Poetry in the 20th Century: From Edwardian to Contemporary

1. Poetry in the 20th Century:1901 - to the Present 1901 – 1914 Edwardian 1914 – 1939 Modernist 1939 - Contemporary The first three decades: The Victorian era continued into the early years of the 20th century and two figures emerged as the leading representative of the poetry of the old era to act as a bridge into the new. These were Yeats and Hardy. Yeats, although not a modernist, was to learn a lot from the new poetic movements that sprang up around him and adapted his writing to the new circumstances. Hardy was, in terms of technique at least, a more traditional figure and was to be a reference point for various anti-modernist reactions, especially from the 1950s onwards. The Georgian poets: The Georgian posts were the first major grouping of the post-Victorian era. Their work appeared in a series of five anthologies called Georgian Poetry which were published by Harold Munro and edited by Edward Marsh. The poets featured included Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and Siegfried Sassoon. Their poetry represented something of a reaction to the decadence of the 1890s and tended towards the sentimental. Brooke and Sassoon were to go on to win reputations as war poets and Lawrence quickly distanced himself from the group and was associated with the modernist movement.

2. World War I As already noted, the Georgian poets Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon are now mostly remembered for their war poetry. Other notable poets who wrote about the war include Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, May Cannan and, from the home front, Hardy and Rudyard Kipling. Although many of these poets wrote socially aware criticism of the war, most remained technically conservative and traditionalist. Modernism The early decades of the 20th century saw the United States begin to overtake Britain as the major economic power. In the world of poetry, this period also saw American writers at the forefront of avant-garde practices. Among the foremost of these poets were T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, both of whom spent part, and in Eliot's case a considerable part, of their writing lives in England. Pound's involvement with the Imagists marked the beginning of a revolution in the way poetry was written. British poets involved with this group included D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Upward and John Cournos. Eliot, particularly after the publication of The Waste Land, became a major figure and influence on other British poets. In addition to these poets, other British modernists began to emerge. These included the London-Welsh poet and painter David Jones, whose first book, In Parenthesis, was one of the very few experimental poems to come out of World War I, the Scot Hugh MacDiarmid, Mina Loy and Basil Bunting.

3. The Thirties: The poets who began to emerge in the 1930s had two things in common; they had all been born too late to have any real experience of the pre-World War I world and they grew up in a period of social, economic and political turmoil. Perhaps as a consequence of these facts, themes of community, social (in) justice and war seem to dominate the poetry of the decade. The New Country poets: The poetic landscape of the decade was dominated by four poets; W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice, although the last of these belongs at least as much to the history of Irish poetry. These poets were all, in their early days at least, politically active on the Left. Although they admired Eliot, they also represented a move away from the technical innovations of their modernist predecessors. A number of other, less enduring, poets also worked in the same vein. One of these was Michael Roberts, whose New Country anthology both introduced the group to a wider audience and gave them their name.

4. Surrealism and Others: The 1930s also saw the emergence of a home-grown English surrealist poetry whose main exponents were David Gascoyne, Hugh Sykes Davies, George Barker, and Philip O'Connor. These poets turned to French models rather than either the New Country poets or English-language modernism, and their work was to prove of importance to later English experimental poets as it broadened the scope of the British avant-garde tradition. John Betjeman and Stevie Smith, who were two of the most significant poets of this period, stood outside all schools and groups. Betjeman was a quietly ironic poet of Middle England with a fine command of a wide range of verse techniques. Smith was an entirely unclassifiable one-off voice. The Forties: The War poets: The 1940s opened with Britain at war and a new generation of war poets emerged in response. These included Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Henry Reed and F. T. Prince. As with the poets of the First World War, the work of these writers can be seen as something of an interlude in the history of 20th century poetry. Technically, many of these war poets owed something to the 1930s poets, but their work grew out of the particular circumstances in which they found themselves living and fighting.

5. The New Romantics: The main movement in post-war 1940s poetry was the New Romantic group that included Dylan Thomas, George Barker, W. S. Graham, Kathleen Raine, Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry. These writers saw themselves as in revolt against the classicism of the New Country poets. They turned to such models as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud and Hart Crane and the word play of James Joyce. Thomas, in particular, helped Anglo-Welsh poetry to emerge as a recognizable force. Other 1940s poets: Other significant poets to emerge in the 1940s include Lawrence Durrell, Bernard Spencer, Roy Fuller, Norman Nicholson, Vernon Watkins, R. S. Thomas and Norman McCaig. These last four poets represent a trend towards regionalism and poets writing about their native areas; Watkins and Thomas in Wales, Nicholson in Cumberland and MacCaig in Scotland. The Fifties: The 1950s were dominated by three groups of poets, The Movement, The Group and a number of poets that gathered around the label Extremist Art.

6. The Movement: The Movement poets as a group came to public notice in Robert Conquest's 1955 anthology New Lines. The core of the group consisted of Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, D. J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn and Donald Davie. They were identified with a hostility to modernism and internationalism, and looked to Hardy as a model. However, both Davie and Gunn later moved away from this position. The Group: As befits their name, the Group were much more formally a group of poets, meeting for weekly discussions under the chairmanship of Philip Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith. Other Group poets included Martin Bell, Peter Porter, Peter Redgrove, George MacBeth and David Wevill. Hobsbaum spent some time teaching in Belfast, where he was a formative influence on the emerging Northern Ireland poets including Seamus Heaney. The Extremist Art poets: The term Extremist Art was first used by the poet A. Alvarez to describe the work of the American poet Sylvia Plath. Other poets associated with this group included Plath's one-time husband Ted Hughes, Francis Berry and Jon Silkin. These poets are sometimes compared with the Expressionist German school. The Modernist tradition: A number of young poets working in what might be termed a modernist vein also started publishing during this decade. These included Charles Tomlinson, Gael Turnbull, Roy Fisher and Bob Cobbing. These poets can now be seen as forerunners of some of the major developments during the following two decades.

7. The 1960s and 1970s: In the early part of the 1960s, the centre of gravity of mainstream poetry moved to Ireland, with the emergence of Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Paul Muldoon and others. In Britain, the most cohesive groupings can, in retrospect, be seen to cluster around what might loosely be called the modernist tradition and draw on American as well as indigenous models. The British Poetry Revival: The British Poetry Revival was a wide-reaching collection of groupings and subgroupings that embraces performance, sound and concrete poetry as well as the legacy of Pound, Jones, MacDiarmid, Loy and Bunting, the Objectivist poets, the Beats and the Black Mountain poets, among others. Leading poets associated with this movement include J. H. Prynne, Eric Mottram, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley and Lee Harwood. The Mersey Beat: The Mersey Beat poets were Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger McGough. Their work was a self-conscious attempt at creating a British equivalent to the Beats. Many of their poems were written in protest against the established social order and, particularly, the threat of nuclear war. Although not actually a Mersey Beat poet, Adrian Mitchell is often associated with the group in critical discussion.

8. English poetry now: The last three decades of the 20th century saw a number of short-lived poetic groupings such as the Martians. There was a growth in interest in women's writing and in poetry from Britain's ethnic groupings, especially the West Indian community. Poets who emerged include Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion, Craig Raine, Wendy Cope, James Fenton, Blake Morrison, Grace Lake, Liz Lochhead, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah. There was also a growth in performance poetry fuelled by the Poetry Slam movement. A new generation of innovative poets has also sprung up in the wake of the Revival grouping. Despite all of this activity, major publishers dropped their poetry lists and both young and established writers became increasingly reliant on small and medium sized presses, generally dependent on State funding. As of 2004, it appears that a still thriving literature is faced with an ever-decreasing audience. Reference: Ian Hamilton The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English . - Online : A Time-line of English poetry See also: English literature: New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1950 All poets included are linked to individual Wikipedia entries.

9. Philip Arthur Larkin (1922-1985) English poet, novelist, and critic, a leading figure of 'The Movement,' term coined to describe a group of British poets that coalesced during the 1950s, about the same time as the rise of the 'Angry Young Men'. 'The Movement' poets addressed everyday British life in plain, straightforward language and often in traditional forms. It first attracted attention with the publication of the anthology New Lines, edited by Robert Conquest. Among its writers were Philip Larkin, Donald Davie and Thom Gunn. Conquest saw the group's work "free from both mystical and logical compulsions and - like modern philosophy - is empirical in its attitude to all that comes." Larkin's best known books were The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitesun Weddings(1964), and High Windows (1974). "It is not sufficient to say that poetry has lost its audience, and so need no longer consider it: lots of people still read and even buy poetry. More accurately, poetry has lost its old audience, and gained a new one. This has been caused by the consequences of a cunning merger between poet, literary critic and academic critic ...” (Larkin in 'The Pleasure Principle', from Required Writing, 1983)

10. Philip Arthur Larkin (1922-1985) He was born in Coventry; was educated at its King Henry III schools and at Oxford and for many years a librarian at Hull University Library. He wrote the poems of his first boo, The North Ship (1945), under Yeats’ strong enchantment but released by his discovery of Hardy’s Collected Poems. Later Larkin found his own voice. Like Hardy, he wrote novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947) and his poems have a novelist’s sense of place and skill in the handling of direct speech. He was the dominant figure of “The Movement” (+Kingsley Amis (1922-1995); Donald Davie (1922-1995); Thom Gunn (1929)) whose work, in the words of Robert Conquest’s introduction to his 1956 anthology New Lines: “is free from mystical and logical compulsions and – like modern philosophy – is empirical in its attitude to all that comes.” No other poet presents the welfare – state world of post imperial Britain so vividly, so unsparingly, and in the last analysis so tenderly. Much has been written on of Larkin’s Hardyesque pessimism, his depiction of loneliness, age, and death. However, the many negatives in his poems imply positive, out of reach of the ironic and self-deprecating speaker, but available perhaps to others more fortunate, elsewhere. His output was small; but his four volumes of poetry and his controversial anthology The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973) testify to the continuing vitality of a native English tradition, the tradition of Chaucer, Wordsworth, and Hardy, distinct from and (in Larkin’s views) opposed to the imported modernist tradition of Eliot and Pound.

11. Aubade I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.In time the curtain-edges will grow light.Till then I see what's really always there:Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but howAnd where and when I shall myself die.Arid interrogation: yet the dreadOf dying, and being dead,Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse -- The good not done, the love not given, timeTorn off unused -- nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climbClear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;But at the total emptiness for ever,The sure extinction that we travel toAnd shall be lost in always. Not to be here,Not to be anywhere,And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.This is a special way of being afraidNo trick dispels. Religion used to try,That vast moth-eaten musical brocadeCreated to pretend we never die,And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeingThat this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound,No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,Nothing to love or link with,The anaesthetic from which none come round. And so it stays just on the edge of vision,A small unfocused blur, a standing chillThat slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will,And realisation of it rages outIn furnace-fear when we are caught withoutPeople or drink. Courage is no good:It means not scaring others. Being braveLets no one off the grave.Death is no different whined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,Have always known, know that we can't escape,Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse.The sky is white as clay, with no sun.Work has to be done.Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

12. Commentary: What sort of poem is shaped in front of me? This is a long poem divided into five stanzas of ten liens each. It is notable that the ninth line of each verse is shorter than the other lines. Shall we say that man towards the end of his life falls short of, retards, shrinks and falls back? The rhyme scheme is ababccdeed + personification, allusion… We usually expect Aubades to be a poignant dawn parting of lovers which is mostly to be taken as an irony. But Larkin’s irony reaches deeper. His dawn song is not wistful (recallable, retrievable: thinking sadly about sth that you would like to have especially sth in the past that you can no longer have) about separating from a mistress, but terror stricken of the inevitable parting from life itself. Larkin does not make that life attractive, but tedious, dreary and mundane. It is a life of work, offices and telephones, with only drink and “people” to relieve the boredom or the lurking fears of death. The emphasis is not on beauty or pleasure or love, all to be lost in the obliteration (eradication, destruction, annihilation) of death, but on the fear of nothingness. The images associated with life provide the only defence against the thoughts of death, and they are images of social connection, culminating in the last line: “Postmen like doctors go from house to house.” All of us, that is, share in the disease of fearing death, and the cure comes in links with other people. But communication is a temporary cure, an alleviation of the fear, but certainly no defence against death itself or the knowledge of its inevitability.

13. The time of the poem, four o’clock in the predawn morning, is a time of total darkness and silence. Staring into “soundless dark” is like staring at death, for the two primary senses of hearing and sight have been lost. Deprived of physical sense, the speaker must “see” what his mind knows, “the total emptiness for ever, / The sure extinction.” Neither the rich, elaborate fabric of religion – now tattered and “moth-eaten” – nor the fallacious (wrong; based on a false idea) plausibility of the plainer fabrics of rationalism is sufficient to hide the naked fact of fearfulness; rich or plain, these are mere covers or garments, incapable of disguising the reality at such a time as this. And “courage is no good” at such times, because it cannot alter the fact the speaker is starting at. Since he defines life in its social connections, “to love or link,” courage seems a matter of social behaviour that has value in the impressions one gives to other people. “It means not scaring others” with the horrifying truth that the speaker understands and faces. He does display another kind of courage, though the courage is in fact is to acknowledge to himself his fears and to look into the darkness with honesty. The final stanza, in which the dawn slowly comes, restores the speaker’s physical senses, and leads him to project the resumption of daylight activities. The terror subsides and the fact of “what we know,” though it is as plain and as familiarly unremarkable as a piece of furniture, may be ignored in the workday world. The knowledge he has faced when alone can be put aside; the dilemma of knowing that “we can’t escape” death and “yet can’t accept it” can be postponed another day.

14. The poem carries the additional richness of its verbal echoes of and allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet : “To be or not to be” (III. i. 55-89) and the conclusion of Jacques’ speech on the seven ages of man in As you Like it (II. vii. 162-65). These allusions in effect re-open the question raised in Hamlet’s meditation, and in several other themes in the play: courage, friendship, even drink – as if Larkin’s speaker was being forced to re-examine Hamlet’s condition for himself. What he finds, in his modern and more squalid (very dirty and unpleasant) experience is a similar dilemma: although being alive is fraught or filled with pain and misery, chiefly because of fear and loneliness, the alternative “not to be” is worse, and so like Hamlet he will have to live with his “indecision.”

15. The Large Cool Store: Commentary: Essential to the themes of detachment and alienation in Larkin’s poetry is his concentration on his dissociation from women and love. This persists through almost all his poetry. In this poem Larkin seems still to be coming to terms with his lot as a single man. He is especially determined to explain to himself the unattainable ‘otherness’ of women. The store, symbolic of the world, is spacious and cool. This immediately conveys –in the title and its repetition in the opening line -- a sense of a passionless and even frigid condition. It is the contradiction of small spaces and warmth of intimacy. Moreover, it is ordinary in its merchandize, conjuring thoughts of the ‘weekday world’. This is an unromantic setting. Yet, within it are objects gesturing towards the possibility of love and passion – at a distance from the familiar and inaccessible tidiness which is metaphorically represented by ‘heaps of shirts and trousers’. These are women’s night-dresses: Bri-Nylon Baby-Dolls and Shories… They are delicate, decorated and colourful – like femininity itself, as Larkin perceives it. But for all their prettiness, these commodities do not evoke a living, breathing sensuality – they are synthetic and unnatural in their studied passionateness. They do not disturb the coolness of the store. They only serve, through their strangeness, to indicate to the speaker, the gulf that is between himself and love, i.e. himself and women: “How separate and unearthly love is”.

16. As in so many of his poems, Larkin uses the occasion for this unusual reflection on love to record, with his keenly visual cataloguing talent, aspects of contemporary Englishness. The store is a working class emporium, frequented by those who live in “low terraced houses”, who rise for work at dawn at the “factorym yard and site”. In a sense, this exaggerates the speaker’s isolation – for this is not his store, he is even further removed from the “Modes For Night”. “The Large Cool Store” is as chilling as the store itself. This is the world of artificial passion, in contradition of nature. Such was Larkin’s view of the dehumanizing forces of modern life. His personal sense of alienation from love is consumed by a more general vision.