MODERN POETRY
IMAGISM
between 1912 and 1917
avantgarde groups
followed the innovations of French Symbolists
Symbolism started in France with Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1857)
WAR POETS promising young poets
unconventional, anti-rhetorical in their way of dealing with the horrors of modern warfare
experimentalism (violent, everyday language)
- ‘Imagiste’ = name invented by the American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
- theorist of the movement = English critic and philosopher T.E. Hulme
T. S. Eliot
poet = the explorer of experience who used language to create rich patterns of meaning that required close analysis in order to be understood.
"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."
("Tradition and the Individual Talent", 1917)
vs Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquillity"
"The Waste Land" recorded the collapse and fragmentation of Western civilisation and the cultural and spiritual sterility that characterised the beginning of the century.
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free verse
evocative power of language
possibility for the readers to give the poem their own meaning
quotations from other literatures (cosmopolitan interests)
importance to the sound of words (‘music of ideas’)
indirect rather than direct statements
OXFORD POETS
A group of poets, who met as undergraduates at Oxford, devoted to left-wing propaganda. (the most famous were W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender)
They concerned themselves with the social and political aspects of human life, as a consequence of the brutal reality of the 1930s, from which there seemed to be no escape: unemployment, Nazism, Fascism.
This generation had been encouraged by its teachers to develop a social conscience.
Though they admired T.S. Eliot, they rejected his complexity in order to reach as many people as possible and encourage them to pursue what is morally good.
NEW ROMANTICS
It officially marked the birth of Modern poetry
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free choice of any subject matter
hard, clear and precise images
aim of poetry = to achieve precision, discipline, 'dry hardness’
short poems, usually the poet’s response to a scene or object, without any moral comment or teaching
no metrical regularity
rediscovery of emotions and individual themes such as love, birth, death and even sex.
Their greatest representative was the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-53).
In the 1940s, young poets VS intellectualism and commitment of the Thirties' poetry
Influence of the Victorian Romantic tradition
GEORGIAN POETS before WW1
indifferent or even hostile to the revolution in sensibility and technique introduced by the Symbolists
conventional style and diction
sympathy for specifically English
elements, such as the countryside as an idyllic place,
W.B.Yeats, leading figure in the Irish literary revival