Poetry before and after World War II

Experimental Poetry

• Already after 1850: tendency to write for a limited group of cognoscenti rather than for the public
• Symbolist era of the 1890s
• This tendency rose to a second climax in the period following the First World War
• Poetry tended to become the exclusive possession of schools, movements and cults, each self-
sufficient, believing to be in the vanguard of modern literature
• The poetry produced by these various groups shares one quality: it is never obvious and it is quite
difficult or esoteric
• It is generally the product of highly educated poets who have a wide background in languages, lit.
history and philosophy
• The most prominent influence on this entire movement is that of the Symbolist school
• From this school the moderns borrowed their interest in sensory associations, which they further
refined by the addition of modern Freudian and Jungian psychology.
• The 19th c. Symbolists also share with many modern poets a certain morbidity, deriving from a
repugnance towards materialism and a disillusionment with the ideals of democracy and science.
• There seems to be little consistency in the political attitudes of these poets
• For one, they are all dissatisfied with the status quo
• Eliot objects to the tendency of modern democracy to become mobocracy, and therefore assumes
a royalist and conservative stand
• Auden and Spender, blaming capitalism for the vacuity of modern culture, take the opposite
course and turn towards the Left.
• The conservative Eliot and the reactionary Pound appear to be exceptions; the more typical poet of
the century is liberal or radical, cherishing ideals of individualism

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)

• Born in York, educated at Christ Church, Oxford

• Teacher at school from 1930 to 1935 and later worked for a government film unit
• His sympathies in the 1930s were with the Left,
• Ambulance driver on the republican side in the Spanish Civil War (became disappointed there)
• He travelled in Iceland and China before going to America in 1939
• 1946: American citizen
• Married Erika Mann, daughter of Thomas Mann (1935)
• Taught at a number of American colleges, and was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford (1956-60
)
• The most active of the group of young English poets in the 20s in search of new techniques and
attitudes to English poetry - Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis (group soon fell apart)
• Learned poetic wit and irony from T.S. Eliot, metrical and verbal techniques from Gerard Manley
Hopkins and from Wilfred Owen
• Rhythms and long alliterative lines from Anglo-Saxon poetry, the rapid and rollicking short lines
from the early 16th-century poet John Skelton

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• From songs of the English music hall and from American blues singers
• About four hundred poems (7 long ones)
• More than four hundred essays and reviews about various subjects
• Collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood; The Ascent of F6 (1936), For the Time Being
(1944), The Age of Anxiety (1947)
• Depression upset America in 1929 and hit England soon; industrial stagnation, mass
unemployment
• Not the metaphorical “Waste Land” of Eliot but a more literal “Waste Land” of poverty followed
• His early poetry is much concerned with a diagnosis of the ills of England
• The liveliness and nervous force of his early poetry made a great impression, even though an
uncertainty about his audience led him to introduce purely private symbols, intelligible only to a few
friends.
• Gradually, Auden learned to clarify his imagery and control his desire to shock; finely disciplined
movement, clarity, and deep yet unsentimental feeling
• Moved from his earlier diagnosis of modern ills in terms of Freud and Marx to a more religious
view of personal responsibility and traditional value
• But he never lost his ear for popular speech or his ability to combine elements from popular art
with an extreme technical formality.
• He was always the experimenter; brought together high artifice and a colloquial tone.
• Auden's most exciting work is found in his early volumes, Poems (1930) and On This
Island (1937)
• For the first part of his career, was very much the poet of his times (i.e. of the Depression).
• He preferred to confront modern problems directly rather than to filter them, as Eliot did, through
symbolic situations.
• Another Time (1940) shows greater control and less violence.
• Nones (1951) shows most clearly his characteristic way of combining or alternating the grave and
the flippant
• In About the House (1967) and City without Walls (1970), poems are increasingly personal in tone
and combine an apparent air of offhand informality with remarkable technical skill in versification
• Auden grew increasingly hostile to the modern world and skeptical of all remedies offered for
modern ills
• Refuge in friendship, and in an ever deepening religious feeling.

Theme of indifference:

Auden reads “Musée des Beaux Arts”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEJyZepZIr8

Musée des Beaux Arts (1938)

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:

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 They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Inspired by Pieter Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1560s)

See here: http://tomreeder.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/fall-of-icarus.jpg

Other adaptations of the myth :

• Marc Chagall. The Fall of Icarus (1975)
See here: http://uploads6.wikipaintings.org/images/marc-chagall/the-fall-of-icarus-1975.jpg
• “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams (1962)
Read poem here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15828

The Shield of Achilles (1952)

Auden reads “The Shield of Achilles”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpblaBb93fo

Book 18, lines 478–608 of Homer’s Iliad

[Excerpt:]
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead. (Auden)

Coleridge, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner”:

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

• Totalitarian state as opposed to ancient ideals(?)

Other poems by Auden:

• “As I Walked out one Evening” (1937)
Auden reads the poem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q__Z185H8I

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• “In Praise of Limestone” (1948)

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

• Born and educated in Swansea, Wales

• Newspaper reporter then "discovered" as a poet in 1933 through a poetry contest in a popular
newspaper
• Eighteen Poems caused considerable excitement because of the strange violence of their imagery
and their powerful obscurity
• A new kind of strength and romantic vividness seemed to emerge in English poetry after the
deliberately muted tones of Eliot and his followers
• Thomas did not, however, turn out to be the founder of a neo-romantic movement
• From his volumes The Map of Love (1939), Deaths and Entrances (1946), Collected
Poems (1953) it became clear that he was a craftsman, and not the loud rhapsodist that some had taken
him to be

FEATURES:
• Images most carefully ordered
• Major theme the unity of all life, the continuing process of life and death and new life
• Biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of diversity
• Unity of man and nature, of past and present, of life and death
• Closely woven imagery (deriving from the Bible, Welsh folklore and preaching, and Freud)

• His autobiographical work Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and his radio play Under Milk
Wood reveal a vividness of observation and a combination of violence and tenderness
• He was a brilliant talker, a considerable drinker, a reckless and impulsive man; he acted the
bohemian poet
• Poetry readings in America between 1950 and 1953 were enormous success; erratic behaviour
• died suddenly in New York
• Brilliant reader of his own and others' poems, many people were drawn to Thomas's by the magic
of his own reading

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night (1951)

Dylan Thomas reads the poem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2cgcx-GJTQ

Do not go gentle into that good night, 

Old age should burn and rave at close of day; 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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 Though wise men at their end know dark is right, 
Because their words had forked no lightning they 
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright 

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, 

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, 
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight 

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height, 

Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. 
Do not go gentle into that good night. 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion (1933)

Dylan Thomas reads the poem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQiZof204yI

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

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 Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion

• “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither
sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”
(Revelation 21:4)
• “Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion
over him.” (Romans 6:9 )

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

• Born in Coventry, educated at the U of Oxford

• Librarian for many years at the U of Hull
• Poems of his first volume, The North Ship (1945) show Yeats’s strong influence
• After discovering Hardy’s Collected Poems, he found his own voice.
• Like Hardy and Auden, he wrote novels (Jill (1946) and Girl in Winter (1947)
• Direct speech in poems may derive from his technique of writing novels
• Dominant figure of “the Movement” – a group of poets including Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin,
Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn, John Holloway and Robert
Conquest:
 Their work appeared in the anthology New Lines in 1956
 Reaction to what they believed to be a trend in English poetry from Romanticism to the Victorian
Age to Modernism to Dylan Thomas
 They saw modernism as the continuation of romanticism (despite Eliot)
 They deprived the poet from awareness of his own importance and authority
 Their work is free ”from both mystical and logical compulsions and – like modern philosophy – is
empirical.” (Robert Conquest)
• Larkin’s world revolves around the welfare-state of post-Imperial Britain
• Hardyesque pessimism: loneliness, age and death, sexuality.
• Collections of his poems: The North Ship (1945), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun
Weddings (1964), High Windows (1974), altogether hardly over 100 poems

• “Church Going” (1955) (compare with Hardy’s ”The Impercipient” (1898))

• “High Windows”(1974) Larkin reads poem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcLNHNyzVcU
• “This Be The Verse” (1971) Larkin reads poem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=1rjRYSfCJvM
– Title from Robert Louis Stevenson's Requiem
– “for I the Lord, thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children
unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” (Exodus 20:5)