ENG 320A Methods of Literary History

Yin 1

ENG 320A Methods of Literary History

Professor WilliamJohnsen

20th Century British/Irish Poetries Characteristics and Quality

Yuwen Yin

December07, 2015

Refine the World—With Modern and Contemporary Poetic Technology and Sentiment

When coming to the Twentieth Century, people’s life was extremely changed and influenced by the confliction of new and old imagery and ideology. From the agrarian age to industrial revolution, from the World War I to World War II, some outstanding poets found that the only salvation for human beings was to educate themselves all the time, especially within moral conscience and humanity.Some representatives like British poets Wystan Hugh Auden, David Herbert Lawrence, Thomas Hardy and Irish poets William Butler Yeats, in their poems mainly played roles as artistic and symbolic critics; emotional patriotic; and national or international travelers. Here, their poetic technologies are responsible for exemplifying some main characteristics of 20th century British and Irish poetries. Firstly, theyused poetic technologies to criticize lifestyles and disclosed human nature through reference to old stories and naturalism. Secondly, fighting with evil ideology from wars as a weapon and trying to heal the trauma was their main purpose as well. Since most of them were willing to travel through mental and physical ways, they were tireless with correcting themselves through contrasting self-view to predecessors for broadening views and practicing imagination in good pragmatism.

Poet Auden’s various talentsand self-charmwere revealed mostly through his peculiar travelling and meditation during his middle ages. Before he prepared to be a war correspondent to East Asia, he visited the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and left the famous poem Musee des Beaux Arts through the admiration and innovationforthe artwork The Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel (Tuma, 313).This can be considered as an art inheritance to effectively develop those forgotten old works into new functions of education. With deep thought to query modern numbness with ancient virtue and myth, he retold the story in the painting with a placid and rhyming words: The young god Icarus is facing the danger of drowning but no one feels sympathetic to his situation, and they just keep on with their own work[j1] (Tuma, 313). Behind the simple but dreadful script, Auden implied a new modern world full of people’s greediness and indifference. People are busying with making a living, for catching up with the fast development of the time and they have already lost the spirit of true happiness and respect to for life in modern materialism. Auden at first firsttime defined the “suffering” in Old masters’ view, and realized that everyone has to take care of their own pains, since others can never experience or understand it exactly the same. In the poem the “expensive delicate ship” looks like the moving history of human beings (313,19). People on the ship ignore the degradation of little Icarus’ life because it values matters not too much for them. All of the tragedy will be ceased and people should do retrospection for avoiding more severe mistakes again during further “voyages”. The puzzling mechanical reproduction [j2]intrigues people’s judgment. Just like a smart camera, Auden transferred his lens through roles of living creature: people who eat or open a window or walk dully; aged people who wait for new birth; children who skate freely; dogs who scratches their bodies on a tree; the working ploughman who heard the forsaken cry (313,15). These jumping imageries composed of the poem’s “hyper links”function like a broad website and evoke readers to think through more extended angles and fields. Auden’s abundant talent was not used to celebrate or satisfy their requirements of much blind reading, but for eliminating bias and suppressing the desire with unlimited vanity. Auden’s poetry always forms a unique atmosphere of intelligent and lucid description, which is neither too enthusiastic or grief-laden. It offers readers spaces to make an amendment every time they reread it.

Another distinguished poet W.B. Yeats also paid a tribute to the “voyage” to seek for Byzantineart. Like Auden, he wanted to borrow the energy of art to explore the truth of history,although he had never travelled to the Istanbul to see the original art works of Byzantium time.Sailing to Byzantium is a complex poem with psychology and philosophy practice to express the “dualism”(Tuma, 42). Yeats’ thought is wanderingbetween reality and eternity; body and spirit; rationality and sensibility; naturalism and humanity. The“golden birds, monuments, gold mosaic and Emperor’s temple” in his imagination perform his mysterious symbolism.Among these, the symbol of “birds” is being repeated in different forms. In the first stanza, the “birds” or “fowl” stand for the vivid and youth life singing, inhabiting and breeding on the green plants in summer time (Tuma, 43). They are not only used for praising people’s childish and romantic happiness, but also satirizing that the mortal body is easy to be decayed, and everyone seems to ignore what is “eternity” at last. In the fourth stanza, Yeats imaginedabout “making an artificial gold bird” to awake the “drowsy” Emperor. This will remind readers about some similar plots emerged present in the Danish fairy tale The Nightingale by Hans Andersen (Tuma, 43). No matter Western or Eastern emperors, many of them selfishly hope to bind the living little bird, to keep it for listening to its songs all the lifetime by neglecting its freedom. Once the bird escapes from human beings’ hands, people try to produce manmade birds with developed technology to imitate singing to satisfy their desire. People’s arrogance makes them to use mechanism or other human wisdom to replace or conquer the power and communication from naturalism.The way people treat spirit, art and civilization is changed to an impetuous status in the modern century. The original source and energy should always come from the nature. People should experience it, burden it, and live with it instead of using technology like machines or distant skills to isolate themselves withinthe nature.

When coming to analyze deep and further views of naturalism, another romantic modern poet and writer Thomas Hardy was also good at expressing compassion and the ideology of returning to nature. His symbol of “bird”—“The Darkling Thrush” is considered to make strong voice to shock and criticize the capitalism society at the end of 19 century (Tuma, 4). The huge century's industrial revolution turns the peasants’ life into a “wasteland” because most of them lost their idyllic life for making a living. Here, the confliction between human beings and nature is coming again. In the poem, the “outleant Century’s corpse” is a symbol destroyed by human being’s actions with coldness, and the emergence of a little “thrush” with moving and enthusiastic sound predicts that a brighter future will come, since birds have the instinct to sing before another dawn coming (4,10).In addition, D.H. Lawrence’s poem Snake can be mentioned here to illustrate a single natural symbol again as a topic in poetic technology and motivation. Lawrence’s symbol “snake” is also a reference to ancient Greek myth of the volcano Mt. Aetna and Typhon (Tuma, 102). The snake is definitely a very naturally evil but frank creature from the underground. While the snake shows up naked with direct pure intention of drinking, the man who meets him is wrapped delicately and casually with dual purposes of taking water and speculating on the snake as his imaginary enemy. Just like the mythology, the snake has the perfect aura of royalty and rulers and it lives peacefully within the natural law. Human beings are aggressive and hypocritical with their selfish and narrow education to disturb and offend the natural order and reputations[j3]. The modern people gradually do not trust themselves because of much turmoil, so that they do not trust anything else including the nature. Their misunderstanding and exaggerated admiration to humanity education authority makes them uncomfortable with any stranger who is going to share the same things with them. When getting back to Yeats’“bird symbol” of “Swan”, it is not hard to see another way of reflecting humanity through endowment from the symbol of nature combined with Greek myth and Italian painter Leonardo Dar Vinci’s ancient painting Leda and Swan (Tuma, 48). In the poem Leda and the Swan, Yeats hinted that the human being’s history is stimulated through the origin of sexual desire and bullying weakness to get resource. The god Zeus fell in love with Aetolian King’s wife Leda and raped her. It is the sex which brings out so many incidents (Tuma, 49). Nevertheless, the history is also extended through mutual learning due to the description in the poem “she put on his knowledge and his power” (49,13). The feminine representative Leda might inherit such military career through Zeus so that her two children with Zeus resulted in future serious wars like the Troy war. The history is also the progress where people create the beauty and destroy it boldly.

Definitely, another essential poetic technology in the 20th Century is practiced through the engagement with war. During the war time, the mass were being led and confused by warlords and magnates’ ideology, such as imperialism, capitalism, democratism, and the following fascism and communism. Even the poets like Yeats and Auden had no political rights to intervene against the warfare with military aid and save the victims directly, their greatness is being determinedbecause they can think independently and dares to acknowledge human being’s mistakes. They were the reliable approach for the public to understand parts of the essence of the wars despite of the potential poets’ personal bias. In Yeats’ mid-ages, his style and dictions in composing his poems are changed from vague romanticism into the obvious practice and expression inlofty nationalism for his motherland Ireland.Yeats’ deeply mourned in a patriotic sentence “ a terrible beauty is born” after he had known that British soldiers executed fifteen rebellion’s leaders who fought for the independence of Irish Republic in the poem Easter 1916 (Tuma, 38).In the second stanza, Yeats described several impressive members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood with discussing and penetrating their complexity combined with the history’s complexity. They were some true-to-life lovely friends with variety variable? personalities but also noble and selfless volunteers who held a common goal of motherland’s unity: “That woman” had young and sweet voice on the horse; “this man” found a school for fame; “this other man” who has drunken and done bitter wrong to Yeats’ beloved woman (38,34). All of them were end completed in the “terrible beauty” and being melted into the Irish mythology to be a legend: in those critical moments of making decisions for politic status, these heroic representatives “resigned” their daily life and devoted all they have into the revolution (39,36).In the third stanza, Yeats was hovering around in a fantastic scroll painting of myth: the living stream, the horse with riders, the birds, and hens are all doing their activities unstoppably minute by minute (Tuma, 39). It means that any life that has his or her goal will finally belongs to the home of the truth, and the superficial peace is resulted from the heavy and unnecessary sacrifice behind the scenes.Yeats always considered that the poetic technology should be separated from the politic power, and his elegant aristocratic styles of writing poems looks too ideal to realize a utopian and natural world in the imagination of mythology. His real intention deserves younger generation to research further more on the topic of history: if people should use violence to defend their country or peaceful classicism to love their homeland?

When coming to the middle-age of 20th century, which is the period of World War II, Poet Auden had taken much heavier and wider responsibility in writing to record facts and influence more people’s mind and behavior. Compared to Yeats’ focus on his own country with romantic imagination, Auden left his motherland England and came out to find more evidence to verify the relationship between the war and peace. Auden’s travel to the far Eastern world like China is a lens of globalization and international humanities. He along with his best friend Isherwood composed The Sonnet In Time of War as part of the book Journey to a War after they finish the journey (Tuma, 312). His world view was shocked by those living conditions people who has different races (languages), social classes, occupations (such as soldiers without qualified weapons in the frontline and miserable homeless people in starving and inhuman labor) while he overcame bunch of obstacles and risks of dying during his journey in China (312,12), and was shocked by those scenes he had never met before even in his most incredible imagination. He deeply understood that the third world is much more in need of his poetic energy to help because they even did not value human being’s life at all in a numb mental status in a post-colonial time. Sometimes he put himself in the position of an “outsider” to observe how people were oppressed in absurdity. In the poem’s fourth and seventh stanza, Auden was teasing his self-righteous knowledge and wealth for the weakness of too much narrow-minded sorrow. People are actually sharing an equal intrinsic quality but they can reflect their specific features through getting in touch with different others. No one really like the aggressive strangers and prefers to trap themselves in the comfortable imagination. When the modern people were being tortured by the wars in a hurry, they lost their direction and all tended to believe what they are willing to see and keep bias in personal territories. Even Auden was only a subjective and weak individual, he had made great effort to blend his real experience and sentiments into his Sonnets to enhance much more huge waves in more angles, fields and enlarge the fitness of his work to more audience in the world. Further more, in another World War II poem September 1, 1939, which imitates styles from Yeats’ poems’ titles September 1913 and Easter 1916, revealed the “folded lie” of the “error bred in the bone” through the “mirrors they stare” in the poem (317,42). Auden here seemed to be a prophet, since he knew no one could live for long in a“euphoric dream” (317,41). Even the democracy is righteous; people’s ethical life is stillaffected by imperialism and rotten culture in absurd imagination and too much expectation for life. In the second stanza, Auden did not want to see the future children lost lose enlightenment of intelligence and suffer from habit-forming pain under authority. The compulsory game between competing for rights, spaces, and resources is from original sins. People are used to strive for what they cannot have and unconsciously learnt about whatever they meet. Up to 2001’s 9.11 terrorist attack incident, all of the intellectuals and progressives were consciously re-eulogized widely the poem September 1, 1939 to memorize the replayed tragedy of historyfor striking human being’s greedy desires. “Into this neutral air, where blind skyscrapers use their full height to proclaim the strength of Collective man… (Tuma, 2001)” Human intelligence is powerful but the mutual competition and psychopathic movements of different countries have already established inevitable hostility and prejudice. No one can exist alone and should educate himself to take responsibility to keep sober.

From 19thcentury to 20th Century, poets were all doing an evolution in their patterns of thinking and gradually found out a clear summary for their whole life.Firstly, these British and Irish poetic masters are devoted much toreforming old literary or art allusion illusion with new significance in educating people. It not only helps people to develop their creativity and respect to classical civilization, but also helps them to comprehend more for living more intellectually and morally. This history is profound and tough but the poets can sophisticatedly rearrange and reargue it to explore more potential humanities and practical values for coordinating world’s new order. Secondly, the poets are great enough to connect international sense with self-background to make his their? career more flexible to grow up again. The wars and evil ideology stimulate their charisma[j4]. They clearly knows that the best material for composition is directly from life and no one can avoid the destiny to communicate with the threat of world and correct oneself again and again until die. All people can do is “love one another or die” finally (Tuma, 318).