END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
The origins of modern British poetry are not unexpectedly to
be found in the poetic cross-currents and developments towards the end of the
nineteenth century. Although the reigning Victorian poetic fashions and
standards were challenged from diverse directions, many modern poets were
indebted to Browning, Hopkins, Hardy and the late Victorian, poets. When modem
poetry broke with the past, the rebellion became particularly visible in the
rejection of conventionally bejewelled and smooth poetic diction which could no
longer articulate the raw, disturbing experience already handled in the
avant-garde novel of Lawrence and Joyce. The debt of Eliot's The Waste Land
to Joyce's Ulysses is well known.
Origin of Modern British Poetry
The point of affinity between Browning and modern poetry is
in his obscurity and irregularity of diction. While this initially may have
sprung from a mind prone to rambling parentheses and therefore often became a
vice, it carried Browning's imagination through a rapid succession of
associations. For Eliot and the modems, he thus linked the past, the
'Metaphysical' poets, with a poet like Hopkins. Browning's ability to create
the natural articulation of a voice, which necessitated syntactical obscurity,
remains a, permanent legacy to modern poetry.
The contrast that the modern British poetry of Hardy and
Hopkins offered to contemporary models lies in their use of ambiguity and
shifting tonalities, their adoption of an ironic mode in short. At times,
Hardy's poetry seems to be boldly experimental, characterized by frequent
flashes of daring imagination. His experiments orchestrate the use of dialect
words, abbreviations, archaisms, and 'kennings' (or verbal riddles in the style
of Anglo-Saxon poetry), some of which would be found barbaric according to
orthodox aesthetics. Nevertheless, Hardy functions largely within the
traditional forms, presenting the drama of unresolved contradictions: he has
himself described his poems as unadjusted impressions. If he tended to relate
the local and individual to cosmic pessimism, he was characteristically
tentative, holding his judgment in suspense. Ultimately his vision is ironic,
involving the rapid and unsettling juxtaposition of images and counter-perceptions
that anticipates modernist techniques. Both Robert Bridges and Hopkins
experiment with prosody.
The former's attempts stem from Greek and Latin prosody,
resulting in much charm and delicacy at the cost of poetic concentration and
intensity. For these qualities we must go to Hopkins whose 'sprung rhythm,'
borrowed from Anglo-Saxon prosody, was reinforced by fresh imagery and compact
structure. By keeping the number of stressed syllables fixed and varying the
number of unstressed syllables, Hopkins was able to revive the 'Metaphysical'
mode linking it to modern poetry. This mode, submerged through the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, was characterized, as we all know, by ingenious
analogy-the extended or cryptic 'conceit -the yoking of contraries and
irregular rhythm and diction. Such a sensibility was sharply different from the
Romantic and Victorian, banishing the bogey of 'high seriousness' from the
concept of poetry and locating the poem's value not in ideas or autobiography
but in the psychological process of creation in the poet's mind. In this sense,
the modem movement amounts to a rejection of expressivist categories in favour
of the Aristotelian theory of mimetic representation, although the former were
never suppressed. The modem poet's unconscious was a storehouse of
heterogeneity stirring him obscurely, prompting him, as it were, to get rid of
excessively accumulated experience. The disparateness and breadth of the
cultural tradition made for impersonality of expression. The 'metaphysical'
poet brought together dissimilars-secular and divine love, for instance so that
the discord plunged him deep into the theme, the greater awareness of the
conflict demanding greater poetic technique.
Romanticism : Literary Theory
Such are the larger implications of Hopkins's achievement of
forging a style capable of conveying the discords and conflicts in his mind.
Apart from the contrapuntal play of regular metrical form and irregular speech
rhythms, the intermeshing of 'inscape' and 'instress' anticipates the
techniques adopted in much modem poetry. If 'inscape' is a variation on the
principle of individuation (as defined by Coleridge), a focus on quidditas
or haeccitas-the thisness and whatness of things-'instress' is the force and, energy
holding together the 'inscape.' In Hopkins's concern with the outer reflection
of a thing as a thing, we encounter the modem mind's awareness of objects in
their essential particularity and its simultaneous search in and through
artistic form, that is, the poem itself, of the universal.
In the 1880s and 1890s the interrelated and overlapping
tendencies of aestheticism, impressionism, and symbolism contributed to the
rejection of Victorian priggish moralism and scientific materialism. Aestheticism
or the movement known as I’art pour I’art (art for art's sake) stressed
impersonal craftsmanship and a stylized rhetoric of passion. These new elements
later became the basis for the ironic and somewhat cold detachment so distinctive
of modernist poetry.
Stylization of Modern British Poetry
Stylization was closely related to decadence, that is, the
desire to understand the deeper and darker resources of the psyche guided in
turn by a sense of overwrought aestheticism. The symbolist movement often aimed
at suggesting an inner richness and mystery, and was thus part of the pervasive
reaction against the positivist attitudes bred by technological smugness: it
fell back upon symbols in order to capture the life above or below pragmatic reality. In France, symbolist
suggestiveness was contested by the The Modernists Parnassian School of poetry
with its emphasis on precise and economical description, of clinical
self-observation. The drive towards hard precision and clarity which represents
perhaps the most decisive break with traditional poetic diction found
expression above all in Imagism just before World War I. Accuracy,
concreteness, and unadorned economy characterized the direct prgsentation of
the objective world without discursive reflection. To this project an evocative
dimension was added not only by symbolism but also by impressionism which
loosened or dissolved an object into a group of impressions. The modern poet
was thereby able to render the passage and dissolution of impressions so
distinctive to the new, unsettling experience of the modem megalopolis, of
rootless and heterogeneous cosmopolitan culture. Juxtaposing impressions or
images apparently disconnected, the poet learnt from the arrangement of
multiple planes in sculpture or movements in music the fundamental technique of
discontinuous composition. This is how modernism held up a faithful mirror to
fragmented reality and in doing so, produced an open gestalt or transformed,
indeterminate structure of coherence. The Waste Land may be a mimesis of the
heap of broken images that modem European civilization has been reduced to but
the final effect, that is, the poem, remains a mastery of fragmentation
THE GEORGIANS AND THE WAR POETS
In the modern British poetry, the colloquial accents and
unsentimental economy of Eliot and the later Yeats were, as we have already
seen, anticipated at the turn of the century. These features are discernible
even along the more conservative Georgian poets at the time of the First World
War, although the excesses and exoticisms of decadence as well as the
discontinuities of impressionism are absent. These poets include Rupert Brooke
and Edward Thomas. Brooke was the most popular and typically Georgian who,
somewhat ironically, began as a rebel against Victorian gentility with its
fondness for vapid sweetness. But like many of his contemporaries, he could not
break out of the orderly bounds of liberal humanism. Edward Thomas's strength
lay in nature poetry, which he started to write on the encouragement of Robert
Frost. Somewhat like Frost, Thomas meditates on a natural scene and using a
plain and direct idiom, creates the effect of a questioning honesty resisting
all temptations to abstract conceptual finality. Such a modernity of
temperament was reinforced by a certain casual and homely intonation. The
American Robert Frost's public image of a Yankee farmer-poet is not entirely
unjustified: he turned against the Romantic tradition by choosing the localized
authenticity of rural New England.
Literary Theory: Deconstruction
Although the reader may miss in his or Thomas's work the
impact of modem psychology, science, and politics, their use of the spoken language
has been rightly admired for its unmistakable modernity.' Frost in particular
was eminently successful in creating and modulating a fictional speaking voice.
The trauma of the First World War was first expressed by poets in the trenches
challenging patriotic and military humbug; it then colored the sensibility of
an entire age.
In Sassoon, war encouraged a direct, colloquial vigor to
reinforce the gruesome imagery, anger, and ridicule. Both Sassoon and Owen used
realism in order to shock readers out of their complacency and expose. The
naked reality of dehumanized violence. After the war, Sassoon's poetry acquired
an ironic quality through an unsettled juxtaposition of viewpoints. Owen,
despite his unparalleled mastery of realistic detail, achieved a truly complex,
sometimes visionary detachment and distancing. Isaac Rosenberg also attempted
this imaginative distancing and often used a rapid succession=of images. Thus
we can see that war poetry prepared the ground for the Modernist poetry of the
1920s.
IMAGISM in Modern British poetry
Modern American poetry was more innovative than British.
While free verse did not last as a vogue, the technique of impressionistic
juxtaposition without the links of smooth transition had a much longer life in
Ezra Pound, and above all, in T.S. Eliot. Support came not only from the new
insights of psychology and psychoanalysis but from the larger mood of a
disintegrating civilization. The technique of discontinuous composition was
highlighted in Imagism, particularly under the aegis of Pound who no doubt took
his cue from T.E. Hulme and Ford Madox Ford. Hulme, in his Speculations, not
only set out a philosophical basis for rejection of Romantic sentimental
meliorism but appended some imagistic fragments as aesthetic equivalents of a
new, austere classicism. A threefold Imagistic manifesto was announced in the
magazine Poetry in March 191 3: (i) direct treatment of the 'thing' whether
subjective or objective (ii) scrupulous avoidance of any word that did not
contribute to the presentation (iii) Rhythmical
composition in order to the musical phrase, not of a metronome.
Among the poets originally grouped as Imagist were Pound
himself, Amy Lowell, H.D. Richard Aldington, and John Gould Fletcher. Soon
divisions surfaced, especially between Pound and Amy Lowell; in any case, the
anthologies often included poets like D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce. In the
ultimate analysis, Imagism had a historical importance; it survives, variously
modified, in the bloodstream of modem poetry, in the search for a hard
precision and economy. Lawrence never really fitted the Imagist bill, despite
his animal and flower poems, because although he valued accuracy and rhythmic
freedom, he rebelled against what he perceived as the cerebral, somewhat academic
impersonality of Imagist poetry. His eroticism and intensity authenticated
immediate experience-the unceasing fecundity of life unharnessed of
teleology-in the tradition of Walt Whitman.
YEATS AND IRISH POETRY
The Irish situation was different particularly because of
the largely agrarian society and the complex history of Irish nationalism. The
struggle against British colonialism not only produced political verse but
extended to a search for identity through Irish history, mythology, folklore
and peasant culture. The so-called 'Celtic Twilight' (actually the name of a
collection of stories or sketches Yeats published in 1873) brought together
poets like George Russell (AE) and Lionel Johnson along with Yeats. Its
primitivism was, however, somewhat sentimental and nostalgic, and its
opposition to scientific, rationalistic dogma was largely a Romantic survival.
Although the poets turned away from the sunny, Southern European or Alpine
landscape celebrated in Romantic poetry to authentically Celtic mists and
overcast skies, the general mood was one of world-weariness and disillusionment
prompting ultimately escapist journeys into a land of heart's desire, away from
the joyless squalor of modem urban life. In the first two decades of the
twentieth century, Irish literature consciously moved away from dreaminess to a
genuine historical awareness, a passionate vigor and coarseness of experience.
This reaction was the hall-mark of the Irish Dramatic Movement. Some Irish
writers like John Millington Synge went to peasant life for fresh sources of
poetry. George Russell's criticism of Yeats's shadowy insubstantiality was
vigorously endorsed by the latter himself when he broke decisively with his
earlier poetic style in The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities’ (1914).
The poetic life of W.B. Yeats of modern British poetry, falls
into two phases, earlier and later, opposed to each other and yet linked by the
same longing for escape from this world. If in his early poetry, Yeats wishes
to escape to a dreamy fairyland, in the later poetry the nostalgia is of the
spirit, for a world of pure ideas. The poetic influence of the Pre-Raphaelites as well as his early interest in the occult
fortified his opposition to mechanistic conceptions of the universe, an
opposition that remains a common link among modem writers otherwise widely
different from each other. Yeats's early poetry is characterized by somnolent
rhythms, symbolist evocativeness and obscure mystic calls. What gave this
mixture credibility was his peculiarly ambivalent Anglo-Irish identity: as a
member of the Protestant Anglo-Norman Ascendancy, Yeats was passionately
involved in Irish politics and yet distrustful of its nationalist zeal. He was
no doubt drawn into politics by his unrequited love for Maud Gonne; at the same
time, he remained aloof discovering a mythically resonant, tragic heroism in
the futile Easter Rebellion.
The quest for identity led Yeats to resolve his own self
into a dialectic, into the antithetical categories of self and soul. Socially
he tried to locate himself the declining aristocracy among the big houses and
estates, ideologically bound to the peasant, the servant or the tramp against
the emerging threat of a bourgeoisie that was relatively new to Ireland.
Failure in love, practical experience, especially of running the Abbey Theatre
and contempt for the nouveau riche brought in a sturdier note into his poetry
chastened by bitterness and disillusionment. The discovery in himself of double
selves was aided by the knowledge received at seances supposedly through the
'medium' of his wife; this knowledge grew into Yeats's philosophical system A
Vision. Here, as elsewhere, we encounter the central symbolism of
interpenetrating gyres or cones aid the phases of the moon. Along with the
doctrine of the Mask, these metaphors enabled Yeats to impose a certain pattern
or order on the history of Western civilization somewhat in the manner of
Spengler.
Yeats's Ideas
Yeats's pursuit of a world of pure ideas, a Byzantine
abstraction-monuments of unageing intellect-was anchored in the concrete
vitality of the imagination. Thus his poetry dramatizes the fundamental
dichotomy of the flesh and the spirit on different levels: as a result, a
dispassionately cold style unleashes passionate intensity by virtue of its
magisterial control. From The Tower (1928) onwards, Yeats's system of
opposed personae or split selves is largely unburdened of its occult trappings:
it is as though in his last poems Yeats rises above his system to the
existential conflict between affirmation and renunciation, art and nature,
passion and conquest, old age and the disturbing promptings of the flesh.
MODERNISM, EZRA POUND AND T.S ELIOT
The High Modernist mode popular in British and American
poetry from the early 1920s to the 1950s was of course dominated by Pound
and Eliot. Modernist poetry was characterized by a prodigious appetite for
assimilating the disparate and fragmentary experiences of a complex and heterogeneous
civilization. Fin-de-siecle formalism and aestheticism, impressionism,
symbolism and imagism all combined to produce the modernist mode. While we have
to wait till the thirties for the poetry of political commitment, the impact of
discoveries in psychology and anthropology are clearly discernible. Poetry
attempted to explore the new territory of the irrational and associative surge
of consciousness, neurosis, dream, and the Collective Unconscious with its
storehouse of myth and archetype. This is why the poets adopted what has been
described above as the technique of discontinuous composition. Pound's wide and
disparate reading extended the range of modem poetry, especially in his
intertextual use of literary traditions. Poetry, as he believed, must be as
well written as prose.
History of Literary Theory & Criticism
By 1911, Yeats’s poetic idiom was relatively stripped
of 'poetic diction': his syntax became more direct and natural. Apart from
compression and excision, Pound concentrated on images against the uninspired
abstractness of language. His Vorticism, as a movement, was a
continuation of Imagism and its dynamic interplay of images. He moved to a
non-mimetic model of the Image, a form produced by an emotional energy, a
cluster, an arrangement of planes as in sculpture. After the War and the
economic difficulties he went through, in Homage to Sextus Propertius(1934)
Pound uses, over and above the concentrated economy, an ironic persona whose
mental ability and emotional variety introduced a shifting point of view.
There is even the pose of foppery and tone of self-deprecation
associated with Jules Laforgue and Eliot. By the time of Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley (1920) and the first seven Cantos (1915-20), the extraordinarily
compressed, oblique, learned, elliptical, and allusive style had been well
established. In these two works Pound uses the masks of two poets in order to
produce a critique of contemporary European civilization. In comparison to the
pictorial and musical avant-garde, however, he remained a little
backward-looking and modishly archaic. Pound's contributions to the modem
movement derived more from his editorial and talent-scouting abilities. Real
stylistic innovation came from T.S. Eliot even before he had come in contact
with the former. In Eliot at last we encounter the fracturing and re-fashioning
of received idiom that had been achieved in music and the visual arts. Largely
on the basis of his reading of Baudelaire, Laforgue, and Jacobean drama, Eliot
quite independently forged a style that not only surpassed Imagist practice but
seamlessly incorporated the self-examining, self-deprecating persona timidly
withdrawing from traditions of passionate immersion and confession. Such a
persona or attitude was no doubt the legacy of Jules Laforgue. If discontinuous
composition is the hall-mark of modernist poetry, then Eliot remains its finest
practitioner. Moreover, what gives coherence to the so-called heap of broken
images is an essentially musical structure of relationship between part and
whole. Apart from music (or for that matter, sculpture), Eliot's use of an
organized whole, a web of relationships, seems to have been inspired by the
notion of gestalt in contemporary psychology. The gestalt psychologists
believed that a random collection of marks or dots on a page would reveal a
certain pattern or design to the observing spectator. If these marks were
re-distributed continuously, the effect would never be that of disorder but of
constantly renewed configurations. Thus Eliot's poetry the genesis of a form
that is harmonious without being closed or rigid, characterized, rather, by its
appetite for inclusiveness. Such a form is no doubt exemplified by The Waste
Land (1922) But it is discernible even in the earliest poetry of Eliot as it
was for him the aesthetic equivalent of fragmentation, rootlessness, and lack
of belief in modem European civilization.
T.S.Eliot
From this viewpoint of Modern British poetry, not only is
The Waste Land anticipated by 'Gerontion' or 'The Love-Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock' but even the germ of Four Quartets (1943) contained within the early
verse. In 'Prufrock' or 'The Portrait of a Lady,' sardonic self-deprecating
attitudes located within a context of drab boredom, timidity, seediness, and
sexual unease are juxtaposed with glimpses of horror and glory. This sets the
tone for Eliot's masterly use of squalor and beauty in the Sweeney poems. The
need for unremitting self-observation, for introspective distrust found its
proper outlet in a withdrawal from passion related to the loss of faith and
certitude in modern civilization. Thus, in 'Gerontion' an accurate, authentic
cosmopolitan setting dramatizes the shrivelled-up life of reminiscence produced
by spiritual atrophy. We have in this poem a central pattern in Eliot's poetry:
fear of the full-blooded, spontaneous urgency of life with its structure of
desire, wish, and expectation leading to an astringent, ascetic renunciation
prompted by the history of tainted, destructive ' passions that European
civilization offers. Even as modernist British poet, Eliot veered towards conservative values and
preoccupation with religious dogma through Hollow Men (1925) and Ash
Wednesday (1930), stylistically he remained as innovative as ever.
After his fairly
successful experiments in verse drama, Eliot moved to the more contemplative,
somewhat philosophical Four . Quartets with its intertwined themes
of time, experience, memory, communication and the possibilities of
reconciliation. 'Burnt Norton,' the first quartet, seems to begin the
polyphonic stricture with abstract speculation and memories in a rose-garden.
'East Coker' is the name of the Somerset village from which Eliot's ancestors
had emigrated to America, and the-quartet thus takes us to the past. In 'The
Dry Salvages' (a group of rocky islands off the coast of Massachusetts) Eliot's
own lived past in America is recaptured. Finally, in 'Little Gidding,' war-time
England is related to the past of the village which had held a religious
community in the seventeenth century and had its church destroyed by Oliver
Cromwell's troops. The poem Four Quartets continues effectively to use the
technique of discontinuous composition, the structure of music, and a subtly
permeated self-reflexivity, We recognize through the moving drama of faith the
old dry, ironic, detached persona, the unremitting self-observation and
preoccupation with language, communication, and poetic form.
If you want more relevant topics so let us know through comment
If You Want More Notes
For UGC NET Prepration So Mail Us : Myexamsolution@gmail.com
WhatsApp Us :
8130208920
0 comments:
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.