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Modernism, modern poetry, the War poets - Coggle Diagram
Modernism
Main features of Modernism
The emphasis on subjectivity and perception (omniscient third person narrator was abandoned in favour of a stream of consciousness)
The use of allusive language
The breaking down of limitation in space and time
Focus on the insight and the unconscious
The distortion of shapes (Picasso)
The need to reflect in artistic form the complexity of the modern life
The advent of Modernism
The modernists express their desire to break with the past and find new field of knowledge such as technology and mass communication.
It is an international movement of the 20th century, typically associated to WWI, that left a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation into people and especially artists.
Towards a cosmopolitan literature --> Modernist artists drew inspiration from classical and new cultures, mixing them in a new way. For example, Thomas Eliot mixed Buddhism and Metaphysics, while Joyce used Freud’s stream of consciousness. The new England was full with cosmopolitan artists.
modern poetry
Symbolism
This movement started at the end of 1800 with Charles Baudelaire’s Le Fleurs du Mal. The characteristic of this new French wave were:
Indirect statements, Language evoked rather than state, The sound of words was very important, Cosmopolitism, like the use of quotation from other literature, Free verse and The readers can give their own meaning to the poem
The movement was brought to England by T.S. Eliot: for him “poetry was an escape from emotion and personality”. The symbol of the ppoet became the symbol of exploring and searching experience: the language adapted to that, becoming less superficial and richer.
Georgian Poets
Before WWI, the poetry was characterized by a distinction between the avant garde group and the one still linked to the Victorian tradition, called the “Georgian Poets”, named after an anthology, “Georgian Poetry”, published under George V.
The main poets were Edward Thomas, Rupert Brook and Walter De La Mare: they describe countryside and reject the focus on sensibility the age has brought.
Imagism
Modern poetry began with imagism, a movement started in 1912 by critic and philosopher T. E. Hulme. The main principles are to be found in the “Speculations: essays on humanism and Philosophy of Art” by Hulme himself (published posthumously):
free choice of any subject, No moral comment, poems very short, Use of hard and precise images, No regular rhyme, The aim was to achieve precision and discipline, “dry hardness”, “the exact curve of the thing”.
The poets of the 1930s
more conscious about what was happening in real time and because the brutality of what was going on with Nazism and Fascism in Europe was no more something they could escape from. Their aim was to communicate with the people encouraging them to be more woke.
The Oxford Poets were a group of left-wing artists committed to spread their political propaganda (W.H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender), focusing of social and political aspect of life,
War Poets --> They are poets who wrote in an unconventional and anti-rhetorical way, dealing with the horrors of the warfare, so using everyday language, almost violent as the war has been.
The new Romantics --> In 1940s a group of young poets re-enacted the romantic times, rediscovering emotions and themes such as love, birth, death,sex, against the intellectualism and the political commitment of the Oxford Poets. The main poet was Dylan Thomas.
the War poets
Many soldiers in trenches improvised some verses, maybe rough and obscene but very genuine.
When the war began, thousands of young people volunteered, thinking going to military service had noble intentions. After 1916, pride was replaced by disillusionment.
A group of poets who actually fought and saw the horrors of the war, managed to represent modern warfare in a realistic and unconventional way, awakening the conscience and the ears of the readers and the literate people back home.