The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

This is Unit Nineteen of Analyzing and Interpreting Literature, part one of two: the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tied for the heaviest band and the writing furthest from what earlier units prepared. Unit eighteen closed by saying the moderns changed the shape where the Romantics had changed the diction. Here is this unit's governing idea, and it pays off on three poets who kept the old forms: the modernists dropped inherited form, so a reader expecting measurable form may find none, and when unit eight's measurements return nothing, that absence is the answer; but the break was real and not total, so a modern passage may be in any form at all. We begin with what replaces measurement. Then Yeats, who sits on both sides of the boundary, with a closed poem whose stanzas settle and an eight-line poem built from forty words. Then free verse becoming the default while Frost, McKay and Yeats kept rhyme, so form dates nothing here. Then modernist prose turning inward, through Eveline and a novel that opens in an infant's vocabulary. Last, the Harlem Renaissance and McKay's deliberate stanzas, the war poets' refusal of the consoling manner, and the band's drama through Wilde's inverted proverb. By the end you will be able to record a failed measurement as evidence. To read Yeats's two poems. To say why form dates nothing here. To read Joyce's inward prose. And to place McKay, Owen and Wilde.

Four entries to start: the band's weight, the break with form, why a measurement that returns nothing is information, and the four devices that organise an open poem.

Thirty to forty percent again.

AIL 1801 The Other Heaviest Band

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries carry thirty to forty percent, level with the previous band. Between them the two modern bands account for most of the paper's period weighting, and this one contains the writing furthest from what earlier units prepared.

The forms themselves were dropped.

AIL 1802 The Break With Form

The Romantics changed the diction of poetry and kept its forms. The modernists changed the forms. Free verse, fragmented narrative and abandoned rhyme schemes all belong to this band, and a reader expecting measurable form will not find it; measurement may find nothing.

The absence is the answer.

AIL 1803 When Measurement Stops Helping

Unit eight's four measurements identify a fixed form and return nothing on an open one. That is information rather than failure: a poem that will not scan and has no rhyme scheme has told you what it is. Record the absence and move to the other devices; a failed measurement is evidence.

Breaks, repetition, parallels, length.

AIL 1804 What Organises an Open Poem

Unit eight named four: where lines break, how phrases repeat, whether grammar runs parallel, and how long a unit runs. Those four are what a modern poetry question asks about, and every one of them is visible without scanning a single line; all four are visible, none scanned.

Nine entries on Yeats: a poet on both sides of the boundary, Innisfree's plan, its measurements, its settling fourth line and its pavement, the cloths of heaven, the turn on but, the repeated words, and plainness as a manner.

One poet, both sides of the line.

AIL 1805 Yeats Across the Boundary

Yeats began publishing in the eighteen nineties and went on into the nineteen thirties, so he sits on the boundary unit eighteen called conventional. His early work belongs to one age and his late work to another, which makes him a useful case for that warning; the boundary runs through him.

A cabin, nine bean rows, a hive.

AIL 1806 "I Will Arise and Go Now"

The Lake Isle of Innisfree opens that the speaker will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, and build a small cabin there of clay and wattles, with nine bean rows and a hive for the honey bee, and live alone in the bee-loud glade; the plan is stated in detail.

Three quatrains, A B A B.

AIL 1807 The Poem's Measurements

Three four-line stanzas, rhyming A B A B, in long lines that run to six beats and then drop to four at each stanza's end. This is a closed form, written in eighteen ninety, and it measures exactly as unit eight's procedure expects; closed form, and it measures.

Each stanza settles at its end.

AIL 1808 The Short Fourth Line

Each stanza's last line is markedly shorter than the three above it, so every stanza settles rather than continues. In a poem about withdrawing to a quiet place, the stanza shape performs the settling. Unit eight called this form carrying the argument; the shape performs the subject.

He is on a pavement, not an island.

AIL 1809 "The Deep Heart's Core"

The last stanza places the speaker on the roadway or on the pavements grey, hearing lake water lapping in the deep heart's core. The escape is not happening; it is being wanted from a city street, and the final line locates the whole poem inside the speaker; the escape is wished, not made.

Cloths of light, offered.

AIL 1810 "Had I the Heavens' Embroidered Cloths"

The speaker says that had he the heavens' embroidered cloths, enwrought with golden and silver light, the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half light, he would spread them under his beloved's feet; the condition is impossible.

Eight lines, and one turn.

AIL 1811 "But I, Being Poor, Have Only My Dreams"

The poem turns on but: being poor, he has only his dreams, which he has spread under her feet, and he asks her to tread softly because she treads on them. Eight lines, one conditional, one turn, one request, and the turn is on the word but.

A small vocabulary, repeated.

AIL 1812 The Repeated Words

Cloths appears three times in four lines, light three times in two, and the word tread twice in the last line. The poem is built from a very small vocabulary repeated, which is a different technique from the dense figuration of earlier bands; repetition replaces figuration.

A few ordinary words, repeated.

AIL 1813 Plainness as a Modern Manner

Where a Renaissance poem elaborates and an eighteenth-century poem balances, much modern verse repeats a few ordinary words. Unit eighteen's Advertisement had argued for ordinary language a century earlier; this is where that argument arrives at its conclusion, the Advertisement's argument concluded.

Four entries on form in the band: free verse as the default, Hughes's line break, the closed forms that persisted in Frost, McKay and Yeats, and why form dates nothing here.

Free verse becomes the default.

AIL 1814 Free Verse Becomes Normal

The glossary defines free verse as poetry without a set rhyme scheme or rhythm pattern. In this band it stops being an experiment and becomes the default. A twentieth-century poem that does rhyme is making a choice the reader should notice, since rhyme now marks a choice.

Breaks where a voice would pause.

AIL 1815 Hughes and the Line Break

Unit eight worked the anchor's free-verse chapter: Hughes's poem about rivers, published nineteen twenty-one, whose lines run to different lengths and break where a voice would pause. Line length is doing the work metre would otherwise do; unit eight already worked it.

The break was real, not total.

AIL 1816 Closed Forms Did Not Die

Frost wrote blank verse in nineteen sixteen, McKay wrote rhymed sestets in nineteen twenty-two, and Yeats wrote quatrains throughout. The break was real and it was not total, so a modern passage may be in any form at all; here the governing idea pays off.

The weakest band for dating by form.

AIL 1817 Form Dates Nothing Here

Units eight, sixteen and eighteen all warned that form is weak evidence about period. In this band it is weakest of all, because writers had the whole history of English form available and used it deliberately. Read the passage; do not date it; three earlier units gave this warning.

Six entries on modernist prose: the novel turning inward, Joyce's Eveline from unit ten, the opening of Portrait in an infant's words, style matching consciousness, a style that grows up, and epiphany.

Inward, and rendered from within.

AIL 1818 Modernist Prose

The novel in this band turns inward: less plot reported from outside, more consciousness rendered from within. Unit ten's free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness are the techniques, and neither has a headword in the anchor's glossary; neither technique is in the glossary.

Her vantage and her vocabulary.

AIL 1819 Joyce and the Close Third Person

Unit ten worked the opening of Eveline: third person throughout, and the reader inside her senses, with her state reported flatly as three words. The narration takes her vocabulary as well as her vantage, which is free indirect discourse at close range; unit ten worked the passage.

A moocow, and a nicens little boy.

AIL 1820 "Once Upon a Time and a Very Good Time It Was"

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man opens with a moocow coming down along the road, meeting a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. The novel begins in the vocabulary of an infant because its protagonist is one; the prose is the child's, not a narrator's.

It adopts the mind rather than describing it.

AIL 1821 Style Matching Consciousness

The prose does not describe a child's mind; it adopts it. Unit ten's rule was that free indirect discourse selects what the character would notice. Here it goes further and selects the words the character would have, which is the technique at its limit.

The prose ages with the boy.

AIL 1822 A Style That Grows Up

The novel's language matures as its protagonist does, so a later passage reads nothing like the first page. An extract from it could be simple or difficult depending where it was taken, which is a caution against generalising from one passage to a writer; one extract does not characterise a writer.

A sudden insight, to the character.

AIL 1823 Epiphany

The glossary defines epiphany as a change, sudden insight or awareness revealed to the main character. Unit eleven took it. Joyce's stories are built on the device, and an exam question may ask where in a passage the realisation falls; unit eleven defined it.

Twelve entries to close: the Harlem Renaissance and McKay's deliberate closed form, the war poets and the manner they refused, reading a war poem by unit four, and the band's drama through Wilde and Shaw named, the study guide's single lines, the inverted proverb, paradox and epigram.

A concentration in the nineteen twenties.

AIL 1824 The Harlem Renaissance

The anchor's anthology gives the movement a headnote and prints McKay among others. It was a concentration of Black American writing in the nineteen twenties, and the anchor notes it faded in the nineteen thirties while leaving a lasting legacy; the anchor supplies the headnote.

Closed form, in a free-verse decade.

AIL 1825 McKay's "From Street to Street"

Unit eight worked Harlem Shadows: three six-line stanzas, each ending on the phrase from street to street, published nineteen twenty-two. The repetition enacts the walking the poem describes, and the form is closed in a decade when free verse was ascendant; unit eight worked the poem.

The old form is the deliberate one here.

AIL 1826 A Traditional Form, Deliberately

A poet writing in rhymed stanzas in nineteen twenty-two is choosing a form his contemporaries were abandoning. Unit eight's warning applies in reverse: an old form in a new decade is as deliberate as a new form in an old one, unit eight's warning reversed.

Trench experience, plainly rendered.

AIL 1827 The First World War

The anchor's anthology prints Owen, who died in nineteen eighteen. His poems report trench experience in deliberately unbeautiful language, and unit six quoted the glossary's assonance example from him. The war is one of this band's defining subjects; unit six already quoted him.

The refusal of the elevated manner.

AIL 1828 Against the Consoling Manner

War poetry of this kind sets itself against the elevated diction earlier centuries used for battle. Unit sixteen's epic treated war as a subject for heroes; Owen's generation refused that vocabulary, and the refusal is the argument; unit sixteen's epic is what it refuses.

The manner, not the subject.

AIL 1829 Reading a War Poem

Unit four's question applies unchanged: what attitude does the handling take. A poem describing horror in flat language is not indifferent, and answering from the subject rather than the manner is the trap the whole tone unit was built against, unit four's first trap.

The same apparatus as before.

AIL 1830 Drama in This Band

The period produced the problem play, the comedy of manners in its late form, and theatre engaged with social argument. Unit thirteen's devices all apply, and the drama questions on this band are answered with the same apparatus as the Renaissance ones; unit thirteen's devices carry over.

Two playwrights, both public domain.

AIL 1831 Wilde and Shaw

The anchor has chapters on Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest and Shaw's Major Barbara. Both are public domain, Wilde's from eighteen ninety-five and Shaw's from nineteen five, and both belong to the exam's British and modern bands, and both belong to this band.

Biography and a link, not the plays.

AIL 1832 What Those Chapters Contain

The Wilde chapter runs to about five hundred words and the Shaw chapter to fourteen hundred. Both give biography and a link to the text held elsewhere. Neither play is on disk in this course, so both are named here and neither is quoted at length; named here, not quoted.

Single lines, inside the questions.

AIL 1833 What the Study Guides Do Carry

The anchor's study guide for Wilde quotes individual lines inside its questions, among them that divorces are made in heaven. Those short quotations are available even though the play is not, and they show the technique well enough to name it; the guide quotes what the chapter does not.

A proverb, stood on its head.

AIL 1834 The Inverted Proverb

The anchor's study guide observes that Wilde's characters make a witty line by standing a familiar proverb on its head. Marriages are said to be made in heaven; divorces are not. The device depends entirely on the audience holding the original, and the audience must hold the original.

Short, pointed, self-contradicting.

AIL 1835 Paradox and Epigram

The glossary defines paradox as a phrase seeming self-contradictory that makes powerful sense despite its lack of logic. An epigram is a short pointed saying, and the glossary has no headword for it. Wilde's lines are usually both at once; the glossary defines only one of them.

That is the break with form, Yeats, free verse and the forms that persisted, Joyce's inward prose, and Harlem, the war and the stage, with the governing idea paid off on three poets who kept the old forms. You can say the band is tied for heaviest, that the moderns dropped the forms, that a measurement returning nothing is the answer, and that breaks, repetition, parallels and length organise an open poem. You can read Yeats across the boundary: Innisfree's three quatrains whose short fourth lines settle, its speaker on a pavement wishing rather than going, and the cloths of heaven turning on but with cloths, light and tread repeated, and name plainness as the Advertisement's argument concluded. You can say free verse became the default while Frost, McKay and Yeats kept rhyme, so form dates nothing here. You can read the novel turning inward through Eveline's vantage and vocabulary and Portrait's moocow, a style that adopts a mind and grows up with it, and place epiphany. And you can place the Harlem Renaissance, McKay's deliberate stanzas, Owen's refusal of the consoling manner read by unit four, and Wilde's inverted proverb as paradox and epigram, with Wilde and Shaw named and not quoted at length. Part two takes the problem play and the copyright line.