11
Introduction to 20th century British literature
examination topics and required reading at the back!!!!!
modernism (first 2-3 decades of the 20th century)
rejection of 19th century optimism in general
in art: experimentalism, rejection of traditional forms
Economic, social, intellectual changes:
the Victorian age: stabilizing era
„positivism” (materialism, rationalism) in philosophy, „realism” in literature
epistemological certainty
Christian norms held up: God, Immortality, Duty
the „Second Industrial Revolution (1865-1900):
industrial, economic and technological developments
Mass production, mechanization of manufacture, employment for increasing numbers
Long Depression (1873-1896)
Second World War
* social changes: widening gap between rich and poor, alienation, break-up of traditional ties, individualism, the loneliness of the crowds
* intellectual changes:
. belief in progress, shattered
rationalism questioned (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard)
previous optimism questioned (Schopenhauer was labelled "pessimistic")
evolution by undermined religious certainty (Darwin: On the Origin of Species: 1859)
Karl Marx: contradictions within the "capitalist" system..
scepticism: no absolute certainty (Einstein’s theory of relativity, 1916), questioning coherence and meaning (Nietzsche)
experience of time and space radically altered
CHANGE is emphasized: Henri Bergson: existence = duration, to exist = to change
mind and world: trend from the objective to the subjective: „everything is in the mind”,
only certainty: individual soul
inward look: interest in unreality and dream, in psychology (Freud)
Modernism in the ARTS in general
Impressionism (Manet)
cubism, surrealism (Picasso, Gustave Klimt, Matisse)
expressionism: (Kandinsky)
Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal music
the modernist artist: elitist, alienated from society
art = salvation, a substitute of faith
escape from history
POETRY:
* Rejection of prevalent Victorian values (also Romanticism)
L’Art pour L’art: / Aesthetic Movement at the turn of the century (Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde)
Art should be independent of all claptrap —should stand alone [...] and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like (James McNeill Whistler1834-1903)
divorce between art and nature (Baudelaire)
Decadence (George Moore: Ode to a Dead Body)
Impressionism
Symbolism: (W. B. Yeats, French symbolists)
To name a thing is to do away with three quarters of your meaning (Mallarmé)
Imagism: (Ezra Pound): An image is that which presents an emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time (Ezra Pound)
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
1. Life:
Born in Dorset, love of country, architect, two unhappy marriages
14 novels (critical of Victorian society)
began to publish poetry in 1898 ((918 poems altogether)
2. Age, background:
awareness of modern problems:
collapse of values, starting point: Darwin
rise of agnosticism: (Thomas Henry) Huxley –
agnosticism = everything outside scientific reach is unknowable (theology, God)
morality: has no basis
value of individual cannot be stated
3. His philosophy and poetic style
a religious man deprived of belief
first he believes in the notion of progress: „evolutionary meliorism”
after the World War: consciousness is an accident, universe: a machine
the only reality = change:
Then we looked closelier at Time,
And saw his ghostly arms revolving
To sweep off woeful things with prime,
Things sinister with things sublime
Alike dissolving (from ’Going and Staying’)
modern: questioning age-old conventions of poetry:
„anti-religous” poems, „anti-love” poems
intensely personal
expressionism: sacrifices beauty for the expressive function
poems expressing his loss of religious faith:
The Impercipient
THAT from this bright believing band
An outcast I should be,
That faiths by which my comrades stand
Seem fantasies to me,
And mirage-mists their Shining Land,
Is a drear destiny.
Why thus my soul should be consigned
To infelicity,
Why always I must feel as blind
To sights my brethren see,
Why joys they've found I cannot find,
Abides a mystery.
Since heart of mine knows not that ease
Which they know; since it be
That He who breathes All's Well to these
Breathes no All's Well to me,
My lack might move their sympathies
And Christian charity!
I am like a gazer who should mark
An inland company
Standing upfingered, with, "Hark! hark!
The glorious distant sea!"
And feel, "Alas, 'tis but yon dark
And wind-swept pine to me!"
Yet I would bear my shortcomings
With meet tranquillity,
But for the charge that blessed things
I'd liefer have unbe.
O, doth a bird deprived of wings
Go earth-bound wilfully!
. . . .
Enough. As yet disquiet clings
About us. Rest shall we.
A Drizzling Easter Morning’
And he is risen? Well, be it so. . . .
And still the pensive lands complain,
And dead men wait as long ago,
As if, much doubting, they would know
What they are ransomed from, before
They pass again their sheltering door.
I stand amid them in the rain,
While blusters vex the yew and vane;
And on the road the weary wain
Plods forward, laden heavily;
And toilers with their aches are fain
For endless rest—though risen is he.
deliberately breaks the conventions of Easter poems, ironical
speaker feels excluded from the joy of Easter
„if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.”
Hap (1866)[1]
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: ’Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!’
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
- Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. …
Thes purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
Questions:
What kind of a „god” does the speaker desire for himself and why? (first two stanzas) Why would he be „half-eased” by a vengeful, cruel god?
What is the real nature of the universe (the real nature of „god/s”) as described in the third stanza? (Why the capital letters?)
expressionism: consonant clusters, alliterations, high-brow, latinized words express alienation and threat
bitter irony (see questions)
God for Hardy = „Immanent Will”
See parallel with his famous novel: Tess of the D’Urbervilles:
„The President of the Immortals finished his sport with Tess.”
Neutral Tones (1867)
We stood by a pont that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
- They had fallen from an ash and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strenght to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing.
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves
*famous poem about the loss of love
*traditional devices of a love poem reversed
*hopelessness, expressed by gray, faded colours
* framed structure
* a personal experience becomes a symbol of universal truth
1. Establish the dominant meter of the poem by indicating stressed and unstressed syllables (do this at least for the first stanza).
2. How do we know that this text is a reversal of a love poem? How are the traditional devices of a love poem reversed?
3. Characterize the relationship of this couple. What are some of the poetic figures expressing that? What is the main source of the figures?
4. Characterize the structure of the poem. It helps to compare thoroughly the first and last stanzas. What makes the last stanza special and different from all the rest? Think about images and motifs that appear in both. What changes can you observe? (Look at the tenses of the verbs for example.)
The Convergence of the Twain
I
biblical idea: a cosmic wedding/marriage/union at the end of time (the Lamb [Christ] and his Bride [the church]; history has a purpose, an outcome
this hope is bitterly parodied: the cosmic consummation consists of the encounter between ship and iceberg
Study Questions
Structurally, the poem can be divided into two parts. Can you identify them? (A grammatical change, among other things, indicates the shift.)
What is described in the first section? What is described in the second section? What does “she” refer to? (There is a clue later.)
Can you identify the historical event behind the poem?
The poem contains a narrative but it does not follow the chronological order. Can you reconstruct the proper chronology/timing?
A contrast is set up in the first stanza which then dominates the poem. Point out the contrasting images in stanzas 1 to 5.
Can you find the synonym of the expression “human vanity”?
What philosophical/theological idea is parodied in the second section? In other words: a historical event is described, but extremely ironically. In what does the irony lie?
Find the phrase which has the same referent as “Immanent Will.”
Explain the title.
The irony is strenghtened by the use of a metaphor to describe the “august event.” Consider the expressions. “prepared a mate”; “consummation.” Which area of life do these images come from?
William Butler Yeats (1865—1939)
Important role in the revival of Irish literature
central theme: Ireland, her history, folklore and contemporary public life
Yeats and Endre Ady: similarities
* national identity: crucial
*symbolism
* the great cataclisms of their time, esp.first world war:
„things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (The Second Coming)
„Minden egész eltörött” (Kocsiút az éjszakában)
1. Life
triangle of three cities: Dublin-London-Sligo
Sligo: Celtic tradition
London: cosmopolitan experience
Dublin: a Romantic, nationalistic shelter
important personalities in his life:
Maud Gonne: frustrated love: unquenchable source for poetry
Lady Augusta Gregory: friend
a writer, dramatist, has a collection of Irish folk-tales
2. symbolism:
through the use of symbols poetry helps you discover an unseen, spiritual world
The Symbolism of Poetry (important esssay)
a symbol =
a complex of metaphors/images, evoking/conjuring up some emotion
emotion: NOT a feeling, it is a power that moves
a Romantic notion of art:
poets (and painters and musicians) are continually making and unmaking the world
It is indeed only those things which seem useless or very feeble that have any power and all those htings that seem useful or strong (armies, architecture, reason) would have been a little different if some mind long ago had not given itself to some emotion and shaped sounds or colours or forms or all of these, into a musical relation, that their emotion might live in other minds.
* belief in a mythic unity of being (Romantics!)
* importance of form:
„your words are as subtle, as complex, as full of mysterious life as the body of a …. woman”
woman (dancer): embodiment of poetry/art
3. Early poetry:
· Romantic:sweet melody, daydreaming
· Celtic twilight: vague atmosphere, dream,
· landscape: vaporous, gray; half lights
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now,
And go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there,
Of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there,
A hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade
And I shall have some peace there,
For peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning
To where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer,
And noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings
I will arise and go now,
For always night and day
I hear lake water lapping
With low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway
Or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core (from The Rose, 1893)
written in London:
wish to escape (influence of Romanticism and “Celtic twilight”)
directness of style and simplicity
but also subtle poetic devices (rhythm, sound symbolism)
complex symbolism:
nine: magic number, of birth, new life
honey: reference to Canaan; glade to Greek mythology
How do alliterations, metrical irregularities and other devices express the direction of the poem towards a sense of calmness and peace?
4. Change in Yeats’ poetry: turbulent first decades of the 20th century
Abbey Theatre 1904
Yeats: manager, involved, more realism
style: „talk”, much more vulgar, ugly and harsh
later: symbolism returns transformed (intensive and shocking)
second decade of the century: turbulent
(Major Robert Gregory, husband shot in the war)
intensification of the independence movement
Easter Rising 1916 (“the Irish ’56”)
revolution and civil war, declaration of the Irish Free State in 1921
leaders = poets, teachers, dreamers, executed
’Easter 1916’
(last lines):
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
elegiac feeling
antithetical: a debate with himself:
on the one hand: eulogistic, ordinary people are transformed by their sacrifice, on the other hand: an unnecessary tragedy?
“The Second Coming”
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?