British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism
British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism Definition: British Poetry In The Age
Of Modernism in literature flourished in the last decades of the 19th century
and the first decades of the 20th century, mainly in Europe and North America. British
Poetry In The Age Of Modernism is the literary movement that is considered an
overturn of traditional writing ways—modernists engaged in writing with
technological advances and societal changes.
British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism is a
break from the past and a concurrent search for new forms of expression. Modernism
It is primarily characterized by optimism and convention in an era of
industrialization, rapid social change and advances in social sciences. The
literary and artistic movement includes imagism, symbolism, vorticism, Acmeist
poetry, futurism, cubism, surrealism, and expressionism.
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Origins Of Literary British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism
Literary British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism started in
the last two decades of the 19th century (the 1880s). Increased attentiveness
was given to the idea that it was necessary to push aside preconceived norms
entirely instead of following preconceived knowledge in light of contemporary
techniques.
The theories of Sigmund Freud inspired early Modernist literature.
According to Freud, all individual reality was based on the
play of fundamental drives and instincts through which the outer world was
perceived.
According to Freud, the description of a subjective state
involving an unconscious mind full of primal impulses and counterbalancing
self-imposed restrictions was combined by Carl Jung with the collective
unconscious’s idea, which the conscious mind either fought or embraced.
British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism tells us about the new
period of art that evolved after WW II. Since literary British Poetry In The
Age Of Modernism is a reaction against the traditional writing practices and
industrialism, a wide variety of themes are present within modernist writings.
Theme of Alienation
Alienation is an essential theme in modern literature as it
responds to W.W. I. modernist writers’ impact on the effects of war in terms of
disconnection. For instance, the speaker in T.S. Elliot’s famous poem, “The
Waste Land,” wanders around a barren scene, trying to reassemble the ruins into
some coherent meaning.
The kinds of narration additionally reflect alienation that
modernist authors favoured. William Faulkner novels, as an example, use
multiple aspects to suggest that reality is broken and fragmented, counting on
the topic. Characters are estranged from each other because each lives in a
world of her own making.
Theme of Transformation
Poet of critic Ezra Pound’s declaration, “Make it new”, emphasizes the
importance of transformation to the modernist aesthetic. Modernist artists are
known for refashioning classical or mythic forms. For instance, T.S. Eliot’s
poem, “The Waste Land,” modernizes Greek mythology by alluding to Greek gods in
the context of the modern scene of war.
Postmodern fiction further portrays how art, like reality, is
usually being reshaped. Postmodern narratives often end inconclusively to
suggest that narrative is ongoing, always subject to change.
Themes of Consumption
Another important theme in modern fiction is consumption. In
the twentieth century, capitalism expanded across the globe, and fiction
reflects this expansion by portraying consumer culture’s excess. Don DE Lillo’s
“White Noise” is famous for its critique of consumer culture.
The narrative portrays characters who are addicted to
shopping—the leading protagonist shops in order to avoid thinking about death.
By assuming consumer culture with distraction, “White Noise” suggests that
modern capitalism tries – but ultimately fails to overcome the problem of human
mortality.
The Modern movement in the arts, although seen as being
almost synonymous with the advent of the twentieth century, actually goes back
to the last decades of the nineteenth century when the foundations of high
Victorian culture were facing serious threats from various agencies. As a
cultural phenomenon, British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism saw the departure
from preexisting modes of aesthetic engagement to the sphere of art.
British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism applies to literature,
music, painting, film, and architecture and to some works before and after this
period). In poetry, British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism is associated with
moves to break from the iambic pentameter as the basic unit of verse, to
introduce vers libre, (free verse) symbolism, and other new forms of writing.
In prose, British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism is associated with attempts to
render human subjectivity in more authentic ways than realism: to represent
consciousness, perception, emotion, meaning and the individual’s relation to
society through interior monologue, stream of consciousness, tunneling,
defamiliarisation, rhythm, irresolution and other techniques. The Modernist
writers therefore strove, in Ezra Pound’s brief phrase, to make it new”
History of British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism
By contrast ‘British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism’ was
first used in the early 18th century simply to denote trends characteristics of
modern times, while in the 19th century its meaning encompassed a sympathy with
modern opinions, styles or expressions. In the later part of the 19th century British
Poetry In The Age Of Modernism referred to progressive trends in the Catholic
Church. In literature it surfaced in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of D’Urbervilles
(1891), to denote what he called a general and unwelcome creeping industrial
“ache of British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism”.
In criticism, the
context with which this article is concerned, the expression was used, but
failed to gain currency by Robert Graves and Laura Riding in their 1927 A
Survey of Modernist Poetry. It was only in the 1960s that the term became
widely used as a description of a literary phase that was both identifiable and
in some sense over.
Its literary roots have been said to be in the work of the
French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire and the novelist Gustave Flaubert,
in the Romantics, or in the 1890s fin de siècle writers, while its culmination
or apogee arguably occurred before World War I, by which point radical
experimentation had impacted on all the arts, or in 1922, the annus mirabilis
of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Katherine Mansfield’s
The Garden Party, and Virginia Woolf‘s Jacob Room.
Social context of British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism philosophy
Technology contributed to the erosion of many cherished
values. It broke up the systems of social integration – the concepts of the
happy family. Not that simply one credo was replaced by another but there was
change in the pace in which life moved it became faster, freer, and grossly
materialistic.
The twentieth century saw a host of material benefits available to man-luxury items, popular
entertainments like cinema, an unprecedented comfort in basic living
conditions. Materialism also enhanced the class divide, but that was not an
unknown experience for the industrial West.
The foundations of faith were also battered by the onslaught
of Darwinism. The challenge to faith is one of the key characteristics in
modern literature. In the early poetry of T.S. Eliot, for instance, the anxiety
of modern living the experience of chaos capture this loss of centre Eliot’s
Prufrock Joyce’s Dedalus are questers without direction.
The modern experience was not confined England alone. The
twentieth century saw the internationalisation literature – the literary
horizons of English were inhabited by writers who used the language but not
necessarily the territorial condition. Writers like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot,
Joseph Conrad, Henry James, a Hemingway found in the modern experience the
resource through engaged their creative impulses.
Modern literature is characterised by a process of
cross-fertilisation of ideas, images, experiences. When Joseph Conrad writes
about Marlow he is a modern man, but not simply an Englishman. In the world of
Charles Dickens in the 19th century, Micawber belongs to a tradition that
traces its sources to a robust English optimism.
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Modern Fiction
The novel was the
dominant literary form in the Victorian period and while engagement with the
reading public of the early twentieth century continued. The high Victorian
fascination for social drama was somewhat pushed to the margins in the attempts
of the modern to accommodate new situations and attitudes. It may be argued
that the modern moment in English diction was brought about by the writings of
Joseph Conrad, especially his Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902).
The possibilities suggested by Conrad were taken further by
other modern novelists such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. In novel Mrs.
Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Virginia Woolf readdressed the
issue of the genre itself by suggesting that external structuring of events
through the frame of the novel was not adequate justify the complexities of
modern experience.
Among other members, the novelist E.M. Forster was associated
with the Bloomsbury group. Like Woolf’s stream of consciousness technique,
Forster’s best known work is A Passage to India (1924) where he wave through
the thread of cultural differences with dexterity. His views regarding India
have been controversial to say the least.
James Joyce’s novel has become a cult text of modern
literature. In Ulysses, ahead with his quest figure, Stephen Dedalus (whom he
had introduced in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1913), in a
narrative that to present the modern day Dublin as the archetype of the
civilized city, and these characters are epitome of modern man.
D. H. Lawrence relied more on the thematic evocation of the
modern experience than narrative jugglery to further his thesis on modernity.
The logic of autobiographical association was used initially to read his first
novel Sons Lovers(1913). Lawrence did not want to impress upon his audience, or
it could be argued that his visualisation of obscenity and vulgarity operated
through a completely different matrix than the one that normally did. The
Rainbow(1915), Women in Love (1920). Aaron’s Rod (1922), and Lady Chatterley’s
Lover (1928/1960) are some of Lawrence’s other novels.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) wrote a futuristic novel about
modern chaos in his Brave New World (1932). The combination of tragedy and
satire was successfully packaged in the novels of Evelyn Waugh (1902 66)
especially A Handful of Dust (1934) and Brideshead Revisited (1945). The plight
of the personal occupied a very important place in Greene’s fiction which was
portrayed in The Power and the Glory (1940) and The Heart of the Matter (1948).
Modern Poetry
The advent of the twentieth century saw interesting
explorations in the field of poetry, which were further quickened by
developments in the contemporary world. The first major change came in the
writing of the group known as the War poets (Modernist Poets). The First World
War was a major political as well as a cultural event. The poetry of Rupert
Brooke was often seen in conjunction with his image of the ‘young patriot’ who
died for the country.
The contemporaries of Brooke who provided responses protest
and frustration included Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). Sassoon wrote anti-war
poems with a quiet but very effective ironic thrust in the Old Huntsman (1917)
and Counter-Attack (1918). Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Ivor Gurney (1890-1937).
Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918), Edward Thomas (1878-1917), and Charles Sorley
(1896-1916) were some of the other poets of the war period, who didn’t survive
it.
The First World War provides a very convenient marker to read
the emergence of new trends in English poetry and figures like William Butler
Yeats (1865-1939), who in fact had been writing from the last decades of the
preceding century, and T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) moved to suggest interesting
departures from the available poetic modes. The conflict between the romantic
idyll and the potentially corrupt urban world is beautifully evoked in his “The
Lake Isle of Innisfree”. Yeats’ romanticism found another counter in the spirit
of Irish nationalism.
Eliot, on the other hand, began his poetic career by reacting
to the romantic assumptions of the nineteenth century brand practised by poets
like William Wordsworth. One of his earliest poems, “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” is today as an example of trademark British Poetry In The Age Of
Modernism for its constructed allusiveness and for subsisting in a parodic
engagement that undercut many of the Victoria certainties, including love. In
his classic The Waste Land (1922), where he presents the angst, corruption, and
materialism of modernist society within the frame of a quest that draws on
various cultural structures. The poem is characterised by a robust
cosmopolitanism. The collection of four poems called “Four Quartets” (1943)
dealt with the complexities of religious experience in the modern world.
Poets like W. H. Auden. Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day Lewis
swerved towards the political ideologies and such alignments eventually
compelled a confinement of some of their poems to purely topical contexts. The
poetry of Stephen Spender (1909-1995) is organized to manifest his concern for
the contemporary scene, and from his first collection Poems (1930) to Dolphins
(1994), he exudes a sober sophistication. The poetry of Dylan Thomas
(1914-1953) exhibits the marks of a genius that, according to many, wasn’t
completely fulfilled.
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Modern Drama
Henrik Ibsen is often regarded as the first modernist in the
history of European theatre, which is conflated with his placement as a pioneer
in terms of the development of realist theatre also. Even though the plays of
Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934) and Henry Arthur Jones (1851-1929) preceded the
innovative theatrics of modern drama, some of their plays do show the potential
of a serious engagement with the problems of modernity. The Second Mrs
Tanqueray (1893) by Pinero, for instance, combines the Ibsenite penchant for
critical readings of contemporary malaises. A similar foray into the theatrics
of Ibsen is seen in Henry Arthur Jones’ Mrs Dane’s Defence (1900) which
enlarges the parameters of society drama to accommodate the sexual politics
that also served as themes in novels of the period.
The only comic reinvention of the time came from the writings
of Oscar Wilde, whose deliberately undercut the familiar by exposing
oppositional facets with those very structures that characterised contemporary
conditions. Outwardly, the four major plays (Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1892: A
Woman of No Importance, 1893: The Ideal Husband. 1895 And The Importance of
Being Ernest, 1895) of Wilde exhibit striking similarities with the theatre of
social convention as epitomised by Jones and Pinero.
Georege Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) inherited, or rather
consciously appropriated, the Ibsenite model and exploited the resources of
such theatrical conditioning in his dramatic experiments. The adoption of
themes of familiar understanding in plays like Androcles and the Lion (1913),
Pygmalion (1914) and Saint Joan (1924), Arms and the Man suggests the
potentialities of these stories that could be dramatically extended beyond the
conventions that framed them.
The works of John Galsworthy, coming at around theme time,
utilised the benefits of plotting to show how engaged the chosen subjects were:
Strife is Galsworthy’s best example of this condition. The success of The
Silver Box (1905) was further emulated by some of his other plays like Justice
and The Skin Game (1920).
Another Irishman who left a mark on the modern stage was John
Millington Synge (1871-1909). In brief but exciting career Synge exploited the
resources of his culture to experiment and engage the potential of Irish
theatre in a way that wasn’t attempted before him. The Shadow of the Glen
(1903), Riders to the Sea (1904), The
Well of the Saints (1905) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907) are Synge’s
plays that move through terrains of heightened pessimism and given their
placement within a culture of Irish indomitableness.
Sean O’Casey occupies a position in the history of Irish
theatre. His early adventure with Irish nationalism and contemporary life was
manifested in three of his plays. – The
Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars.
British Poetry In The Age Of Modernism T. S. Eliot wrote
innumerable plays which are worth mentioning – Murder in Cathedral, The Family
Reunion, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerketc.
The 1920s and the 30s were fertile years for the English
theatre. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) successfully demonstrated the
possibilities of satire in his plays. They include Our Betters (1917), The
Circle (1921), The Constant Wife (1927) and For Services Rendered (1932).
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