Analysis of Poetry In The Early Twentieth Century & the New Poetry

NAME: - ASHISH B. PITHADIYA
ROLL NUMBER:-2
TOPIC NAME: - Poetry in the Early Twentieth Century and The new poetry

PAPER NAME: - The Modern Literature
SUBMITTED TO: - DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Enrollment no: -2069108420190037

What is early 20th century

The 20th (twentieth) century was a century that began on January 1, 1901^[1] and ended on December 31, 2000.^[2] It was the tenth and final century of the 2nd millennium. It is distinct from the century known as the 1900s which began on January 1, 1900 and ended on December 31, 1999.

The 20th century was dominated by a chain of events that heralded significant changes in world history as to redefine the era: flu pandemic, World War I and World War II, nuclear power and space exploration, nationalism and decolonization, the Cold War and post-Cold War conflicts; intergovernmental organizations and cultural homogenization through developments in emerging transportation and communications technology; poverty reduction and world population growth, awareness of environmental degradation, ecological extinction; and the birth of the Digital Revolution, enabled by the wide adoption of MOS transistors and integrated circuits. It saw great advances in communication and medical technology that by the late 1980s allowed for near-instantaneous worldwide computer communication and genetic modification of life.

Poetry in the Early Twentieth Century

 Hardy-Yeats-Synge-Housman-de la Mare- the Georgians-Great War poets

THE THREE GREATEST modern English poets are widely agreed to Hardy, Yeats, and Eliot. Of these Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was t only Englishman. Hardy was the last great Victorian novelist, He gab up novel-writing before Queen Victoria died. His first volume poem was not published till 1898. But Hardy had been Writing poet since the 1860s, and he often borrowed scenes and situations from it f his novels. Hardy the poet is continuous with Hardy the novelist. What is alive in the poems is what is alive in the novels. But he wrote the poems solely to please himself: while in the novels he was concerned t entertain his public

Hardy's novels are old-fashioned in form and style. They depend o sensational incidents, astonishing coincidences, surprising twists of plot Hardy is a story-teller in the tradition of Scott. But he had learned for George Eliot, and from Shakespeare, how to depict the country people he loved in a convention of light caricature. And in his early books h recounts the joys and sorrows, the charm and the hum our, of the loc rural life that in his day was vanishing from England. But from The Return of the Native (1878) onwards his books become more sombre and philosophically preoccupied. Hardy, like George Eliot, was a pro- gressivist, or, to use her word, a meliorate, but he was a half-hearted one. Again and again he shows human fulfillment and happiness thwarted by stupidity and selfishness, or by conventionality and ignore dance. He did not rule out the possibility of human improvement, but he was painfully conscious of all the forces, within and without human beings, that made against it. His tone in his later novels is often peevish and irritable. But at times it takes on a more tragic dignity, when Hardy implies that people are up against not only stupidity and ignorance, but something in the scheme of things.

Hardy's greatness appears in his poems. Here he was able to dies- encumber himself from the conventions of Victorian fiction and write as he pleased. Hardy's output was very large, about nine hundred poems. Naturally they are mixed, both in subject-matter and quality, but they have some things in common. Hardy liked to experiment with rhythm and meter. Sometimes a tune came into his head before he had thought of the words to accompany it. He tried to find the right music for different moods. And his moods do vary. We think of Hardy as melancholy, even morbid; but many of the poems are really light verse.

 The strangest feature of Hardy's poetry is his diction. Fundament- ally, it is traditional. Hardy never abandoned his first masters, the great poets of the romantic period. But he introduced into this diction strange mixture of elements. Sometimes he uses provincial words, Dorset dialect. Sometimes he is very colloquial, even slangy Sometimes he is magniloquent, with Latinate polysyllables. Hardy loves to coin new words. Often he uses awkward inversions, or falls into grammatical tangles. Sometimes he sings effortlessly and simply; sometimes he sounds jangling and cacophonous.

Ford Maddox Ford said that Hardy's poetic style seemed to have been borrowed from a country newspaper. Much of his subject-matter might have appeared there too. Unlike most great poets, Hardy wrote about a wide range of ordinary events. He liked to dwell on 'life's little ironies the sad or strange or funny incidents that we hear about every day. But he also wrote about the routine of day-to-day incidents. the fine mornings and the overcast afternoons, the local gossip and scandals, the irths, the marriages, and, above all, the deaths.

Many of the poems reflect Hardy's philosophical ideas. Intellectually, Hardy did not believe that nature revealed any signs of conscious pure-pose. Organic sentience was a mere accident, and the reflective self- consciousness of man was the cruelest accident of all. But emotionally arty was convinced that the amount of suffering and misfortune in he world exceeded what could be reasonably expected from mere hence. He could not help imagining the presence of malign and mocking spirits in the universe, even if their influence upon the blind, unconscious Immanent Will remains unclear. Opposed to them he imagines compassionate spirits, whose influence, if it exists, is small. This half-fanciful mythology provides the framework for the principal work Hardy produced during the Edwardian age, the epic drama of The Dynasts (1904-8).

The new poetry

The New Poetry

 Eliot-Pound Hopkins

FOR MANY READERS of our time the name of T. S. ELIOT (1888- 1965) is virtually synonymous with modern poetry. During the 1920s Eliot was an avant-garde figure, a centre of controversy, a party leader. By the 1940s he had conquered the literary establishment and was generally accepted as the leading writer of the age. Many of his critical dicta achieved a world-wide fame. His taste for Dante, for the metaphysical poets, for French symbolist poetry, his comparative disaster for Milton and for much nineteenth-century poetry, shaped the opinions of a whole generation, and left a lasting mark on school curricula and university syllabuses. In his later years Eliot became some- what remote from the world of literary movements and fashions. And since his death his reputation has been in a sort of critical limbo.

Thomas Stearns Eliot came of an old-established American family with ancestral English connections. He was born at St. Louis, Missouri. From 1906 to 1915 he studied literature and philosophy at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford. He made personal contact with French poets of the symbolist school, and with the Anglo-American movement known as Imagism, which included such writers as Ezra Pound, T. E. Holmes, and 'H.D.. Eliot was employed in Lloyds Bank in 1916. He was assist- ant editor of the Egoist from 1917 to 1919 and founded the Criterion in 1922. Shortly afterwards he was made a director of Faber, the publishers. A book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), was allowed by a volume of criticism, The Sacred Wood (1920). Eliot's amour poem, The Waste Land, was published in 1922. During the 1930s Eliot first reached a wide public with his play Murder in the horal (1935), which was followed by another play, The Family Re- union (1939). Eliot published much criticism and miscellaneous prose, mainly lectures and addresses, His standing in the literary world reached its greatest height with the series of poems called Pour Quartets (first published together in 1943, though the poems had previous appeared separately, starting in 1936 with Burnt Norton' in Collected Poems 1909 35.

Eliot as a young man abandoned America and sought to become a European writer. For a while he even seems to have thought of becoming a French poet, like his fellow-countryman Stuart Merrill. Some of his early poems were written in French. But it was soon clear to Eliot that his future as a poet lay in the English language. In London and Paris Eliot was drawn to the Imagist poets because, like them, he wanted to correct the loose expression and woolly sentiment of contemporary entry. He disliked the vague poeticism into which the romantic tradition had degenerated. Eliot, like his friend Pound was preoccupied with craftsmanship; He thought twentieth-century verse lacked standards. What interested Eliot above all in these writers was their use of the spoken word, the colloquial language and rhythm that had long been absent from serious poetry. But French influence on the early Eliot was more immediate than these. And deeper and more influence was Dante, the medieval poet who still grips centuries because he is so graphic and unconventional. Dante was to remain Eliot's master from the beginning to end.