MODERN POETRY: TRADITION AND EXPERIMENTATION
The first decades of the 20th century werea period of extraordinary originality and vitality in poetry.
A variety of trends and currents expressed the nature of modern experience:

The Georgian Poets was influenced by the Victorian Romantic tradition. They were Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), Walter de la Mare (1873–1956), and Edward Thomas (1878–1917). They:

•felt sympathy for English elements, such as the countryside as an idyllic place;

•remained indifferent or hostile to the revolution in sensibility and technique started by the Symbolists.

•employed the conventions of diction;

The War Poets:

•in most cases lost their lives in the conflict

•experienced the fighting

Content of their poetry = the horrors of modern warfare represented in an unconventional, anti-rhetorical way

Aim of their poetry = to awaken the conscience of the readers to the horrors of the war

Language employed= violent, everyday

Their poetry = a definite move away from the 19th-century poetic conventions.

Modern poetry officially began with Imagism, a movement which flourished between 1912 and 1917.
The name ‘Imagiste’invented by the American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972).
The main aesthetic principles of Imagist poets were:

•constant use of hard,clear and precise images

•use of a rhythm freed from the artificial demands of metrical regularity

•choice of any subject matter

poems,usually short, were the poet’s response to a scene or object, and contained no moral comment;

the aim of poetry: to achieve precision, discipline, dry hardness.

Symbolism was a movement started in France with Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal(1857). It influenced the new poetry.
The style of the Symbolist poets was characterised by:

indirect rather than direct statements

the use of allusive language and of the multiple association of words

•the importance given to the ‘sound’ of words

•the use of free verse

•the use of quotations from other literatures, revealing cosmopolitan interests

•the possibility for the reader to bring meaning to the poem