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Modern poetry and free verse - Coggle Diagram
Modern poetry
and free verse
Tradition and
experimentation
The first decades of the 20th century:
a period of extraordinary originality and
vitality in poetry.
A variety of trends and currents
expressed the nature
of modern experience:
The War Poets
Imagist Poets
Symbolist Poets
The Georgian Poets
The Georgian
Poets
Influenced by the Victorian Romantic tradition.
They were
Rupert Brooke
Walter de la Mare
Edward Thomas
They:
employed
the conventions of dictions
;
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 symbolists.
The War Poets
Aim of their poetry
: to
awaken the conscience of the readers
to the horrors of the war.
Language employed
: violent, everyday
Content of their poetry
: the
horrors of modern warfare
represented in an unconventional, anti-rhetorical way.
Their poetry
: a definite move away from the 19th-century poetic conventions.
The War Poets:
in ost cases lost their lives in the conflict
experienced the fighting
Imagist Poets
Modern poetry
officially
began with
Imagism
, a movement which flourished
between 1912 and 1917.
The name '
Imagiste
' was invented by the
American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972).
The main aesthetic
principles of Imagist
poets were
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
.
constant use of
hard, clear and
precise images
;
Symbolist Poets
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
quotations from other literatures
, revealing cosmopolitan interests;
the use of
free verse
;
the possibility for the reader to bring meaning to the poem.
Symbolist Poets
and T.S. Eliot
it was
T.S. Eliot
who developed the new poetic theory and practice. In his essay
Tradition and the Individual Talent
(1917), he stated that:
Poetry
is not a turning loose of emotion but
an escape from emotion
; it is not the expression of personality but
an escape from personality
.
According to
T.S. Eliot the poet
used language to create rich patterns of meaning
that were not easy for the superficial reader.
recorded
the collapse of Western civilisation
and
the culture and
spiritual waste
of the beginning
of the century.
was the
explorer of experience
.
Free verse
At the beginning of the 20th century under the
influences of the French Symbolists, such as
Stephane Mallarmé
(1842-98), and the American
poets
Walt Whitman
and
Emili Dickinson
,
many poets:
rejected the 19th-century
regular metre.
employed
free verse
.