The English Literature Course British Poetry in 20th Century
A movement from traditional poetic diction to new forms of poetic expression.
Modern poetry was written predominantly in free verse in a language that was closer to everyday speech.
Dialect, colloquial and foreign words could be found in many modern poems.
TRANSITION FROM VICTORIANISM TO MODERNISM
Thomas Hardy, as a poet, represents the transition from Victorianism to Modernism.
T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965) )
One of the most outstanding figures in English poetry of the 20th century is Thomas Stearns Eliot (who was also a critic).
Born in the USA, he went to Europe to study and remained in London where he worked as a teacher, banker, and eventually, writer.
Eliot was the major innovator in modern English poetry.
He looked for inspiration in French Symbolist poetry, Dante, Shakespeare and English metaphysical poetry of the 17th century.
He published his first book of poetry Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. He edited literary magazines The Egoist and The Criterion.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) reflects a total break with the conventions of Romantic poetry.
The poem is written in a form of an interior monologue (the stream of consciousness technique), which is in a way related to Robert Browning's dramatic monologue.
It shows the fragments of thoughts of an average man, Mr Prufrock. The poem is ironic in its message.
In 1922 Eliot published his most famous poem The Waste Land which shows in a series of visions the chaos, impotence and emptiness of the world.
The poem reflects Eliot's belief in the collapse of the values of western civilisation.
The basis of the poem is the legend of Fisher King who ruled over the Waste Land.
First World War Poetry
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) wrote bitter poems about his experiences as a soldier in World War I. He also published an autobiographical work Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) which was the first of a trilogy of novels (1928-36) reissued together as The Memoirs of George Sherston (1937).
Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
Brooke was interested in the imagism of Ezra Pound and the works of T. S. Eliot. He wrote a series of sonnets 1914 and Other Poems (1915) which expressed the patriotism and optimism of the British war effort during World War I.
He died of blood poisoning. His poems were highly praised during the war.
Later he was accused of sentimentality. Brooke's “War Sonnets” include “The Soldier”, one of the most patriotic poems.
Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
The most admired of the First Wa poet.
Owen was killed in action on Nov. 4, 1918, at 25 years of age.
Owen's finest poems include "Dulce et Decorum Est," "Futility," and "Anthem for Doomed Youth".
These poems are both elegiac and realistic descriptions of "those who die as cattle." Owen's poetry is also remarkable for his innovative use of half rhyme.
Poetry after 1939:
W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney
W. H. Auden (1907-1973).
W.H. Auden was associated with the leftist poets.
Auden's poetry of the 1920s and 1930s dealt much with the topics of the day: the Depression, unemployment and poverty.
During the Spanish Civil War Auden volunteered as ambulance driver.
In 1939 he went to America and became an American citizen but he returned to England and settled down in Oxford in the last period of his life.
After the war Auden became interested in Christianity. Auden's poetry is noted for strong didacticism and a tone of moral responsibility.
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
Dylan Thomas wrote poems which absorbed the images of his native Wales.
In 1934 Thomas published his first volume of poetry, Eighteen Poems, which restored a Romantic sensibility to English poetry.
In 1936 he published a second volume of poetry, entitled Twenty-Five Poems.
Thomas also wrote autobiographical short stories entitled Portrait As a Young Dog (1940).
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Analysis
In "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," the poet depicts the inevitability of death through repetition and diction. Furthermore, he portrays the stages of man's life in his comparison to "good men, "wild men," and grave men." Finally, Thomas' medium of poetic expression presents itself in the villanelle.
Night replaces death in a metaphoric manner. From the stages of his life, he finally reaches this one. The blind may once again see this sign that death knocks on one's door. The second and fourth stanzas, the final lines match. Stanza four's reference to "wild men" concerns the living part of life.
The poem ends ambiguously hinting the acceptance of death by the father and the son. It reveals the fact that men often learn too late to change their actions. How the speaker depicts that "Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay" refers to the bright light many often reported seeing in near-death experiences. The dying of the light refers to life as a light that shines to prove existence.
A 19-line poem of fixed form consisting of five tercets and a final quatrain on two rhymes, with the first and third lines of the first tercet repeated alternately as a refrain closing the succeeding stanzas and joined as the final couplet of the quatrain.
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
was the dominant figure in the group of poets who were labelled in the 1950s as The Movement.
Larkin wrote both poetry and fiction.
His early poems show the influence of W. B. Yeats, e.g. The North Ship (1945). In his later poems Larkin refers to the poetry of Thomas Hardy and W.H. Auden, whom he admired.
Philip Larkin wrote about the spiritual vacuity of the British welfare state.
Why did I dream of you last night?
Why did I dream of you last night?
Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
beyond the window.
So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
--Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.
Ted Hughes
Hughes studied at Cambridge University, where he read English before changing to archaeology and anthropology.
At Cambridge he met the American poet Sylvia Plath, whom he married in 1956.
Plath encouraged him to pursue his poetic vocation, and they lived together in the United States, teaching and writing, until 1959.
Hughes's first collection of poems, Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957, followed by Lupercal (1960) and Wodwo (1967).
British poet and author, who in 1984 was appointed Poet Laureate.
Hughes' earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals, an interest from an early age.
Tennyson's phrase "nature, red in tooth and claw" could have been written for Hughes. He is acutely aware the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural world, and writes of it with fascination, fear and awe.
He finds in animals a metaphor for his view on life: animals live out a struggle for the survival of the fittest in the same way that humans strive for ascendancy and success.
A classic example is Hawk Roosting.
His later work is deeply concerned with myth and the bardic tradition, heavily inflected with a modernist, existential and satirical viewpoint.
Hughes' first collection of poetry was Hawk in the Rain (1957).
His most famous work is Crow (1970), which presents a bitter, cynical and surreal view of the universe with what appears to be simple, sometimes (superficially) badly constructed verse.
In Birthday Letters Hughes writes on his relationship with his wife Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide at the age of 30.
The poetry of Ted Hughes is indebted to myth and archetype.
He also had a fascination for nature and especially animals like frogs, bulls, eels, rats, etc.
Hughes published collections of poems: The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Crow (1970), Cave Birds (1975), Season Songs (1976). He also wrote books for children.
In his use of sprung rhythms and onomatopoeic sounds, Hughes was following the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. However, the greatest influence during this period was D. H. Lawrence.
Lawrence, who had an English working-class background similar to Hughes's, had explored primitivism and the unconscious in animal poems such as “Snake” (Complete Poems, 1964). Hughes's first collection of poems, Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957, followed by Lupercal (1960) and Wodwo (1967).
Many of the finest poems in these volumes describe animals, characteristically using bold metaphors and dramatic, physical language. They often concentrate on the deadly violence of the natural world, made manifest in jaguars, pikes, hawks, and even thrushes, as in these lines from “Thrushes”:
By examining the ruthless, instinctive behaviour of animals, Hughes revealed the distance between human civilization and its primitive origins. His poetry continually seeks to reconnect language to its unconscious source.
Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)
Seamus Heaney is one of the best known Irish poets.
In 1966 he published his first volume of poetry, Death of a Naturalist.
His second volume, Door Into the Dark, was published in 1969.
He continued to write poems on the Irish past and present, such as Wintering Out (1973), North (1975), Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984), The Hawn Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991).
Heaney is recognised by many as the `most important Irish poet since Yeats'.
In his poetry Heaney makes frequent references to the history, language and culture of his native Ireland. He acknowledged the influence of such poet as Robert Frost and Ted Hughes as well as Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy and even Dante. In 1995, Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Heaney's work exhibits supple rhythms, but it is the intensity and sensuality of his language—his burrowing in what he calls the “word-hoard”—which has led to critical acclaim.
His later work, from the long narrative sequences in Station Island (1984) to the shorter lyrics in The Haw Lantern (1987), Seeing Things (1991), and The Spirit Level (1995), includes love poems and elegies, and displays an increasing concern with metaphysical subjects and themes.