Modern English Poetry

Modernist poetry emerged around 1908 and continued up to the 1960s of the 20th
century. The Victorian age ended officially by the death of Queen Victoria in 22
January 1901, but Victorianism continued to shape and influence literary
writings, including poetry, for a few years more.

Critically speaking, the period between the late 19th century and the first decade
of the 20th century is described as Post-Victorian. During the 1890s, poets
basically composed lyric verse, influenced intellectually by the critic and
novelist Walter Pater . Such writings stressed an exquisite craftsmanship and a
devotion to intense emotional and sensory effects. Therefore, Post-Victorian
poetry is often sentimental, tearful, pompous and extravagantly romantic.

Young poets were urged to imitate the great Victorian poets and especially Alfred
Tennyson. Poets were not encouraged to be creative or inventive whether in the
choice of poetical themes or verse forms. The outcome is that the post-Victorian
poetry was imitative, decorative, weak and had no originality.

Besides, at the turn of the century, The Poets Club, the most esteemed literary
institute, seemed to value poets such as Alfred Austin, William Watson and
Henry Newbolt whose poetry was conservative and feeble.

Other writers, including Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, who had
established their reputations during the previous century, were less confident
about the future and sought to revive the traditional forms—the ballad, the
narrative poem, the satire, the fantasy, the topographical poem, and the essay—
that in their view preserved traditional sentiments and perceptions.

Factors that influenced Modern Poetry

1. The death of the last great Victorians: Swinburne in April and Meredith in
May 1909. Their death ended officially any attempts to revive Victorian
poetical tradition. It left a vacancy which could be filled by none of the big
poetical names of the time . The younger generation of poets used such
vacancy to their advantage and promoted their new type of writings.

2. Symbolism and Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature.

 3. The Revolution in art and music as it happened when the expressionist
Exhibition and the performance of Russian Ballet group in London
triggered a revolution in change and readiness to embrace difference.

4. The new century had begun with Britain involved in the South African
War (the Boer War; 1899–1902), and it seemed to some that the British
Empire was doomed to destruction, both from within and from without. In
his poems on the South African War, Hardy questioned simply and
sardonically the human cost of empire building and established a tone and
style that many British poets were to use in the course of the century, while
Kipling, who had done much to engender pride in empire, began to speak
in his verse and short stories of the burden of empire and the tribulations it
would bring.
5. The arrival of American poets, Ezra Pound (1908), H.D. and Richard
Aldington ( 1912), T. S. Eliot (1914) and Amy Lowell ( 1914). The
American influence was so powerful that some critics insist that the first
half of the 20th century was dominated by Americanism.

Features of Modernist Writings

1) Modernist writings are innovative, inventive progressive, and almost futuristic.

Modern English poets were motivated by a desire to have a clean break with the
conventions of the past. Modernism rejected Romantic ideas of Post-
Victorianism and preferred a more realistic, hard core portrayal of reality. They
took courage to explore new styles, new vocabulary, new poetical forms, new
themes and in short they brought about a new diction.

2) It endorses nihilism, pessimism, scepticism and alienation and describes the

world as though it is on the brink of cultural apocalypse and disaster. The most
significant writing of the period was inspired by neither hope nor apprehension
but by bleaker feelings that the new century would witness the collapse of a whole
civilization.

3) It is highly intellectual in that it appeals to the mind, therefore, modern verse

comes across as obscure, complicated and abstruse. and it invests in ambiguity
by suggesting different and even opposite meanings.

4) Modern poetry is also cosmopolitan in that it speaks to all people all around
the world. Poetry was coloured by foreign elements, borrowed and imported from
remote and/or even exotic cultures, including Chinese and Japanese.
5) It invests in myths of the ancient world and mysticism without being oriented
towards a particular religion. Instead, it endorses faithlessness. Poets used the
myths and legends of the ancient world as well Christian mythology to serve
symbolic ends.

6) It’s dominated by British and Foreign influences: Welsh/Irish tradition,

Americanism, French Symbolism and other European influences. Among the
influential poets were Irish such as Yeats and Welsh such as Dylan Thomas,
Americans: Pound, Eliot. As to French Symbolism, no one can deny the shaping
influence of Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899).

7) It is oriented towards politics and political school of thoughts: Eliot was a

royalist. Yeats was accused of harboring fascist sentiments because of his dislike
of the mobs. Pound was a staunch Fascist and he later joined the fascist
propaganda in Italy up to the end of the war where he was arrested and sent to a
mental hospital.

8) It focuses on the problems, worries and suffering of simple people, the working
classes, the laborers and women. Therefore, modern verse was written in the
language of simple people and capitalises on modern human beings as they
struggle with poverty, unemployment, loss of identity in this technological age.

9) It is interested in psychology and psychoanalysis, under the inspiration of

Freud and Jung. It breaks taboos, whether social, ethical or religious. It challenges
accepted norms and aspires to create new ones more reflective of the age.

10) It introduces the anti-hero to the reading public and gives voice to flawed
human beings who are far from being perfect or ideal.