Page 71 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes ends with the Second World War. The beginning and ending of the modernist period are of course
arbitrary: poets like Yeats and Rilke started in a post-Romantic, Symbolist vein and modernised
their poetic idiom under the impact of political and literary developments; other poets, like
T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, or E.E. Cummings went on to produce significant work after World War II.
The questions of impersonality and objectivity seem to be crucial to Modernist poetry. Modernism
developed out of a tradition of lyrical expression, emphasising the personal imagination, culture,
emotions and memories of the poet. For the modernists, it was essential to move away from the
merely personal towards an intellectual statement that poetry could make about the world. Even
when they reverted to the personal, like Eliot in the Four Quartets or Pound in “The Cantos”, they
distilled the personal into a poetic texture that claimed universal human significance. After World
War II, a new generation of poets sought to revoke the effort of their predecessors towards
impersonality and objectivity. Modernism ends with the turn towards confessional poetry in the
work of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, among others.
Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th
century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets
wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional
formalism and ornate diction. In many respects, their criticism echoes what William Wordsworth
wrote in Preface to Lyrical Ballads to instigate the Romantic movement in British poetry over a
century earlier, criticising the gauche and pompous school which then pervaded, and seeking to
bring poetry to the layman.
In general, modernists saw themselves as looking back to the best practices of poets in earlier periods
and other cultures. Their models included ancient Greek literature, Chinese and Japanese poetry,
the troubadours, Dante and the medieval Italian philosophical poets, and the English Metaphysical
poets.
Much of early modernist poetry took the form of short, compact lyrics. As it developed, however,
longer poems came to the fore. These represent the main contribution of the modernist movement
to the 20th-century English poetic canon.

7.4 Summary

• A War poet is a poet writing in time of and on the subject of war.
• Many poems by British war poets were published in newspapers and then collected into
anthologies.
• In Russian literature, Nikolay Gumilyov’s war poems were assembled in the collection The
Quiver (1916).
• Modernist poetry refers to poetry written between 1890 and 1950 in the tradition of modernist
literature in the English language.
• After World War II, a new generation of poets sought to revoke the effort of their predeces-
sors towards impersonality and objectivity.

7.5 Keywords

Diaphragm : A dome-shaped muscular partition separating the thorax from the abdomen in
mammals.
Dichotomy : A division or contrast between two things that are opposed.
Amorous : Feeling sexual desire.
Enjambement : The continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line.
Volunteer : A person who freely offers to do something.

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