10.

BRITISH POETRY IN THE FIRST HALF

After the WW1 there came many changes in politics as well as in cultural life. The start of the new
century was marked by decaying influence of the Victorian period. The British writing was
pessimistic, influenced by politics and return to the realism. The English literature in the first fifty
years of the 20th century did not come through radical changes. Writers tried to continue in work of
writers from Victorian period and the most important was still the method of critical realism.

William Butler Yeats was not only an Irish dramatist but also a poet whose works draw heavily on
Irish mythology and history. He was a devoted patriot but spoke also the harsh Nationalist policies.
His work could be divided into two stages: The end of Victorian Era till WWI of Celtic Revival when he
published The Wanderings of Oisin based mainly on the Celtic mythology, The Lake Isle of Innisfree
presenting idyllic portrayal of the untouched Irish countryside and No Second Troy about his
unhappy personal life.
In 1910 in his second era he met American poet Ezra Pound which influences his further works.
Suppressed Irish uprising, his marriage and the end of WWI cased changes in his writing -
sentimentality or romanticism of Celtic Revival is abandoned and instead he becomes interested in
real life and political poetry. On a Political Prisoner is about the Irish strife for independence,
Meditations in Time of Civil War features the Irish Civil War in 1922 – 1923 and against the war is his
An Irish Airman Foresees his Death.

Wilfred Owen was an English poet whose work was characterised by his anger at the cruelty and
waste of war which he experienced during service on the Western Front. He was influenced by his
friend Siegfried Sassoon but died a few days before peace. His collection Song of Songs is about
compassion to the suffering of the poor. Anthem for Doomed Youth in sonnet form is a lament for
young soldiers whose lives were unnecessarily lost in the WW1 and it’s also dedicated to funeral
rituals suffered by those families deeply affected. Futility shows a group of soldiers attempting to
revive an unconscious soldier by moving him into the warm sunlight. However, it has absolutely no
effect on the soldier - he has already died = it was a futile effort.

Dulce et Decorum Est presents a view from the front lines of World War I; specifically, of British
soldiers attacked with chemical weapons. In the rush to equip themselves against the gas, one soldier
is unable to get his mask on in time. The speaker of the poem describes the gruesome effects of the
gas on the man and concludes that were one to see firsthand the reality of war, one might not repeat
lying phrases about the nature of war: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. = It is sweet and fitting
to die for one's country.

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Rupert Brooke was born into academic family and was popular for his strikingly handsome looks.
He made many friends such as Virginia Woolf and Edward Thomas. Brooke's fame rests on the war
sonnets of 1914 that show an enthusiasm that most soldiers and poets eventually lost but he’s
remembered as a war poet who inspired patriotism in the early months of WW1. 1914 and Other
Poems were criticized for not responding to the horrors of the war but he died 1915 = too soon to
could have done so. His The Soldier was praised after his death by Churchill as an example for
soldiers. Peace, Treaty, The Dead, Safety.

Siegfried Sassoon was born into a wealthy family the life of a country gentleman, spending his time
hunting, playing cricket and golf, and writing poetry, the latter of which he had privately printed and
which made little impact critically. He enlisted for army and quickly gained reputation his fearless
courage on the Western Front, often volunteering to lead night raids but eventually developed angry
feelings concerning the conduct of the war which led him to publish in The Times a letter announcing
that the war was being deliberately and unnecessarily prolonged by the authorities.
Sassoon narrowly avoided punishment by courts martial and was sent to military hotel to recover
where he met Wilfred Owen whose work Sassoon edited after the war. Collections of anti-war
poems The Old Huntsman and Counter-Attac, War Poems and loosely based upon his war
experiences prose Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man.

Dylan Thomas was a Welsh neo-romantic poet and a heavy drinker, famous for radio play Under
Milk Wood and his villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night which tries to imitate by
repetition of stanza a pattern of a folkloric dance. The poem is about death and “gentle” contrasts
with “rage” = it rages against death. In And Death Shall Have no Dominion he expresses his love of
humanity and idea that death shall never triumph over life. His frequent topic is the contrast of life
and death. Under admiration of James Joyce he wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
Collections Map of Love and Deaths and Entrances.

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 Political poetry of the thirties – Auden circle

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in English but later became an American citizen. His early work was
socially committed left-wing writing, he read Marx and Freud, but was also influenced by the need to
conceal that he was writing about his and his friends' homosexuality, which was illegal at that time.
His poetry was ranging in style from the most obscure twentieth-century modernism to the most
lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks.
Look, Stranger! included political odes, lyrical love poems, comic songs and reflective lyrics. Letters
from Iceland is a travel book in prose and verse written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice. Spain
is a politically-engaged pamphlet poem. New Year Letter is a long philosophical poem. Later, he
became writing about religious themes like The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on
Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Cecil Day-Lewis was an Anglo-Irish poet, a friend of Auden, who he also gained fame as a detective
story writer under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake. In his youth he adopted communist views but
gradually became disillusioned. Day-Lewis decided to supplement his income from poetry and his
agent advised him to separate the roles of detective novelist and poet. Thus he created Nigel
Strangeways, the hero of sixteen of his twenty books. The first novel A Question of Proof was
written to pay for the repair of a leaky roof. For Day-Lewis's surprise, it was popular and eventually
followed by nineteen more crime novels. He published several collections of poems under the
influence of Auden, among others From Feathers to Iron, Collected Poems and A Time to Dance and
Other Poems. In Word Over All he reached his full reputation as a poet.

Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet and playwright, a friend Auden and Spender at Oxford and his
poetry has often been linked to their own. MacNeice was as mistrustful of political programs as he
was of philosophical systems and he possessed a sharp political awareness. As a reaction against
darkness, his childhood memories of Puritanism and rigid ideology fostering in him a contrasting love
he developed the famous phrase "the drunkenness of things being various".
Some of his best-known plays like Christopher Columbus and The Dark Tower were originally written
for radio. In a poem Prayer Before Birth he expresses his fear at what the world's tyranny can do to
the innocence of a child. Collections: Letters From Iceland (together with Auden), Plant and
Phantom and The Burning Perch.

Stephen Spender was a friend with Auden, MacNeice and Day-Lewis which gave rise to the
collective nickname 'McSpaunday', though they were never a movement in any formal sense. He had
relationships with men but following an affair with a woman he seems to have gravitated towards
heterosexuality. His early poetry reflects his commitment to the socialist cause, particularly Poems
and Vienna. Spender's poems of social protest were personal and humanistic in tone, rather than
didactic. Praising technological progress was a poem The Pylons, written as a deliberate challenge to
the prevailing rural themes of English poetry. The Truly Great has become something of a signature
poem for Spender, written early in his career it shows his awareness of the power a genuine artist is
capable of.