Trends of Modern

Poetry

Dr. Neerja A. Gupta

Introduction

 The modern age has proved inimical to Victorian traditions, and

modern poetry is essentially the poetry of revolt. It is not,
however, implied that all modern poets have reacted against the
older traditions in poetry.

 The spirit of revolt in modern poetry has been manifested in

many ways and in many directions. This revolt is the result of a
very natural desire for something new after years of a kind of
poetry which had begun to show signs of exhaustion and
lifelessness.
• The Modern age has rightly been called the Age of Interrogation, for older

values in literature, like those in life, have been questioned.

• The range of diction in modern poetry has been extend­ed to include slang

'words, colloquialisms and jargon. Passages in John Masefield's poetry

mark the limit, to which this movement has been carried.

 The extension of subject-matter was even more remarkable every subject now is
considered capable of poetic treatment.

 The modern poets have discovered elements of poetry in tram­cars and railway trains,
locomotives and airplanes, the factory and the stock exchange Masefield wrote his
songs, " about "the dirt and the dross, the dust and the scum of the earth," of the
maimed, of the halt and the blind"' W. W. Gibson in his Songs praised the courage of
"the man at the machine" and described the underworld in mining areas.
 In spite of his pre-occupation with a variety of subjects, the modern pod has not
ceased to love Nature Indeed a deep love for her, has found, expression modern
poetry Our poets have widened the Bounds of beauty by describing the loveliness of
the "wildness and wet" of nature.

 The poetry of patriotism, of the love of the homeland, of the sea and its defenders,
has received splendid additions in the modern age.

 While realism is the avowed aim of many of our modern poets, there are others who
have tried to escape from the sordid realities into regions of fantasy and imagination.
 The modern age is an age of disillusionment.

 The last War shook the foundations of the dream-world that the complacent,

Victorian poets had tried to impose on their readers.

 One often comes across a mood of pessimism and disillusionment modern poetry,

particularly in the delicately chiseled poems of A. E. Housman and in some of

Eliot's poems such as The Wasteland or The Hollow Men.

 One of the outstanding features of modern poetry is humanism.

 Many modern poets show a passion for humanity and a deep sympathy with all

classes of men.

 John Masefield generally deals sympathetically with the lower classes of people

and is their representative poet.

 The War poetry produced during the years 1914-18 is essentially a, glorification

of the hero, in man.

 A reaction from the studied perfection of the Victorians is
apparent everywhere and some of the poetry that is being
produced is obviously experimental in nature that will not
stand the test of time.

 It is thus possi­ble perhaps to dislike much in modern poetry,

but it is hard to doubt the sincerity of the work and art of
modern poets.
 Explanation of poets, era and tendencies

1. Robert Bridges (1844-1930) - Bridges is a poet of the transition, bridging

the gulf between the Victorians and the moderns. "In the time sense", says Ward,

"he is a Victorian poet: in form and spirit he belongs to the future.“

• He generally dealt with tradi­tional themes and gazed at traditionally poetic objects

as a detached spectator. For these reasons he is as much cried down at present as his

friend Gerard Manly Hopkins is glorified.

• Bridges published his first book of verse in 1873, and his last, The Testament

of Beauty, was published in 1929.

• During this period, he wrote dramas, narratives, masques and pastorals. His

dramas such as Nero, The Feast of Bacchus and The Return of Ulysses lack

"the dynamic essence of humanity".

• A cultured country gentleman, he had all a classicist's reserve and dislike of

outbursts. He lacked penetration, and his range of vision was narrow.

• He succeeded best in his 'lyrics. Even in lyrics his imagination is not very wide though
the theme is varied. They are lacking in suggestiveness and subtlety, but they are
chiseled and polished like marble. Early in his life Bridges wrote –
I love all beauteous things,
I seek and adore them,“

• He is a dignified priest of Beauty. To him all: earthly beauty, the beauty that perishes,
is but a stepping -stone to the heavenly beauty; the beauty that lasts. As he says-
"All earthly beauty hath one cause and proof
To lead the pilgrim soul to beauty above."
2. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) - It has been said that if a poet had written

Kipling's verses they would have been poetry. For a long time, there were two

entirely opposite views of Kipling’s poetry; by some he was looked upon as a, great

genius, as a popular idol, and many people read his verses to whom poetry was

otherwise repellent.

• But there were certain sensitive-minded people to whom his poetry.

• Appeared loud and vulgar; "they were infuriated by his aggressive

Imperialism, by his incongruous union of brutality and

sentimentality, by his banjo rhythms and exces­sive use of Cockney

soldier speech.“

• By 1925 Kipling had ceased to be either a popular idol or an object

of detesta­tion, and his work began to be judged by literary rather

than political standards.

• The massive bulk of Kipling's poetry stands in the way of a fair appreciation of it,

for it is unequal in quality; there is much admittedly excellent poetry much of

doubtful quality and much that is definitely inferior.

• His poetry is contained in several volumes; Barrack Room Ballads, Departmental

Ditties, The Seven Seas, The Five Nations and Songs from Books. Who can forget

the tired tramping of the weary soldiers with befogged minds?-

"Try-try-try-try-to think of something different

O-my-God keep me from goin' lunatic!“ (Boots)

• Showing fine sympathy and insight he made the common soldier articulate
and thus introduced a new element in English poetry.

• He showed us that soldiers were not mere fighting automatons:

"We aren't no thin red 'errors, nor we aren't no black guards too,
But single men in barricks most remarkable like you“

• In a poem like Shillin' a Day he spoke of the nation's neglect of the maimed
and discharged soldier.
• The sea poems of Kipling are superb. He glories in the kick of life, the attraction of danger

in perilous waters. Poems like The Last Chantey or The Song of the Dead are among the,

finest poems in English poetry dealing with the life at sea.

• Kipling's poetry has little metaphysical interest. What serves as a philosophy of life in his

poetry is a conviction that Englishmen ate divinely charged with the duty of enlightening

the world's uncivilized races-

"Fluttered folk and wild‑

Your new-caught sullen peoples

Half devil and half-child."

3. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) - Thomas Hardy re­minds us of the great Renascence

figures, famous as he is for his prose, lyric verse and epic drama. The central theme of

Hardy's poetry is the drama of human passion. He is deeply interested in Nature but it only

forms a background 'to the human figures.

• To understand and appreciate Hardy's poetry we must-know something of his attitude to

life. He had a most' sympathetic mind and it was permeated with the sadness that steps

in even our happiest moments and the futility of our life on earth. He was bitterly

disappointed with the imperfections of the world and out of his emotional protests he

created a world of his own where all protest is valueless.

• It would be bearable to think that consciously malignant Power was the

cause of all our woes but

"These purblind Doomsters had as readily-strewn,

Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.“

• The range and scope of Hardy's sight and insight are apparent by the

titles of his volumes of verse. They are headed Satires of Circumstance,

Moments of Vision, Time's; Laughingstocks, Wessex Poems, Human

Shows.
• There is the dying. man, who overhears his wife ordering new clothes soon to be "required for a

widow of: latest fashion," the Bible-class girl, after a moving sermon, sees the preacher, "her

idol", re-enacting. His pulpit gestures-in the vestry mirror "with a satisfied smile. "It will be

wrong to say that Hardy had no sense of hum­- our, but we must admit that Hardy takes

inevitable moods a little too seriously. We might take the poem At Waking for instance. The

lover suddenly realizes that his mistress is but an ordinary woman—

"She seemed but a sample

Of earth's poor average kind

Lit up by no ample

Enrichments of mien and mind."

• Now for a word about The Dynasts. The book has an infinite variety, vast sweep, mighty speed
and poetic unity. It is a great tragedy, but it is free from all bitterness and crossness-which peeps
out here and there in the novels. Like all great tragedy it is "cathartic." If it leaves no room for -
hope, at least it excludes despair. And the closing note is almost hopeful-

"But—a stirring thrills the air

Like to sounds of joyance there

That the rages.

Of the ages

Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the

darts that were,

Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashions all
things of air!
4. W. H. Davies (1870-1940) - Davies writes himself—

"This Davies has no depth,

He writes of birds, of staring cows and sheep

And throws no light on deep eternal things.“

• Generally speaking, this is also the verdict of the world on, his poetry. It is so

simple and artless. It astonishes us by its naivete. But in reality, Davies is a poet , of

extreme accomplishment and sophistication which he hides by a deceptive aura of

simplicity.
• All the time "-he is' Sensible to "the menace of the dark wing that life

spreads upon creatures.’

"When I am in those great places

I see ten thousand suffering faces;

Before me stares a wolfish eye,

Behind me creeps a groan and sigh.“

• The best poems of Davies can be found in his Collected' Poems (1916)

and Forty New Pieces (1918).

• His themes are fairly varied. Besides nature-poems he has written poems, on
infancy, children, friends, death, sickness, poetry, money; eating and drinking, sleep,
sailors, music, religion, love.

• His love for Nature is deep and sincere.

"A rainbow and a cuckoo, Lord
How rich and fine the times are now 1"
and again in the same poem,
"A rainbow and a cuckoo's song
May never come together again,
May never come
This side the tomb."
• Davies is not, however, oblivious to the miseries of life. He thinks and feels
deeply for the unemployed; and poor children he cannot view without finding
tragedy lurking be­hind them as, for example, in The Blind Child and the Little
Ones.
• When he goes into the woods he heaves a sigh of relief to have escaped all the
misery that can be witnessed in large cities.
He says—

"This life is sweetest; in this wood

I hear no children cry for food,
I see no woman white with carp
No man with muscles wasting there."
5. Walter de la Mare (1873—) - Walter de la Mare might be styled the

laureate of the faery world. He possess­es the charming gift of fantasy and can

give expression to it in haunting subtle melody. Walter de la Mare is known

to many as the writer of pretty—pretty' poetry for the nursery.

• It is true he wrote a few volumes for children—for example, Songs for

Children (1902) and Peacock Pie (1913)—and edited a beautiful antho­logy

for "the young of all ages," Come Hither.

• But this is a very inadequate view of his poetry. In a poem, Hide and Seek,

he says:

"Hide and Seek, say I,

To myself and step

Out of the dream of Wake.

Into the dream of Sleep.“

• His 'child-poetry' possesses an astonishing variety. It contains nursery

rhymes, stories and songs.

• He captures the moods of childhood and recreates the prattle of children. Walter de la
Mare did not believe in the distinction between: the real and the unreal. Their charm
lies in the suggestiveness of something weird, and uncanny.

• We can take one example, The Mocking Fairy:

"'Won't you look out of your window, Mrs'. Gill?'
Quoth the fairy, nidding nodding in the garden,
'Can't you look out of your window, Mrs. Gill?'
Quoth the fairy, laughing softly in the garden;
But the air was still, the cherry boughs were still,
And the ivy-bed 'neath the empty sill,
And never from the window looked out Mrs. Gill
On the fairy shrilly mocking in the garden."
• There are elegies scatter­-ed all over his works as for example, The Epitaph. But
there is one consolation. Though he knows that—
"Beauty vanishes, beauty passes;
However rare—rare it be",
• The single individual is drowned in the ever-flowing 'stream of consciousness.'
"Oh when this dust surrender
Hand, foot, lip to dust again,
May' these loved and loving faces.
Please other men."
• He is most deep­ly stirred by the silence that pervades the world at dawn or dusk:
"There, when the dusk is falling
Silence broods so deep
It seems that every wind that breathes
Blows from the fields of sleep."
6. W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) - Yeats laid the founda­tions of the Irish literary movement

in collaboration with Lady Gregory, Synge and others. He wrote two fine poetic

dramas, The Countess Cathleen and The Land of Heart's-Desire.

• His most popular collections of lyrics were Poems (1895) and The Wind Among the

Reeds (1899). He conti­nued to produce lyrics as well as plays after 1901 and his Later

Poems (1922) show an increase of poetic power and a deepening of intellectual quality.

• Yeats is a fastidious poet, writing little and revising often. As a consequence, the average

merit of his poetry is high.

• He is a great artist and his mastery of technique is seen in such perfect lyric

as The Lake Isle of Innisfree, When You Are Old, The Sorrow of Love, Down

by the Salley Gardens, The Fiddler of Dooley and A Dream of Death.

• Ward has said about the Innisfree poem: "Few modern poems can have had

so much artistry lavished on them as The Lake Isle of Innisfree."

• He might be likened to the human child led away by the fairies of
whom he speaks in The Stolen Child—
"Away with us he is going
The solemn-eyed"—away from a "world more full of weeping than he can understand.“

• In the second poem he leaves the familiar earth and weaves a magnificent tapestry borrowing all
the colours of the heavens. But the atmosphere is too rarefied. He himself warns us:
"I have spread my dreams under your feet
Tread lightly because you tread on my dreams.”

• In his later years Yeats moved more and more outside his world of faery and came into closer
contact with reality.
• In poem of his middle period he said, "I am worn out with dreams," a memorable
fragment of self-criticism. Indeed, he must have thoroughly wearied of being
cited as the poet of The Lake Isle of Innisfree. As he realized that the time has
come when
"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,“

• Yeats believed that "all men will more and more reject the opinion that poetry is
‘a criticism of life’, and be more­and more convinced that it is the revelation of a
hidden life.“
• This remark helps to explain the presence of symbol­ism and mysticism in his

poetry. But he was broad-minded enough to have both sympathy and

understanding for the younger generation of poets whose ideals were so

different from those of his own youth.

• This can be seen in the pre­face he wrote to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse.

• In the poems of his last years, the vigour of his mind' and senses is unimpaired

and it is in revolt against the en­feeblement of his body.

• His progress as a lyrical poet Might be gauged from a comparison of the

Innisfree poem: with the more complex one, Byzantium, published in 1930.

• It was the harder quality of beauty in his poems of the last phase that aligned

him with the poets of the new age.

• Yeats gave a new mythology to English poetry—the­Celtic.

• His style also has the usual Celtic peculiarities: a Meditative and melancholy

beauty, a misty idealism, and a sweet and dignified diction.

7. A. E.Housman (1859-1936) - Two slim volumes of verse comprise the
poetry of A. E. Housman.
• In 1896 A Shropshire. Lad was published without any mystical gloss or romantic­
flavour.
• Everything about his poems except their length is ‘paradoxical, bewitching,
uneasy.’ he shirks all responsibility of a teacher because he finds himself in an
alien world subject to laws he never made –
"I, a stranger and afraid
In a world T never made."
And how bitterly disappointed is he with that world
"The stinging nettle only
Will still be found to stand."
• Three themes can` easily be distinguished in his poems—Soldiership,

Love and the Gallows.

• Friendship, however, was a passion with Housman. On the battlefield

lifelong friendships are formed between man and man.

• In rueful language he speaks of the friends he has lost—

"With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden

And many a light-foot lad.”

• Coming to Housman's style, it is that of a poet who has passed through every phrase of

romantic ornament and emerged with bleak economy.

• There is a profusion of mono-syllables, classical simplicity and lucidity of expression,

and rhymes so easy and antitheses so inevitable that they are scarcely noticed.

• He certainly succeeds in evolving grand music, but on close application it appears to be

intelligently contrived. It is not spontaneous.

• Housman, like all pessimists, drew a false picture of life. It is not true to say that all's ill

with the world just as it is untrue to say that all's well.

• All great 'writers, like Shakespeare, teach a moral unobtrusively and proclaim God
without Mentioning Him.
• Housman's love of Nature is passionate and unaffected. His affectionate portrayal of
the lovely details of Nature act as an antiseptic to the gloom of his philosophy.
• Love, War and the Gallows work their ravages in country lanes and meadows,
decorated by trees and flowers, watched at night by the stars, wrapped in the beauty
of winter's snow.
• Men and women tear their hearts out or gladly seek a respite from cares by cutting
their throats with a knife that costs eighteen pence, but the lovely scenery remains
untorn.
• Housman was time master of an incomparable style; the flute on which he played
Captivate all readers, and as long as the music holds; the charm lasts.
Thank You