ENG-02-XV (1) Institute of Distance and Open Learning Gauhati University MA in English Semester 3 Paper XV Poetry IV : Modern Poetry Block 1 Defining the Modern Contents: Block Introduction: Unit 1 : Poetry in the Modern World Unit 2 : W. B. Yeats: “Sailing to Byzantium” Unit 3 : T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land Unit 4 : W. H. Auden: “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1) Contributors: Dolikajyoti Sharma Assistant Professor, (Unit 1) Department of English, Gauhati University Dr. Tapati Baruah Kashyap Lecturer in English (Unit 2) Beltola College Dr. Uttara Debi Assistant Professor in English (Units 3 & 4) IDOL, Gauhati University Editorial Team: Dr. Kandarpa Das : Director IDOL, GU Dr. Uttara Debi : Asstt. Professor in English IDOL, GU Prasenjit Das : Asstt. Professor in English KKHSOU, Guwahati Manab Medhi : Guest Faculty in English IDOL, GU Sanghamitra De : Guest Faculty in English IDOL, GU Cover Page Designing: Kaushik Sarma : Graphic Designer CET, IITG July, 2011 © Institute of Distance and Open Learning, Gauhati University. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission in writing from the Institute of Distance and Open Learning, Gauhati University. Further information about the Institute of Distance and Open Learning, Gauhati University courses may be obtained from the University's office at IDOL Building, Gauhati University, Guwahati-14. Published on behalf of the Institute of Distance and Open Learning, Gauhati University by Dr. Kandarpa Das, Director and printed at J.S. Printer, Silpukhuri, Guwahati, Assam. Copies printed 1000. Acknowledgement The Institute of Distance and Open Learning, Gauhati University duly acknowledges the financial assistance from the Distance Education Council, IGNOU, New Delhi, for preparation of this material. (2) Block Introduction: With this block we come to the achievements of English poetry in the modern world. Do keep in mind the nuances of the word ‘modern’ since it undergoes ever so many protean transformations! Here, the exact term with which we shall carry on our celebrations of the word shall be properly yoked to that idea of the “modernist” in the ‘modern’ world. Our Block, thus, instead of carrying on the dry-as-dust, text-bookish figure of “Modern Poets” which is likely to make you think of dry, old professors who will turn up their noses at your middling examination essay, we have renamed our material in such a way as to remind you that the modern world is so large as to have a little space for an unprofitable activity like poetry! So–“Poetry in the Modern World”. We also need to be reminded that the poets whose work you are welcomed to here – with little savoury pieces, and not whole tomes! – carried on their play with words while bombs whizzed over their heads, grinding machinery hauled skyscrapers to their heights, the poor and the hungry marched in masses forcing government authorities to cram their heads together to find ways of making official, public-pleasing pronouncements, and so on. It may seem even surprising that poetry, which seems such a delicate art at times, went on. At least, we can still thank the poets who believed in the sacredness of words to have sustained their endeavour to forge it into the manuscript of human thought. Let us remember that the modern world has not been, at least in the earlier half of the twentieth century, the most congenial to poetry- writing. And yet the poetic records that survive today show how right perhaps Jacques Lacan is when he welds together the letter and the human Unconscious. The poets of the modern world whom we look at here show the many multiple combinations of meanings that emerge through the trails left behind by a word or even a letter. You can look closely at ‘Shantih shantih shantih’ to see what it does to the view of human civilization leading up to its imprint. Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ cannot be thought of without reference to what Auden came to write of him – the words of the dead poet take on new shape in the guts of the living. The meaning of Yeats, then, cannot be understood apart from the statement that came a few months following his death in January 1939. (3) One could go on – Ted Hughes is not to be confined to mean only a focus on animals. the animals (especially the “Thought-fox”) speak to us in strange ways from the lines of his poems. Remarkably they reveal the sources of energy –intense energy – in a world that has concentrated the meaning of energy within the devastating systems of destruction bequeathed by two great wars. It is a similar bated energy, potential and tense below the surface that gives to Larkin’s lines their acuity. Heaney, who acknowledges his indebtedness to Hughes, is a sharp witness of what the modern world meant to the Irish sensibility. Thus, from our own Indian, postcolonial position, we can comprehend perhaps even better for the being outside of it, what transpired in the world of letters in the modern world. Whose modernity was it, might be a question, opened up to better linguistic scrutiny and emptied of its answers before we can assert that the old answers are final. Language thus is an important vessel of the transgressions of history. We refrained from calling this block, “the historical background” because it is not as if history first happens and then come the documents that record the sequence of events. If we turn to American modernism, with Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, we should not be surprised by what we see there. The Americans, for obvious reasons, looked askance at the “modernism” proposed by T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound. They wanted to shape the meaning of the word in their own terms. We have tried, below, to bring to you all of these possibilities and probable meanings. We have not included all that we think you should know of purely on account of lack of space. And, then, of course, this is not the place for you to start doctoral research! However, we do feel confident that you will feel interested enough to carry on from where we leave you. Our Block contains the following units:–– Unit 1 : Poetry in the Modern World Unit 2 : W. B. Yeats: “Sailing to Byzantium” Unit 3 : T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land U nit 4 : W. H. Auden: “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (4) Unit1 Poetry in the Modern World Contents: 1.1 Objectives 1.2 Introduction 1.3 Important Poets 1.3.1 William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) 1.3.2 Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) 1.3.3 William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) 1.3.4 Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) 1.3.5 Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) 1.3.6 Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) 1.3.7 Philip Larkin (1922-1985) 1.3.8 Ted Hughes (1930-1998) 1.3.9 Seamus Heaney (1939-) 1.4 Socio-Historical Context 1.5 The Modernist Modes 1.6 References and Suggested Readings 1.1 OBJECTIVES The present unit aims to familiarise you with the context of modern poetry in general, and give a brief introduction to the poets included in your syllabus and their particular themes. However, by the time you finish reading this unit you will have– • made a comprehensive survey of modernism in modern poetry • read about the representative modernist poets • grasped the main ideas behind the kind of poetry they are involved with • understood the significance of the various socio-historical elements which became instrumental in their inception (5) 1.2 INTRODUCTION The period of modern poetry stretches from around the end of the nineteenth century to contemporary times, as the inclusion of later poets like Hughes and Heaney implies. This means that you have to read many of these poets in a frame of reference that goes beyond the tradition of modernist poetry and that brings in postmodern and postcolonial references as well. In this section, I will give a brief overview of this unit. The next section will give you a short introduction of some major modern poets and their particular styles and preoccupations. Section 1.4 will attempt to present some of the major events of the period that had a significant impact on literature, including poetry, produced during this time. The following section again goes over some of the key themes and concerns common to all the poets discussed in Section 1.3, while the final section will comprise a list of works cited in the unit as well as a few books for further reading. Stop to Consider: Modern/Postmodern/Postcolonial Poetry David Perkins writes: “During the 1950s poets in both England and the United States rejected the styles that were then established. In the continuity of poetry from generation to generation, there had been no comparably sharp break for forty years, since the advent of Modernist poetry just before and after the First World War. The beginning of this new period might be pinpointed in 1954, when Philip Larkin’s Poems appeared and when, in a completely unrelated event, Allen Ginsberg gave the first public performance of his Howl. Other points of departure were Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) and Charles Olson’s 1950 manifesto “Projective Verse,” which voiced premises shared by many of the younger poets. The term “Modernism” derived from poets in the 1910s. It named the new style they hoped to create. In its current senses “Postmodernism” was invented by critics in the 1950s and 1960s. So far as I know, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan are the only poets who often referred to contemporary poetry as “Postmodern.” They meant that they and their fellow poets in the 1950s and 1960s were basing their work on the styles of the 1910s and 1920s.