Twentieth Century English and American Poetry

Fourth Year
2018-2019
Course Code : EPT7526

A compilation of poets and some selected poems

By
Dr. Hamid B. Abdulsalam
PhD in Modern American Poetry

1
Introduction
The 20th century was like no time before it. Einstein, Darwin, Freud, and Marx
were just some of the thinkers who profoundly changed the Western Culture.
These changes took distinct shape in the literature of the 20th century.
Modernism, a movement that was a radical break from 19th century Victorianism,
led to post-modernism, which emphasized self-consciousness and pop art. While
20th-century literature is a diverse field covering a variety of genres, there are
common characteristics that changed literature forever.
The most striking thing in twentieth-century English literature is the revolution in
poetic taste and practice. Various movements and changes had a greater influence
upon modern poetry. Though poets are often influenced by each other and
sometimes, share a common outlook, their style and the ways of writing differ
from each other. So modern poetry is essentially a private art form and it contains
very much a story of individual poets.
The 20th century opened with great hope but also with some anxiety, for the new
century marked the final approach to a new millennium. For many, humankind was
entering upon an unprecedented era. H.G. Wells’s utopian studies, the aptly
titled Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon
Human Life and Thought (1901) and A Modern Utopia(1905), both captured and
qualified this optimistic mood and gave expression to a common conviction that
science and technology would transform the world in the century ahead. To
achieve such transformation, outmoded institutions and ideals had to be replaced
by ones more suited to the growth and liberation of the human spirit. The death of
Queen Victoria in 1901 and the accession of Edward VII seemed to confirm that a
franker, less repressed era had begun.
The most significant writing of the period, traditionalist or modern, was inspired
by neither hope nor apprehension but by bleaker feelings that the new century
would witness the collapse of a whole civilization. The new century had begun

2
with Great Britain involved in the South African War (the Boer War; 1899–1902),
and it seemed to some that the British Empire was as doomed to destruction, both
from within and from without, as had been the Roman Empire. In his poems on the
South African War, Hardy (whose achievement as a poet in the 20th century
rivaled his achievement as a novelist in the 19th) questioned simply and
sardonically the human cost of empire building and established a tone and style
that many British poets were to use in the course of the century, while Kipling,
who had done much to engender pride in empire, began to speak in his verse
and short stories of the burden of empire and the tribulations it would bring.

The Modernist revolution

Anglo-American Modernism: Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot
From 1908 to 1914 there was a remarkably productive period of innovation and
experiment as novelists and poets undertook, in anthologies and magazines, to
challenge the literary conventions not just of the recent past but of the entire post-
Romantic era. For a brief moment, London, which up to that point had been
culturally one of the dullest of the European capitals, boasted an avant-garde to
rival those of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, even if its leading personality, Ezra Pound,
and many of its most notable figures were American.
The spirit of Modernism—a radical and utopian spirit stimulated by new ideas in
anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis—was
in the air, expressed rather mutedly by the pastoral and often anti-Modern poets of
the Georgian movement (1912–22; see Georgian poetry) and more authentically by
the English and American poets of the Imagist movement, to which Pound first
drew attention in Ripostes (1912), a volume of his own poetry, and in Des
Imagistes(1914), an anthology. Prominent among the Imagists were the English
poets T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, and Richard Aldington and the Americans Hilda
Doolittle (H.D.) and Amy Lowell.
World War I brought this first period of the Modernist revolution to an end and,
while not destroying its radical and utopian impulse, made the Anglo-American
Modernists all too aware of the gulf between their ideals and the chaos of the
3
present. Novelists and poets parodied received forms and styles, in their view
made redundant by the immensity and horror of the war, but, as can be seen most
clearly in Pound’s angry and satirical Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), with a note
of anguish and with the wish that writers might again make form and style the
bearers of authentic meanings.
On the other hand, the poet and playwright T.S. Eliot, another American resident in
London, in his most innovative poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
and The Waste Land (1922), traced the sickness of modern civilization—a
civilization that, on the evidence of the war, preferred death or death-in-life to life
—to the spiritual emptiness and rootlessness of modern existence. As he rejected
the conventions of the poetic tradition, Eliot, like Lawrence, drew upon myth and
symbol to hold out the hope of individual and collective rebirth, but he differed
sharply from Lawrence by supposing that rebirth could come through self-denial
and self-abnegation. Even so, their satirical intensity, no less than the seriousness
and scope of their analyses of the failings of a civilization that had voluntarily
entered upon the First World War, ensured that Lawrence and Eliot became the
leading and most authoritative figures of Anglo-American Modernism in England
in the whole of the postwar period.
Modern poetry came into being not out of a manifesto not the inauguration of a
new school of writing but out of a revolution of ideas both about the outer world
and about the world of the self. It began with Edwardian and Georgian poetry.
Edwardian Poetry- In a review of modern English poetry, Edwardians claim
attention first. Kipling, Bennett, de La Mare, Masefield and Yeats stand in the
forefront of Edwardian poetry. Of course they did not solve difficulties, whether
social, political or introspective, but they helped to view them impersonally and yet
practically, under the influence of contemporary ideas. These poets continued in
the old tradition; none of them founded a school. They kept to 19 th century
methods. They were well-advised to do so, because behind and around them there
was a body of traditionalists, less inspired and less creative, but never the less
sufficiently influential to sustain public opinion. The Edwardian age is in the main
an age of criticism, of questioning and of refusal to accept established institutions.
From another point of view Edwardian age appears as a time of great prosperity
and glitter, of social stability and spacious case, the halcyon period before storm.

4
Georgians- The new school of English poets started in England with the
publication of five volumes called “Georgian Poetry” (between 1912-1922)
containing works by forty poets who supported the movement at various times
during that period. Their leader was Edward Marsh. Among the promoters of the
neo-Georgians were Rupert Brooke, Harold Monro, John Drinkwater, W.W.
Gibson and others; Ralph Hodgson soon joined the movement, with James Stephen
and John freeman. The movement came to represent an attempt to break away
completely from whatever might be Victorian in outlook or manner, while
remaining true to the main tradition of the poetry.
The main body of the Georgians tradition proper might be described as quietest. It
was quite, intimate, and not ambitious. It dealt with familiar sights and scenes of
English country life. Many of the Georgians were pastoral writers, whose vaguely
pantheistic attitude to the English scene seemed to make it less dull than one
imagines it to have been. Drinkwater, W.H. Davies and Edward Thomas, all did
excellent work in this tradition. Wordsworth might be regarded as the great
grandfather of Georgians. The temperamental endowment of a nature poet in
England is a queer blend of pantheism and pietism. Nature was good enough for
them. It is perhaps the limitations of their intention and predisposition that has
made them so often a target of satire.
General Characteristics of 2oth-Century Poetry
 The early twentieth century, between about 1900 and the First World War
saw the beginning of radical new experiments in poetry. Early writers were
especially concerned to delineate clear images and to rid poetry of its
Romantic and Victorian era superfluities (its emotion, its didacticism, its
exposition).
 The metaphysical poets—of whom John Donne was the best example—
worked with simile and analogy to present the reader with startling new
comparisons. T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" contains
a good example in its opening lines: "Let us go then you and I when the
evening is spread out against the skylike a patient etherized upon a table"
(p. 2524; italics added).
 The comparison of the evening to an etherized patient is both surprising—
a comparison we have likely never heard before—but it also reflects the

5
 perspective of the poet's speaker―that is, we learn about him by how he
views the world.
 T. S. Eliot was also important in the way that his work presented allusions
to, and direct quotations from, many other works, as though a "new" kind
of poetry could in fact be built from fragments of the old.
 Modernism was not just a literary phenomenon; it took hold in many art
forms and flourished both in England and Continental Europe. Many
writers, in fact, borrowed ideas from music and the visual arts.
 Many poets of the late 1930s and 1940s (especially post-Second World
War) embraced a more direct, impassioned, and human tone, perhaps
responding to the inhumanity of the war.
 But with the 1950s came a movement back towards the linguistic precision
of the early Modernists (i.e., away from the emotive extravagance of the
1940s). While returning to a more precise language, however, poets of the
mid-century (calling themselves the "Movement") were not so concerned
to return to a style heavy with allusion and intellectualism. They were just
as concerned to produce a poetry that was well-crafted and concise but that
communicated the details of everyday life.
 Over the last half of the twentieth century (and continuing today) the
English poetic landscape became more and more diverse. This is thanks in
part to the diverse "English" voices that are now part of the literary
tradition but that emerged from colonial and post-colonial experiences in
India, Africa, and the Caribbean, for example.
 Writers from these "mixed" heritages are especially well equipped to speak
to the modern sense that manypeople feel (regardless of their heritage) in a
world that often seems a mixture of positive and negative and the product
of a fractured past.
 Poets like St. Lucian speak directly to a divided sensibility: a love for an
English literary tradition but a deep scorn for a history of imperial
mistreatment.
 This mixed-ness is becoming more obviously a benefit and not a problem
of "impurity" as for so long it was deemed to be by cultures who sought to
protect a "pure" racial identity by denigrating anything that was different.