Modernism

Part one ended on Eliot's call for tradition and impersonality. This second part opens on his late meditations and then on the war that shaped the whole movement. The unit's governing idea pays off at the capstone: Modernism broke the Victorian forms yet kept tradition through allusion, so a fragmented work is often full of the past. We move in three steps: late Eliot and the war poets, Owen, Sassoon, Brooke, Rosenberg and Thomas, with Imagism, the Georgians, the Irish Revival and its playwrights; then five procedures, for a Modernist poem, stream of consciousness, a war poem, naming a Modernist and matching works; and then the errors, the city, Bloomsbury and the capstone.

We begin with late Eliot, the poets of the First World War, and the movements that argued about poetry around them.

First, Eliot's late meditations.

ENL 1532 Four Quartets

Four Quartets is a set of four long meditative poems, beginning with Burnt Norton, first published as a series by Faber between nineteen forty and nineteen forty-two. They reflect Eliot's Christian faith and meditate on time. The course describes them and does not quote them. Four meditations on time and faith. Late Eliot is religious and meditative.

The war made its own poets.

ENL 1533 The War Poets

The First World War, with its trenches, gas and mass slaughter at the Somme and Ypres, produced the war poets. Early poems like Rupert Brooke's were idealistic; later poets such as Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg described the horrors and attacked the patriotic lie. From idealism to horror. The war changed poetry's tone.

One poet called a motto a lie.

ENL 1534 Wilfred Owen: "Dulce et Decorum Est"

Wilfred Owen, killed in November nineteen eighteen, a week before the Armistice, wrote of trench horror under Sassoon's influence. "Dulce et Decorum Est," drafted in nineteen seventeen, describes a gas attack, "Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!", and calls Horace's motto "The old Lie." A gas attack; the old Lie. Most of Owen's poems appeared after his death.

Two poets saw the war differently.

ENL 1535 Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke's idealistic sonnet "The Soldier," from the sequence nineteen fourteen, imagines an English grave in a foreign field; he died in nineteen fifteen. Siegfried Sassoon satirized the war's patriotic pretensions and protested its continuation in his Soldier's Declaration of nineteen seventeen. An idealist and a satirist. Brooke wrote before the worst of the war.

Two more poets died in it.

ENL 1536 Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas

Isaac Rosenberg, a poet and painter from a Jewish East End family, wrote "Break of Day in the Trenches," which the critic Paul Fussell called "the greatest poem of the war," and was killed in nineteen eighteen. Edward Thomas, known for "Adlestrop," was killed at Arras in nineteen seventeen. Two poets killed in the war. Both were killed in the war.

One movement wanted precise images.

ENL 1537 Imagism and Ezra Pound in London

Imagism, led in London by the American Ezra Pound with H.D., Amy Lowell and others, stressed precision and economy of language and the direct presentation of the image. Imagist anthologies appeared between nineteen fourteen and nineteen seventeen. Pound promoted Eliot and Joyce. Precise images, few words. Pound was the movement's promoter.

Another stayed traditional.

ENL 1538 The Georgian Poets

The Georgian poets, named for a series of anthologies called Georgian Poetry published early in George the Fifth's reign, wrote traditional, often rural verse. They included Brooke, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden and Lawrence. Modernists such as Pound reacted against them. Traditional, pastoral, anthologized. Georgian is not Modernist.

Modernist fiction had its techniques.

ENL 1539 Modernist Fiction's Techniques

Modernist fiction broke narrative continuity, used stream of consciousness, a term William James coined in eighteen ninety, and interior monologue, which presents thoughts directly. It questioned coherent character and relied on epiphany, fragmentation and shifting points of view. Stream, monologue, fragment, epiphany. Stream of consciousness is the technique.

Ireland had a revival.

ENL 1540 The Irish Literary Revival

The Irish Literary Revival, sometimes called the Celtic Twilight, was a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century flowering of Irish writing, drawing on folklore and the Irish language, with Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory and Yeats. The Abbey Theatre, which opened in nineteen-oh-four, was its stage. Folklore, language, a national theatre. The Revival was cultural nationalism.

Two playwrights filled the Abbey.

ENL 1541 J. M. Synge and Sean O'Casey

J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, first performed at the Abbey in nineteen-oh-seven, about a young man who claims he killed his father, provoked riots. Sean O'Casey's Dublin trilogy, including Juno and the Paycock, of nineteen twenty-four, set in tenements during civil war, followed. Riots at the Abbey; tenement tragedy. Playboy's riots were in Dublin.

Now five procedures that turn Modernism into answers.

Here is the method for a Modernist poem.

ENL 1542 Reading a Modernist Poem

A Modernist poem often refuses to explain itself. Identify the voices: The Waste Land and Prufrock shift among speakers. Mark the images, which carry meaning without comment, as Imagism required; the evening "Like a patient etherised upon a table" tells you Prufrock's paralysis. Find the allusions and ask what each brings, a line from Dante setting the present against a richer past. Notice the juxtapositions that argue by contrast. Look for the mythic pattern beneath, such as the grail quest. Fragmentation is the method, not a flaw.

Here is the method for stream of consciousness.

ENL 1543 Reading Stream of Consciousness

A stream-of-consciousness passage follows a mind. Find whose consciousness it is: Woolf moves between Clarissa and Septimus, Joyce between Bloom, Stephen and Molly. Track the associations, which jump by memory and sensation, and ask what triggered each shift: a sound, a sight, a word. Separate present from past, because one sentence can move from a London street to a summer years ago. Notice what the character avoids or returns to. Then name the character, the trigger and the feeling. Do not expect logical order.

Here is the method for a war poem.

ENL 1544 Reading a War Poem

First World War poems divide by attitude. Find it: idealistic, as in Brooke's "The Soldier," or bitter and documentary, as in Owen and Sassoon. Find the concrete detail, gas, trenches, wounds, used to counter official language. Find the target: Owen calls Horace's motto "The old Lie," and Sassoon satirizes generals and civilians. Notice the form: Brooke's polished sonnet, Owen's half-rhymes, the irony of a traditional form describing horror. Then state whether the poem honours or indicts the war. Not every war poem is anti-war.

Here is the method for naming a Modernist.

ENL 1545 Identifying a Modernist From a Passage

Use voice, subject and method. A London hostess and a shell-shocked veteran suggest Woolf; Dublin, epiphany or Homeric parallels, Joyce; a frame on the Thames and an African river, Conrad; miners, mothers and the body, Lawrence; "Only connect" or the Raj, Forster; fragments and a ruined city, The Waste Land; an anxious, ageing speaker, Prufrock; gyres, swans or Irish rebellion, Yeats; gas and bitter irony, Owen or Sassoon; a delicate story by a New Zealander, Mansfield. Woolf and Joyce both use the stream, so decide by setting.

Here is the method for matching works.

ENL 1546 Matching Modernist Works and Authors

Sort by author. Conrad: Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Yeats: Innisfree, "Easter 1916," "The Second Coming," Byzantium, "Leda and the Swan," A Vision. Joyce: Dubliners, A Portrait, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake. Woolf: Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One's Own. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love. Forster: Howards End, A Passage to India. Eliot: Prufrock, The Waste Land, Four Quartets, the tradition essay. Owen, Brooke, Rosenberg; Synge and O'Casey. A Room of One's Own is Woolf's essay; A Room with a View is Forster's novel.

Last, the errors to avoid, the city and the circle at the movement's centre, and the capstone.

Four errors need correcting.

ENL 1547 Common Errors About Modernism

Four errors recur. T. S. Eliot was born in America, not England. Joyce left Ireland but wrote only of Dublin. Heart of Darkness was published in eighteen ninety-nine, before the century turned. And Georgian poetry is traditional, not Modernist. Four common corrections. Modernism began before nineteen hundred.

Modernism lived in cities.

ENL 1548 Modernism and the City

The city is Modernism's characteristic setting: Joyce's Dublin in Ulysses and Dubliners, Woolf's London in Mrs Dalloway, Eliot's "Unreal City" in The Waste Land, and Conrad's Thames, "one of the dark places of the earth." The crowd, the street and isolation recur. Dublin, London, the Unreal City. The city often stands for modern alienation.

A London circle mocked the Victorians.

ENL 1549 Bloomsbury

The Bloomsbury Group, centred in London's Bloomsbury district, included Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes. Strachey's Eminent Victorians, of nineteen eighteen, the anchor notes, punctured Victorian pretensions to superiority. Writers, artists, an economist. Bloomsbury mocked Victorian solemnity.

The capstone weighs what Modernism did.

ENL 1550 What Modernism Broke and Kept

Modernism broke the forms the Victorians trusted and kept, in fragments, the tradition they inherited. Shaped by Freud, Frazer, Nietzsche and the First World War, its writers made it new. Conrad opened the century with a frame on the Thames and Kurtz's horror, a novella Achebe later called racist. Yeats moved from Innisfree to the terrible beauty, the rough beast and the golden bird. Joyce replaced the climax with the epiphany and set a Homeric day in Ulysses. Woolf followed minds through a London day, let time pass, and argued that a woman needs money and a room of her own. Lawrence wrote of mothers and the body, Forster asked us to only connect, Mansfield refined the story. Eliot's Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons, and The Waste Land shored fragments against its ruins. The war poets turned from Brooke's idealism to Owen's old Lie. Imagists sought the precise image; Synge and O'Casey made the Abbey a national stage. Identify the voice, trace the fragments, and ask what pattern beneath the disorder the work proposes.

This second part turned Modernism into method. We described Four Quartets by description alone, and the war poets' turn from Brooke's idealism to Owen's old Lie. We explained Imagism against the Georgians, and the Irish Revival with Synge's riots and O'Casey's tenements. We read a Modernist poem by voices, images and allusions, and a stream of consciousness by its triggers. We read a war poem for its attitude first, and named Modernists by clue. And we matched the works and closed on the capstone: broken forms, kept tradition. Unit seventeen, After Modernism: Britain and Ireland, follows the century on.