Chapter Two 20th Century English poetry

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Chapter Two 20th Century English poetry

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Title: Chapter Two 20th Century English poetry

1
Chapter Two 20th Century English poetry

I. Introduction
1910sThomas Hardy, traditional rural poetry
W.B.Yeats, symbolism, Aestheticism
1920s T.S.Eliot, modernism
1930s W.H.Auden, political concern
1940s Dylon Thomas,romanticism
1950s Philip Larkins, modern and traditional
1960s Ted Hughes, post-modernism
1970s Andrew Motion, narrative

2
II. T.S.Eliot(1888-1965)

T.S. Eliot was born in the United States
in 1888, settled down in London in 1915 and
became a British subject in 1927, so his works
are considered a part of both national
literatures. He was a poet, playwright, and
literary critic.As the most influential poet, he
stands at the foremost place to 20thcentury
poetry.

He was educated between 1906 and 1910 at
Harvard University, where he studied philosophy,
which Eliot adopted and reflected in his poetry.
He was influenced by anti-Romanticism and the
Italian Renaissance, particularly in Dantes
poetry. He went to France and Germany to study
literature and philosophy. Then he studied at
Oxford University.

From 1917 to 1919 he was assistant editor of
The Egoist , a magazine advocating the Imagist
Movement. In 1921 his marriage was a failure and
then he went to Switzerland to receive medical
treatment. Two months later he gave Ezra Pound
the manuscript of The Waste Land. In 1927 he was
received into the Church of England

His main works
1.The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock(1915)J.
?????.????????
2.The Waste Land (1922)??
3.Four Quartets (1943)???????
1).Burnt Norton(1936) ?????
2).East Coker(1940) ???
3).The Dry Salvages(1941)
?????? ??
4).The little Gidding (1942) ???

4.Prufrock and Other Observations(1917)
????????
5.The Gerontion (1919)???
6.The Sacred Wood (1920) ??
7.Homage to John Dryden(1924)
????????
8.The Hollow Men (1925)???
9.For Lancelot Andrews (1928)
??????????
10.Ash-Wednesday (1930) ?????
11.Murder in the Cathedral(1935)??????
12.Family Reunion (1939) ???
13.The Cocktail Party (1950) ????

7
The Waste Land

Published in 1922 in The Criterion and
dedicated to Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot poem The
Waste Land is 433 lines long, and includes five
parts. It involves lots of borrowings from 35
different writers and 6 foreign languages, so it
is obscure and hard to understand. It is broadly
acknowledged as one of the most recognizable
landmarks of modernism.

8
The Waste Land

The title derives from the Fisher King
legend and benefits from Jessie L.Westerns From
ritual to Romance(??????) and James Frazers
The Golden Bough(??). Jessie L.Western tells of
the Grail legend of which the story of the Fisher
King is a part. The Fisher King sins against
God,who then punishes him by making him sexually
wounded, and this disability is reflected on his
land, so that his kingdom becomes a waste land.
To make the King well, the Holy Grail, the Cup
which is said to have been used by Jesus at the
Last Supper, must be searched for by the quester.

The quester must not get the Cup, but he must
come to right place and ask the right question
about the nature of the Cup. Western also states
that the Holy grail legend is connected with the
Arthurian legend(Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight). King Arthur sends his knights to look
for the Grail to save his kingdom. The knights
searching for the Holy Grail is one plot of the
poem. The title symbolizes the decay of Western
culture and the disorder of the modern
civilization, so in fact it is the spiritual
crisis of the postwar Europe.

10
Five Parts

I. The Burial of the Dead
II. The Game of Chess
III. The Fire Sermon
IV. Death by Water
V. What the Thunder Said

"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis
meisvidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri
dicerentSibylla ti theleis respondebat illa
apothanein thelo."¹(epigraph)
For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro ²

1.Quoted from Satyricon(?????) by Petronius
Arbiter(?????).In English
For I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl of Cumae
hanging up in a bottle, and when the boys said,
Sibyl, what do you want? she replied I want to
die. Sibyl of Cumae, the famous prophetess
whohas been given long life by Apollo but has
failed to ask for eternal youth and health.So she
withered into miserable old age. Like the Waste
Land dwellers, she fears and wishes to escape her
sterile life.
2. From Dantes Purgatorio. The better poet.

I.THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
April4is the cruelest month, breed5ing³
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

3.Varied rhythm, not fixed, and varied length,
irregular. But it is still harmonious.
4.April-spring-death
5. Winter-breed-life. Death and life are
inverted, alive in body but dead in spirit.
6. Tone pessimistic,despair

Summer surprised us, coming over the
Starnbergersee7
With a shower of rain we stopped in the
colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour8.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt
deutsch. 9
And when we were children, staying at the
archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,

7.placelake,
park (both in Munich)
8 actiondrank,
talk
9.German, I m not Russian, Im pure German,
from Lithuania.

And I 10was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.I read,
much of the night, and go south in the winter.

10.Heroes Marie, I
I speaker,Tiresias, prophete
the author talked with Mary, a countess,who
described the depression of Austria after
WWI. The author reminisce his past the Stream of
consciousness

What are the roots11 that clutch, what branches
grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man12,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images13, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket
no relief,14

11. They are dead and barren,images of death and
terror.
12.Jesus???,forefather of Israel
13. Quoted from????, images of God, broken
because they have no power to command faith
14 Ecclesiastes(???)of the Bible
imagedry land, no water, dying, fear inherent

And the dry stone no sound of water15. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,16
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from
either
Your shadow17 at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.18

15.water natural symbol of life
16. The rock on Jesuscoffin, rock is the belief
of the Church,hope of security by God, the
themesearch for the Holy Grail.
17. Failure of sex
18. Bible, from the dust the body is formed, to
which it returns

Frisch weht der WindDer Heimat zuMein Irisch
Kind,Wo weilest du?19
"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago
They called me the hyacinth girl20.

19.from Wagners Tristan and Isolde??????????????
?
Fresh blows the wind
To the homeland
My Irish child
Where are you waiting?
The love of Tristan and Isolde is part of Legend
of Arthur, Tristan,a knight of the Round Table
20.hyacinthgod of breedsymbol of love

Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth
garden21,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing22,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer. 23

21. Place of growth and regeneration
22.I ,Tiresias fails to ask question about the
Holy Grail, no ability to get love, Fisher king
cannot recover, land is waste. No love, no
belief-theme.
23. From Wagners opera Tristan ans Isolde.
Tristan, dying , asks a servant to look at the
sea, hoping Isolde is coming. Answer Vast and
void is the sea. Tristan died.

Madame Sosostris24, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold25 nevertheless,
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. 26
Here, said she,Is your 27card, the drowned
Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes29. Look!)28
Here is Belladonna 30, the Lady of the Rocks,31
The lady of situations.

24. A gypsy fortune teller, from Aldous
Huxleys Crome Yellow(??),
25. Winter has not kept her warm
26. The Tarot pack of cards
27. Tirasias
28.from Shakespeares The Tempest,
29. Rebirth
30 pretty girl
31. From Leonardo da Vincis Madonna of the
Rocks(?????)

Here is the man with three staves32, and here the
Wheel33,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his
back,
Which I34 am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man35. Fear death by water.

32.the Pope of Tarot
33. The wheel of fate
34. Madame Sosostris
35. Jesus, people cannot find Jesus- belief

I see crowds of people, walking round in a
ring36.Thank you. If you see dear Mrs.
Equitone37,Tell her I bring the horoscope38
myselfOne must be so careful these days.39

36. The crowd looking for the Holy Grail.
37.dull woman
38.tool of astrology, symbol of combination of
past richness of meaning with present emptiness.
39. Warning by Mrs. Equitone

Unreal City40,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

40. From baudelaires poem Les Spept
(??????0vieillards(The Seven Old Men) Teeming
city, city full of dreams, Where the specter in
broad daylight accosts the passerby(
?????,??????,/?????????????The scene is like an
earthly urban hell, souls are purposeless

I had not thought death had undone so many.41
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth42 kept the hoursWith
a dead sound on the final stroke of nine43.

41.From Dantes Inferno,
so long a train /of people, that I never would
have thought/That death had undone so many,
42. A church
43.Jesus died at nine.
Nine means a beginning of a new day,dull, to death

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying
"Stetson!43You who were with me in the ships at
Mylae!"That corpse44 you planted last year in
your garden,"Has it begun to sprout? Will it
bloom this year?"Or has the sudden frost
disturbed its bed?45Oh keep the Dog46 far hence,
that's friend to men,"Or with his nails he'll dig
it up again!"You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon
semblable, - mon frere!47

43. Modern everyone, waste lander. Iis both an
onlooker and one member of them
44. The Dead God
45.fear there will be no revival or rebirth of
nature. Spout and bloom rebirth. Frost refuse
rebirth
46.Sirius, ???
47.from Baudelaires Fleurs du Mal(???)you!
Hypocrite reader!-my likeness,-my
brother?????????? ??,???????,??????,?????Waste
landers inward agony

II. A GAME OF CHESS48
The Chair she49 sat in, like a burnished
throne50,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass Held up by
standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon51 peeped out (Another
hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched 52candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as

48.????????????????,???????
49. Upper class
50. From Shakespeares Antony and
Cleopatra??????????
51. God of love
52.????

The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion
In vials of ivory 53 and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic
perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid - troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours stirred by the
air
That freshened from the window, these ascended

53.???

In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia54,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured
stone,
In which sad light a carved dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed As though
a window gave upon the sylvan scene 55

54. ?????
55.from John Miltons Paradise Lost

The change of
Philomel,56 by the barbarous king
So rudely forced yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voiceAnd
still she cried, and still the world pursues,"Jug
Jug57 to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls staring forms

56.?????????????, ?????????, ???????
57 ????????

Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
My nerves are bad to-night.
Yes, bad.
Stay with me.
"Speak to me.
Why do you never speak.

"I never know what you are thinking. Think.
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones."What is that
noise?
The wind under the door.58
What is that noise now?
What is the wind doing?
Nothingagain nothing.Do"You know nothing? Do you
see nothing? Do you remember"Nothing?
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes."Are you
alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?
But

58 ????????????

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag59
It's so elegant
So intelligent
What shall I do now?
What shall I do?"I shall rush out as I am, and
walk the street
With my hair down, so.
What shall we do to-morrow?
What shall we ever do?"
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess60,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock
upon the door.

59.a popular Jazz in 1912.
60.????????????

When Lil's husband got demobbed61, I said -I
didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Now 62
Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you done with that money
he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

61.veteran after the first World War
62. Close of the shop

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.
And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor
Albert,
He's been in the army four years, he wants a good
time,
And if you don't give it him, there's others
will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.

Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give
me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
If you don't like it you can get on with it, I
said.
Others can pick and choose if you can't.
But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of
telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so
antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)I can't help it, she
said, pulling a long face,It's them pills I took,
to bring it off, she said.(She's had five
already, and nearly died of young George.)

The chemist said it would be alright, but I've
never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.Well, if Albert
won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don't want
children?
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot
gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty
of it hot -HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May.
Goonight.Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.Good night,
ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night,
good night.

36
Analysis

The first part represents the stirring life
in the land after the barren winter the second
contrasts the splendors of the past represented
by Cleopatra with uneasiness and despair of
modern life the third makes an imaginative
silhouette sketch of the ugliness of cities and
the mechanization of modern life and emotion

the fourth presumptively proving by the vision of
a drowned phoenician sailor that water is not
only the constructive source of life, but also
the destructive source of death because of
drowning and also its absence as well, which
causes droughtthe fifth presents a picture,
through symbols of the Grail legend, of the
drought, the decay and emptiness of modern life.

The five parts dont nave sufficient formal
connection between them. Things stop and begin
without clear shift, the transition from one
thing to another thing is sudden and abrupt, with
no hint of logical order and. The separate
fragments are weaved together through the plot
and theme. The poet intends the reader to see and
feel the fragmentary nature of life.

The poem reveals the authors historical
sense. He holds that the goal in poetry is a
search for impersonality. The past is of
great importance to writers, the past should be
changed by the present and the present is
directed by the past. In this poem he is trying
to throw into relief the negative qualities of
the present by contrasting them with the positive
ones of the past, and shock the reader into a
recognition of the dismal truth about modern
life.

. The poem is a social criticism. But through
the whole poem the author still implies the hope
for salvation for the West. It is a
representative work of the High Modernism of the
1920s, impersonal, discontinuous with its
fragments, full of literary allusions and ancient
myths, measuring modern life against the
historical past. It marked a literary revolution
in English poetry. Its influence was so powerful
that a whole pseudosociology was developed in
keeping with its attitude.

41
Writing Technique

1.symbolism
The waste land symbolizes the spiritual crisis
and debility of the modern individual, and the
disillusionment of the traditional values and the
fear and despair for the great impact by the
science advancement after the First World War.
Water symbolizes life.
the hyacinth girl symbolizes the romantic love
sprout and bloom symbolize rebirth

2.Expressionism
1) dislocation of time sequencefor example,
April is the , Summer surprised us, , And when
we were children
2) dislocation of spatial logic for example,
coming over the the Starnbergersee , into the
Hofgarten, from the hyacinth garden, unreal
city, London Bridge, King William Street

3.Stream of consciousness Marie and I talked
about the past , the hyacinth girl , Madame
Sosostris, London Bridge. From place to place
and from time to time, suddenly changed.

44
Structure

It was organized like music the poem created
sequences of emotions, rather than the sounds,
and rhythms. The different phases of emotions
interrelated to make a complex whole. This was
partly shown by the special feature of the
poem-the repetition in separate contexts of the
same or easily associated scenes, images and
allusions. The broken pieces of the images and
allusions converge into some kind of unity.

45
Style

It abounded in vivid episodes, startling
transitions, learned allusions and mythological
images. It was full of echoes and symbolic
correspondences. It mixed literary and religious
language, especially dramatic and lyric modes in
a lament for the contemporary spiritual and
cultural wilderness of post-war Europe.

46
Theme

It showed the spiritual breakup of the post-
war generation and an urban civilization,and the
despair and depression after the first World War,
and the decline of the western culture which had
lost its roots, meaning , significance and
purpose.

It is regarded as a reflection of the 20th
century peoples disillusionment and frustration
in a sterile society. It also brings
self-awareness of the spiritual thirst, and
search for salvation for the West through revival
of religion and change in the individual.

48
III W.B.Yeats(1885-1929)

Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland. He lived in
London from 1887 and became a founder of Irish
Literary Society in London in 1891. He met Maud
Gonne, a passionate Irish nationalist in 1889 who
gave him inspiration for many of his love poems
and

his love for her hunted him for more than ten
years.
He was also a founder of Abbey Theatre, Dublin in
1904. He met many outstanding literary men of the
time, such as William Morris and Oscar Wilde,
T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. He wrote many poems,
plays, fiction and others, but he was mainly
remembered for his poems and plays. He received
Nobel Prize for literature in1923.

50
His Main Works

Poems
1. The Lake Isle of Innisfree ???? ???
2. The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems(1889)
3. When You Are Old (1893) ????
4. The Wind among the Reeds (1899) ?????
5. In the Seven Woods (1903)
6. Sailing to Byzantium ?????
7. On Bailes Strand (1905)

8. No Second Troy (1910) ????????
9. Responsibilities (1914)??
10.Easter 1916(1916) ????????
11.The Wilde Swan s at Coole (1919) ??????
12. September 1913 (1913) 1913 ???
13. The Second Coming(1920) ?????
14. Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)
Sailing to Byzantium ?????
15. The Tower (1928 )?
16. The Winding Stair (1933) ?????

Plays
1.The Land of Hearts Desir (1904)?????
2. The Hour Glass (1901) ??
3. Dedidre (1907) ???

53
Terms About Poem

Meter in poetry the recurrence of a rhythmic
pattern, or the rhythm established by the regular
or almost regular occurrence of similar units of
sound pattern. There are four basic kinds of
rhythmic pattern poetry. 1) quantitative, in
which the rhythm is established through units
containing regular successions of long and short
syllables this is the classical meter.

2) accentual, in which the occurrence of a
syllable marked by stress or accent determines
the basic unit, old English versification employs
this kind of meter. 3) syllabic, in which the
number of syllables in a line is fixed, much
Romance versification employs this meter, 4)
accentual syllabic, in which both the number of
syllables and the number of accents are fixed or
nearly fixed when the term meter is used in
English, it usually refers to accentual-syllabic
rhythm.

2. Foot the rhythmic unit within the line is
called a foot. Iambic (???), trochaic(???),
anapestic(????), dactyllic(????), spondaic (???),
and pyrrhic (???) are the standard feet in
English accentual syllabic verse. The number of
feet in al line forms another means of describing
the meter.

The following are the standard English lines
monometer, one foot dimeter, two trimeter,
three tetrameter, four pentameter, five
hexameter, six, also called the alexandrine.
Heptameter, seven octmeter, eight and etc.

57
When You Are Old