УНИВЕРЗИТЕТ “ГОЦЕ ДЕЛЧЕВ” – ШТИП

ФИЛОЛОШКИ ФАКУЛТЕТ

КАТЕДРА: АНГЛИСКИ ЈАЗИК И КНИЖЕВНОСТ

ИЗРАБОТКА НА СЕМИНАРСКИ ТРУД

ПО ПРЕДМЕТОТ АНГЛИСКА КНИЖЕВНОСТ 5 – МОДЕРНА ПОЕЗИЈА

Ментор: Студент:
Проф. Наталија Поп Зариева Симона Јанкова 162061

Штип, Мај 2019

 Essay on the topic number TWO:

Many of the poems that we have considered so far are considered pessimistic.
Which of them do you think makes the most compelling case that the 20 th century
was a nightmare, and why?

The period after the wars is better known as the period of modern poetry, where a
great deal of poets managed to stand out with their exquisite art and poems about the
negative effects of the wars and the pessimism that was dominating everywhere. The
outbreak of the wars was a period which meant an end to a time known as THE
VICTORIAN ERA, and was followed by the beginning of the modern world. In the
beginning of the 20th century, people were optimistic, they had even built the biggest
ship to ever sail the ocean, the Titanic. But this prominent event ended in a tragedy –
the ship sank on the first voyage. Soon after that, a treacherous period was on the
horizon, the first world war. It is a little bizarre to thank the war for giving birth to
incredible talented minds, but none or less it was the hardships of this phase that gave
us the great names in literature we have today – Owen, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, cummings
and many more.

Most of these important poets were writing in a sense that was pessimistic, in a way.
Or should we really say realistic? How thin was the line between pessimism and realism
at the beginning and after the wars? One could say that in fact, the reality itself was
pessimistic, and the way it was portrayed in the songs was just an artistic way of seeing
the world as it really was. This was a time when individuals were dispersed; everything
was crushed and demolished, and for many, it was a time when anyone could hardly
ever prosper or find themselves as individuals in the cruelty around them.

In some of the early ages of the outbreak of first world war, some of the soldiers
themselves proved to be great artists by giving to us the experience of how it really was
to be in a war, through poems. None of the works of art are joyful or happy. They all
portray a reality in which young people die for abstract concepts like freedom, bravery,
patriotism and so on. Some of them even suffered from shellshock and were left with a

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permanent mental scar. Most of their poetry deals with questions like ‘Is it really worth it
to risk your life for nothing’ and ‘How cruel can a war really be?’ With this idea being
introduced, they further on give us, as readers, the idea that it is pointless to teach
young people to prove their masculinity and bravery by signing up to fight, because in
the end you are left with nothing but your shattered psyche, or worse, those who had
died left a family behind and people who really cared about them and loved them.

The wars left a cruel mark on many people, a lot of which were able to somehow
express that through poetry. For example, Owen was a rather interesting individual that
wrote many famous poets on dehumanization that was happening at that time. Just like
the title of his song says, ‘The doomed Youth’ was nothing but young people dying and
throwing away their lives needlessly, these soldiers were all no more than twenty and
the only music that was heard at that time was the sound of the rifle. He talked about
how lost and dehumanized everyone was left, and was famous for the pity of war. He
was a person who wanted to make his poetry to stand for pity. All the old gentlemen and
politicians with hidden agendas were to die from natural deaths, and yet the young were
doomed to suffer and perish. War is nothing but a planned concept in which old men
speak and young men die. There is nothing ‘good and fitting to die for your country’ as it
is said in Owen’s poem title ‘Dulce et decorum est’. In fact, what he is trying to
emphasize is the absurdity of war and the outcomes that followed. If people could only
see what was really happening in the wars, they would have never told their kids it was
sweet and brave to fight and die for your country. Why should so many die in such a
hideous way? Even though some might consider Owen as a pacifist rather than a
pessimist, the element that is dominant in most of his poetry tends to just be a
pessimistic and negative view of how he perceived the world during the wars

Similar to him was Yeats, a very prominent and transitional figure who also started to
have more pessimistic views as he grew older. Many of his poems like ‘The Second
Coming’ or ‘Easter 1916’ show us the destruction that happened to the 20 th century,
nevertheless creating a hell on earth. Instead of something good following, he has a
negative view of the future, saying how ‘a second revelation is at hand’, but this time it is
to be something not of peace, but a dark Anti-God, a real nightmare. As the time

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changes, every generation hopes for the better, we all tend to think of the future as a
more positive time, where someone or something would save us from the misery we are
in right now, but we never tend to think of the worse that might come. Not every
progress in time means progress for the better, even though the human mind is not
bound to think like that. Or at least, we rarely do it. However, sometimes the worst has
to be done in order for ‘a terrible beauty to be born’. Sometimes the negative and the
pessimistic is inevitable in order to allow us to move on with our lives and remember the
time when everything seemed as if it was falling apart.

Most of the European history is just people being individuals, it is being alone and
left all on your own in the society. Being an individual is hard because you need to think
and act for yourself, everyone is deprived of feeling and experiencing emotion, we live a
life that is slowed down, drugged and many things are happening and yet we don’t know
it, we are not at all aware of it. Many people tend to live life not even being the main
character in it, everybody is afraid to act or talk at some point, and the whole idea of
being left on your own is scary and pessimistic. The 20 th century is shown as a real
nightmare in which individuals are too afraid to act or are too indecisive, spending their
time asking themselves the same questions as ‘Can I do it?’, ‘Should I do it?’ and ‘What
if…?’ all the time. There is a constant worry stopping us from doing what we want or
love. One of the most important figure that shows to us that the 20 th century was a
complete nightmare is T. S. Eliot. He suggests that that civilization people lived in, was
broken and incoherent, full of experiences you don’t understand or don’t even know how
to experience them. There is no clear philosophy, nor religion, people are lost and all
they do is rely on horoscopes and fortune tellers. We live our lives constantly
overhearing conversations we don’t know the end to, we present a reality in which
nothing is coherent and not even some of the greatest artists that ever were to exist like
Dante or Shakespeare are recognizable to us now. His poem ‘The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock’ is a perfect example of how unpleasant the world at that time is
depicted. He immediately gives us a description of a foggy, urban and cold isolation,
where there is smoke and air lines of empty fog everywhere. He leads us to the cheap
part of London where everything is nasty, which makes us think if that period really was
that bad. We interact with people daily and yet nobody is really able to make a human

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contact; everything is just abstract philosophy and we see the tortured and damaged
psyche of the modern man – neurotic and emotionally unstable. He gives us a full
fragmentation of thoughts and mental imagery of how it was living at that period; the
anti-aesthetics are strongly represented and there is nothing neat or positive in being an
individual in a world like that. The society is anxiety-provoking and dream-shattering and
everything that’s optimistic disappears. The J. Alfred Prufrock poem is one of his major
works, being a close second next to ‘The Waste Land’, where we see a whole new level
of pessimism. Even the tiniest bits of romantic ideas that are present in The Love Song,
disappear in The Waste Land, leaving us to see how crabs become rats.

Eliot was a figure that caught the changes happening in society perfectly, and later
on represented this uncertain world in his poetry. He was a cosmopolitan, heavily urban
which, at the time of writing, was dealing with pressure like never before. Society was
constantly changing for the worse, and the first world war was about to happen.
Everything was becoming demoralized and the new ideals and struggles for power were
beginning to alter people and how they lived their lives and how they loved. Eliot tried to
create a concept of a ‘persona’, taking someone’s identity and individual voice to
address issues and ideas that were present in the minds of people at that time. Those
who were fortunate enough to survive the war, saw the changes in the lifestyle before
and after the outbreak of the war. Everything was different than before, including the
morals, the philosophy and religion. Almost all the life values suffered a change, which
left a major impact on the lives of millions. The poem that also deals with this theme is
‘The Waste Land’, a poem where it is hard to point out to one meaning only. It is about
the misery of the world after the wars, a land that belongs to nobody, a no-man’s
territory that is neither fertile nor useful. It serves to us as a living proof of the twisted
pattern of human mind and culture, the spirit of human mentality. The poem itself starts
with the least joyful way possible – saying how ‘April is the cruelest month’, in contrary
to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Throughout the chapters we see references written in
different languages, that is of course because in the modernism you were expected to
speak many different languages. With this, we can see that the start is immediately filled
with death and new life is avoided. We see a heap of broken images that represent the
reality as it is, empty and without guidance or belief. If the other poets were trying to

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represent the world, as pessimistic and as negative as it is during the war, Eliot tries to
convey an idea of how damaged the human mind was after. Instead of celebrating love,
people are preoccupied by glorifying death, the cultural and spiritual values as twisted
as never before. Nothing is exciting and the desolate landscape of the Waste Land
shows us how people felt both physically and mentally. Nothing makes sense and
people’s beliefs have undergone a serious chance, now searching for solace in the
absurd things like the supernatural and superstitious. What he is implying throughout
the whole poem is that nobody would want to be reborn in a world without culture.
Everything is fragile and demolished. People’s minds are ravaged and there is nothing
positive about any of poems that were written in the same time frame as the wars were
going on.

These major figures represented how it really was, living at that time, in a reality as
broken and as damaged as never before. Going from war poetry by the soldiers
themselves, to Eliot and Yeats, everything is represented tragically, leaving us to not
help but think that the period of the 20 th century was a real nightmare at a certain point.
From being banished from the war to experiencing the consequences after, everything
seems to be falling apart. Similar to Eliot, Ezra Pound was one of the greatest figures of
modernism as well that left a huge influence on poetry by always being a contrarian –
taking the opposite side of everything. In some of his poems like ‘The Garret’ he clearly
shows us that people are constantly unhappy no matter what they do, they always want
what they can’t have and what’s not theirs, therefore inviting us to pity the whole world
and those who are constantly in a miserable mood.

Dying for a culture and society which is full of lies is the worst way someone could
ever imagine. According to Pound, those who died for their country threw away their
lives for nothing, and the post-war period, which was supposed to be better, was an
actual nightmare. In fact, this is what’s illustrated in Pound’s poem ‘Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley’, as he is trying to improve the situation everybody was in by trying to create
an art and culture worth dying for. We can clearly see the struggles as he is trying to
emphasize the importance of aesthetics and poetry in our modern world. The society is
in a desperate need of a ‘reconstruction’, and those old men who lure the youth into

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war, making them fight for nothing, are cruel hypocrites who utter nothing but empty
words and empty promises. Everyone was allegedly saying how the period after the war
was supposed to be a thriving one, with a better economy and culture, but as the
soldiers went back home they all realized the society was turned into an ‘old bitch gone
in the teeth’, meaning Pound compared the civilization to a toothless whore who doesn’t
have anything to give but disappointment and despair. And that is what reality was
actually like back then. Greedy men who wanted to exercise power roamed free with the
twisted ideas as they watched youth being destroyed. What Ezra is trying to convey
through his poems is the nonsense people were slaughtered for. Pound was an
exceptional artist and his idea was that if people were dying anyway, at least they
should have done it for a culture worth dying for.

The modernism and the poems written at that time generally all deal with the themes
from the wars and the period after them. Overall, most of the poems are negative ones,
expressing pessimistic views about the 20 th century, almost indicating that it was a
nightmare that should never be repeated. Thanks to this period, the world today is left to
look at some of the greatest works of art from poets who were not only artists, but some
of them were soldiers too. What they all are trying to make us realize is the fact how
terrible that time was, because of everything happening without a reason. People
fighting and dying without any aim, world leaders trying to turn young men against each
other without their will, as well as teaching children it is beautiful and patriotic to go to
war and defend your country. Even today we still have no clue of how awful it was,
having to deal with such a horrible reality which many described through art. Some
might call it pessimistic, in fact even most of the critics view it that way, but sadly it was
real and it happened. Those who haven’t experienced it think it was sweet, but those
who did, made it all real by putting it on paper, so it can live and be spread to future
generations coming. Nevertheless, the 20 th century was a period in which an exquisite
poetry was born, creating a new modern movement in literature all around the world.