The Early Twentieth Century:

Outline of the Twentieth century:

Irish drama blossomed in the early 20th century, largely under the umbrella of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and Sean O'Casey all wrote on Irish themes—mythical in Yeats’ poetic drama, political in O’Casey’s  realistic plays. Also Irish, George Bernard Shaw wrote ironical dramas that reflect all aspects of British society. In fact, many of the towering figures of 20th-century English literature were not English; Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, O'Casey, and Beckett were Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, T. S. Eliot was born an American, and Conrad was Polish.

Poetry in the early 20th century was characterized by the conventional romanticism of such poets as John Masefield, Alfred Noyes, and Walter de la Mare and by the experiments of the imagists, notably Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), Richard Aldington, Herbert Read, and D. H. Lawrence. The finest poet of the period was Yeats, whose poetry fused romantic vision with contemporary political and concerns. Though the 19th-century tradition of the novel lived on in the work of Arnold Bennett, W.H Hudson, and John Galsworthy, new writers like Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad expressed the doubt and alienation that were to become features of post-Victorian sensibility.

World War I shook England to the core. So also were shaken, social customs artistic conventions. There were also poets, who were influenced by the world wars fought and wrote war poems. The wars produced a new category of poets called French poets. They wrote against the myth that wars were noble. They wanted to show, the sadness of senseless slaughter. This movement used romantic conventions of English poetry. Chief among them were Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon. The work of war poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, was particularly influential. Ford Maddox’s landmark tetralogy,’ Parade's End’, is perhaps the finest depiction of the war and its effects.

The new era called for new forms, signified by the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, first published in 1918, and of T. S. Eliot, whose long poem, ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) was a watershed (Classical work)  in both American and English literary history. Hopkins adopted metrical forms and a verse technique of metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century .He was more of an innovator. To describe in his own language, he used the term,’ sprung rhythm’, and the word’ inscape’ to denote his aim in the treatment of subject material. The far reaching,  influence of Hopkins after 1918, was not altogether fortunate for English poetry , since it encouraged lesser minds than his to cultivate the illusion that obscurity and profundity go hand in hand.

Two great poets of the twentieth century who wrote best poetry and brought about a change in the poetry form are Eliot and Yeats. Between 1919 and 1939 Yeats wrote the best poetry. His important poetic works are the Winding stairs, Tower, The wild Swans of Coole, and Byzantium among others. The Gyre, the spiral form and the cycle of civilization, are the symbols that occur in his poems. He was a poet, as well as a visionary, whose work is relevant even today. T.S.Eliot remarked that Yeats is one of the greatest English poets.

Eliot himself is the greatest English poet and a critic. He was greatly influenced by the American poet Ezra Pound and T.E.Hulme.He learnt to write sharp and clear images under their influence. His poetry is distinct for its irony and obscurity. His poetry reflects the disillusionment of the present age. He departed from conventional poetry. He revived the tradition of the seventeenth century metaphysical .His poetry reflect the influence of metaphysical school of thought. He does not follow narrative method or logical sequence of ideas or events. He was influenced by Symbolists. His poems highlight the horror and boredom of modern life.

T.S. Eliot was the disciple of Hopkins but his first poem was published in 1917,before Hopkins’s was published in 1918.It is important to distinguish the writing style of Hopkins and T.S.Eliot, though their fame has happened in the same time and there are close resemblances in the writings of these two poets. Eliot’s’ work is original and personally creative. His poem the waste land portrayed a disturbing picture of the contemporary world. It was a vision of the human society as he saw it. He uses free verse intermingled with allusions, quotations, imagery, and a note of bleakness. He used allusions, and imagery from shabby side of life. Its difficulty, formal invention, and bleak Anti- Romanticism were to influence poets for decades. It was unromantic and designed to shock.

Equally important was the novel Ulysses, also published in 1922, by the expatriate Irishman James Joyce. Although his books were controversial because of their freedom of language and content, Joyce's revolutions in narrative form, the treatment of time, and nearly all other techniques of the novel made him a master to be studied, but only sometimes copied.

Though more conventional in form, the novels and poems of D. H. Lawrence were equally challenging to convention; he was the first to champion both the primitive and the super civilized urges of men and women. D.H.Lawrence (1885-1930) was a controversial figure. He believed it his mission to seek to release English people from the pressures of moral restraints which are regarded as essential for holding together civilized society.

Moved by the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and English policies of appeasement, many writers and intellectuals sought solutions in the politics of the left—or the right. The poets W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis all proclaimed their leftist respective political commitments, but the pressing demands of World War II superseded these long-term ideals.

The Postwar Era to the Present:

The division of literature into periods convenient for study may create an impression that the writers in each age can be put into tight compartments, and can be land treated independently of their predecessors and successors. This view is not right. What ever seems to be new in literature seems to have its roots in the past. The poetry of 1930s returned to the serious mood of the Victorian period but with a difference in the theme. The Victorians were occupied with the condition of England while the 1930s were occupied with the conditions of the whole world. There is no parallel in history to Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) whose poetry influenced the younger poets so much that the aspect of modern poetry was changed. It is the same with T.S.Eliot whose popularity is unparalleled. After the war most English writers chose to focus on aesthetic or social rather than political problems; C. P. Snow was perhaps the notable exception. The novelists Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Joyce Cary, and Lawrence Durrell, and the poets Robert Graves, Edwin Muir, Louis MacNeice, and Edith Sitwell tended to cultivate their own distinctive voices. Other novelists and playwrights of the 1950s, often called the angry young men, expressed a deep dissatisfaction with British society, combined with despair that anything could be done about it.

While the postwar era was not a great period of English literature, it produced a variety of excellent critics, including William Empson, Frank Kermode, and F. R. Leavis. The period was also marked by a number of highly individual novelists, including Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, William Golding, Doris Lessing, who continued to work in the expansive 19th-century tradition, producing a series of realistic novels chronicling life in England during the 20th century.

Some of the most exciting work of the period came in the theater, notably the plays of John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), reached a larger audience. His poetry had metaphysical mannerisms. Thomas's lyricism and rich imagery reaffirmed the romantic spirit, and he was eventually appreciated for his technical mastery as well. Walter De La Mare (1873-1956) was a poet of high rank. His poetry carried depths of meaning beyond what the words actually say. There was also Irish expatriate novelist and playwright, Samuel Beckett. Beckett, who wrote many of his works in French and translated them into English, is considered the greatest exponent of the theater of the absurd.

Other outstanding contemporary poets include, Hugh MacDiarmid, the leading figure of the Scottish literary renaissance; Ted Hughes, who’s harsh, post war poetry celebrates simple survival, and Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet, who is hailed for his exquisite style. Novelists generally have found as little in the Thatcher and Major eras, as in the previous period to inspire them, but the work of Margaret Drabble, John Fowles, David Lodge stands out, and the Scottish writer James Kelman stands out.

SWINBURNE.

A younger disciple of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement but also a strongly original artist was Algernon Charles Swinburne. During the next fifteen years he was partly occupied with a huge poetic trilogy in blank verse on Mary Queen of Scots, He produced also some long narrative poems, of which the chief is 'Tristram of Lyonesse.' His chief importance is as a lyric poet, and his lyric production was large. His earlier poems in this category are for the most part highly controversial in substance or sentiment. Many of his poems are dedicated to the cause of Italian independence or to liberty in general. His poetry is notable chiefly for its artistry, especially for its magnificent melody, proportion and restraint. From the intellectual and spiritual point of view his work is negligible, but as a musician in words he has no superior, not even Shelley.

MINOR VICTORIAN POETS.

Among the other Victorian poets, three, at least, must be mentioned. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), a tutor at Oxford and later examiner in the government education office, expresses the spiritual doubt and struggle of the period in noble poems similar to those of Matthew Arnold, whose fine elegy 'Thyrsis' honours him. Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), Irish by birth, an eccentric though kind-hearted recluse, and a friend of Tennyson, is known solely for his masterly paraphrase (1859) of some of the Quatrains of the eleventh-century Persian astronomer-poet Omar Khayyam. The similarity of temper between the medieval oriental scholar and the questioning phase of the Victorian period is striking and no poetry is more poignantly beautiful than the best of this. Christina Rossetti (1830-94), the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wrote poetry, composition, prose articles and short stories. Her poetry is limited almost entirely to the lyrical expression of her spiritual experiences, much of it is explicitly religious, and all of it is religious in feeling. It is tinged with the Pre-Raphaelite mystic medievalism; and a quiet and most affecting sadness is its dominant trait; but the power and beauty of a certain small part of it perhaps entitle her to be called the chief of English poetesses.

Conclusion:

The preeminent poet of the Victorian age was Alfred, Lord Tennyson Although romantic in subject matter, his poetry was tempered by personal melancholy; in its mixture of social certitude and religious doubt it reflected the age. The poetry of Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barret Browning, was immensely popular, though Elizabeth's was more venerated during their lifetimes. Browning is best remembered for his superb dramatic monologues. Rudyard Kipling, the poet of the empire triumphant, captured the quality of the life of the soldiers of British expansion. Some fine religious poetry was produced by Francis Thompson, Alice Meynell, Christina Rossetti, and Lionel Johnson.

In the middle of the 19th cent the so-called Pre-Raphaelites, led by the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, sought to revive what they judged to be the simple, natural values and techniques of medieval life and art. Their quest for a rich symbolic art led them away, however, from the mainstream. William Morris—designer, inventor, printer, poet, and social philosopher—was the most versatile of the group, which included the poets Christina Rossetti and Coventry Patmore.

Algernon Charles Swinburne began as a Pre-Raphaelite but soon developed his own classically influenced, sometimes florid style. A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy, Victorian figures who lived on into the 20th cent., share a pessimistic view in their poetry, but Housman's well-constructed verse is rather more superficial. The great innovator among the late Victorian poets was the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. The concentration and originality of his imagery, as well as his jolting meter (“sprung rhythm”), had a profound effect on 20th-century poetry.

During the 1890s the most conspicuous figures on the English literary scene were the decadents. The principal figures in the group were Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, and, first among them in both notoriety and talent, Oscar Wilde. The Decadents' disgust with bourgeois complacency led them to extremes of behavior and expression. However limited their accomplishments, they pointed out the hypocrisies in Victorian values and institutions. The sparkling, witty comedies of Oscar Wilde, W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan were perhaps the brightest achievements.