English poetry in between two wars Essay Example For Students

English poetry in between two wars Essay Measures. The Sirens was suggested by the first transatlantic flight. The theme is mans power over nature, which goes on increasing day by day. Man is really great, And where light is, he enters unafraid. The Idols is directed against the terrors and superstitions which are mans own creation and which hold him captive. Bonbon makes a plea for the demolition of these false gods. Yeats started his writing career as a poet in the nineteenth century. The period between the two wars brings us to consider his later poetry as we find it in his Tower. His later poetry is very different from his early poetry. Grievers and Smith point out the difference in these words: The difference between Yeats early and later poetry reminds one of the early and later poetry of Done, but he has changed in the opposite direction, from the ideal to the real, the. Spiritual to the sensuous. Some of his later poems are almost definitely bawdy. In the later part of his career Yeats came under the modernistic, Imaging influence of Ezra Pound. Consequently, his later poems are full of concrete but delicate images and particulars redolent of ancient myths. But the appearance of, what Samuel C. Chew calls, a most unexpected sensuality in his poetry is quite baffling indeed. Another feature of his later poetry is its recurring expression of passionate regret at the passing of youth. This regret conditions much of the symbolism employed by him. Chew observes: The gyred, the spiral, and the winding stair are constantly recurring symbols of the cyclic philosophy which he had evolved from reading and from life. The Georgians: Before we consider some important modernistic movements which came between the wars, let us dispose of some important Georgians who were writing before the First World War and who continued writing between the Wars too. The most important of these poets are Walter De la Mare, Mansfield, and Gibson. De la Mare was a poet of childhood and the supernatural, before the first World War. However, after the War, at least for once, he became a realist of the grimmest kind. Insistzee Five (1921) he focused his attention, to quote Grievers and Smith, on the dreadful figures of the criminal in the dock, the drug addict,the suicide. However, his indulgence in realism did not continue long, for in The Fleeting (1926) he returned to the hocus-pocus of supernatural and dream poetry for which he always had a strong predilection. In some poems his religious feelings also find a good expression. He was a congenital, incorrigible dreamer and the last of his Collected Poems is, in fact, an argument for a life of dreams: And conscience less my mind indicts For idle days than dreamless nights. But not to speak of nights, even his days were seldom without dreams. About Mansfield poetry between the Wars, Grievers and Smith maintain: Mr.. Mansfield celebrated the return of peace to England with a long poem on fox-hunting, the typical sport of the England he loves. Earned the Fox is modeled on Saucers Prologue; the meet gives Mr.. Mansfield the same opportunity to bring English people of different ranks together as the Canterbury pilgrimage gave Chaucer. Mr.. Mansfield has not Saucers witty touch, nor his. Universality: his characters are more Transitional than Chaucer, recognizable contemporary English types, not the lineaments of universal human life. But as contemporary types they are very well done and as a whole Earned the Fox is the best sustained and events in execution of all Mr.. Successfully, to the other typical English sport of horse-racing. The verse he has written since then has not added much to his fame as a poet. One drawback of Earned the Fox may be pointed o ut here: it is that the weight of the Prologue is not well borne out by the story which follows, unlike what we have in Saucers Canterbury Tales. Rupert Brooke War Poetry - Peace EssayAmbivalence and paradox are the rule rather than the exception. Most critics of today consider The Waste Land to be the greatest poem of the twentieth century. It is an image of the modern restlessness, anxiety, and despair. Though at the end the thunder promises the arrival of the life-giving rain, no rain falls. The frameworks the poem is provided by the legend of the Holy Grail. Fertility will not come to the earth till the Holy Vessel has been found. The treatment of this simple theme is the most abstruse, so much so that Eliot had to take upon himself the work of annotating his own poem. The Hollow Men sketches the spiritual emptiness and purposelessness of modern men. We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw, alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together, Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats feet over broken glass In our dry cellar In Ash Wednesday, however, we meet with a note of spiritual assurance which is essentially inimical to despair. Miss Edith Stilwell and her brothers, Sobers and Severely Stilwell, made some robust experiments. Edith used bold and artistic imagery, and her peculiarity was her constant utilization of the effects of kinesthesia-that is, interchanging senses. Sobers struck an astringently satirical note and enjoyed taking pot-shots at dowdiness and dowdiness. Severely was very earned but was quite satisfied indulging in the baroque. Some poets like Herbert Reader and Robert Graves came under the influence of the psychoanalytic studies of Freud, Jung, and Adler. Graves, for some time, saw nothing but sexual symbols in everything. Reader wrote surrealistic poetry which is expressive of the unconscious and has to be read most carefully to get at something. These experiments, as is known, paved the way for the stream-of-consciousness novel. The Irish Poets: Between the Wars there was a tremendous resurgence of literary activity in Ireland. The chief moving force was Yeats himself. The oater notable Irish poets of the period were G. W. Russell (AWE) and J. M. Singe. Russell, according to Grievers and Smith, was a much less versatile and melodious poet than Yeats, but a purer mystic, never; astray by that will-o-the-wisp, that hopes-pocus of evocation and incantation which have the same qualities as his plays. The Young Poets of Eliot Tradition: The most important poets of the second decade of the period between the Wars are Cecil Day Lewis, W. H. Aden, and Stephen Spender. All of them are followers of Eliot, and they have tried to establish a neo-metaphysical tradition. But there is a preference-their interest in social reform and their communistic leaning. Aden is learned but his technique is unpredictable. He, observe Moody and Lovely, ranges freely from the most cryptic and condensed utterance to a potato of music hall rhythms, folk-ballads, and nursery rhymes. He is indeed a clever poet. Cecil Day Lewis is the most manifest of revolutionaries. Spender is a poet less of revolution than of compassion. His communism is conditioned by his strong liberal convictions. His heart bleeds when he finds the Jobless poor loitering in the streets and turning. Their empty pockets out, he cynical gesture of the poor.