British Poetry from Modern to Postmodern: An Introduction

Modernism marks with its insistent interruption with the immediate past, the nineteenth century Victorian temperament. The elements of impersonality and objectivity seem to be crucial to modernist poets. As the slogan of Ezra Pound suggests ' make it new' was the ultimate aim of modernism. It is considered as an epistemological dominant ; For modernists, it was essential to move away from the personal to the intellectual parlance of human thinking. Thus, a deliberate cultivation of obscurity is discernible in modernist literature in general and poetry in particular.

 

Although the reigning Victorian poetic fashions and standards were challenged from diverse directions, many modern poets were undoubtedly indebted to Browning, Hopkins, Hardy and other late Victorian, 'Fin-de-siecle' (end of the century) poets.

 

When modern poetry broke with the past, the rebellion became particularly visible in the rejection of conventionally embellished and smooth poetic diction, remarkably handled in the works of T.S Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and so on. The debt of Eliot's The Waste Land and Joyce's Ulysses is well known.

 

The point of affinity between Browning and modern poetry lies in his obscurity, irregularity of diction, exploration of Mind (dramatic monologue) and multiple perspective. His celebrated concept Dramatic Monologue can be considered as an anticipation of modern stream of consciousness. Browning's poetic faculty remains a permanent legacy to modern poetry.

 

The poetry of Hardy and Hopkins marked by bold experimentations in tones and modes. Hardy's poetry is characterized by frequent flashes of daring imagination. His experiments orchestrate the use of dialectic words, archaism and 'kennings' (verbal riddles in Anglo Saxon diction). Ultimately his visions are ironic, involving the rapid and unsettling juxtaposition of images and counter perceptions that anticipates modernist techniques.

Hopkins experiments with prosody, that results in much charm and delicacy at the cost of poetic expression. The qualities of 'sprung rhythm' and Anglo Saxon prosody reinforced fresh imagery and compact structure. He was able to revive the 'Metaphysical' mode linking it to modern poetry, this mode was characterized by the cryptic conceit such as the yoking of the contraries and special use of diction. Apart from the contrapuntal play of regular metrical form and irregular speech rhythms, the inter-meshing of 'Inscape' and 'Instress' anticipate the techniques adopted in much modern poetry. These are complementary concepts about individuality and uniqueness. 'Inscape' means the particular features of a certain landscape or other natural structure, which make it different from any other. The theological belief behind this was that God never repeats himself.
'Instress' means the actual experience a reader has of Inscape: how it is received into the sight, memory and imagination. The poet's job is to find images that will ‘nail' the Inscape down for readers, so they can recapture the poet's perception and experience.

 

The Georgians and the war poets:

Georgian poetry emerged in the early decades of 20^th century when king George ruled England. It is a simple and Straightforward in form, largely in the romantic temper. The Georgian poets are neither impressionistic nor pantheistic but “as simple as a child’s reading book”. Their themes were nature, love, leisure, old age, childhood, animals etc. It is poetry for the many and not for the scholarly few alone. It can be enjoyed even by the learned. Georgian poetry has been subjected to severe criticism by critics like T.S. Eliot. These poets include Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas. Brooke was the most popular and typically Georgian, who somewhat ironically, began as a rebel against Victorian gentility with its fondness for vapid sweetness. But like many of his contemporaries, he could not break out of the orderly bounds of liberal humanism. While Edward Thomas's strength lays in nature poetry, which he started to write on the encouragement of Robert Frost, as he meditates on a natural scene and employs a plain idiom.

The trepidation and trauma of the First World War was first expressed by poets in the trenches, challenging patriotic and military hypocrisy; it then coloured the sensibility of an entire age. The war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen increasingly saw the war as an organized and motivated insanity: their poetry witness to the ugly truth seen through the eyes of a common soldier. Both Sassoon and Owen used realism in order to shock readers out of their complacency and exposed the naked reality of dehumanized violence. Thus, war poetry prepared the ground for the modernist poetry of the 1920s.

 

The moment of high modernism(1922):

The high modernist mode was popular in British and American poetry in 1920s was of course dominated by Ezra pound and T.S Eliot. Modernist poetry was characterized by the fragmentary experiences of a complex and heterogeneous civilization. Aestheticism, Impressionism, Symbolism, Imagism, Surrealism, Cubism, Vorticism, Expressionism and Dadaism all combined to produce the modernist mode. The impact of discoveries in psychology and anthropology are conspicuous. Poetry attempts to explore the new territory of the irrational and associative surge of consciousness, neurosis, dream and the collective unconscious with its storehouse of myth and archetype. Pound's wide and disparate reading extended the range of modern poetry, especially in his intertextual use of literary traditions. His concept of Imagism marked by the sharp and brief use of language and he considers poetry is an act of illustration.

T. S Eliot remains the finest practitioner of modern poetry. All the modern features are discernible in his magnum opus The Waste Land (1922). Eliot also focuses on the conservative values and preoccupation with the religious dogma through Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday, stylistically he remains as innovative as ever. After his fairly successful experiments in verse drama, Eliot moved to the more contemplative, somewhat philosophical Four Quartets with its intertwined themes of time, experience, memory, communication and the possibilities of reconciliation. 'Burnt Norton', the first quartet, seems to begin the polyphonic structure with abstract speculation and memories in a rose garden. 'East Coker' is the name of the Somerset village from which Eliot's ancestors had emigrated to America, and the quartet thus takes us to the past. In 'The Dry Salvages' Eliot's own lived past in America is recaptured. 'Little Gidding' is the final poem in the quartets, it discusses time, perspective, humanity, and salvation.

 

The poetry of the thirties:

As we move on to the 1930s, the poets such as W.H Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNiece (known as MacSpaunday / pink poets) turned against their predecessors. The focus shifted out of literary tradition or myth into social and political commitment. "MacSpaunday" was a name invented by  Roy Campbell in his Talking Bronco (1946), to designate a composite figure made up of these four poets. Campbell evaluated that the four were a group of like-minded poets, although they shared little but left-wing views in the broadest sense of the word.

 

The poetry of the Forties:

The forties saw a reaction against the poetry of social reporting and political commitment, in the form of surrealism and neo-romanticism. This New Apocalypse writers focused exclusively on self unravelling. Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet sets the examples for this expressive style marked by mystery, inarticulate terrors and a dream like quality. He extracted an elemental and innovative richness of vocabulary and diction that went much deeper than the concerns of the Auden circle. Thomas and to some extent poets like George Darker and G.S Fraser rejected the self- conscious, intellectualized and ironic style of modernism in favour of an intoxication with words and Gothic effect.

The poetry of the Fifties:

The fifties were marked by the rejection of the poetic tradition of previous decade. The process perhaps began with the sarcastic conservatism of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and John Wain who were together at Oxford. Robert Conquest's influential anthology, 'New Lines' (1956), brought in six other poets: Elizabeth Jennings, John Holloway, Thom Gunn, D.J Enright, Donald Davie and Conquest himself, Known as 'The Movement Poets'. This body of poetry cultivated elegant lucidity and economy against extravagantly figurative language and shapeless syntax of any kind. In place of theoretical systems and ideology, these poets choose withdrawal from intellectual, public issues; instead of building the unconscious depths they attempted to operate on the register of ordinary and orderly commonsense.

The most accomplished Movement poet, Philip Larkin goes far beyond the manifesto in his use of deflationary rhetoric and teasingly casual irony. As a poet he opened up the territories which previously dismissed with contempt. His poetic fame rests on The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings(1964) and  The High Windows (1974).

 

The poetry of sixties and after:

"The British Poetry Revival" is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry. In fact American poetry as we have seen, remained always more innovative and intellectually challenging. For instance, the forties witnessed the emergence of a new generation of poets in America whose influence extended fruitfully to the British poets of the sixties. The most important of these American poets were Robert Lowell and John Berryman along with their contemporaries and successors such as Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Anne sexton and Sylvia Plath. Lowell began the tradition of 'confessional poetry', which directly influenced Sexton and Plath.

Sylvia plath, a legatee of 'confessional' tradition, settled in England after her marriage to Ted Hughes. She wrote primarily out of the influence of strange terror and despair. She was able to observe and analyze with unflinching honesty of her imprisoned psyche and explores the surreal landscapes of the mind.

The British poets of the sixties were exposed not only to American confessional poetry but also to the freewheeling and open structured verse of the 'Beat' movement. The resulting enlargement of poetic vision is seen in Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. Violence is rampant in Ted Hughes, he represents and reframes the poetic visions of animal world, also approximates to a Beckett  like grim and sardonic insights in his language. Like Hughes, Thom Gunn's poetic arrival was also explosive. We encounter a reckless immersion of energy and cautious wisdom in his poems. The poetry that he produced under the influence of hallucinatory drugs only intermittently achieves a surreal insight. This weakening of poetic control is reflected in his later poetry where his honesty is diluted by sentimental nostalgia.

Among his contemporaries, Geoffrey Hill seems to strike a different note by virtue of his religious preoccupation. He presents the history and memory of  Europe through a dense intertextuality.