Yet the four Victorians he chose for treatment were not independent of the moral system of the Victorian Age. His verbal attack against Cardinal Manning is an attack on the evangelicalism that was to be the defining characteristic of 19th century culture, an exposure of its hypocrisy and the emptiness of self-regarding ambitions. 

Strachey toppled Florence Nightingale from the pedestal where she was placed as the legendary lady with the lamp, having saintly and self-sacrificing qualities. He replaced her with a twentieth century neurotic. Thus Strachey struck ironically at the popular mythology of Victorian England, in particular its conscience-saving humanitarianism.  His irony towards the Dr. Arnold probably arose from his own unhappy schooldays. He depicted Arnold as the most influential teacher of the Victorian public school system whose cult distorted middle-class intelligence and set hard the principle of Victorianism into the 20th century. Strachey has ironically presented his sinister picture of Manning’s formal interview with the Pope. He ironically mentioned Manning as an ‘eagle’ and Newman as a ‘dove’.

There are times, however, when Strachey’s sharp sense of the ridiculous does find its way into his irony. It is a definite undercurrent in this treatment of the Chinese diplomatist Li Hung Chang: “It was Gordon who gave him his first vision of Europe. Nothing could be more ironical. The half-inspired, half-crazy Englishmen, … the irresponsible knight-errant whom his countrymen first laughed at and neglected, then killed and canonized – a figure staying through the perplexed industrialism of the nineteenth century like some lost “natural” from an earlier Age.”

Thus irony with its marked possibilities for variation, served Strachey admirable not only for comic purpose of suggesting change and dissimilarity which could be significantly and effectively relate to a background of uniformity in style. Strachey’s great weapon was irony and ‘Eminent Victorians’ set the tone for subsequent biographers. It made ‘debunking’ fashionable. Few of Strachey’s imitators possessed his gift of sharp irony or his picturesque humour. They inherited from him nothing but his shallow scepticism. Strachey was in high favour with the wound because they relished the breaking of ‘Eminent Victorians’ praised till then like idols.

P. M. Jack wrote in praise of Strachey that he had a faculty for sharpening the readers’ critical sense and often proved to be right. “We doubt if another miscellany of this sort could possess half the wit and distinction of a biographical style that we find here.”

In 1937 Edgar Johnson praised Strachey’s ironical sense of values and the largeness of his opinion:

“In Strachey the old Elizabethan lion refines down to a cat. The lion singles out the enemy to be destroyed; it is the cat, however, that plays slyly and patiently with the victim.”

Andre Maurois had already spoken of him not only as an iconoclast using the method of irony but also as a highly gifted writer in the tradition of the great humorist and as “a very deep psychologist”.

In fact, Lytton Strachey is best known for his ironic attitude towards the subjects of his biographical studies. His point of view was highly personal and some of his judgments have been described as exaggerated. But his sense of form and his witty, ironic style inspired a host of imitators who were eager to reduce historical figures to life size. He established the ironical writing of biography as a literary art. The biographer Lytton Strachey belonged to the Bloomsbury Group. He inaugurated the new era of biographical writing at the close of World War I. In his preface, Strachey enunciated the two fold principle of selection and scrutiny which was to mark all his work.

Strachey proposed a briefness which excludes everything that is superfluous and nothing that is significant. The completion of this mission made Strachey the greatness of modern biographers. Strachey has certainly revolutionized the art of writing a biography. Before him, the biographer used to neglect like a hagiographer the darker side of their heroes because they generally used to idealize their heroes by representing them as angels of virtue. Strachey was the first to realize that in order to give a complete and human portrait.

Strachey did not hesitate to include in his biographies the failings, jokes and whims of his heroes. He believed that a biographer must have a psychological insight into his character. A biographer must neither suppress vital facts nor obscure those aspects of his character which help us visualize his true picture as he lived. Instead of giving abstractness, Strachey indeed gave a creature of flesh and blood.

Strachey has suggested that the biographies must be primarily a form of literary art capable of giving the pleasure. In biography, it is not so much the subject as the treatment of the subject that really matters.

Strachey suggested that the biographies of eminent men should not be immediately written after their death because their relatives and friends are naturally reluctant to disclose the relevant confidential details. Thus he was of the opinion that: “First class biographies can only be written long after the hero’s death.”

Strachey had a gift of irony which has hardly been equaled in literature by anyone since the eighteenth century masters. Strachey has made biography a literary medium. His biographical style has the appeal of a fine work of art. Strachey has brought us face to face with men and women, who are nonetheless fallible human beings and not infallible saints or gods. We watch them live, think, and quarrel like us. Sometimes they behave meanly and foolishly and sometimes nobly and wisely.

Strachey’s objectives were to make biography an unmistakable channel for the truthful transmission of personality; to write it as the most authentic footnote to history; to make it a vivid and complete story; to make it a source of inner satisfaction to the reader. In most of his experiments in biography Strachey certainly succeeded in attaining them. Strachey’s achievement in biography was indeed a challenge to dullness and incompetence. 

Charles Richard Sander says: “Throughout his career Strachey protested against the lengthy, formless, badly written biographies produced by the Victorians. He insisted that the spirit of the biographer should be free and that he should write from a definite point of view, should select and include only the essential materials of a subject, should give to a work good structure and excellence of style.”

His intensely personal sketches shocked many critics but delighted many readers. M. Forster says:

“Strachey helped sweep away the ponderous Victorian approach to the writing to biography, replacing it with a witty and with impressionistic style that was widely imitated and studied at the University of Cambridge.”

Instead of using the conventional method of detailed chronological narration, Lytton Strachey carefully selected his tact to present “Eminent Victorians”. These deliberations suffice to signify that Strachey is the greatest biographer of the Victorian age.

D. H. Lawrence

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
i o And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.
I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.
I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.
And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.
And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
Taormina, 1923



D.H. LAWRENCE’S CRITICAL VIEWS IN HIS POETRY

D.H. Lawrence began his career of writing in his mid-twenties and the 

first form of literature he wrote was poetry indeed. The first collection of his 

poetry entitled Love Poems and Others appeared in 1913. Then two more 

volumes of poetry were published in 1929. It is observed that there are the

accent and sweep of poetry in his novels especially in The Rainbow and 

Woman in Love. Like his novels, his poetry is also personal and 

autobiographical. Louis Untermeyer comments on the poetry of D.H. Lawrence 

thus: “his poems are concerned with little else than the dark fir, the broken

body, the struggle, death and resurrection of crucified flesh, the recurring cycle 

of fulfillment and frustration. This is D.H. Lawrence’s theme, a theme which 

he varied with great skill, but one which he could neither leave nor fully 

control. It is not merely his passion, it is his obsession.”1 (Modern British 

Poetry,(New York, Harcourt, Brace and company, 1936, 360). His poems also 

exhibit criticism of man, life and writing in a very subtle and personal way. 

Since the elements of criticism in his poems form an adequate size, there is s 

need to explore and it is undertaken in this chapter.

Many poets wear a mask. They are not so honest in their poetic 

production, for they suffer from duality. Samuel Palmer thinks but D.H. 

Lawrence wears no mask. Even poets like Milton and Tennyson wore a mask. 

But poets like Blake did not wear a mask. So is D.H. Lawrence’s case.

D.H. Lawrence in his Foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious speaks of poetry as ‘pure passionate experience.’ This he calls as ‘demon.’ This demon is timeless. Blake calls this the fourfold vision the poet needs to write down In an early letter (dated 18th August 1913) to Edward Marsh, who had objected to the rhythms of some of his poems, D.H. Lawrence wrote,“‘…. I think, didn’t know, that my rhythms fit my mood
pretty well, in the verse. And if the mood is out of joint, the
rhythm often is. I have always tried to get an emotion out in
its own course, without altering it. It needs the finest instinct
imaginable, much finer than the skill of craftsmen. That
Japanese Yone Noguchi tried it. He doesn’t quite bring it in.
Often I don’t –sometimes I do. Remember skilled verse is
dead in fifty years…’”

Snaps of the International Symposium March 2016

Modernism

Background:
Modernism: I

The term modernism is widely used to identify features in the subjects, forms, concepts and styles of literature, and the other arts in the early decades of the present century, but especially after World War I (1914-1918). The specific features signified by modernism vary with the user, but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of Western art, but culture in general. Modernism is a term frequently used in discussion of 20th century literature. The 20th century English Literature is a complex and elusive phenomenon. Diverse dimension of literary movements can be discerned in poetry, fiction, drama and literary criticism in the twentieth century. Modernism is a conscious movement. It has the philosophical, aesthetic and literary dimensions. It is impossible to give an exact definition of Modernism. But surely it can be said that modernism is one kind of substitution of realism and escapist romanticism. Modernism can be studied on different views as intellectual investigation, questioning any fixed relation between man and his social and material environment. But Modernism in literature can also be examined as a particular selection from a wide range of linguistic and literary options. The syntax of modernist text shows signs of epistemological uncertainty and metalingual criticism. Modernist semantics is characterized by consciousness, detachment and observation, which might restrict the workings of a free mind.
As a literary movement, modernism gained prominence during and especially, just after the First World War; it flourished in Europe and America throughout 1920s and 30s. Modernist authors sought to break away from tradition and conventions through experimentation with new forms, devices and styles. They incorporated the new psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung into their works and paid attention to
language. Their works reflected the pervasive sense of loss and despair in the wake of the Great War. Hence they emphasized on historical discontinuity and the alienation of humanity. Modernist works are called avant-grade. Although modernist authors tended to perceive the world as fragmented, many—like T. S. Eliot and
James Joyce—believed they could counter that disintegration through their works. Such writers viewed art as potentially integrating, restorative force, a remedy for the uncertainty of the modern world. To this end, even while depicting disorder in their works, modernists are injected order by creating patterns of allusion, symbol and myth.
The period of high modernism is the period between 1910 and 1930 and the writers of the period are T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Woolf, Stein etc. They emphasized on subjectivity. They did not give importance to omniscient external narration and stressed techniques. The year 1922 alone was signalized by the simultaneous appearance of such monuments of modernist innovation as James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob's Room, as well as many other experimental works of literature. The catastrophe of the War had shaken faith in the continuity of Western civilization and raised doubts about the adequacy of traditional literary modes to represent the harsh and dissonant realities
of the post-war world. T.S. Eliot wrote in a review of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1923 that the inherited mode of ordering a literary work , which assumed a relatively coherent and stable social order, could not accord with ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’. Like Joyce and Ezra Pound in his Cantos, Eliot experimented with new forms and a new style that would render contemporary
disorder, often contrasting it to a lost order and integration that had been based on the religion and myths of the cultural past. In The Wasteland (1922), for example, Eliot replaced the standard flow of poetic language by fragmented utterances, and substituted for the traditional coherence of poetic structure a deliberate dislocation of parts, in which very diverse components are related by connections that are left to the
reader to discover or invent. Major works of modernist fiction, following Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and his even more radical Finnegan’s Wake (1939), subvert the basic conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative continuity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language by the use of stream-of-consciousness and other innovative modes of narration. Gertrude Stein, often linked with Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Woolf as a trail-blazing modernist—experimented with writing that achieved its effects by violating the norms of Standard English syntax and sentence structure. These new forms of construction inverse, prose and narrative were emulated and carried further by many poets and novelists.


POETRY:

The twentieth century English poetry is called modern poetry. The most significant fact of 20th century English lyric poetry is the revolution that took place in poetic form and content which resulted in the rejection of the earlier poetic taste and practice. Modern (as the first half of the twentieth century was referred to) English lyric poetry in all diverse manifestation remains an incredibly effective way of embodying a rich variety of human experience and in “criticizing life”. It has been enriched by the changes that have taken place in the realms of thought, emotion, revelations and the like. It has incorporated the dramatic changes that have taken place in the intellectual and physical mores and aesthetic, political, social and economic aspects.
The term ‘modern’ amounts to more than a chronological description. It implies a distinctive kind of imagination, whereby its themes and forms, conditions and modes of creation, interrelate with each other and form an imaginative whole. It is sometimes aggressively and consciously different from the past literary tradition. Modern poetry is regarded as anti-traditional. It is more anti-traditional in terms of
“Victorianism”, which was a poetry of exclusions, while modern poetry in one of inclusions. The 1920s and 1930s are often described as the period of ‘high modernism’. There are some featuress of Modernist poetry. They are as follows:
• Use of allusion and myth, often from non-Western tradition
• Fragmented and non-linear
• Symbolism used in some cases


Influenced by various movements like imagism, Vorticism. Surrealism and
objectivism
• Metropolitan in theme and setting
• Experiment with form and style

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Modern English poetry is its centrality to human concerns. Man was caught in an atmosphere of disillusionment or apathy, tension or guilt, anger or bitterness. The world that it portrays is the one which has gone through two Worlds Wars, the Nazi concentration camps, economic

crisis and depression, intellectual changes, genocide and the constant threat of a nuclear war. Modernist poetry in England was influenced by French symbolism (Rimbaund, Laforgue, Mallarme and Bauderlaire), the American imagists and the writings of Ezra Pound. Since the beginning of the 20th century a departure from the late Victorian poetry, especially, in the exploration of form and attitude to human

experience took place with the advent of Ezra Pound, an extreme instance of modernism, and T.S. Eliot, an innovator. Both Pound and Eliot, each in his own way, brought about a revolution in the 20th century poetry. Other poets such as Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, A. E. Housman, Walter de la Mare, G. M.

Hopkins, W. H. Auden, Spender, Louis Macheice, Day Lewis, Dylan Thomas, D. H. Lawrence, just to name some major poets, one finds the basic concern with modern man and his world, yet expressed in a matter so strikingly different from each other.

Ezra Pound (1885-19720), was born in the USA but moved to Britain and Europe later in his life, has the reputation of being one of the most difficult poets of the 20th century. He largely created the poetry of our time, and revolutionized its poetic diction and verse forms. His significance to 20th century criticism and poetry is unimaginable. He nurtured several poets – one of them was T. S. Eliot, whose The Wasteland was edited by Pound -- and was at the forefront of major literary movements and developments like Vorticism and Imagism. Pound was one of the first modernists who assimilated the ancients and the non-European cultures in English poetry. Eliot recognized this and described him as being both ‘objectively

modern’. He adapted literary and cultural traditions form China and Europe, which makes his poetry inaccessible. His attention to form – he was an advocate of spare imagery and free verse – established trends in modernism. A good example of his Pound’s Cantos, running into 120 sections, is multicultural epic. There are Chinese characters, quotations in European languages and references from the history of Africa, the United States and Europe. Pound did not bother to explicate his references, and this adds to the poem’s difficulty. The unconnected sections of the poem and the fragmented imagery have been interpreted by some critics as reflecting the fragmented nature of human experience of itself.

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), is surely Ireland’s greatest modern poet. Yeats was particularly influenced by the French symbolists and adapted from Celtic mythology and various mystic traditions. Yeats was also a deeply political poet and his engagement with Ireland’s struggle with England produced some exceptionally fine poems like Easter 1916. His poetry falls roughly into three divisions: the romantic, the realistic, and the mystical. In the poetry of the first period he dwells on love, beauty, Nature and Irish mythology and tales of the supernatural, which he weaves into lovely dreams. The verse also flows on sweetly in the traditional romantic manner. In the second period the grim reality on the Irish strggle for freedom claims

most of his attention. In the final period both the dreams of early youth and the realities of the Irish situation are replaced by a mystic contemplation of life, developed from various philosophical systems, native, eastern, and western. The poems which convey this – Leda and the Swan, Sailing to Byzantium, Byzantium are

extremely difficult to understand in spite of the prose comments which the poet provided to some of them. Yeats also tried to escape the dilemmas and anxieties of his time by turning mysticism. His experiments with automatic writing with his wife Georgia Hyde-Lees revealed multiple sides to his personality and he concluded that his daimon was female. Like other modernists writing under the influence of

Freudian theory – Yeats was exploring his own fragmented personality where the mind is not just male or female but a bit of both. In Among School Children, the mystic vision fuses present and past, and suggests a harmony and unity that is truly organic. The poem Leda and the Swan is about linkage of power and sexuality. His vision of civilization and destruction appears in a poem like The Second Coming. It

indicates vision of chirstianity’s peak and destruction after 2000 years. He proposed a universal memory -- what he called spiritus mundi – which was eternal in the Byzantium poems. His poems often also expressed anxiety about body, mortality and death. Like other modernists, Yeats was skeptical of order and beauty and his poems reflect the modernist anxiety about impermanence. Symbolism, suggestion, and allusion abound, but they are too enigmatical to be interpreted with. In versification, while he is always musical, he is more regular in the earlier volumes than the later, where he adopts freer metres and attempts to keep close to the rhythm of speech. This together with his interest in the complexities of life makes him a modern.

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), often taken to be one of the most complex poets of the 20th century, changed his location, political beliefs and faith. He is the major modern poet. He is aware of disintegration of moral values in the contemporary society and of the spiritual bankruptcy of the age. All the characters of his early poetry suffer from inertia, distrust and spiritual vacuity. His The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock presents many of modernism’s features. The ‘topos’ or setting is the city. There is a sense of ennui as the city; its people and its very character seem to be in coma. It reveals that time and life are meaningless. Prufrock is away from instinct and passion and he becomes a victim of indecision and fear. He is ‘like a patient etherized upon a
table’. The man (Prufrock) in the poem seeks to convey something to the woman, who does not seem to understand. He admits he is unable to choose the right words. A parodic element is also introduced as the women of the lower class talk about great artists and high culture (Michelangelo). There is a sense of collapse and decay towards the end of the poem. Some startling images and numerous intertextual
allusions and juxtapositions made the poem fascinating and modernist. Time is nonlinear and space is surreal in the poem. The Wasteland was his most ambitious poem. It is an unparalleled work in modernist poetry. It attempts to project an impersonal society, barren of belief. The technique is very varied and derived from French symbolists and Imagists, and they appear to be fragmentary. The poem is in the form of fragments, and is meant to indicate how human knowledge will always be limited and incomplete:
Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images,
The poem also explores the collapse of collapse of contemporary civilizations. Sexuality is meaningless, as illustrated in the incident of typist. Religion has failed. Technology and science are used in wars to kill people. The collapse of civilization in Eliot is perhaps the single most pervasive modernist theme.


D.H.Lawrence’s (1885-1930) reputation rests on his fiction, even though he wrote some highly accomplished poetry. He was influenced briefly by Imagists. His poems are intimate, deep, and depict his personal emotions. He was probably the most controversial figure of his time. The language of his poems is direct and natural, which introduced a new tone into English poetry. His poetry is not the
outcomes of rules and formal craftsmanship, but of a purer, more native and immediate artistic sensibility. He created openness to sexual feelings and a myth making vision that saw great meaning in ordinary life. He constantly stressed in his poetry, the physically and instinctual awareness of the psychic forces at work in the
universe. In contrast to the modernists, Lawrence highlighted spontaneity and sentiment in his poetry. Like modernist, He is extremely self-conscious. Poems such as Snake, Piano, Bavarian Gentians, Baby Tortoise, Mosquito, and End of Another Home Holiday, portray the acute insight, mystical and psychological experiences that open a wonder, wit, honesty, and intelligence. The confident, direct style of
Lawrence’s poems introduced a new tone into English poetry.

During the thirties the new poets were the ‘pink poets’ who wrote of Marxism, and class-struggle. The voice of protest is seen in W H Auden, Stephen Spender Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis. At the beginning they did not suffer alienation, but later they ask men to seek refuge in privacy and loneliness. W. H.
Auden (1907-1973), was a witty and intelligent poet countering the rhetoric and theatricality of others with his own brand of understatement. Of the poets of the1930s, writing in the wake of Eliot and Pound’s high modernist mode, the work of W H Auden is perhaps the most significant. Auden was a member of a group of writers at Oxford: Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis. As an intellectual poet, he had the capacity to invent witty language, forceful imagery, a mystic pattern of fantasy and diagnosis by which he could lead his readers to a greater self awareness about themselves and their society. Auden wrote about war, culture, morality, workers and humanity. A Brilliant satirist and chronicler of human and civilization follies, Auden’s poetry is notable for its range of subject matter and precise control over rhythm and diction. Like modernist Auden is disillusioned by the decaying civilization. His dexterous craftsmanship, his wit, humour and learning make him one of the most interesting of modern poets.

The high-talk of modernism is dead long back and the present cultural phase is described as postmodern. Rejecting both the modernists’ abstract philosophizing and experimentation with form and the deliberate commonness of the Larkin kind, contemporary poetry, from the 1970s, has moved along various lines. It is seen that so many readers think that Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes are the British poets of Today. But some other readers include D J Enright, R S Thomas, Peter Levi, Carol Ann Duffy, and Geoffrey Hill and so on. The old names like W H Auden and T S Eliot would be forgotten. Today, there are so many promising poets actively writing in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Most
poets have some groups: The Movement, The Mavericks, the Group and the Beat. There is an anxiety that poetry has exhausted all possible forms. Cyberculture has enabled new experimentation with hypertexts, thus providing a new form. The contemporary poetry was divided on the line followed by two major poets – Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. It is said that the misfortune of the British poetry began when Philip Larkin rejected the “common myth-kitty” of Dylan Thomas. Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was the most distinguished voice of a new generation reacting equally against what seemed to them the confused romanticism of Dylan Thomas and his imitators and the naïve political enthusiasm and idealism of the poets of the 1930s such as Auden, Spender, and Day Lewis. He preferred the forthright virtues ofThomas Hardy, whom he acknowledged as his most important influence, as an alternative to what was offered by modernism. Larkin tried to write poetry of irony, clarity and exact observation. Larkin’s poetry lies a constant awareness of the passing of time and of man being a captive of time, disappointment, loneliness balanced with their opposites – permanence, joy, and the sharing of some ritual. His poems are invariable subtle, disturbing, complex, however, ‘domestic’ in his subjects.


A return to primitivism is an important feature of contemporary poetry. A raw, violent primitivism is visible in Ted Hughes (1939-98), Poet Laureate of England from 1984 until his death. He has an imaginative depth, emotional complexity and powerful expression which have placed him till the present day as one of chief
exponents of postmodern poetry. He was a prolific writer, fascinating, and bewildering at times. Turning away from the urbanism of the moderns, Hughes’ early work is rooted in nature. However, Hughes did not have the Wordsworthean view of nature. The nature found in The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Crow (1970) and other early poems, is a violent, barbaric and blood-ridden one. Dismemberment, blood and violent mutilation mark Hughes’ work. In Snowdrop, nature and its creatures are visualized almost entirely in terms of their power, brutality and capacity for the violence. Hughes examines the divided nature of man and his relationships: between men and women, between them and natural life and finally with god. The
publication of Crow brought along with it controversy regarding its new hero, Crow, resilient, resourceful, deceitful and God as Crow’s adversary, passive and caught sleeping when Crow is going about his tricks.

Compiled By Dr. Asis De

For more details follow the links below.
wwnorton.com/college/english/nael9/section/volF/overview.aspx (Background)
http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html (Essay by T . S Eliot)
https://www.uni-due.de/lyriktheorie/texte/1900_yeats.html (Essay by W. B Yeats)

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