Poetry of the XXth century. Yeats. Elliot.

As for the English Poetry of the XXth century, a most prominent poet to be mentioned here is William Buttler Yeats. Born near Dublin of a cultured Irish family Yeats was educated in London but returned to Ireland in 1880 and soon afterwards he began his literary career. recognition came quickly. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Like so many of his contemporaries, Yeats was sharply conscious of the spiritual emptiness of his age and his whole artistic career is best seen as an attempt, at first to escape from pitiful materialism which he found everywhere, and later to formulate a new positive ideal which would supply his spiritual needs. His early works have something of the melancholy pictures. A believer in magic and similar arts Yeats sought to escape into the land of the “faery” and looked for his themes in Irish legend and the simple, elemental impulses of Man’s primitive nature. The best remedy for the emptiness of the present seemed to lie in a return to the simplicity of the past. To this period belong his narrative poem “The Wanderings of Oisin”, which first established his reputation “Poems”, “The Wind among the Reeds”, and “The Shadowy Waters” and it was in these early days that he wrote many of the lyrics, whose simplicity of style and melodic beauty have found them a place in numerous collections of modern verse. Probably the best-known of them is “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”:

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree

And a small cabin build there, of clay

And wattles made nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade”.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings”.

I will arise and go now, for always, night and day

I hear lake-water lapping with low sounds by the shore

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Between 1900 and 1910 much of Yeat’s time was devoted to the drama and philosophical and literary essays but such poetry as was produced during this period shows a gradual movement away from the escapism of his early work, and a steadily growing courage in grasping the nettle of contemporary reality. The increasing realism of this period is clearly seen in “The Green Helmet and other Poems” and “Responsibilities” which strike a more personal note. It was however, the impact of the 1914-1918 war, and even more of the Irish troubles of 1916, which brought him face to face with the need to grapple with the realities of life. his mystical and philosophical studies and his excursions into spiritualism led to the publication of a new philosophical system, and much of the poetry of this period was devoted to the explaining of his theories, which are most fully stated in his prose work “A Vision”. The peak of his achievement is reached in “The Tower” and ‘The Winding Stair and Other Poems”, in which he handles philosophical themes with a compact precision of style and a great mastery of rhythm and language. He continued to write with undiminished vigour until his death, and to his last period belong “Tthe Crazy”. Jane poems, some of which had appeared in “The Tower” and ‘The Winding Stair”. In them his philosophy, hidden beneath a mask of childlike simplicity, is put into the mouths of such characters as “The Fool”.

It is no exaggeration to describe Yeats as one of the most difficult of modern poets. His attempt to formulate a philosophical system which could replace the scientific Materialism of his age underlines most of his later verse. His trust was in the imagination and intuition of man rather than in scientific reasoning, and his attempt was to reach back, through the study of Irish folklore and legend, to primitive impulses of human life. The natural man (the peasant or the fool) he felt to be more in contact with these primary forces than the intellectual man of the world; and this idea and his great belief in passion, led in his later work to a constant assertion of the importance of the human individuality. An ideal type of being was the “Solitary Soul”, above the crude world of politics and action. Yeats believed in fairies, magic, and other forms of superstition, and his later thought was much influenced by his study of Indian and other mystical philosophies and the excursions into spiritualism, which became more frequent after his marriage, in 1916, to medium.

Thomas Stearns Eliot is the master of modernism in poetry. He was born in the USA and moved to England in 1915. In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. he began his literary career in England, in 1915 he published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”), “Portarit of a Lady”, “preludes”, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”).

In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” he ironically depicts a mean man’s pretensions on sincere feeling. The poem represents the stream of so consciousness of the lyrical hero. Alfred Prufock realizes that his feelings are ridiculous and absurd. The poem ends with a gloomy conclusion of dream vainness.

Urban theme in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ is marked with deep pessimism. Town life is represented as a dreadful realm of fatal power as a mad existence.

Eliot’s poems are cold and they urge to transmit abovepersonal people’s feelings. Contrary to romanticists and realists Eliot in his Verse didn’t liberate emotions but ran away from them. In romanticists and realists tried to reveal the unique individuality of a human being, Eliot was no image of individual personality. Eliot rejected emotional and individual conception of life.