International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences

Vol-9, Issue-4; Jul-Aug, 2024

Peer-Reviewed Journal
Journal Home Page Available: https://ijels.com/
Journal DOI: 10.22161/ijels

Modern Poetry: An Overview

Prof. (Dr.) Kokila S. Mathur

Department of English, Dyal Singh College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India

Received: 20 Jul 2024; Received in revised form: 19 Aug 2024; Accepted: 24 Aug 2024; Available online: 31 Aug 2024
©2024 The Author(s). Published by Infogain Publication. This is an open-access article under the CC BY license
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Abstract— Modern Poetry presents the modern consciousness in modern idiom. It is a break from the
Romantic tradition of thought, feeling and utterance prevalent at the turn of the century. This is brought out
starkly in T.S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ with its declaration that poetry is not a
turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion; it is not an expression of personality but an escape
from personality. This Impersonal theory of poetry differentiates between the man who suffers and the mind
which creates. Modern Poetry in assessing the changed dynamics of the machine age, rapid industrialization
and advance in technological progress, urbanization, the advent of Darwinism, the impact of Marx,
Nietzsche, the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung, Einstein’s theory of Relativity, brought about a
veritable storm of progress of ideas, and multiple perspectives on the world. In response, when poetry rallies
to Ezra Pound’s call to make it new, Modern Poetry presents new aesthetics with dazzling innovation of
subject and stylistics.
Keywords— imagism, innovation, modern consciousness, modern idiom, objective correlative.

I. INTRODUCTION America. Edith Sitwell’s Wheels, founded in 1916,

The first half of the twentieth century saw a revolution in challenged Georgian poetry and was a bugle call for English
poetic taste in England. The poet was no longer a singer of poetry to create a distinctly Modernist movement.
sweet verses who used conventional romantic imagery to
convey self-indulged personal emotion. Rather, he was the II. DISCUSSION
explorer of experience of any shade and who used language
F.R. Leavis in Revaluations states that Modern poetry is the
in a more complex, allusive and intellectual way. The new
poetry of “actuality”. It is in contrast to Nineteenth century
movement began with a revolt against every kind of verbal
poetry with its dreamy lyricism, as evident in the words of
imprecision and lushness. ‘Imagism’ was a poetic
O’Shaughnessy:
movement between 1912-1917, influenced by the theory of
T.E. Hulme and was a revolt against what Ezra Pound called “We are the music-makers, / And we are the
the “rather blurry, messy…sentimentalistic mannnerish” dreamers of dreams” (Ode;1874)
poetry at the turn of the century. Imagism abandoned and as manifest in Tennyson’s The Lotus Eaters. F.R. Leavis
conventional poetic materials and versification, was free to condemns Shelley as having “a weak grasp of the actual”.
choose any subject and to create its own rhythms or ‘Free
Lawrence Durrell in A Key to Modern Poetry (1952), brings
Verse’. It proved to be the beginning of Modern poetry; it
out the “Great Divide” between these two ages of poetry
was “the first Modernist movement in English poetry”,
by comparing and contrasting Tennyson’s Ulysses and T.S.
states David Perkins in A History of Modern Poetry. Ezra
Eliot’s Gerontion. Both are old men and both have a sense
Pound born in Idaho, America, shifted to London in 1908,
of History, though Gerontion cynically refers to “the
it being the literary capital of the English- speaking world:
cunning passages of history”. Tennyson’s Ulysses has faith
“London….is the place for poetry” he said. London was the
and optimism:
place to hone and master this “complete art” and to establish
poetic reputation in both England and the United States of “To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”. In
contrast Gerontion feels alienated, uprooted and

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Mathur Modern Poetry: An Overview

pessimistic: “I have no ghosts”; “We have not reached Coming prophecies the coming of the anti-Christ because
conclusion / When I stiffen in a rented house.” “the falcon cannot hear the falconer”, or be guided by the
The ‘Great Divide’ is evident in W.B. Yeats poetry itself: in Messiah, and presents the Apocalyptic modern. Edwin
Coole Park and Ballylee (1931) he writes of his early dream Muir’s The Labyrinth symbolizes man in quest of God and
poetry and the awakening into the harsh political realities of salvation.
Ireland and the world: This barrenness and sterility find supreme exposition in The
“We were the last romantics--- took for theme / Waste Land. The poem has an epic sweep, is complex and
Traditional sanctity and loveliness…/ But all that is allusive, drawing on a great variety of both Occidental and
changed, that high horse riderless”. Yeats discards his Oriental myth and symbol; it is a long poem in five sections
romantic “coat/ Covered with embroideries” to be “walking linked together by a profound emotional pattern and a
naked” and will “wither into the truth” (A Coat; The Coming ‘music of ideas’----‘The Burial of the Dead’, ‘A Game of
of Widom with Time). Chess’, ‘The Fire Sermon’, ‘Death by Water’, ‘What the
Thunder Said’. Eliot’s Wasteland finds salvation in the
The ethnic Black poet, LeRoi Jones’ words: “We want
message of The Upanishads : “Datta, Dayadhvam,
poems that kill” ---- could form the Epigraph of Modern
Damyata” meaning ‘Give, Sympathize, Self- control’. This
poetry. The language has more edge and bite, prosaic
would lead to peace or “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih”. In Four
subjects are commonplace, for eg; ---the spider in the bath
Quartets, Eliot deals with Christianity and Hinduism and
tub is the subject matter of Roy Fuller’s poem The Image,
evolves a ‘creative theology’ where God is the “still point”
where the spider, an ugly unwanted creature signifies the
and man is at “a point of intersection of time and the
ugliness and unhappiness of life in the modern times. There
timeless”. Eliot’s search for a mystic centre started with Ash
are startling titles and subjects for eg; Jarrell’s Eighth Air
Wednesday where he explored the dark night of the soul
Force and The Woman in the Wahington Zoo; Lowell’s
under the guidance of St. John of the Cross, and achieved
Skunk Hour and For the Union Dead; Stephen Spender’s
its most individual expression in Four Quartets.
Come Let Us Praise the Gas Works is ‘austerely modern’ in
its reference to Nazi brutality. The “Impersonal theory of poetry” advocated by Eliot in
his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent has been an
Modern poetry mirrors the despair, disillusionment,
influential trend in Modern poetry. Coleridge in Biographia
loneliness and isolation of man, the spiritual barrenness and
Literaria preferred to talk about the poet first and then the
sterility of the times. T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece The Waste
poem, a preference characteristically Romantic. But Eliot
Land (1922) is the epic of modern times. W.H. Auden’s
distinguishes between “the mind which creates” and “the
‘wasteland’ is his poem The Age of Anxiety (1948) and gives
man who suffers”. He contradicts Wordsworth when he
classic utterance to the dominant emotions of fear and
states “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an
anxiety typical of the times. ‘Fear’ is the paralyzing emotion
escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality,
of Prufrock in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “I was
but an escape from personality” (Tradition and the
afraid”; “Do I dare?”; “how should I begin?” and he is never
Individual Talent). Eliot presents emotion through the
able to frame his “overwhelming question”. Philip Larkin in
“objective correlative” so as to distance the merely
Wants expresses the “desire for oblivion” as the world has
personal and achieve ‘impersonality’. In his essay Hamlet
become unbearable. Lawrence Whistler in A Form of
and His Problems, Eliot calls Shakespeare’s play Hamlet an
Epitaph questions modern man’s “purpose of visit” or the
“artistic failure” because it lacked the ‘objective
meaning of life and answers “barely ascertained”. Louis
correlative’, that is, “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of
MacNeice in Prayer Before Birth laments that man has
events which shall be the formula of that particular
become a “lethal automaton”, “a cog in a machine”, an
emotion”. The Epigraph of Prufrock typifies the hellish
unthinking, unfeeling monster. In Bagpipe Music he paints
situation that Prufrock suffers because of his diffidence and
the sordidness and lovelessness of the world as the mother
anxieties and becomes somewhat neurotic. The triviality of
callously asks the midwife to take away her newborn babe
his life is objectified in the self-acknowledgement: “I have
saying: “I’m through with overproduction”. In Gerontion
measured out my life with coffee spoons”. His self-
the old man is “waiting for rain” or regeneration and hope,
contempt is given through the ‘objective correlative’ of “I
but “Christ the tiger” comes not to redeem, but to condemn.
should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the
This terrifying situation is reflected everywhere by a
floors of silent seas”. In Ash Wednesday, the passage from
“wilderness of mirrors”. Jack Clemo in Christ in the Claypit
struggle to despair to hope is given through the passage of
finds Christ not in the church but in the claypit, cast there
a staircase. Thus ‘Literary modernism’ encompasses a
by the “facile praise/False to the heart” of modern man who
number of avant-garde works that were attempting to move
has lost all faith in divine benevolence. Yeats’ The Second

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Mathur Modern Poetry: An Overview

beyond traditional practice and conventions in the impulse of its presence… a sense of the timeless as well as of the
to shape literature and to ‘make it new’. temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together”.
The Waste Land (1922) was the classic of the Modernist No poet or artist has “his meaning alone. His significance,
movement and resembled an avant-garde documentary film his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the
with its vivid impressions of contemporary city life, a dead poets and artists”. This “mythical method” set up the
cinematic montage, its juxtaposed images, scenes and negotiation of the contemporary with antiquity and
fragments of conversation. Pound hailed it as “the endowed poetry with a visionary depth in Yeats and Eliot.
justification of our modern experiment, since 1900”. Reviewing Joyce’s Ulysses, he stated how myth was “a way
of controlling, of ordering …the immense panorama of
Ambiguity and Obscurity is of essence to Modern poetry
futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”; how
as set out by William Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity
‘Psychology…ethnology, and The Golden Bough have
(1930). The Waste Land has quotations from six different
bestowed a “mythical method” which will enable “making
languages and a reference to thirty-five authors. Ezra Pound
the modern world possible in art”. Eliot’s critical essays on
in The Pisan Cantos has Chinese allusions. Prufrock’s
poetry paid serious attention to a close analysis of poetic
“overwhelming question” is never framed and becomes an
method and formal qualities of verse and were followed
enigma.
with great zeal in England and America. Eliot’s Selected
The use of myth is a significant aspect of Modern poetry. Essays is a collection of his best pieces and he enjoyed the
The Waste Land is an interweaving of stark realism, status of “an oracle” on the literature of his times writes
symbolism and the mythical---- creating an allusive, Perkins.
somewhat bewildering and plotless complex of thought and
feeling ----all together, conveying the music of ideas to
present the anxiety- ridden, sterile and aimless life in this III. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
urban wasteland where people are experiencing a living The Georgian Poets of the 1900’s dealt with homely topics
death. It broke the fixed association of poetry with the and valued simplicity and emotional directness. Georgian
beautiful, the agreeable, the genteel and the ideal. Its lyricism is aptly defined by Robert Lynd as “Beatrice born
heterogenous fragments, elliptical juxtapositions mirrored under a dancing star”--- for example: In Arabia, Walter de
the new reality of a world torn asunder by the harsh and la Mare writes of “dim silked, dark haired musicians/ In the
grim realities of Industrialization, urbanization, War, the brooding stillness of night” ; in Cargoes, the “Quinquireme
new anthropological, scientific and psychological of Nineveh” brings “a cargo of ivory/And apes and
perceptions about human life, impact of technology, loss of peacocks/Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine”.
religious faith and identity crisis—'-how the human spirit Edward Marsh’s anthology, Georgian Poetry,1911-12,
was wounded in modern times’. Yet the interweaving of the announces this movement in poetry. Marsh coined the term
symbolic and the mythological enable Eliot to present “the “Georgian” and published 5 anthologies of Georgian Poetry,
sordidly realistic and the phantasmagoric” where the past between 1912-1922. Some important poets were—
melts into the present, where the crowd on London Bridge Abercrombie, Brooke, W.H. Davies, Monro, Masefield,
recalls Dante’s Limbo. The Waste Land attributes the angst Drinkwater, Walter de la Mare, Squire, Shanks, Turner,
of modern life to its alienation from myth. Eliot praised Freeman. Middleton Murry in the Athenaeum, Dec., 5,
Frazer’s The Golden Bough to the work of Freud as 1919 criticized them for their “false simplicity”; there is
“throwing its light on the obscurities of the soul from a “nothing disturbing” about their poetry and they worship
different angle”. The Waste Land uses the myth of the “trees and birds”. Inspired by the English Romantics the
Fisher King as delineated by Frazer, as the myth of dying Georgians were nature poets, treating Nature as in the
and reviving god, its association with fertility rites and Wordsworthian belief of it being the “guide, the guardian of
vegetative myths. Myth integrated primitive man with the my heart, and soul/ Of all my moral being”. They rebelled
natural world, with fellow human beings, with the past and against Victorian “rhetoric”, and like the Edwardians before
the future and with the divine, bestowing his world and life them, they reacted against the ‘fin de siecle’; drew
with significance, anchoring him with moral, religious and inspiration from contemporary poets like Hardy, Yeats and
psychological validity. Since myth wells up from the depths Synge; they disliked the noisier side of Edwardian poetry –
of human nature, to lose contact with such powerful Kipling, Chesterton, and Noyes, but continued with the
resources is to lose emotional vitality and succumb to a dry traditional attitude of cultivation of the ‘agreeable’ and the
and barren emptiness. In his essay Tradition and the ‘beautiful’, yet preferred a tightening of the loose and
Individual Talent, Eliot explains Tradition as : “the slipshod Edwardian narrative style. Georgian poetry was
historical sense… not only of the pastness of the past, but traditional with an easy and smooth popular style, a

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Mathur Modern Poetry: An Overview

cautiously optimistic tone; though some of them had grammar school of modern poetry, the instruction and drill
experienced the horrors of War, yet it did not alter their in basic principles”, writes David Perkins. Precision of
mindset. They had none of the shock effects, dislocation and phrase wrought with metaphor, free verse, the use of
dissonance typical of the Modernists. Their poetic feelings idiomatic and colloquial language, the rejection of poetic
were wholesome, kindly, compassionate and diction and ‘rhetoric’---are its essential features. Imagist
compromising, “capable of a civilized, complex balance poetry, inspired also by the Japanese ‘Haiku’, suggests short
and charm that has been rare since”, writes Perkins. free-verse impressions of places, objects, human
War Poetry: English poets of the First World War began as interactions with a consciousness of craft and technique,
Georgians, but their poetry changed gradually as they controlled and reticent evocation of emotion and the
experienced shock and moral outrage at the horrors of war. significantly insightful. The Imagist poem was considered
the most accessible way to the “modern” and to “make it
The World War I poets like Rupert Brooke romanticized
new” as Pound exhorted the poets of his times. Their
war: “If I should die, think only this of me:/That there’s
subjects were not the conventional ideas of beauty, love,
some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England”.
death or God; instead, the focus was on “Hedges”, “Leaf
Nationalistic feeling, patriotism and heroic death on the
Prints”, “Fog”, and “Meeting-House Hill”---- often
battlefield are prized values. But Sigfried Sassoon and
containing wry humour and evoking complex feelings.
Wilfred Owen write of the harsh and grim realities of war.
Such poems displaced the Romantic nature lyric with new
Owen wrote: “my subject is war, and the pity of war. The
perspectives of the modern consciousness. Influential
poetry is in the pity”. This is to be found in his poems,
names associated with Imagism are those of Ezra Pound,
especially Futility, Anthem for Doomed Youth and
Amy Lowell (Some Imagist Poets 1915-17), H.D., D.H.
Insensibility which presents cynicism about War: “Men are
Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, John Gould and
gaps for filling/ Losses who might have fought/Longer, but
Richard Aldington.
no one bothers.” Though there is not a very significant
connection between War poetry and the first Modernists -- T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock becomes
Pound, Eliot and others-- since their line of development the harbinger of Modern poetry. A vision of the apocalyptic
moved in a different trajectory and they adopted traditions modern is presented in W.B.Yeats’ The Second Coming.
completely different from those of the Georgians and War Eliot and Yeats dominate the modern poetic movement.
poets. Yet the War poets with their shocking descriptions, Eliot’s “Objective Correlative” as well as the emotional-
satire, invective and bitter irony widened the possible tones intellectual complex in Yeats’ poetry are a modernistic
and subjects of poetry. War poetry and the War itself rehabilitation of Donne and the Metaphysical School of
prepared an audience for the High Modernist poetry of the Poetry of the 17th century. In 1900 Yeats wrote ‘The
1920’s when the Modernists voiced disgust, stark realism, Symbolism of Poetry’ wherein he expressed his belief in
horror, satire and black humour, as well as a spiritual inspiration, imagination, magic and mystical transcendence,
questing atmosphere of literature in the post- war period. a belief in a shared human mind and memory or the ‘Spiritus
Mundi’ and the ‘Anima Mundi’. Pound in his poem ‘Hugh
The World War II poets could not romanticize war at all
Selwyn Mauberley’ rues the absence of ‘the sublime’ in the
because of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
twentieth century’s preoccupation with mass consumerism
Edith Sitwell wrote Dirge for the New Sunrise, “dirge” or
mass media and mass culture, where beauty and
song of lamentation at the “new sunrise”, the intense,
transcendence have faded away. Pound in The Cantos,
searing heat of the atomic mushroom of destruction. Man
having 120 sections, is akin to another modern epic poem,
with his “murderous brain/.…conceived the death/Of his
namely, Eliot’s The Waste Land,---both are concerned with
mother Earth, and tore/ Her womb, to know the place/ where
the disintegration of modern civilization.
he was conceived”.
Social and political unrest finds expression as in Yeats’
Imagism, a poetic movement between the years 1912-1917,
September 1913, Easter 1916, and The Second Coming
influenced by the poetic theory of T.E. Hulme, sought to
which reflect the Irish political turmoil and the World Wars;
present an image that is hard, clear and concentrated as in
in W.H. Auden’s September1,1939 and Spain; Stephen
the famous lines of Ezra Pound, its pioneering guru: “The
Spender’s poem Not Palaces an Era’s Crown reflect
apparition of these faces in the crowd; /Petals on a wet,
Communist ideology : “No man shall hunger/Man shall
black bough” (In a Station of the Metro). Pound saw the
spend equally”.
Imagist poem as a complex in which “painting or sculpture
seems as if it were just coming over into speech”. He saw Modern poetry’s experimental and innovative aspect is to
Des Imagistes, published in 1914, as a collection to promote be witnessed in the ‘--isms’ that influenced it ---Imagism,
this new poetry. Imagism has been described as “the Symbolism, and others. “On or about December 1910

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Mathur Modern Poetry: An Overview

human character changed” stated Virginia Woolf in her political developments and economic stress of the time. A.
essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. The London Art Alvarez called for a ‘new seriousness’ in British poetry---
exhibition of 1910 entitled ‘Manet and the Post- likening it to an American poetry industry instead of treating
Impressionists’ curated by Roger Fry, her fellow member of it as an art. The ‘Martian School’ is associated with Reid
the Bloomsbury group, shocked many art enthusiasts who and Raine. Reid describes ‘Martianism’ as “a parish
witnessed such Abstract and experimental works. Visual matter”. Craig Raine’s poems establish a parochial
and Fine Art was blazing a new path and creating new ones typicality—'The Butcher’, ‘The Barber’, ‘The Grocer’, to
---Impressionism/Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, suggest a sense of community, domestic environments, the
Cubism, Vorticism, Surrealism, Dadaism and Futurism. rural village milieu, and ‘global concepts’ were obscured.
Modernism moved away from traditional Victorian ‘New Generation’ poetry is associated with Carol Ann
representation and depiction of the world to focus on Duffy and Simon Armitage. They cultivated a ‘class-free’,
aesthetics of representation--- language, form, narrative easy accessibility, ‘a man-of-the-people’ attitude. For Duffy,
strategies and perspectives on a rapidly changing world. ‘voice is an index of moral health’; characters are diagnosed
Cassirer defines a symbol as the “actualizing of inarticulate by the words they speak: “She didn’t shit, she soiled or had
experience in an apprehensible form”. The Symbolist a soil/and didn’t piss, passed water. Saturday night,/ when
Movement in France began with Baudelaire’s Fleurs du the neighbours were fucking, she submitted/to intercourse
Mal (1857) and continued by such major poets like and, though she didn’t shit cobs then,/later she perspired.
Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme and Valerie. English and Jesus wept. Bloody Nora. Language!” (Selling
European literature since World War I has been a notable era Manhattan;1987).
of Symbolism. The important practitioners are--- Arthur Modernist ‘Little Magazines’ played a central role in
Symons, Ernest Dowson, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Dylan promoting this new aesthetics of poetry of the early
Thomas, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens and others. Eliot’s twentieth century. While many favored the modernist male
The Waste Land employs symbolism of the elements—Air, canon, others included the emerging discourses like
Water, Fire, Rock. Yeats’ ‘Tower’ stands for truth; Anarchism and Feminism. It was “the golden age of the
Byzantium symbolizes the ‘Artifice of Eternity’; ‘gyres’ literary manuscript” writes D. Van Hulle. These magazines
denote the cycles of history. created a platform for the dazzling experimentation, the new
Eliot becomes ‘minor industry’ after the 30’s and Modern idiom, the newness of urban culture and perceptions, and
poetry witnessed movements like ‘Pure Poetry’, ‘The focused on the literary value of the avant-garde. The
Movement Poets’ and ‘Confessional Poetry’. pioneering spirit of the little magazines brought out the best
in Anglo-American interfusions. Some important
“Pure Poetry” of Middleton Murry and Swinburne sought
magazines providing an outlet to the work of new poets ---
to communicate its experience in an instance like music in
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse(1912), The Dial(1916), The
keeping with their belief “poetry is akin to music”. They
Little Review (1914), The Seven Arts(1916), BLAST(1914),
wrote poetry ‘unaltered’ by any allusions whatsoever.
The Criterion, The Egoist.
D.J. Enright in Poets of the 1950’s writes of the group of
poets known as “Movement” and who rejected the neo-
romanticism of the 1940’s. They sought to cleanse poetry of IV. CONCLUSION
the ‘dead spots’ of Allusion and valued the neatness and Yeats declared: “All art is…. an endeavor to condense as out
pithiness of the great Augustan figures—Dryden and Pope. of the flying vapour of the world an image of human
The ‘Movement’ poets are ---Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, perfection”. In 1930, Edmund Wilson questioned: “Is Verse
William Empson, Thomas Gunn, Donald Davie who also a Dying Technique?” But with so much experimentation the
wrote Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952). possibilities on the human landscape are immense as
Confessional Poetry of American poets---- Slyvia Plath, Malcolm Bradbury suggests in his book Possibilities
Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Theodore (1973).
Roethke and Alan Ginsberg deals with the poet’s self
intimately, and sacrifices aesthetic distance between self REFERENCES
and utterance. Plath’s Fever 103 frankly confesses her
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British poetry in the late 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s adopted Companion to Modernist Poetry. Cambridge: University
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[3] Childs, P. (2000). Modernism. London & NY: Routledge.

[4] Perkins D. (1976). A History of Modern Poetry. Harvard
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