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Subject: ENGLISH Class: B.A. Part 1 English Hons., Paper-1, Group B Topic: Neo Romantic Poetry Lecture No: 21

By: Prof. Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College Samastipur L.N.M.U., Darbhanga Email: [email protected] Website: www.sunitasinha.com Mob No: 9934917117

“NEO ROMANTIC POETRY”

Definition:

• The neo -romanticism appeared in the twentieth century as a reaction against realism and intellectualism of the political and social poetry of the twentieth century poets. The neo -romantic movement aims to revive the romantic spirit which was for long forgotten.

• The term neo-romanticism is used to cover a variety of movements in philosophy, literature, music, painting, and architecture, as well as social movements, that exist after and incorporate elements from the era of Romanticism. 2

• The term neo- romanticism has been recently used with reference to very late 19th century and early 20th century composers who uses it as synonymous with late romanticism. The 1920s, artists like Dylan Thomas, George Barker, W.S.Graham and Kathleen Raine had begun to re-evaluate and re-discover the works of their romantic forebears; from the visionary work of William Blake of high romanticism, to the neo-romanticism that flowered between 1880 and 1910.

• The neo-romantic poets add feeling and internal observation. These artists tend to draw their inspiration from artists of the age of high romanticism and react in general to the ugly modern world of machines and new cities.

Characteristics of Neo Romantic Poetry:

Neo-Romanticism is an art movement that begins around 1880 and continues to the present day. Characteristic themes include longing for perfect love, utopian landscapes, nature reclaiming ruins, romantic death, and history-inlandscape. The authors focused on mood and the state of mind. It is defined by these key characteristics:

• They distanced themselves from social problems, and went back to write about the untouched nature, they wrote about the grey, problem that filled world. • It was also a reaction against the new society, the breakthrough of the great capitalism, industrialization and development of the cities. 3

• The literature became more individualized and lyrical, and they wrote more about young love. • The neo -romantic poetry shows a new faith in man with all his feelings, senses and all the sides of his experiences. • It rejects rational intellect as the only source of poetry and stressed imagination and intuition as the supreme faculties of the poet. • Another predominant feature of the neo -romantic poetry is the sense of nostalgia for the past. Neo -romantic poets were heavily preoccupied by their past and express that in their poetry.

• The nature is also important. This can be interpreted as a reaction to the civilization and the chaos of the material thing. The nature is fresh, original and genuine. In the nature, fantasies and true feeling are allowed to come out and the suppressed instincts can spread.

NEO ROMANTIC POETS:

DYLAN THOMAS • Dylan Thomas is one of the twentieth century greatest neoromantic poets and by far the best-known poet of the neo - movement. He is influenced by the romantic movement from the beginning of nineteenth century which marked most of his poem. • Dylan Thomas like the romantics tries to make nature paradise by using nature symbols; his imagery and imagination are influenced by the natural surroundings of his mother country; specially, the beautiful nature, where he spent the early stages of his life. Nature for Dylan Thomas is holy, he finds all nature holy, when he speaks about God or Christ, he has nature in mind or himself, and his holiness is a romantic holiness. In his poem "Fern Hill", Dylan Thomas describes nature as it 4

appeals to his boyish imagination; the depiction of nature reveals the process of growth in the company of nature. • Unlike most of the contemporary poets, who were interested in social and impersonal themes, Thomas dealt with Permanent human themes subjectively, which express his romantic views. Characteristically, a romantic poet responds to experiences more with heart than with head. Neo -romantic poetry expresses the intensity of emotion, inspiration, imagination and acute sense of perception; Thomas’s poems possess all these characteristics. He expresses his emotional being in his poem "Fern Hill” to share his ideas of imagination that creates ’a sequence of romantic scenes. • Nostalgia for the past is a significant characteristic of neoromanticism. Thomas was a greatly preoccupied by his past; he conveys that loudly in his poems, he is a great celebrator of the theme of childhood which has made his works visionary and mystical. In his poem "Fern hill", he expresses his yearning to his childhood in a holy romantic scene. • Thomas is an outstanding romantic poet with all the attributes of romanticism such as absolute creative freedom, nostalgia for old past, myth-making, love of nature, spontaneity, sincerity, a logical or magical view of poetry, these characteristics are abundantly found in most of his poems. • The poets of this period were influenced by Second World War. The notable poets who composed war poetry were Sidney Keyes, Alum Lewis, Alan Rock, and Roy Fuller. Among the themes which occur in these war poets were boredom and frustration of service life, the waste caused by war, appreciation of the friendship found in services, a deep enjoyment of Nature and of landscapes of Home. The predominant note is of sadness. • "Fern Hill" is one of Dylan Thomas' best-known poems, a nostalgic and melancholic poem in which he looks back at the time that passed by him, this poem was published in 1946, and it's the last poem to be included in Thomas' book of anthology: "Deaths and Entrances." 5

Dylan's description of nature is seen clearly in the poem; Idealistic description of nature is one of the most prominent subjects of the neo - romantic poetry. Dylan Thomas was truly a nature poet as he drives his motivation from the beauty of nature. The poem is full of natural imagery which Thomas constantly used to beautify his poems. • Dylan as neo- romantic poet is very fond of myths ,most of the neo - romantic poets used myths in their poetry ,not just to create horror and awe but rather to bring pleasure to the reader .In "Fern hill", Dylan Thomas employs the myth of the fall of the first man (Adam and Eve). • Thus, we can conclude that Dylan Thomas is an archetype of modern romanticism, he revolted against the intellectualism and realism of his era of his era and moves to write in the romantic vain of the eighteenth century, with his poetry a new romantic was ushered in, his poetry manifested all the major qualities of neo -romanticism, no wards can express his love for nature, most of his poems are deeply attached with nature, specially his famous poem "Fern Hill".

W.B. YEATS

• Like the romantic poets of the 19th Century, Yeats was also inspired by a profound romantic urge. He has also evinced in his poetry all the salient characteristics of romanticism, discerned in the poetical works of Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Coleridge. In perfect and close affinity with the Lake School of poets, he upheld the principles of humanism and love of nature. • His poetry is marked by a plethora abundance of romantic features. First and foremost, his poetry is richly coloured by his great imaginative fecundity. His unbridled imagination may be evidenced by the plenitude of symbols employed in his verses. The symbols have mostly been culled from Irish national history and legends of remote antiquity. These have been used for objectifying and externalizing personal emotions. 6

• Yeats put the symbols so derived in curiously interesting texts, for giving vent to his complex thoughts and reflections. Secondly his poetry is marked by a deep-rooted humanism. This humanism enabled him to rise above the narrowness and myopia and to widen the horizon of his mind. As is the wont of the romantic poets Yeats too had a great fascination for beauty. • He was a worshiper of beauty for beauty’s sake. His craving for the countryside, the idyllic charm of the pastoral landscape may be illustrated by his early poems. Yeats beautifully consummates all the characteristics of a Neo Romantic poet.

W.S. GRAHAM • William Sydney Graham (1918–1986) is increasingly acknowledged as one of the most important British poets of the twentieth century. The Scottish poet W. S. Graham, born a hundred years ago just a few days after the end of the Great War, is increasingly recognized as a writer of enduring significance, both for Scottish poetry and for 20th century Modernist poetry more broadly. • He remained a Celt, moving from Scotland to Cornwall where he found seascapes without urban clutter, just an occasional ruined tin-mine with its human echo. In the 1950s and 1960s he became a key member of the artistic scene in St Ives and was a friend of Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, Roger Hilton and Peter Lanyon . • His work is haunted by guilt: in becoming a writer he felt he had betrayed his family and background. He attempts to assuage this by means of an ingenious metaphor that presents language itself as a community. • We can trace the development of this metaphor from the experimentalism of the early poems through the complexities of Graham’s most ambitious poem, ‘The Nightfishing’, to the subtlety and daring of the late work.

GEORGE GRANVILLE BARKER

• George Granville Barker a prize-winning poet who wrote in the neo-romantic manner. Encouraged by T. S. Eliot and other literary figures, Mr. Barker had his first verse, "Thirty Preliminary Poems," published in 1933.His next work, 7

"Calamiterror," appeared two years later, but he did not attract wide attention until "Lament" and "Triumph" appeared in the first year of World War II. "Eros in Dogma," in 1944, won him wider recognition. • "The True Confessions of George Barker," which literary critics regard as his most important work, was published in part in 1950. Drawing much of its inspiration from Byron's "Don Juan," it won notoriety from a BBC radio broadcast in 1958. Peers in the House of Lords denounced it as pornography, and the poem was not published in full until 1965.

DAVID GASCOYNE • By the age of 20 David Gascoyne had firmly established himself within the movement with the publication of his groundbreaking A Short Survey of Surrealism and the poems of Man's Life Is This Meat. In 1938 Hölderlin's Madness marked his move away from surrealism in 'a renewal of vision', followed by his milestone collection, Poems 1937-1942. • After the war Gascoyne revisited Paris, publishing A Vagrant and other poem in 1950 and Night Thoughts, the acclaimed BBC radiophonic poem for voices and orchestra, in 1956. Despite several breakdowns he continued to write, particularly during the latter years of his long life, producing few poems, but many translations, reviews and literary criticism, memoirs and obituaries. Even so it was his contention that he was 'a poet who wrote himself out when young and then went mad'. This self-deprecating judgement could not be further from the opinion of those who know his work and value his achievement. • This New Collected Poems, compiled by Gascoyne's friend and editor Roger Scott, comprises work that the poet chose to preserve, together with uncollected and unpublished material; all meticulously researched from notebooks and manuscripts held in the British Library and internationally in academic institutions. It falls to present-day readers of Gascoyne's poems to experience the impact of his work, to recognize its significance in twentieth- century literature, and its continuing relevance. EDWIN MUIR • Edwin Muir was also a poet with Neo Romantic leanings. In addition to all of the poetry published by Edwin Muir in his lifetime, the volume “The complete 8

poems of Edwin Muir” includes works published after his death, as well as a number of poems and earlier drafts left out of previous collections. Also featured are notes on when and where the poems were written and Muir's own comments—originally from letters and journals—on his poetry's genesis and meaning. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD • Fitzgerald was drawn towards lyrical aspect of Renaissance literature as he was towards the works of Romantics and Neo romantics. VERNON WATKINS • Vernon Watkins was an accomplished Welsh poet, published throughout his lifetime and acclaimed by his peers, but in recent years, public awareness of Watkins has ceased, creating a bizarre gap in the perception of 20th-century poetry. *** By: Prof. Sunita Sinha Head, Department of English Women’s College Samastipur L.N.M.U., Darbhanga Email: [email protected] Website: www.sunitasinha.com Mob No:9934917117