After Modernism: Britain and Ireland

Unit sixteen closed on Modernism's broken forms and kept tradition. This unit follows writing in Britain and Ireland after nineteen thirty, which answered Modernism while history pressed on it: depression, a second world war, the end of empire and a welfare state. Its governing idea is that the period has no single style, so the mode comes before the writer, and that these works are described here, not quoted. This first part moves in three steps: the thirties poets, Auden, MacNeice, Dylan Thomas and Stevie Smith; then the prose, Orwell, Huxley, Waugh, Greene and Golding; and then the stage from Beckett to Churchill, and the poets from Larkin and the Movement to Hughes, Plath and Heaney, closing as Lessing arrives.

We begin with a changed Britain and the poets of the nineteen thirties.

First, what changed after nineteen thirty.

ENL 1601 Britain After 1930

After nineteen thirty came depression, a second world war, the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, then the loss of empire, from the partition of India to African independence, and a welfare state at home. The anchor notes Britain moved to the sidelines of the world stage. War, empire's end, welfare state. These works are described, not quoted.

The decade's leading poet.

ENL 1602 W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden, born in nineteen-oh-seven, was the leading poet of the nineteen thirties, writing on love, politics and psychology. In nineteen thirty-nine he moved to the United States and became an American citizen in nineteen forty-six while keeping his British citizenship. Thirties poet, then American. Auden moved to America in nineteen thirty-nine.

Two Auden poems the exam knows.

ENL 1603 "Musée des Beaux Arts" and "September 1, 1939"

"Musée des Beaux Arts," written in Brussels in December nineteen thirty-eight, uses Bruegel's paintings, including the fall of Icarus, to show human indifference to others' suffering. "September 1, 1939," written after Germany invaded Poland, turns to love; Auden later disowned its most famous stanza. Icarus ignored; a poem on war's outbreak. Some poem details rest on one reference source.

A group that rarely met.

ENL 1604 Louis MacNeice and the Thirties Poets

Journalists grouped Auden, Louis MacNeice, Cecil Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender as the "Auden Group," a label W-7 calls essentially a myth; the four were in one room only once in the thirties. MacNeice, born in Belfast, was a poet, playwright and BBC producer. A group that rarely met. The Auden Group history rests on one source.

A Welsh poet and a play for voices.

ENL 1605 Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet who died in nineteen fifty-three, wrote "Do not go gentle into that good night," a villanelle often linked with his dying father, and the radio drama Under Milk Wood, in which a narrator voices the dreams of a Welsh fishing town. A villanelle; a play for voices. A villanelle repeats two refrains.

One poet hid despair in comedy.

ENL 1606 Stevie Smith

Stevie Smith, a secretary who lived in a London suburb with her aunt, wrote witty, experimental novels and poems. Her best-known poem, "Not Waving but Drowning," of nineteen fifty-seven, describes a dead man whose distress others misread as playfulness. The anchor notes its tight, conversational tone. Comic surface, private despair. The title states the misreading.

Now the prose: Orwell's plain style against tyranny, Huxley's pleasure state, and three novelists.

First, a writer with a pen name.

ENL 1607 George Orwell

George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Blair, served as a police officer in Burma, documented poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier and fought in Spain, recorded in Homage to Catalonia. A democratic socialist, he opposed Stalinism. He died in nineteen fifty. Burma, Wigan, Spain. Some life details rest on one reference source.

His two most famous books.

ENL 1608 Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm

Animal Farm, of nineteen forty-five, is a beast fable allegorizing the Russian Revolution and Stalinism. Nineteen Eighty-Four, of nineteen forty-nine, imagines Britain as Airstrip One in the totalitarian superstate Oceania, ruled by Big Brother through surveillance. A farm allegory; a surveillance state. Plot details here rest on one reference source.

Orwell also wrote essays.

ENL 1609 Orwell's Essays

In "Shooting an Elephant," of nineteen thirty-six, a police officer in Burma shoots an elephant to avoid looking foolish, exposing imperialism. "Politics and the English Language," of nineteen forty-six, argues that vague language hides the truth and urges concreteness and clarity. Empire's pressure; plain language. Essay details here rest on one reference source.

Another dystopia ruled by pleasure.

ENL 1610 Aldous Huxley: Brave New World

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in nineteen thirty-two, imagines a World State whose citizens are engineered and conditioned into a fixed hierarchy and kept content. Huxley called it a "negative utopia." His last novel, Island, offered a utopia. Engineered contentment. Huxley's dystopia rules by pleasure.

Waugh moved from satire to faith.

ENL 1611 Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh wrote the satires Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust, converted to Catholicism in nineteen thirty, and wrote Brideshead Revisited, of nineteen forty-five, in which Charles Ryder recalls his friendship with the Flytes, a wealthy Catholic family. Satire, then Catholic memory. This entry rests on one reference source.

Greene wrote of sin and pursuit.

ENL 1612 Graham Greene

Graham Greene, a convert to Catholicism, wrote serious Catholic novels and thrillers he called "entertainments." The Power and the Glory, of nineteen forty, follows a renegade "whisky priest," Greene's term, hunted in a Mexican state that bans Catholicism. Faith, sin and pursuit. This entry rests on one reference source.

Golding stranded boys on an island.

ENL 1613 William Golding: Lord of the Flies

William Golding's first novel, Lord of the Flies, of nineteen fifty-four, strands a group of British schoolboys on an uninhabited island, where their attempts to govern themselves descend into savagery. Golding won the Nobel Prize in nineteen eighty-three. Boys alone; order collapses. The island is an allegory of human nature.

Now the postwar stage, absurd and realist, and the poets who followed the war.

A Dubliner wrote in two languages.

ENL 1614 Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett, born in Dublin, moved to Paris, assisted Joyce, served in the French Resistance, and wrote in both French and English. The anchor describes his work as minimal and absurdist, marked by futility, gallows humour and a will to live. He won the Nobel Prize in nineteen sixty-nine. Dublin, Paris, two languages. Beckett wrote Godot first in French.

Two men wait.

ENL 1615 Waiting for Godot

Waiting for Godot, written in French and first performed in nineteen fifty-three, shows two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for someone named Godot who they believe will save them and who never arrives. Little happens, and the second act nearly repeats the first. Two men waiting for no one. Godot never appears.

A critic named a kind of play.

ENL 1616 The Theatre of the Absurd

The critic Martin Esslin coined "the Theatre of the Absurd" in nineteen sixty for plays by Beckett, Ionesco and others that present the human condition as purposeless, echoing Camus's Myth of Sisyphus. Plot, character and logical dialogue break down. No purpose, no plot, no logic. The label is Esslin's.

An angry play changed the stage.

ENL 1617 John Osborne and the Angry Young Men

John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, of nineteen fifty-six, a realist play about the disaffected working-class Jimmy Porter, is seen as an early "kitchen sink" drama. The Royal Court's press officer called Osborne an "angry young man," a label extended to writers such as Kingsley Amis. Kitchen sink, working-class anger. This entry rests on one reference source.

Pinter's plays are full of pauses.

ENL 1618 Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter's plays, including The Birthday Party, The Homecoming and Betrayal, use pauses, ambiguous identity and unexplained threat; critics called his early work "comedy of menace." In The Birthday Party, intruders torment a lodger in a seaside boarding house. He won the Nobel Prize in two thousand five. Pauses, menace, a boarding house. "Comedy of menace" is a critics' label.

One playwright staged Hamlet's wings.

ENL 1619 Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard, born in Czechoslovakia and brought to Britain as a Jewish child refugee, wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, of nineteen sixty-six, an absurdist tragicomedy staged in the wings of Hamlet, and later Travesties and Arcadia. He died in two thousand twenty-five. Hamlet from the wings. This entry rests on one reference source.

A playwright of power and gender.

ENL 1620 Caryl Churchill

Caryl Churchill, born in nineteen thirty-eight, is a British playwright known for non-naturalistic techniques and plays on power and sexual politics, including Cloud 9 and Top Girls, of nineteen eighty-two, about Marlene, a career-driven woman, and the cost of ambition in Thatcherite Britain. Feminist, experimental theatre. This entry rests on one reference source.

A librarian wrote plain poems.

ENL 1621 Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin, a librarian, came to prominence with The Less Deceived, of nineteen fifty-five, followed by The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. His poems are plain-spoken, ironic and skeptical, often about ordinary English life, ageing and death. He died in nineteen eighty-five. Plain, ironic, English. Larkin rejected Modernist difficulty.

A group favoured clarity.

ENL 1622 The Movement

"The Movement" was a term coined in nineteen fifty-four by the literary editor of The Spectator for a group including Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn and Elizabeth Jennings, whose poems were collected in the anthology New Lines. They favoured clarity and traditional form. Clarity, form, restraint. The member list rests on one reference source.

Hughes wrote of animals.

ENL 1623 Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes, fascinated by animals from childhood, wrote violent, elemental nature poetry in collections such as The Hawk in the Rain and Crow. He married the American poet Sylvia Plath in nineteen fifty-six and was Poet Laureate from nineteen eighty-four until his death. Animals, violence, myth. Hughes is not a Movement poet.

An American wrote in England.

ENL 1624 Sylvia Plath in England

Sylvia Plath, an American poet who lived in England with Hughes, advanced confessional poetry, writing from intensely personal experience. Her works include The Colossus, The Bell Jar and Ariel, published after her death in nineteen sixty-three. Her Collected Poems won a Pulitzer Prize. Confessional poetry. Plath was American.

A farmer's son won the Nobel.

ENL 1625 Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, born to a farming family in Northern Ireland, identified as Irish rather than British. His first collection, Death of a Naturalist, of nineteen sixty-six, drew on rural childhood. He translated Beowulf and won the Nobel Prize in nineteen ninety-five. Farm, Ireland, Nobel. Heaney identified as Irish.

Two kinds of Heaney poem.

ENL 1626 "Digging" and the Bog Poems

In "Digging," the speaker admires the skill of his family's men with the spade and resolves to dig with his pen instead. North, of nineteen seventy-five, his first book to face the Troubles directly, uses the Iron Age bog bodies of northern Europe as images of ritual violence. Spade and pen; bodies in the bog. The bog bodies stand for present violence.

Other poets wrote through the Troubles.

ENL 1627 Northern Irish Poetry After Heaney

Other Northern Irish poets wrote during and after the Troubles: Derek Mahon, born in Belfast, who died in two thousand twenty, and Paul Muldoon, born in County Armagh, who has published more than thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize while teaching at Princeton. Mahon and Muldoon. Facts only for living authors.

A novelist raised in Africa.

ENL 1628 Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing, born in Iran and raised in Southern Rhodesia, wrote The Grass Is Singing, of nineteen fifty, on racism in southern Africa, and The Golden Notebook, of nineteen sixty-two, in which a writer keeps four notebooks and seeks to unite them in a fifth. She won the Nobel Prize. Africa, politics, the divided self. The Golden Notebook is structurally experimental.

This first part followed many modes. We described a Britain of war, lost empire and welfare, and its thirties poets: Auden, the label of his group, Dylan Thomas's villanelle and Stevie Smith's misread distress. We described Orwell's fable, his surveillance state and his plain-language essays, beside Huxley's rule by pleasure. We identified Waugh, Greene's whisky priest and Golding's island. We described Beckett's waiting, Esslin's label, Osborne's kitchen sink, Pinter's menace, Stoppard and Churchill. And we met Larkin and the Movement, Hughes, Plath, Heaney's spade and bog, the Northern Irish poets, and Lessing. Part two turns to the later novel and the methods.