1901 – 1914 Edwardian 1914 – 1939 Modernist 1939 – Contemporary The Twentieth Century: 1901- Present 1901 – 1914 Edwardian 1914 – 1939 Modernist 1939 – Contemporary  

Significant events: World War I (1914-18) Spanish Civil War (1936-9) J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890-1936) World War II (1939-45) Writings of Sigmund Freud (1913-38) Chief poets: Robert Bridges (1844-1930) ●Louis MacNeice (1907-64) Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) ●James Joyce (1882-1941) Thorn Gunn (1929—) ●Roy Campbell (1901-57) Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) ●Philip Larkin (l922—) Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) ●A E Housman (1859-1936) William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) ●Dylan Thomas (1914-53) Walter de Ia Mare (1873-1956) ●D H Lawrence (1885-1930) ●Ted Hughes (1930—) ●Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) ●Seamus Heaney (1939—) Robert Graves (1895—) ●Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) Cecil Day Lewis (1904-72) ●Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

Modernism 'Make it new'   Modernism was the dominant aesthetic movement of the earlier 20th. C. It is often considered to be a thorough critique and repudiation of Romanticism in general and Victorianism in particular. Now that modernism is no longer modern, however, we are able to evaluate the ideas and artistic expressions of the modernists from a distance. We can see that modernism included modified elements of characteristics which are associated with Romanticism they professed to find as so revolting. a report of something such as a political situation or system or a person's work or ideas, which examines it and provides an often negative judgment.

First Modernist poets were as inclined as Wordsworth or Shelley to see themselves in detachment from and criticism of their society. W.B., the Irish poet who called himself 'the last Romantic' and whom we might describe as the first Modernist, located himself literally and metaphorically in a solitary tower (Thoor Ballylee), set apart from ordinary human experience. Similarly, T. S. Eliot, whether in guise of Prufrock in his 'Love Song' or Tiresias in The Waste Land, is a lonely commentator on the mores of his age. The Romantic motifs of solitude and loneliness persist in Modernist poetry in the distinctly 20th c. condition of alienation.

Secondly, the Modernists share the Romantics' desire to escape to distant and idealised worlds. As Coleridge dreamt of Xanadu and Tennyson of Lotus-land and King Arthur's court, Ezra Pound wrote of oriental Cathay. Yeats would journey to Byzantium and Eliot yearned for the life-giving rain of distant, eastern Himavant which will not fall in the decayed infertility of modern Western civilisation. He also idealised the earlier 17th c., not only for its literature, but also for its social order, as the Romantics and Victorians were nostalgic for the Middle Ages.  

The dissimilarities of these similarities, however, indicate the newness of Modernism. In the Romantic poets' celebration of isolation, the mood was one usually one of elevation and exhilaration, even in the experience of melancholy. In Modernist poetry, however, the isolated condition of the men and women portrayed is usually seen as part of a collective experience of spiritual despair and emotional dissociation in the passionless and soulless waste land of their post-industrial society.

The Romantics escaped from the present by contemplating past ages and distant worlds. And Tennyson transported his readers to the Lotus-land of the imagination.   The Modernists wanted to confront the present rather than to escape from it. They used contrasts with past ages as measures of the decline of the 20th. C. They saw the 20th c. as the beginning of a new age antithetical to the 2000 years of the Christian era.   The Modernists confronted modernity and that is what sets their artistry apart from the dominant modes of 19th poetry. There is a sense of modernity in the 19th c. realistic novels, but unlike the realists in prose Modernist poets used the resonance of imagery and symbolism.

Where the Romantics retreated to a rural scene, Modernist poets focussed on the urban environment. Although they were repelled by city, writers such as Pound, Eliot and Joyce were drawn irresistibly to it. The dehumanising metropolis was the microcosm of 20th c. existence, as Eliot writes in Preludes.   And the city, for all its faults, was crucial in practical terms to the development of Modernism. After the 1st WW, the concentration of artist in Paris and London facilitated the cross-fertilisation of their ideas. The movement being fostered in these large centres of teeming life was essentially that of a coterie, an elite generated and sustained by a highly educated and cultivated class of writers and readers.

Before the war Yeats had appointed Ezra Pound as his secretary in London, and Pound also acted a kind of literary agent for the unknown Eliot and edited his Modernists masterwork The Waste Land, which Eliot dedicated to him as il miglior fabbro – ('the better craftsman'). Even a section of London was colonised by and has given its name to one of the artistic groups related to Modernism: 'Bloomsbury'. Writers such as Virginia Woolf were prominent members of the Bloomsbury Group. Modernism was a metropolitan, cosmopolitan phenomenon. But it was not a popular movement. Much of the publication of Modernists works, which were themselves erudite, educated and allusive, took place in 'highbrow' journals with small circulation—Joyce's Ulysses was serialised in The Little Review from 1918 to 1920, before being published as a book in 1922. Yet Modernism sought to express the spirit of the new age of democracy.

The dating of the beginning of the movement need not be precise, but D The dating of the beginning of the movement need not be precise, but D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf both presented suggestions. Woolf proposed December 1910, when King Edward VII and the Edwardian era came to an end. With devastating simplicity she believed that at that time 'human nature changed', she says: All human relations shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, literature.   D. H. Lawrence, in Kangaroo, his Australian novel, prefers a later date: It was in [1915] the old world ended.   —that is which Thomas Hardy referred to as 'the breaking of nations', the dismemberment of Europe during the Great War.

I The 1st WW (1914-18), a period which also included the Irish uprising of 1916 and the Russian revolution of 1917, is the decisive historical phenomenon in the development of Modernism. Yeats' Responsibilities collection was published in 1914. In it, he dedicates himself and his poetry to giving voices to the new world that was emerging out of Victorianism and Edwardianism. The 1st of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘new’ novels, The Rainbow, which introduced a startling frankness into the discussion of sexual relationships, appeared in 1915.

T.S.Eliot’s collection Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. It included poems that had been written as early as 1910 challenging both the conventional subject matter and style of contemporary post-Victorian poetry and Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, scrutinizing and denouncing Victorian reputations, was published in 1918. The great war, in which nearly nine million lives were lost, was the shocking and the tragic beginning of our age of violence and carnage on an international scale. Literature, and poetry in particular, was bound to register both the cosmic and personal impact of this horror on contemporary society and on individuals.

In Eliot’s poetry, there is both the probing of personal psychological and emotional disturbance and the broader evocation of societal and cultural decay, as in the beginning verse paragraph of “Gerontion” (little old man) of 1920: Here I am, an Old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought. My house is a decayed house, And the Jew squats on the window-sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. This poem represents the European and personal consequences of the conflict. However, the most immediate manifestation of this cruel new world was in the poems written during the war by those English soldiers who had experienced the nightmare of trench warfare against the Germans in France, on ‘The Western Front’.

The Romantic ideals of heroism and patriotism were assaulted by Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney, Issac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen, who had experienced the realties of battle. Their poems shockingly contradicted the official propaganda about the conflict as a noble venture– as it had been envisaged by Rupert Brooke, for example, in his war sonnets at the beginning of hostilities: If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her way to roam, A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the Eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

The blithe spirit of this work was replaced by poetry of a very different kind, as the fighting wore on and the casualties mounted. Wilfred Owen wrote this sonnet, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” in 1917, by which time Rupert Brooke and the serene world he represented in his life, his person and his poetry, had been buried forever: What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? – Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the shuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons (prayers) No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires. What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing – down of blinds.

The title, appearing to promise an ‘anthem,’ is deliberately ironic The title, appearing to promise an ‘anthem,’ is deliberately ironic. An anthem is usually a prolonged song of praise, such as a patriotic writer might have penned for a nation’s fighting heroes. It also has religious connotations, as the part of a service– perhaps of commemoration of the dead, such as occurred in Britain during and after the Great War. Owen, in representing such a brief utterance as an ‘anthem’, strikingly disappoints such expectations and thereby emphasises his point that there is nothing to celebrate in his subject. Notice the title of the poem! The tragic implications of the title are strengthened because it is youth that is “doomed”. Age is doomed to death by virtue of its years. But it is a perversity of circumstances for youth to be so brutally truncated. The poem is a sonnet: an octave and a sestet with a strict rhyme. The discipline of the form restrains (and thereby intensifies) the passion of the ideas in the poem.

The slaughter of young men in the war is so inhuman that any idea of their humanity is stripped from them and “they die as cattle”. The question in the opening line is rhetorical, for the dignity of the “passing-bells” (in the parish church, tolling to inform the community that one of their member is dying) has itself passed, in the dehumanisation of this situation. To accompany their deaths, the young men only have the percussion of the guns and rifles. Echoing the opening line of the poem, the sestet similarly begins with a question. This marks a further stage in the progress of dead youth’s fate and gives a new emphasis in the poetry. Owen new asks who will pray for the souls of these lost ones and wish them “God-speed” on their spiritual journey: What candles may be held to speed them all?

The weeping eyes and pallid brows of their friends and family at home will keep them in the remembrance. In the place of wreaths, there will be the memories kept in minds which patiently hope for a reunion beyond the grave and, in the meantime, there is at “And each slow dusk a drawing – down of blinds” . The most remarkable feature of this poem is its commemoration of bitterness and poignancy. Owen’s direct and forceful criticism of the brutality of war and his “tenderness” in contemplating the loved ones of the “doomed youth”. Both emotions could have become uncontrolled. Owen’s mastery of the sonnet form prevents such a lapse.

The anti-war poets of the first World War brought a new reality into poetry, of a disturbing contemporary kind. Theirs was a crucial contribution to Modernism, displaying its commitment to confronting modernity with the facts of contemporary life. Their subject-matter, nonetheless, was limited. Philip Larkin insisted that Owen’s poetry, for example, is not only connected with the Great War, ‘but all war’: not particular suffering but all suffering; not particular waste but all waste. Yet our minds inevitably turn to the First World War when we read their poems. And while no-one regrets the mastery of traditional poetic forms which they display, their exploration of the possibilities of form was also limited.

II The most important feature of Modernist poetry is its innovative style; it fulfilled the urgent imperative of Ezra Pound, emphatically capitalised, to “MAKE IT NEW”. Outmoded ways of writing, in particular the lyrical and discursive voices of 19th poetry, were discarded in order to discover and pursue a style suited to the new subject which the Modernists were addressing. An unlovely world demanded an abrasive new voice and the confrontational aspect of the project called for immediacy and succinctness (succinct is what is said in a clear and short way; expressing what needs to be said without unnecessary words). Pound, the principal theorist of the movement, had promoted these new ideas with an imperative voice in Poetry magazine in 1913: Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something ... Go in fear of abstractions. Do not tell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.

However, although traditional poetic diction is rejected, a clear distinction between prose and poetry is maintained and the priority of poetry is affirmed. The Modernists avoided abstractions (when a subject is very general and not based on real situations), but they did not commit themselves absolutely to the concrete. Rather they pursued imagistic and symbolic use of language (we will study imagism) Pound declared that the image “presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” because it resists paraphrase, suggesting rather than telling. In this it was unlike the formerly popular narrative poetry and moralistic verse of Victorianism. An image, an inspired insight, is also found in prose, in the ‘epiphanies’ of James Joyce who describes the technique as a ‘revelation of the whatness of a thing.’