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
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)
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.
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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