The Twentieth Century
The Major Trends in 20th Century Poetry/ 511
THE MAJOR TRENDS : IN
TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETRY
Q.81. W rite a short essay on any one of the following :-
(e) Trends in Modern Poetry (Rohilkhand 1987)
Or
Q. Bring out the main tendencies of Modern English Poetry
(Rohilkhand 1990) Or Q> Write an essay on any one of the following :-
(g) The main trenoVin Modern English Poetry (and five more topics),- (Gorakhpur 1990)
Or
Q. Write a short essay on the distinguishing features of
20th century English poetry (Gorakhpur 1985)
Or Q. Write a short essay on one of the following:-
(d) The main trends in English portry after 1900 (and four more topics). (Agra 1965)
Or
Q. Mention the chief trends in the poetry of the present century, (Agra 1977)
Introduction :-
After 1900 the English literary scene becomes terribly chaotic In the field of poetry~as also in other fields of literature-we find a tremendous activity. Thousands of poems are written, and thousands published, every day. The sales are indeed limited, but almost every poet, however ”minor,” does find some audience. The chaos in the field of poetry is due to the fact that in modern times no literary tradition is respected at all, and, on the contrary, aU emphasis is made to fafl on individualism, for whatever it may be worth. Whenjsvery man navigates his poetic craft by the light of his own individuality and his personal sense of direction, the voyage becomes adventurous and therefore, interesting; but ship-wrecks are many. That is why in the modern age we are familiar all too well with the jetsajn and flotsam of literature. The Decline: Tradition and Innovation :•
Many have sincerely felt that in the twentieth century no great poetry was written and none is being written now. As a critic has put
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it, there have been many poetic persons in the twentieth century, but no poets. It is said that as civilisation advances poetry declines. Poetry indeed has declined, though it is somewhat debatable if civilisation has advanced. At the beginning of the new century at feast, there was no poet of any stature. Thus A. C. Ward in Twentieth Century Literature .avers: ”When the twentieth century opened Tennyson had been dead nine years, and there was a widespread impression that English poetry had died with him.”1 He further says: The poetry of the period shows a general decline, not in general level of execution but in genius and breadth of range.” But, he admits finally: There has been no. dearth of great poets or great poems that will stand the test of time and become a part of the imperishable literary heritage of England.”
As in modem painting, we find a lot of experimentation and innovation in modem poetry. Most of the poets have broken away from tradition completely, as they feel that poetry should change with the changing times. Many movements, schools, and groups have appeared and disappeared over the years. Imagism, Surrealism, and the socalled ”Apocalypse” school have had their day. Some poets, mostly belonging to the early years of the century, remained, on the other hand, sticking to the traditions of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, etc. Among these poets may be mentioned-Robert Bridges, William Watson, and Sir Henry Newbolt. Still many more combined tradition with innovation: A. E. Housman, for instance, poured his most withering and oppressive pessimism (which appears to be ”modern”) into the mould of the ballad-one of the oldest of literary forms. Even T. S. Eliot~who with Huhne, Hopkins, and Ezra Pound has been a tremendous shaping influence on modern poetry-looks too often to Donne and the fellow metaphysicals. Thus, in a word, even innovators are influenced, little or much, by the poets before them. Modern Themes :-
Modern poetry exercises a great freedom in the choice of themes. Gone are days when it was believed that the job of the poet was only to create ”beauty.” T. S. Eliot offers a representative view : The essential advantage of a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is. to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom and the horror and the glory.” He is free to write poems on themes ranging from kings to cabbages and from the cosmos to a pin’s head. Some poems have beeiTwntten on pretty unpromising
I. Some may say that poetry today has not yet ”died.” It is, to adopt a line from T.S. Eliot’s Lave Song o/J. Alfred Prufrock,
’ailce a patient etherised upon a table. , -, , ;, ., ;
The Major Trends in 20th Century Poetry / 513
subjects which are peculiar to our machine age. Consider, for instance, such poems as Richard Aldington’s Machine Guru, Kenneth Ashley’s Goods Train at Night, Sheila Smith’s 77k? Batfad«/aWotor Bitr, and Sir Edmund Gosse’s The Charcoal Burner.: Unflinching Realism :-
This thematic revolution is indicative of the unflinching realism of the poets of the twentieth century. Pastorausm, romanticism and suchlike tendencies are things of the irretrievable past. Gone are the days of piping shepherds ”piping down the valleys green”, the knights cantering on moonlit heaths, and damsels with dulcimers. As Ronald Bottrall wistfully observes, ~^~
Nightingales, sunset or the meanest flower
Were formerly the potentialities of poetry,
But now what have they to do with.one another,
With Dionysus or with me ?
The searching realism of modern poets often brings them face to face with repulsive facts which would have scandalised a goody-goody Victorian. But our poets handle them most daringly. Prostitution, war, slum-dwellers, and other such ”unpoetic” themes find-adequate treatment in modem poetry. Our century lias witnessed two terrible holocausts in the two global wars. The terror, ugliness, and brutality of war became a major theme in the poetry of ”the war poets” like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen who themselves fought as soldiers. Bitter satire permeates the former’s poems like ”Counter-Attack” (”set out to present In brutal verse the realities of war without gloss or evasion”) and ”Suicide in Trenches.” In the latter he refers to the suicide of a young soldier:
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With cramps ’and lice and lack of rum
He put a bullet through his brain,
No one spoke of him again….
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
Some war poets, such as Rupert Brooke, however, seem to have loved war as a test of their valiance arid patriotism, and they treated it in their poetry accordingly.
Pessimism :-
The two wars and impending danger of a third (and perhaps the last) have cast a gloomy shadow on much of the poetry of the twentieth
I
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century. Well has the modern age been called ”the age of anxiety.” In spite of our material prosperity we are full of tensions and anxieties which arc almost an inseparable feature of modern living. Add to them the disappearance of religious faith. A note of disillusionment and autumnal gloom is, then, natural in our poetry. This note can be heard in the poetry of many major poets like Housman, Hardy, Huxley, and T. S. Eliot. ”God’s in his heaven” type of optimism is a thing of the past. Housman refers to the Supreme Power in this most blasphemous phrase: ”Whatever brute or blackguard made the world.” Hardy in his greatest work The Dynasts also expresses his disbelief in God and his concept of determinism. Huxley was manifestly and professedly an agnostic. T. S. Eliot was quite religious but his attitude towards life as we find it in such poems as The Waste Land and The Hollow Men, is far from optimistic To quote a few lines from the latter:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filed with straw. Alas !
Our dried voices when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless «
As wind in dry grass.
The pessimism of twentieth-century poets is not of the nature of the somewhat stylised melancholy of Shelley or what David Daiches describes as ”the Tennysonian elegiac mode with its lingering enjoyment of self-pity.” It is more intellectual and more impersonal. Humanitarianism :-
This pessimistic realisation of sad realities of life is partly responsible for the note of fellow-feeling and humanitarianism which is to be heard in the work of some modern poets. The realisation of human suffering spurs them to align themselves with the suffering. Even in the Victorian age there were poets like Thomson, Hood, and Mrs. Browning who demanded justice for the down-trodden. The twentieth-century poets like Galsworthy, Gibson, and Masefield also voiced their indignation against social repression. In Gibson’s ”Farm Holiday” we notice the grim struggle for existence waged endlessly by workers living from hand to mouth:’
All life moving to one measure :- Daify bread, daify bread-
The Major Trends in 20th Century Poetry /,515
Bread of life and bread of labour
Bread of bitterness and bread of sorrow
Hand-to-mouth and no tomorrow
Death for housemate, death for neighbour. Masefield in’’Consccration” thus unveils the stark realities of life:
Others may sing of wine and wealth and the mirth,
The portfy presence of potentates goodly in girth,
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth. Galsworthy in ”Stupidity Street” strikes a note of sympathy for even birds:
I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For people to eat
Sold in the shops
Of Stupidity Street
In their solicitbusness for the working classes, some modem English poets have gone over to the side of radical socialism, and even communism.
Romantic Tendency. :-
Such prosaic social concern is basically inimical to all romantic tendency.Most modern poets, as we have said earlier, scorn all romanticism-even the subdued kind of romanticism as in Tennyson. Hulrae, a major influence on Eliot and others, asserted in his essay ”Romanticism and Classicism” in the New Age : ”I object to the sloppiness which doesn’t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other.” Others have also freely tilted against the traditional romanticism. Still, a few modern poets manifest unmistakable romantic tendencies. Among these poets may be mentioned Walter de la Mare, W. B.Yeats, John Masefield, James Elroy Flecker, and Edward Thomas. Yeats’s imagery is often redolent of mythical splendour. Flecker in his poetic drama Hassan tries to evoke the Oriental splendour though ”in a style stripped of romantic excess and a mood purged of romantic subjectivity.” However, the most important romantic poet of all is de la Mare who is pre- eminently a poet of childhood and supernaturalism. To quote Chew, some of his poems • ”where ghosts and demons walk beneath a waning moon, are morbid, terrible, and dreadful” But some others, in which the world of nonsense
I
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intermingles with the world of dreams, are quite delightful-especially to children.
Nature :-
Another ”romantic tendency to be found in some modern poets is interest in nature. Nature fascinates some poets because she offers such a wonderful contrast with the hubbub and ugliness of an industrialised and over-sophisticated age. ”In the face of modern industrialism,” says A. C. Ward, ”they [modern poets] solace their souls by retiring to the country and celebrating the beauties of unspoiled Nature.” Such poets as Masefield, Robert Bridges, W. E.Davies, and Edmund Blunden may not find any mystic significance in Nature, but they are, all the same, charmed by her unsophisticated beauty. Masefield in ”Sea-Fever” expresses a strong desire to run away from the dreary life into ”the lonely sea and the sky.” Edmund Blunden points his finger lovingly at the little-noticed things of nature. Davies’ poetry has the feature of childlike curiosity in the natural objects everybody finds around himself.
Religion and Mysticism :-
Religion and mysticism also find a place in the work of some poets of the twentieth century. Coventry Patmore and Francis Thompson, who wrote religious poetry towards the end of the preceding century, seem to have inspired a number of poets in this century. The name of Mrs. Alica Meynell deserves to be mentioned. In the poetry of the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, too, we have something religious now and then. Ralph Hodgson’s Tlte Song of Honour is a notable poem pulsating with religious feelings. Even in the poetry of such poets as Yeats there are mystical strains.
Complexity and Psychological Profundity :-
Complexity and psychological profundity are some other qualities of the more representative poetry of today. The reaction against the earlier naivete of poetry was initiated by Eliot and Ezra Pound in the second decade of the present century. The publication of Hopkins’ work in 1918 was also a force in the new direction, Daiches observes: ”Complex, allusive, using abrupt contrasts and shifting counter-suggestion to help to unfold the meaning, eliminating all conjunctive phrases or overt statements that might indicate the relation of one scene or situation to another, depending entirely on ’the music of ideas’, on the pattern of symbolic suggestion set up as the poem moves, Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land .(1922)… was the first major example of the new
The Major.Trends in 20th Century Poetry / 517
poetry, and it remains a watershed in both English and American literary history.”
Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and Hilda Doolittle-all Americans and Richard Aldington-an Englishman-were the pioneers of Imagism in poetry. Visual images before they were matured by intellect were sought to be expressed by them without any respect for conventional phraseology. Moody and Lovett observe : The Imagists defined poetry as the presentation of a visual situation in the fewest possible concrete words, lightened of the burden of conventional adjectival padding, and unhampered by general ideas or philosophical or moral speculations. Form and substance were to be identical. As an instance of the Imagist poetry consider the following lines from Hilda Doolittle’s ”Garden”:
O wind, rend open the heat,
• Cut apart the heat,
Rend it to tatters ;
Fruit cannot drop
Tlirough this thick air;
Fruit cannot fall into heat
Tliat presses up and blunts
Tlie point of pears,
And rounds the grapes.
Many of the major poets of the century have shown the influence of the Imagist doctrines in their work.’
Diction and Metre :-
This movement has also revolulionalised the concept of poetic diction and metre. Traditional ”poetic diction,” saccharine poeticisms, and even regular metre have been discarded almost completely. As Moody and Lovett point out, ”Imagism did modern poetry a tremendous service by pointing the way to a renovation of the vocabulary of poetry and the necessity of ridJing poetic technique of vague and empty verbiage and dishonest and windy generalities.” Though rhyme has almost completely gone, yet as Daiches puts it, ”rhythm freed from the artificial demands of metrical regularity” is still used. A language with the flow and turns of common speech is mostly employed. Verse librc (free verse) is the most usual mode of all serious poetry of today. In the twentieth century many experiments have been made on the technique and diction of poetry. Doughty, for example, as Grierson and Smith put it, ”manhandled” English. The American poet Cum-
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mings refused to start every line of his poetry with a capital letter, and so oiuMany of such experiments have been interesting-but interesting only.
ENQUSH POETRY BETWEEN THE TWO WARS
Q.82. What do you know about English poetry between the two World Wars 7 (Rohilkhand 1984)
Or Q. Write a short essay on one of the following :-
(g) English poetry between the two World Wars (and eight more topics). (Agra 1966)
Or Q. Write a short essay on one of the following :•
(e) English poetry between the two world wars (and four more topics). (Agra 1964)
Introduction :-
The years between the two world wars (1919-1939) witnessed prolific poetic activity. It was a period when tradition and innovation went side by side. In the direction of innovation we can find such groups as the Imagists, Symbolists, and Surrealists working, whereas we also find some traditionalists fighting a last-ditch battle against the forces of change. However, most of the poets c ”the age combined tradition and innovation; and even the most daring inovators did not, or could not, cut at the root of the essential continuity of English poetry. In general the changes which came upon poetry may by aptly summed up in the words of Samuel C. Chew : ”Poetry became obscure, experimental, irregular, antagonistic to didacticism, indifferent to any social value, the private language of small coteries, with much dependence upon verbal subtleties and patterns of association so complex, unstable, and fleeting as sometimes to become presently incomprehensible to the writers themselves.” Poetry did become considerably unpopular. Chew remarks: ”It is a question whether poetry became esoteric because the public had abandoned it or whether the public abandoned it because it had become esoteric.”
But in spite of all this experimentation, many old and some new poets of the period were broadly traditional in their craft. When the
English Poetry Between the 1\w> Wars / 519
Knt World War ended ”in 1918, Hardy, Bridges, and Yeats were yet active. According to Gricrson and Smith, the most important poetic works of the first decade of the period under review are Hardy’s Late Lyricv Yeats’s Tower, Bridges’ Testament of Beauty, and Laurence Binyon’s ”greatest poems” The Sirens and The Idols. Strangely enough, these critics, do not mention Eliot’s The Waste Land which appeared in 1922 and which was as potent an influence on the current of English poetry as had been, say, Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads.
Anyway, let us first consider these wqrks before proceeding further.
Hard^ Bridges, Binyon^nd Yeats :-
A year or two of elation followed the termination of hostilities in
• 1918, before the period of depression arrived. But Hardy remained as
depressed as ever-come war, come peace. All bis poems are full of the
spirit of atheistic pessimism, though there are passages lit by his
childlike interest in the elemental simplicities of nature.
Robert Bridges (1844-1830) was the Poet Laureate. His Testament of Beauty came in 1929 when he was eighty-five. But even at this ripe age he displays a wonderful alacrity of perception which enlivens his mature philosophical speculation. ”It”, says Lcgouis, ”is a philosophical poem of remarkable vitality and energy, and is interspersed with beautiful passages of natural description and human wisdom.” Bridges employs a hitherto untried poetic measure which he- calls ”loose Alexandrines.”
Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) who succeeded T S. Eliot in the Norton Professorship of Poetry at Harvard (1933-34), published his two above-mentioned poems as also Collected Poems in the first decade of the interregnum under review. Binyon called each of these two poems ”an age,” though they are altogether alien to any English age. What are they, then ? They,” observe Grierson and Smith, ”are symphonies in verse, each developing a theme in successive movements in. different measures.” The Sirens was suggested by the first’ transatlantic flight. The theme is man’s power over nature, which goes on increasing day by day. Man is really great,
And when, light is, he enters unafraid
The Idols is directed against the terrors aud superstitions which are man’s own creation and which hold him captive. Binyon makes a plea for the demolition of these false gods.
Yeats started his writing career as a pees in the nineteenth century. The period between the two wars brings us to consider h’u later poetry
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as we find it in his Tower. His later poetry is very different from his early poetry. Gricrson and Smith point out the difference in these words: The difference between Yeats’s early and later poetry reminds one of the early and later poetry of Donne, but his has changed in the opposite direction, from the ideal to the real, the spiritual to the sensuous. Some of his later poems are almost definitely bawdy.” In the later part of his career Yeats came under the modernistic, Imagist influence of Ezra Pound. Consequently, his later poems are full of concrete but delicate images and particulars redolent of ancient myths. But the appearance of, what Samuel C. Chew calls, ”a most unexpected sensuality” in his poetry is quite baffling indeed. Another feature of his later poetry is its recurring expression of passionate regret at the passing of youth. This regret conditions much of the symbolism employed by him. Chew observes : The gyre, the spiral, and the winding stair are constantly recurring symbols of the cyclic philosophy which he had evolved from reading and from life.”
The Georgians :•
Before we consider some important modernistic movements which came between the wars, let us dispose of some important ”Georgians” who were writing before the First World War and who continued writing between the Wars too. The most important of these poets are Walter de la Mare, Masefield, and Gibson.
De la Mare was a poet of childhood and the supernatural, before the first World War. However, after the War, at least for once, he became a realist of the grimmest kind. In his The Veil” (1921) he focused his attention, to quote Grierson and Smith, ”on the dreadful figures of the criminal in the dock, the drug addict, the suicide. However, his ”indulgence” in realism did not continue long, for in The Fleeting (1926) he returned to the hocus-pocus of supernatural and dream poetry for which he always had a strong predilection. In some poems his religious feelings also find a good expression. He was a congenital, incorrigible dreamer and the last of his Collected Poems is, in fact, an argument for a life of dreams :
And conscience less my mind indicts For idle days than dreamless nights.
But not to speak of nights, even his days were seldom without dreams!
About Masefield’s poetry between the Wars, Grierson and Smith maintain : ”Mr. Masefield celebrated the return of peace to England with a long.poem on fox-hunting, the typical sport of the England he loves. Reynard the Fox is modelled on Chaucer’s Prologue ; the meet gives Mr. Masefield the same opportunity to bring English people of
English Poetry Between the Two Wars / 521
different ranks together as the Canterbury pilgrimage gave Chaucer. Mr. Masefield has not Chaucer’s witty touch, nor his universality; his characters are more ItoUopian than Chaucerian, recognisable contemporary English types, not the lineaments of universal human life. But as contemporary types they are very well done and as a whole Reynard the Fax is the best sustained and evenest Jin execution of all Mr. Masefield’s long poems. In Right Royal he applied similar methods, not quite so successfully, to the other typical English spott of-horse- racing. The verse he has written since then has not added much to his fame as a poet.” One drawback of Reynard the Fox may be pointed out here: it is that the weight of the Prologue is not well borne out by the story which follows, unlike what, we have in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Wilfred Wilson Gibson, one of the leaders of the Georgian School of poets who opposed post-Tennysdnian prettiness, continued writing poems and plays beyond the First World War. His poems on the War are instinct with bitterness, stark realism, and a controlled but devastating irony. He was, from first to last, a poet of the ”people”-peasants and workers who’were victims of social and economic inequalities. In his unflinching realism and unadorned style he often reminds one of Crabbc ; but whereas Crabbe was diffuse and detailed, Gibson often secures his effects through telling condensation. Gibson did not mind using in his poetry some elements of the dialect of Northumberland to which he belonged. To the technique of poetry his contribution is minimal.
Let us now cast a hurried glance on the rest of the poets who were not appreciably influenced by the modernistic movements. Ronald Macfie in his long ode War expressed the point of view of the pacifist when he described the impact of the War on civilian life. The poem ends on a strong note of optimism where Macfie envisions an age of love:
The love that sighs in every wind And breathes in every flower-
John Freeman, by profession a businessman, wrote good poems on the themes of nature and childhood. Edmund Blunden, an editor of Clare, shows the same painstaking fidelity to his paintings of nature as Clare does. He, quip Grierson and Smith, is ”so solid that some readers find him stodgy.”
Thelmagists :-
The Imagist Movement in English poetry was a product of the War years, but it did considerably influence the poetry between the two
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Wars. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Aldington, and F. S. Flint were the protagonists of this movement. The Imagists in Some Imagat Poets (1915) enunciated some clear principles whichjoaq M. Klanly and Edith Rickert sum up as follows in Contemporary British Literature :•
”1. to use the language of common speech but to employ the exact word;
2. to create new rhythms for the expression of new.ntoods;
3. to allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject
4. to present-aii image, not vague generalities;
5. to produce poetry that is hard and clear;
6. to aim at concentration, since concentration is th« very essence of poetry.”
Apart from the poets mentioned above D. H. Lawrence also came under the influence of the Imagist Movement, though this influence was not to continue for long. As the critics just quoted above observe : ”though Lawrence never succumbed to technical conservatism, he was too mystical, too passionately and destructively critical a nature to content himself with die limitations of an essentially sensational medium, and his later work, rough and fragmentary as much of it is, is a more direct expression of his prophetic denunciations and visions than his purely imagist work.”
TS. Eliot and the Innovators :•
T. S. Eliot, the greatest of the modern poets, started his career as a poet during the course of the War with his Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) but his greater and,more characteristic works come later~7%e Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and the rest. Eliot was the founder of the nJodernistic school of poetry which even today is quite flourishing. He himself as a poet came under the influence of numerous schools and writers. The Imagist Movement, the views of Hultne, the Symbolist Movement of France, the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins which was first published in 1918 many years after his death, Freud’s ideas, and the poetry of Donne may be mentioned arjjong them. Donne’s ”unified sensibility1 was with Eliot something worthy of the most assiduous imitation. In his attempts Eliot produces even more jolts than his master. His poetry is very heavy reading as it is thick with recondite allusions and quick transitions from mood to mood which simply baffle even a sound and painstaking reader. Ambivalence and paradox arc the rule rather than the exception.
English Poetry Between the Two Vfers / 523
Most critics of today consider The Waste Land to be the greatest poem of the twentieth century. It is an image of the modern restlessness, anxiety, and despair. Though at the end the thunder promises the arrival of the life-giving rain, no rain falls. The framework of the poem is provided by the legend of the Holy Grail. Fertility will not come to the earth till the Holy Vessel has been found. The treatment of this simple theme is the most abstruse, so much so that Eliot had to take upon himself the work of annotating his own poem.
Tlie Hollow Men sketches the spiritual emptiness and purposelessness of modern meiu
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw, alas I
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together,
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rat’s feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar….
In Ash Wednesday, however, we meet with a note of spiritual assurance which is essentially inimical to despair.
Miss Edith Sitwell and her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, made some robust experiments. Edith used bold and artistic imagery, and her peculiarity was her constant utilisation of the effects of synaesthesia-that is, interchanging senses. Osbert struck an astringently satirical note and enjoyed taking pot-shots at dowdiness and tawdriness. Sacheverell was very learned but was quite satisfied indulging in the baroque.
Some poets like Herbert Reade and Robert Graves came under the influence of the psychoanalytic studies of Freud, Jung, and Adler. Graves, for some time, saw nothing but sexual symbols in everything. Reade wrote ”surrealistic” poetry which is expressive of the unconscious and has to be read most carefully to get at something. These experiments, as is known, paved the way for the stream-of-consciousness novel.
The Irish Poets :-
Between the Wars there was a tremendous resurgence of literary activity in Ireland. The chief moving force was Yeats himself. The other
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notable Irish poets of the period were G. W. Russell (*AE”) and J. M. Synge. Russell, according to Grierson and Smith, ”was a much less versatile and melodious poet than Yeats, but a purer mystic, never led astray by that will-o’-the-wisp, that hocus-pocus of evocation and incantation which had such an attraction for Yeats.” Synge was chiefly a dramatist whose very few poems have the same qualities as his plays.
The Young Poets of Eliot Tradition :-
The most important poets of the second decade of the period between the Wars are Cecil Day Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender. All of them are followers of Eliot, and they have tried to establish a nee-metaphysical tradition. But there is a difference-their interest in social reform and their communistic leaning. Auden is learned but his technique is unpredictable. ”He,” observe Moody and Lovett, ”ranges freely from the most cryptic and condensed utterance toapatody of music-hall rhythms^olk-ballads, and nursery rhymes.” He is indeed a clever poet. Cecil Day Lewis is the most manifest of revolutionaries. Spender is a poet less of revolution than of compassion. His communism is conditioned by his strong liberal convictions. His heart bleeds when he finds the jobless poor loitering in the streets and turning.
Their empty pockets out, ’
The cynical gesture of the poor.
/ MODERN~NOVEL
Q. 83. Write a brief essay on one of the following :-
(e) The English novel in the twentieth century (and four more topics). (Agra 1958)
Or
Q. Write a short essay on any one of the following :-
(d) The main trends in the English novel after 1900 (and four more topics). (Agra 1964)
Or Q- What turn has the novel taken in the present age?
Give illustrations. . (Agra 1968)
Or Q. Make a survey of the novel in the twentieth century.
(Agra 1972) Or
Q. Write a short essay on the main trends of the twentieth
century novel. (Rohilkhand 1975)
Or Q- rite >» essay on the major concerns in modern
Modern Novel / 525
Introduction :-
Well has the twentieth century been called ”the age of interrogation.” A spirit of relentless enquiry is abroad testing the age-old beliefs in every field of fife and literature. The new philosophy calls us all in doubt,” as it did Donne centuries before us. With the encouragement of inquisitiveness has come emanctpaion -with a vengeance. Values are fast crumbling. In this background of crumbling values the timehonoured conceptions about the nature and function of the novel have also bowed their way out. It has come to be realised-for good or ill:–that a novel can be made about anything. With the arrival of a new age none of the tacit obligations which had been ruling the novel was held as valid any longer-even that of using an intelligible language. The novel could now be realistic or unrealistic, conform to an organised story or dispense with plot, present scenes and episodes or expatiate on dreamy fancies, and so forth. Experimentation has become an essential activity of every’ important novelist worth the name. J. B. Priestley puts it like this: ”If we are asked what has been happening to the English novel during this period we are tempted to reply, ’Everything’ and to let go at that.” However, to be specific, we can say with David Daiches that the modem novel differs from the traditional novel in three important points which are given below.
(i) First, its changed conception of what is significant in human life. Formerly, the novelist was pre-eminently occupied with the task of sketching the ups and downs in the social and economic status of his characters, particularly, the major ones. Even such incidents as marriages and emotional activities wore social and economic colour. But the novelist of today considers social and economic status, and, therefore, the fluctuations in it, as less significant occurrences in the life of a person.
(ii) Secondly, the conception of time has changed, affecting some of the modem novels. Time is no longer conceived as a movement of moments each of which passes away irretrievably. It is rather considered as a continuous flow, having no divisible parts (moments). All moments are always present.
(iii) Thirdly, modern psychology has had its impact on the very conception of the novel.
These three changes are radical changes. The other points, such as the distrust of didacticism, emancipation from rigid moral codes, and freedom from goody-goody religion are only shifts, not Changes, for they are only relative or quantitative.
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The Early Masters-Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy :-
It was only in the twenties and thirties that the technique of the novel underwent radical changes. In the early years of the century the old masters like Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy conformed obediently to the form of Victorian novel, though they added quite a few things even staying within this form. What links these three novelists is their awareness of social problems. Galsworthy even suggested solutions for the problems.
Of them H. G. Wells was the most creative and energetic, though his contribution to the form and technique of the novel is minimal. His novels can be divided into three broad categories as follows:
(i) Fantastic romances or what is called ”science fiction.” Two Men in the Moon, The War of the Worlds and The9 Wonderful Visit are examples of this kind. They are all imaginative, but like a good story teller with his mind working like a powerful dynamo, Wells keeps the attention of the reader always under his control.
(ii) Novels of character and humour, like Kipps and The History of Mr. Potty. 1% such novels he gives a sympathetic but interesting and unsentimental picture of the lower-middle class English life.
(iii) The discussion novels, like Tono Bung/ay, which searchingly consider the deeper problems and aspects of human life and the ideal of progressive civilisation.
Wells cannot be classed among the great novelists of the century because of his lack of depth and his poor appreciation of the side of art. As David Daiches points out, he ”had little sense of artistic form and no awareness of the significance for fiction of new concepts of time and consciousness, was essentially a Baconian and~a Victorian, and his best novels are really good Victorian minor fiction.
Galsworthy’s technique is as Victorian as Wells’s. His Forsyte Saga, a combination of six novels, is a realistic picture of middle -class life, but treated with symbolism. He tried to sketch in these novels the struggle of Beauty against the Idea of Property or Possession. Irene is Beauty and her husband Soames Forsyte is the idea of Possession, exacting even forcibly his marital rights from her. Galsworthy excels in subtle analysis,, in truth and diversity of character-drawing, in the poetical quality of the descriptions of natural scenery, and above all a sensitive, delicate, and flexible, style, which maybe sometimes audaciously colloquial. However, as an artist, he suffers, like Wells. David Daiches maintains: ”His humanity anjd social observation exceeded his creative and imaginative powers as a literary artist.”
1
Modern Novel / 527
The same observation may as well be applied to Arnold Bennett whose greatest novel was The Old Wives’ Tale (1908). In Riceyman Steps (1923) he gave a good regional novel. As J. B. Priestley puts it, ”Arnold Bennett was at once the historian, the philosopher, and the troubadour of our ordinary human life.”
Other Conventional Novelists :•
Among the other important conventional novelists-that is, those who bother still to tell a story and are not tangibly influenced by the modernistic conception of chronology and the subconscious-may be mentioned Maugham, Hugh Walpole, Swinnerton, and some others. Somerset Maugham started with the realistic’studies of London life, such as Liza ofLambetii, but then he turned his gaze to the life in the Pacific. China and Malaya provide the backdrops of, respectively, The Trembling of a Leaf and The Painted Veil. Maugham is sometimes disconcertingly frank about sexual matters and his greatest character-Rosie of Cakes and Ale- is nothing more than a meretrix. But still she is a woman in a million-the eternal, warm-blooded lover, incidentally a nymphomaniac and adulteress, yet sublime in her tranquil beauty and kindness of heart, untamed by the parochialism which others cannot escape.
Hugh Walpole and Swinnerton were content to stay within the pale of tradition. Walpole’s plots are full of interesting and, not unofien, surprising incidents. Thackeray and Trollope were his obvious models. Frank Swinnerton’s novels of suburban London are in the Arnold Bennett tradition; but^iis tittle masterpiece Nocturne is all his own. J. B. Priestley also fqllowed tradition; and his way of telling stories is quite reminiscent of Dickens’. In him the spirit of the twentieth-century left-wing reformer is dearly to be felt. His characters, though definitely ”alive”, are yet products of commonplace observation.
New Forces-James, Lawrence, and Forster :-
Henry James, D.H.Lawrence, and E. M. Forster struck out new paths-but in different directions. James was the novelists’ novelist just %s Spenser had been the poets’ poet. The modern novelist could learn a lot from James’s fastidious care for form and style. Like Meredith, James gave himself to probing the minds of sensitive characters. The subtle refiaeaMUff ttsttflepnd the niceties of his art are too much for tbe general reader, th<*|& they please the tribe of novelists. He pat into some of the prefaces of his novels his conception of the art of the novel. These criticisms are of very great value-especially to a novelist.
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There are few novelists of today who can beat him in the technical side of their craft
D. H. Lawrence came out with a new land of novel based on a deep study of the sexual passion combined with mystic symbolism and a prophetic strain. But in some of his novela there are also,what David Daiches calk, ”a mtirkiness and a hysteria.* D. H. Lawrence was extremely critical of modern sophisticated civilisation which believed in curbing man’s natural instincts. 16 discover again a free flow of passionate life became for him almosty* mystical ideal. He wrote boldly in the preface to his very controversial novel Lady Giattcricy’s Lover: ”I want men and women to be able to think sex fully, completely, and clearly.” Elsewhere he writes: ”My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect.. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind or moral, or what-not. I conceive a man’s body as a kind of flame, like a Candle flame, for ever upright and yet flowing.” Here, then was the ”fleshly school” of the novel. Sons and Lovers, like some other Lawrence novels, is unmistakably autobiographical. It tells how a family of boys are so dominated by their mother’s affection that when they grow up they cannot love, but lust Some of his subsequent novels, like The Rainbow were banned in certain quarters on the ground of obscenity. As if in revenge, Lawrence published Lady Qtatterley’s Lover which met the same fate and which even today is banned in some countries in the unexpurgated form. Indeed Lawrence sometimes did go too far but it stands to reason whether his novels are pornographic in the true sense of the term. A word about his style. A critic observes: To style, in the ordinary definition of the word, he was indifferent He seems to hack his meaning out of the word, as his father [a coal miner] had hacked coal from the pits. But the effects are original He invented a language in which sexual experience can be described-correct to its every fine shade.” What is Lawrence’s place in the development of the English novel ? David Daiches observes: The fierce individuality of Lawrence’s genius kept him aloof from schools and influences and though one can trace some Lawrentian elements in later novelists, he cannot be said to have bequeathed a significant legacy to English fiction, or at least not one that is yet clearly visible : his increasing popularity in the middle 1950*5 might yet alter this situation.”
Fbrster’s popularity has now considerably declined, and he is now known only for A Passage to India (1924) which,indeed, is a masterpiece. The novel sketches the impact of the British rule on India. Forster is everywhere a crusader against materialism and lack of
Modern Novel/ 529’
sensitiveness. His favourite leitmotif is the struggle of a sensitive and often artistic character against the humdrum world of crude realities around him. Forster is convincing enough, but he is inimical to realism and particularly the realistic novel Moody and Lovettpoint out: The surface manner of Footer’s novels is realistic, but his impatience with realism is apparent in his introduction into his plots of sudden acts of violence or accidents and in his wilful juxtaposition of a romantic figure in a realistic environment ; as in Tlie Longest Journey (1907) or a realistic figure in a romantic environment, as in A Room with a View (1908).” The Psychological Novel :-
James Joyce, Virginia Woelf, and Dorothy Richardson are the . greatest among the psychological novelists of the twentieth century. It is in. their novels that we find the old tradition disappear completely and the three changes listed earlier by us completely realised. They discarded the conventional concept of time and directed their attention to exploration of the layers of human consciousness and even the unconscious. Moody and Lovett observe : ”Development depthwise rather than lengthwise becomes the logical technique.” They are also called the stream-of-consciousness novelists.” They attempt to portray life and reality by setting down everything that goes on in the mind of a character, notably all those unimportant and chaotic thought-sequence which occupy.our idle and somnolent moments, and to which, in real life, we pay but little attention. Influenced by the new psychologists-Freud, Jung, and Adler-they came to recognise the human consciousness as a flowing stream which linked the past, present, and to come in an organic unity, and gave them all a neverchanging reality. At any given moment in time the consciousness of a man is abode of a million disjointed impressions which it is the job of the novelist to reproduce with the least possible interference. In a way the stream-of-consciousness novel bears a close resemblance to Imagist poetry.
James Joyce (1882-1941) was a daring innovator. He started his career as a novelist with realistic pictures of life, but with a special emphasis on the exploration of the states of .human consciousness. In his materpiece Ulysses (1922), however, realism altogether disappears and the novelist is only left with the task of representing the stream of consciousness of the main character. Leopold Bloom is a seedy, grubby solicitor of newspaper advertisement in Dublin. Joyce’s avowed purpose; is to present what passes in the consciousness of Bloom in twenty-four hours-the day and night of June 16,1904. Action com-
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pletely disappears, for the only important ”events” in the novel are Bloom’s meeting with Stephen Dedalus, a young artist, and his reconcilement with his wife Molly. The exhaustive study of Bloom’s mind seems to be without any pattern but critics have come forward to read many parallelisms, myth, symbols, and meanings from and into it. But one thing is certain: Bloom is a hero as well as a commoner. He is the modern Ulysses-the legendary Greek hero and the protagoinst of Homer’s epic, The Odyssey. MoHy is another Penelope to whom Bloom-Ulysses is ultimately reconciled. Nevertheless, Ufysses is a highly complex novellas complex (or even more) as T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land which appeared the same year. Joyce’s later novel Fwnegans Wake (1939) is still more complex. It, say Moody and Lovett, ”is linguistically so intricate that to all but a very few patient and learned readers it is likely to remain an insoluble puzzle.”
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) also tried to convey through her novels, like To the Lighthouse, Mrs. DaUoway, and The Waves, her study of the stream of human consciousaess. She, as Moody and Lovett point out, ”saw consciousness, as all but the behaviouristic psychologist sees it, as a complex of sensations, feelings, emotions, and ideas, and she attempted, through her rendition of this complex to create the sense of being alive.” Her poetic sensitivity was a great asset to her and gave her works a delicate finesse not to be found in Joyce’s. However, she cannot somehow convince the reader of the reality of her characters who but seldom seem to step out the bounds of her mind.
Dorothy Richardson, though less important today than Virginia Woolf, yet influenced her and the subsequent women novelists with her novel Painted Roofs (1915). It was a new kind of novel in England as in it Dorothy Richardson endeavoured to give both the subjective and objective biography of a character-a young woman named Miriam Henderson. The description comes from Miriam’s own mind. It is the stream of her consciousness that Miss Richardson reproduces without any interference on her own part. Her novel is truly feminine, and she comes closest, among all English novelists, to fidelity in her study of the mind of a woman.
The Romancers :-
The impact of psychological study is apparent even in the novel of adventure of the twentieth century. Conrad’s is a good illustration. Gerald Bullet observes: ”Indeed, far from writing in any materialistic spirit, Conrad wrote with the vision and spirit of a poet He wrote of the conflict between man and nature and of the mysteries of the human soul, and in his view of man the word ’soul’ was an inevitable word to use.” Some romancers, like Kipling, however, went merrily along the
Lawrence’s Work and Achievement as a Novelist / 531
beaten track. H. G. Wells wrote a number of interesting ”science romances.”
.The Satirists :-
Huxley, Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh have written novels of ideas rich in satiric elements. Crome Yellow, Point Counter Point, and The Brave New World are Huxley’s best novels. In the last mentined novel he gives a ludicrous picture of the future world with its test-tube babies, ”soma gas,” and cold and effete creatures reminiscent of Swift’s Houyhnhnms. Huxley is a disillusioned cynic whose chief job is to go about disillusioning others. His art is the art-of exposure, not of comprehension. He is a gigantic intellect, but his creative energy is limited and his characters mrre abstractions. Orvretys Animal Farm is a lively and interesting satire on communism. Evelyn Waugh has also impressed with his satirical novels.
LAWRENCE’S WORK AND ACHIEVEMENT AS A NOVELIST
Q. 84. Discuss Lawrence’s work and achievement as a novelist Introduction :-
Lawrence’s achievement as a great modern novelist came to be recognized long after his death in 1930. It was no other than the stormy petrell of criticism, F. k.Leavis, who with his epoch-making D. H. Lawrence : Novelist (1955) rescued Lawrence from faddists and sexmaniacs on the one hand and puritans and respectable ”men of letters” on the other and fairly succeeded, virtually single-handed, in establishing him as ”one of the greatest creative writers in English of our time.” Leavis thus tried to end the era of the neglect and censure of Lawrence, or, what he called, ”the shameful history of misrepresentation and abuse.” While endorsing E. M.Forster’s view that Lawrence, is ”the greatest imaginative write* of the twentieth century,” Leavis included Lawrence in The Great Tradition of the English novel which, according to him, comprised apart from Lawrence, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. Leavis recognized Lawrence’s merit as a critic, a poet, and a dramatist as well, but primarily he singled out his achievement as a novelist~as the very title of his epoch-making work on Lawrence shows.
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Lawrence’s Work and Achievement as a Novelist / 533
Lawrence’s Independence :-
According to Middleton Muny, Lawrence belongs to no school and no tradition, except the ”tradition of himself.” A fierce individualist as he was, his slogan was, not surprisingly, ”Art for My Sake.” As a poet, a critic, a playwright, and as a novelist, he maintained his fierce individuality and refused to yoke his inspiration to the mechanizing discipline of any school or literary coterie. At best his fierce individualism manifests itself in his piercing insights into the predicament of man in the context of twentienth-century civilization, and, at worst, it appears.in his numerous crotchets and brain-waves which have invested his personality with a pronounced aura of eccentricity.
When Lawrence started his writing career hi 1911, such novelists as Bennett, Galsworthy, aind Wells were occupying the scene. These novelists can all be called ”conventional” both as regards the theme and the form of their novels. Love, money, and socia^status are their prime concern and there is not even muted experimentation with the form of the novel. Lawrence revolutionized both the theme and the form of the novel. Once when Arnold Bennett found fault with Lawrence’s bold departure from the traditional structure of the novel, he wrote indignantly in a letter to his literary executor: Tell Arnold Bennett that all rules of construction hold good only for novels which are copies of other novels. A book which is not -a copy of other books has its own construction, and what he calls faults, he being an old imitator, I call characteristics.”
Lawrence criticized novelists such as Flaubert and Mann whose novels are too ”well-made” and who apply themselves all-too-assiduously to their craft. Lawrence believed in his own version of the living, orgnic, or emotional form, which is not external or mentally imposed but grows in response to the necessity of the embodiment of experience. Evidently, Lawrence took a cue from the latter-day romanticists who in turn looked to Coleridge and his German predecessors.
Experiments with Form :•
It may be admitted that in spite of his fierce independence and radical romanticism, Lawrence did not make with the form of the novel experiments which may be described as bold. Some modern novelists, such as Joyce and Virginia Woolf, have been particularly interested in the problems of time and human consciousness. Though Lawrence radically changed the very concept of the novel, he did not much bother about these particular problems. David Daiches observes: ”In his mature novels Lawrence was at least as revolutionary as Joyce in the conception of prose fiction which he was acting out, but he was not involved b those problems of time and consciousness which
Joyce and Virginia Woolf saw as paramount and which had such an immediately visible effect on those writers’ technique.”
Lawrence’s formal excellence rises from the diffident and rather clumsy (from the formal point of view) maiden venture The White Peacock to Women iarLove, which is a tour deforce of tight symbolic architectonics in which texture and structure are in almost perfect harmony and even coalescence. In The White Peacock Lawrence seems to have tried to adopt the Jamesean point-of-view technique according to which the principle of formal coherence is provided by the consciousness of one of the dramatis personae. But, obviously, he has made a mess of it, so much so that at times it becomes difficult to ascertain as to whose point of view-of a character’s or of the novelist himself-is being brought to the fore. Sons and Lovers, The ’Trespasser, and The Lost Girl follow more or less the conventional concept of form; the time pattern is strictly chronological, though the ebb and flow of the human consciouness as also the use of symbols impart to these novels a kind of poetry which is so peculiarly Laurentian.
Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo are structurally the weakest of Lawrence’s novels in which he often seems to be mocking at the very notion of structure. In the former, to quote an instance, there is a chapter entitled ”Talk” which contains nothing more than inconsequential conversation among some of the characters. At one point in this novel he asks the reader to give up reading his novel if he cannot brook his wayward procedure. In Kangaroo Lawrence for once builds bloodcurdling atmosphere of terror and anticipation in the chapter ”Willie Struthers and Kangaroo” where Kangaroo thereatens Somers (the Lawrence figure) with dire consequences for refusing his love. In the next chapter ”Nightmare^ however, Lawrence is so overwhelmingly taken up by his own outrageous experiences in England during the First World War that he forgets everything about the novel in hand to launch a fierce tirade against his own country where the human body is subjected to desecration.
The form of Lady Chatteriey’s Lover suffers from being mechanical. Though it is largely based on the use of symbols and their interaction, the form is a-little too neat and obtrusive because the symbolism is rather schematized. (Lawrence averred it was not so.) The mutually contrasting categories of this scheme of symbols, under which these symbols cohere, are life and death. Connie, Clifford, Mellors, and the wood have obvious enough referends.
The Rainbow and Women in Love, particularly the latter, do not fend themselves to such criticism. The Rainbow is in a sense a ”historical” novel. But how different it is from, say, the novels of Scott! It is a long story involving three successive generations, but what it really
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endeavours to do is to bring out the inner history of the English psyche over about a hundred years. The cohering principle is provided by the most important of human relations-man-woman relationship or, in other words, marriage and self-fulfilment through marriage. The three generations get telescoped into each other and the problems of manwoman adjustment of one serve implicitly as a comment on and a criticism of the others.
According to Daleski, the principle of structure in Women in Love is locative : there are five important mutually connected loci in the novel representing different modes and sections of life. To Eliseo Vivas it is the use of what he calls the ”constitutive symbol” that gives this novel a subtly satisfying structure. There are other opinions, too. It may be noted that the structure of the novel is symbolic and analogical rather than causal~in the traditional Aristotelean sense. Water and the moon, for example, are important symbols which connect mutually divergent (apparently) episodes many of which do not seem to advance the action at all.
Lawrence’s Themes: His Moral Fervour :-
While Lawrence hasn’t much to show in way of formal mastery as a novelist, his achievement in the field of the novel is still tremendous. His uncompromising moral preoccupation which finds expression in all his oeuvre along with his diagnostic insight and perspicacity makes his novels the singular, achievement that they are. The theme of all his novels is both perennial and curiously modern : the achievement of fulfilment through the right cultivation of human relationships. It may be said that all novels, for whatever they are worth, are about human relationships; but Lawrence’s forte is to trace the ever-fluctuating curve of these relationships at a very profound level where human speech gets silenced and where mind _.d will-controlled gestures and actions become sheer irrelevancies. The problem that Lawrence poses in all his novels is: how can a man achieve fulfilment (presuming that there is no God) in the context of the modern, mechanical, industrial civilization which is moving fast towards pure materialism and massinsanity? And because man-woman relationship is the most important of all relationships, much of Lawrence’s exploratory imagination is employed on the depiction of this particular relationship.
It is interesting to note that from The Rainbpw onwards Lawrence’s novels constitute a single series which comprehensively deals with the totality of human relationships, though the emphasis continues to fall on the most important of these relationships. The Rainbow and Women in Love (which were originally conceived as one
Lawrence’s Work and Achievement as a Novelist
novel) explore chiefly the man-woman relationship. But at pi Women in Love ,and particulary at the end, Lawrence hints insufficiency of this relationship alone for man’s fulfilment and suggests in addition man-man relationship as contributory to such fulfilment. The next novel, Aaron’s Rod, takes up the thread and deals chiefly with man-man relationship. Kangaroo, while dealing with manman relationship, also takes up the political question, that is, how best to develop a polity involving a number of people in society. Tlie Plumed Serpent finally considers man’s relationship with ”God”-to Lawrence not a ”personal” authority administering the universe from above but a pantheistic power in which a man participates while fulfilling his nature. Lady Chatterley, Lawrence’s last novel, reverts to and brings into sharp focus Lawrence’s primary concern, namely, man-woman relationship. ’ ’•
Lawrence and Sex :-
As Lawrence concentrated on man-woman relationship, it was inevitable for him to deal intimately with the theme of sex. The boldness of his treatment of this forbidden theme involved him in legal battles against what he called the ”censor-morons” and the ”canaille”. The Rainbow was proscribed and Lady Otaltcrley, with its frank use of the four-letter words and its open (though often poetic) descriptions of the sex act, raised a storm of indignation which Lawrence bad rather hopefully anticipated. In his essays Pornography and Obscenity and Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lawrence tried earnestly to defend his last novel and his use of the obscene words. His plea was that he had used these words to give the phallic reality its true phallic language. He reverenced sex as a mystery beyond the interference of the mind and as the prime mode of achieving the fruition of one’s nature. Lawrence was against the pornographer who tended to cheapen and to commercialize sex as also the puritan who shied away from its very mention as from a tabooi Lawrence, however, could not cut much ice with the people, and, ironically Lady Chatterley has become a collector’s piece for everybody fond of ”porno.” Lawrence’s conviction that there is religious mystery in sex relationship is deemed nothing more than an eccentricity today, but Lawrence is also a’novelist of tomorrow.
I
Q.85.
Q
MODERN POETIC DRAMA
Trace the development of Modern English Poetic
Drama.
(Rohllkband 1985)
Or
Examine the salient features of modern poetic drama. (Rohiikh?jid)!993
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Q. Q
Write a ooteoo the reviymlrftnePoetk Drama hi the twentieth center* ’ . (RohiUdwnd (1978)
Q Write a ihorteswqr oo oo« of tht following :- (e) Modern poetk drama.
(and four more topics) (Agra 1965)
Or” ., … ” ’ /
Q. Write a note <mth« poetk drama of U* twentieth
century >: .
(Himadial 1991, Agra 1958) Introduction :• : . .
Like the rest of the literature of the twentieth century, drama is .marked by excessive realism-almost naturalism. In the early years of the century English drama under the influence of Ibsen, Shaw and Galsworthy was too realistic and too involved in contemporary social problems to be tolerant of any poetry-least of all, poetk expression. Prose–witty,serious, pathetic, or ironical -was the accepted medium of drama. But that does not mean that poetic drama was dead beyond hope. At least a few early twentieth-century dramatists like Stephen Phillips did write poetic drama. In the later years of the century, thanks to Yeats, Abercrombie, Bottomley, and most otall, T. S. Efiot, poetic drama came to its own once again and could thereafter compete with prose drama without, needing any special excuses. In fact, in the twenties of our century there is a clear evidence of a marked reaction against the naturalistic drama of the earlier years; there is, conversely what Allardyce Nicoll in British Drama calls, ”a renascence of imagination.” The ascendency of imagination and the challenge to realism took in the field of drama three divergent directions as below:
(i) The establishment of poetic drama.
(ii) The coming into its own of the modernistic Continental school
(iii) The arrival of the historical dramatists. Stephen Phillips (1864-1915) :-
But even before this ’renascence of imagination* we find tome dramatists writing verse drama in the early years of the twentieth century. Of these dramatist Stephen Phillips deserves the first mention. Paolo and Francesco was his greatest achie””>.ment, though he wrote some other verse plays also, like HerodJJtysses, The Sin of David, and Vsro. His work is not original, for unlike T.S.EIk*,.hedoesoottiyto subject an old traditional style to the needs of the modern age. ”He,” says Nicoll, ”looks backward always andean think of nothing save the
Modern Poetic Drama / S37
continuance of the wornout nineteenth century styles based on uncritical admiration of the Elizabethans,* Now that is just not sufficient Phillips is a fossilized Elizabethan. In spite of their flamboyantly melodramatic elements and wooden characters, his plays dazzled his contemporaries, at least for a time, but could not succeed in creating an appreciable public demand for poetic drama.
His Follow* :-
Nor did he found a tradition, though some dramatists like Rudolf Besier and J. E. Flecker tended somewhat in his direction. Besier’s The Virgin Goddess b written much in the same style as Phillips’. Flecker’s Hassan (published in 1922 and staged in 1923) is different in the sense that it is related to the Middle East. It does capture much of the gorgeous splendour of the East with its hedonistic lustfulness and grotesque sadism, but its characterisation and incidents (mostly of the melodramatic kind) are quite crude and incapable of interesting the more discerning of readers and spectators. There is some really splendid poetry also no doubt, but, to quote Allardyce Nicoll, it is ”a mere patchwork of heterogeneous elements without harmony and without form.* Edward Knoblock’s Kismet (1912) is another Eastern phantasmagoria.
John Masefleld (1878 -1967 ):-
John Mesefield was not affected by the Middle East, but he was influenced * great deal-especially in his later dramatic work-by the Japanese No’drama which was introduced in English for the first time in
1913. In the beginning Masefield tried his hand at domestic and historical themes, in such plays as The Tragedy of Nan, the prose play The Tragedy ofPompey the Gnat, and Philip the King (written in heroic couplets). The Japanese influence is perceptible first in The Faithful (1915). His later plays mostly on religious and historical themes, show an appreciable evidence of the Japanese influence. Good Friday (191T),A King’s Daughter (1923), The Trial of Jesus (1925), Tristran and Isott (1927), and The Coming of Christ (1928) are his important later plays. In them he skilfully combines prose and verse, and, following the precedent of the ancient classical stage, introduces choral interludes. His language is well-wrought but lucid. His Christianity is quite conventional and as such unacceptable to the moderns. But there is a childlike quality in his conception and presentation which cannot go unobserved and uncommended.
John Drinkwater (1882-1937) :•
John Drinkwater is best known for his prose historical drama Abraham Lincoln (1918) which secured for him international fame. But
CU
„*&, –
Aff
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here we are concerned with his poetic dramas which came only before
1918 and which include The Storm (1915), Tin Cod of Quiet (1916), and X-O: A Night of the Trojan War (1917). These plays were not, s popular as Abraham Lincoln and even his other historical dramas like Mary Stuart and Oliver Cromwell, but they helped to promote and preserve the vogue of poetic play. The Storm is indeed very effective and puts one in mind of Synge’s Riders to the Sea. A young woman is waiting fearfully for her husband who has been overtaken by a furious storm. Her mind,torn between hope and fear, comes to a settlement with the bringing in of the dead body of her husband. The play is meditative rather than expressive of action. The storm in the soul of the young woman going to be bereaved is given more importance than the physical storm raging outside her cottage. Her tragedy which she takes with an agonized silence is really pathetic and heart-wringing. X- O attempts a smart exposure of the evils of war. Even the most expensive war yields no profit in the end: it comes to zero. Drinkwater has presented in the play an imaginary episode during the course of the Trojan War. The chief characters of the play are four-two Trojan friends and two Greek friends. At night one of the Trojans leaves his friend behind to kill some Greek straggler, and, likewise one of the Greeks goes to ambush some unwary Trojan. The Greek and the Trojan left behind happen to become the victims It is discovered by the Greek and the Trojan assassins when they come back from their respective errands. Drinkwater, aware as he was of the ttagedy of war, was not yet a pacifist-as iu&Abrafiam Lincoln shows. Lincoln turned to war when things went out of hand, though he did so with a deep spiritual agony.
Yeats and the Irish Movement :•
The Irish Movement contributed a lot to English drama, both prose and verse. The leaders of the Irish Movement were W. B.Yeats (1865-1939) and Synge. Their followers were many and included some very talented writers. Synge wrote plays in a poetic language all his own, but it was prose not verse. Hence he will not detain us here.
Yeats was a poet of considerable powers. His poetic plays posed a serious challenge to the products of the realistc prose school. They were poetic not only in form but spirit also. They were full of rich symbolism, mystic esotericism, and delicate refinements which characterise much of his poetry. Yeats ”deprecated the conversion of the theatre into the lecture-platform and tha pulpit by realistic playwrights.” His was, say Moody and Lovett, ”the first dramatic verse since Jacobean days that was really related to human impulse and
Modern Poetic Drama / 539
expression and was not a mere decoration; he took the new AngloIrish poetry, with its tendency towards rhetoric and its. gleams of racial imaginativeness, and he gave it an aesthetic form that was to be the greatest influence on the next generation of Irish writers.” TJie Countess Cathleen (which came towards the end of the nineteenth century), The Land of Heart’s Desire, The King’s Threshold, On Baile’s Strand, and Deirdre are his chief plays. For sheer poetry and emotional effectiveness The Countess Cathleen occupies the most prominent place. It is the story of a Christ-like countess who offers her own soul for hell in return for the release of many others. She is a benevolent Faustus. On finding her dead even the unsophisticated peasants express them selves poetically :
A Peasant. She was the great white lity of the world. A Peasant. She was more beautiful than pale stars. An Old Peasant Woman. The little plant I love is broken in two. The grief of Aleel, the Countess’s lover, finds a Shakespearean expression. He breaks the Countess’s mirror and exclaims:
I shatter you in fragments, for the face ,r
That brimmed you up with beauty is no more:
And die, dull heartfforshe wliose mournful words
Made you a living spirit has passed away
And left you but a ball of passionate dust.
And you proud earth and plumy sea, fade out I
For you may hear no more her faltering feet,
But are left onfy amid the clamorous war
Of angels upon devils. Yeats was a dramatist of visions and symbols which were to him
Forms more real than living men;
Nurslings of immortality.
”I had unshakable conviction”, he once remarked, ”arising how or whence I cannot tell, that invisible gates would open as they did for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg.” The ”gates” might not have opened wide for Yeats, but at least some wickets did.
Lascelles Abercrorabie (1881-1938) :•
Abercrombie’s verse plays, like Deborah (1913), The Adder(1913), The End of the World (1914), ’Staircase (1920), The Deserter (1922), and Phoenix (1923), struck a note of departure from the fanciful and symbolical plays of Yeats. Abercrombie had nothing to do with the land of fairies or mysticism. He was a poet, no doubt, but he was also *
540 / A History of English Literature
realist He took upon himself the task of adapting the blank verse of the Elizabethan age to the contingencies of the modern times. ReferringtoAbercrombie’s work, Moody and Lovett maintain: ”fundamentally, Abercrombie endeavoured to bring his poetry into close contact with reality. He was not another singer from fairyland as was Yeats: he deliberately departed from the Elizabethan tradition which kept so many writers of the past in its thraldom. Consciously he sought to find a form of blank verse expression which might adequately convey to modem spectators or readers the immediate emotions of our times in terms of poetry. The powerful resonance of his verse, with its peculiar welding of highly imaginative language and common expressions presents a notable contribution to dramatic form.” Abercrombie’s plays are poor in characterisation and stage effects. Moreover, there is a sizable proportion of narrative which does not fit well into the dramatic framework. Anyway, Abercrombie scored an advance upon the unthinking Elizabethanism of Stephen Phillips by .showing a much greater awareness of contemporary taste and conditions.
Dr. Gordon Bottomley :-
Whereas Abercrombie tried to poetise ordinary speech and thus combine poetry with realism, Dr. Gordon Bottomley endeavoured to make an altogether new start. In his search for a new poetic medium he did not turn to the Elizabethans or their Victorian imitators, but the No drama of Japan and the classical drama of Greece. In his youth Bottemley was an enthusiastic admirer of D. G. Rossetti in whom he found, to quote himself,
The lost Italian vision, the passionate
Vitality of art more rich than life,
More real than the day’s reality.
Later, however, his enthusiasm for aestheticism dwindled considerably. His plays can be roughly divided into two groups as follows:
(i) The earlier group; and (ii) the lyric, choral plays.
What attracts our attention in the plays of the earlier group is the solidity of Bottomle/s characterisation and his pleasing inventiveness. These plays include some with Shakespearean themes-such as King Lear’s Wife and G/uocA-which are extremely interesting. Gruach tries to show the background of Lady Macbeth and succeeds in convincing us psychologically.
Modern Poetic Drama / 541
In the choral plays Bottomley further removed dramatic dialogue from common speech. His experiments are quite interesting even though they could not excite much emulation. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965):-
T. S. Eliot has been the greatest shaping force in the literature of the twentieth ccntury»in poetry, criticism, and drama. Long before he came forward with a poetic play of his own, he had started defending poetic drama. In The Possibility of Poetic Drama, The Need for Poetic Drama, Aims of Poetic Drama, and Poetry and Drama he strongly advocated thecauseof poetic drama. At one point, comparing prose and verse as the media of drama, he conveyed histelief that ”poetry is the natural and complete medium of drama, that the prose play is a kind of abstraction capable of giving you only a part of what the theatre can give, and that the verse play’is capable of something much more intense and exciting.”
But all this verbal pleading would have been of little avail if Eliot had not, with his own practice, proved the potentialities of poetic drama in the modern age. He wrote some seven poetic plays which are:
Sweeney Agonistes
TheRock
Murder in the Cathedral
1 The Family Reunion
The Cocktail Party ”0
The Confidential Clerk
The Elder Statesman
Of all of them Murder In the Cathedral is the most outstanding. Bamber Gascoigne observes in Twentieth Century Drama : ”It is the highest tribute to a poetic drama to say, as one can of Murder in the Cathedral, that it is both intensely dramatic and inconceivable in prose.” Eliot’s plays are quite complex (like his poetry), but they are satisfying in their poetry and the evocation of the desired moods by a wonderful handling of the verse medium.
Others :•
W.H.Auden in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood wrote some good poetic plays-TTie Dog Beneath the Skin, The Ascent ofF 6, and On the Frontier. Miss Dorothy Sayers in The Zeal of Thy House and The Devil to Pay followed T. S. Eliot’s lead in handling religious subject-matter. Stephen Spender with The Trial of a Judge came out
I
542 / A History of English Literature
with a powerful poetic play depicting the fate of Liberals and Socialists in the Nazi Germany of Hitler. This play, as Nicoll points out, ”despite its brilliance in execution, exhibits a burning emotion so consuming as todestroy that simple structure from which a stage play must be built.” Christopher Fry in his poetic plays imported some mystical suggestions and philosophical speculations. For this very purpose he preferred verse to prose. His verse is quite suggestive but is sometimes marred by a little immaturity and incomprehensibility. Consider an instance showing both his excellence and weakness.-
Tlie world is an arrow
Or larksong, shot frarjt the earth’s bow and falling
In a stillborn sunrise.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY sX ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM Q. Jfc».. Write an essay on twentieth-century English literary criticism.
Or
Q. Discuss the major trends in modem English literary
criticism.
Introduction :-
The present century has witnessed-and is witnessing-a terrific deluge of literary criticism. Scarcely a day passes when quite a sheaf of critical writings does not make its appearance. To impose some sort of pattern on this tremendous mass of writing-even for the sake of discussion-is a desperate attempt. Our ears are all too familiar with the bewildering cacophony of critical noises which are apt to overset our wits and defy all comprehension. Scarcely does a ”school” of literary criticism appear when it finds another ready to measure swords with it. ”Literary criticism,” says Douglas Bush, ”which for over two thousand years seemed to be a light-house radiating a fairly steady beam, has in recent times become a tower of Babel, or, to change the metaphor, a darkling plain where arrogant armies clash by night.”1 However, on the side of credit, it has to be admitted that some of modern literary criticism is indeed rarely illuminating, and does things undreamt of our ancestors who wer.e unpossessed of the impressive (even though partly dubious) stock-in-trade of the average critic of today.
1. ”American Literary Criticism: The Contemporary Scene”, The Literary Criterion, Vol. 5, no. 3.
Twentieth-Century English Literary Criticism / 543
Some General Observations :•
Some general observations about twentieth-century English literary criticism may now be profitably made, without, of course, losing sight of the fact that it pertinaciously defies ali neat lebclling or wholesale generalisation.
(i) First, we have to take cognizance of America which has contributed to the critical output of the present century more than even Britain. Many critical schools-such as those of the New Critics and the Chicago Critics-and influential critics- such as T. S.Eliot-have sprung from the American soil. Many scholars of literature-notably some British professors-are righly sceptical of the quality of much of American critical output, but credit cannot but be given to a good quantity of it.
(ii) Secondly, we have to take into account, to use Stanley E. Hyman’s words in The Armed Vision ”the organized use of nonliterary techniques and bodies of knowledge to obtain insight into literature”. The sciences of psychology, anthropology, sociology, semantics, linguists, and even mathematics, and such techniques as that of psychoanalysis have been increasingly pressed into the service of literary criticism by many practitioners of this craft in the twentieth century, with sometimes dazzling, and as often, baffling, results.
(iii) Thirdly, we are all too well aware of the complexity of modern literary critidsm-particularly of the American brand. Simplicity has ”simply” gone out of fashion. Even in creative literature, complexity has come to be reverenced and even relished. There is substance in Donald Davie’s complaint. ”The one thing,” says he, ”that really distinguishes the critical pedantry of today is the high price set upon complexity…^ more complex the work the better. The many works of wit* distinguished for massive simplicity, directness of approach, and unaffected lucidity of language are undervalued-or complexity is put upon them.”1
Chief Trends and Schools :-
The literary critics of the twentieth century are, mostly, independent thinkers, yet they can be roughly classified into so uany ”schools” or groups. Some critics, however, stick to, more or less, Victorian modes of criticism, and therefore, may not be called ”modern” or ”modernistic,” and, consequently, ought not detain us here. This category of critics includes Saintsbury, Chesterton, and
1. ”Academism and Jonathan Swift,” Twentieth Century (1953) Vol. CLIV, 217.
544 / A History of English Literature
many others ^*Vy rt»*”», who arc always entertaining and, now and then, illuminating; but they ieem unaware of the winds of change blowing across our age, ncmsitatmg a radical, readjustment of values *nd •ifffrndft, Let us confine our attention here to the truly ’modern* schools and critics of our century. The ISsdwlogkal School >
The group of literary critics who study literature in the light of psycbologyts&n influential one. Theyowe much to Freud, the greatest psychologist of modern times. His psychoanalytic techniques have been adopted by a number of critics for exploring the problems of literature. A psychoanalytic critic attempts to perform the task of piercing the social mask of the writer and studying the unconscious urgtj, frustrations, and motives behind his literary work. Even the characters in a literary work may be subjected to psychoanalysis. Thus Freud’s disciple Ernest Jones treats the famous prince of Denmark in A Psychoanalytic Study of Hamlet (1922). Miss Maud Bodkin, Herbert Read, Lionel Trilling, and Kenneth Burke-among others-have made use of Freudian psychoanalytic techniques in their discussion of literature and literary problems-often with interesting and edifying results. However, the most notable of all psychological critics is I. A. Richards-both in stature and influence. ”Richards,* says George Wrtson, ”is simply the most influential theorist of the century, as Eliot is the most influential of descriptive critics.* 1Richards’ works-77i« Foundations of Aesthetics (1921), The Principfa of IMenw Criticism (W2A)t and Practical Criticism (1929)»have considerably contributed to, and influenced, modern literary criticism. Richards rejected the view that poetry has only the aesthetic value. He averred that it has psychologically therapeutic value, though no cognitive importance. Further, he popularised, the concept of ”anonymity in literature” by directing the attention of the reader from the poet to his poetry. He struck a note of dissent with the strict Freudians who gave primary importance to the comprehension of the psychology of the poet. Thus he was instrumental in lessening the popularity of ”biographical” and ”historical” criticism which ruled the roost before the twentieth century, and promoting the techniques of close reading and verbal analysis adopted by the so-called New Critics years later: Watson says : ”Richards claim to have pioneered Anglo American New Criticism of the thirties and forties is unassailable. He provided the theoretical foundations on which the technique of verbal analysis was built’’
4
JL The Literary Critics, p. 177.
m ’I^^^-Ce^mi^^^n^^^1^
B The New Critics :-
B The New Criticism arose in England in the late twenties and
££ R spread to the United States, in the years following the Second World
fi?^B War, to dominate academic criticism in the’forties, and partly, the
tMP fifties. John Crowe Ranson, Allen late, Robert Penn Warren,
^jTf R. P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, and Cleanth Brooks are the most
OH important New Critics. They discredited the historical arid biographi-
£*%}! cal background of a poem, to concentrate on the poem itself. Their
>”^B ideal programme”, says Irving Howe in Modem Literary Criticism,
71 ”posited-and in practice they sometimes achieved-a close and patient
*”!• description of what the poem is.” Their neglect of the historicity of a
* I work of literature was both a disadvantage as well as an advantage.
Oil Lionel Trilling asserts ”that the literary work is ineluctably a historical
fSDl fact, and what is more important, that its historicity is a fact in our
VP| aesthetic experience.” The New Critical methods were useful only
I I while dealing with lyrical poetry which, as Trilling puts it, is ”a genre in
V«l which the historical element, although of course present, is less
*F*I obtrusive than in the long poem, the novel and the drama,”
•?•*•( A word here may be added about a brilliant but somewhat con-
• troversial critic-William Empson, once a student of I. A. Richards.
• Empson is not, strictly speaking; a New Critiq but in his technique of
• brilliant verbal anylysis, he comes close to some New Critics. His
• major works are Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Some Versions of
• Pastoral (1935), and Tlte Structure of Complex Words (1951). The first
• mentioned is the most important of all. With concrete analyses-many
• of them extremely brilliant and illuminating-he points out in this work
• the various shades and nuances of meaning the understanding of whirh qm is essential forjhe appreciation of the total poetic statement. Enipsou
• is often subtle, but sometimes looks too fussy and quibbling, and even m ”ambiguous.” We owe him the vogue of ”difficult” poetry, for ambiguity r is tacitly exalted by him as the test of the greatness of a poem. I Objections to such a position have come from many quarters. Here is
1 F. L. Lucas*: ”In a recent work with the apocalyptic title, Seven Types | of Ambiguity, it has been revealed to an admiring public that the more
JL ways a poem can be misunderstood, the better it is.
1 The Impressionistic and Romantic School :•
jj The impressionistic critics are concerned with recording their
! personal impressions when they are in contact with a given work of art,
”without attempting to generalize or draw inferences.”2 ”Criticism,”
1. The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1937), p. 288.
2. Osborne, Aesthetics and Criticism, p. 17.
V
544 / A Hktory of English Literature
many others like them, who are always entertaining and, now and then, fflumiaating; but they .seem unaware of the winds of change blowing across our age, nnyttitaimg a radical, readjustment of values *nd •ffitwter Let us confine our attention here to the truly ”modern* schools and critics of our century.
The ftycbologjkal School N
The group of literary critics who study literature in the light of psychology is an influential one. They owe much to Freud, the greatest psychologist of modern times. His psychoanalytic techniques have been adopted by’a number of critics for exploring the problems of literature. A psychoanalytic critic attempts to perform the task of piercing the social mask of the writer and studying the unconscious urg,. j, frustrations, and motives behind his literary work. Even the Characters in a literary work maybe subjected to psychoanalysis. Thus Freud’s disciple Ernest Jones treats the famous prince of Denmark in A Psychoanalytic Study of Hamlet (1922). Miss Maud Bodkin, Herbert Read, Lionel Trilling, and Kenneth Burke-among others-have made use of Freudian psychoanalytic techniques in their discussion of literature and literary problems-often with interesting and edifying results.
However, the most notable of all psychological critics is I. A. Richards-both in stature and influence. ’Richards,* says George V&tson, ”is simply the most influential theorist of the century, as Elk* is the most influential of descriptive critics.** Richards’ works-TTur Foundations of Aesthetics (1921), The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), and Practical Criticism (1929)»have considerably contributed to, and influenced, modern literary criticism. Richards rejected the view that poetry has only the aesthetic value. He averred that it has psychologically therapeutic value, though no cognitive importance. Further, he popularised, the concept of ”anonymity in literature* by directing the attention of the reader from the poet to his poetry. He struck a note of dissent with the strict Freudians who gave primary importance to the comprehension of the psychology of the poet. Thus he was instrumental in lessening the popularity of ”biographical” and •historical” criticism which ruled the roost before the twentieth century, and promoting the techniques of close reading and verbal analysis adopted by the so-called New Critics years later: Watson says : ”Richards claim to have pioneered Anglo American New Criticism of the thirties and forties is unassailable. He provided the theoretical foundations on which the technique of verbal analysis was built”
V’J ;
L The Literary Critics, p. 177.
s
&y si
3)
oJ tel
^ •M
Twentie ,h-Century English Literary Criticism / 545
The New Critics :-
The New Criticism arose in England in the late twenties and spread to the United States in the years following the Second World War, to dominate academic criticism in the forties, and partly, the fifties. John Crowe Ranson, Allen late, Robert Penn Warren, R. P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, and Cleanth Brooks are the most important New Critics. They discredited the historical arid biographical background of a poem, to concentrate on the poem itself. Their ideal programme”, says Irving Howe in Modem Literary Criticism, ”posited-and in practice they sometimes achieved–a close and patient description of what the poem is.” Their neglect of the historicity of a work of literature was both a disadvantage as well as an advantage. .Lionel Trilling asserts ”that the literary work is ineluctably a historical fact, and what is more important, that its historicity is a fact in our aesthetic experience.” The New Critical methods were useful only while dealing with lyrical poetry which, as Trilling puts it, is ”a genre in which the historical element, although of course present, is less obtrusive than in the long poem, the novel and the drama.”
A word here may be added about a brilliant but somewhat controversial critic-William Empson, once a student of I. A. Richards. Empson is not, strictly speaking, a New Critic; but in his technique of brilliant verbal anylysis, he comes close to some New Critics. His major works are Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), and Tlie Structure of Complex Words (1951). The first mentioned is the most important of all. With concrete analyses-many of them extremely brilliant and illuminating-he points out in this work the various shades and nuances of meaning the understanding of which is essential for .{he appreciation of the total poetic statement. Empv >n is often subtle, but sometimes looks too fussy and quibbling, and even ”ambiguous.* We owe him the vogue of ”difficult” poetry, for ambiguity is tacitly exalted by him as the test of the greatness of a poem. Objections to such a position have come from many quarters. Here is F. L. Lucas*: ”In a recent work with the apocalyptic title, Seven Types of Ambiguity, it has been revealed to an admiring public that the more ways a poem can be misunderstood, the better it is.”1
The Impressionistic and Romantic School :•
The impressionistic critics are concerned with recording their personal impressions when they are in contact with a given work of art, ”without attempting to generalize or draw inferences.”2 ”Criticism,”
L The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1937), p. 288.
2. Osborne, Aesthetics and Criticism, p. 17.
5467 A History of English Literature
says an impressionistic critic M. Jules Lemaitre, .”whatever be its pretensions, can never go beyond defining the impression which, at a given moment is made on us by a work of art wherein the artist has himself recorded the impression he received from the world at a certain hour.” The impressionistic critics are impatient of all dogmas and processes of labelling and codification. Thus they are, in a sense, ”romantic” in their attitude. The most important of impressionistic romantic critics is John Middleton Murry who waged for years in his journal, the Adelphi, a debate on behalf of what’he called the ”inner voice” and ”romanticism” against the ”classicism” of T. S. Eliot.
The Sociological Critics :-
The twentieth century has also seen the emergence of a group of critics who emphasize the sociological context in the study of a work of literature or even art in general. Most of them are avowed Marxists, and their approach to literature, therefore, is propagandist and prejudiced. They”, as Rene Wellek says in Theory of Literature, ”tell us not only what were and are the social relations and implications of an author’s work but what they should have been or ought to be. They are not only students of literature and society but prophets of the future, monitors, propagandists: and they have difficulty in keeping these two functions separate.” The sociological approach (both Marxist and anti-Marxist) has many more adherents in America than England. Christopher Caudwell, Raymond Williams, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, W. H-Auden, and Stephen Spender are some of the most important critics whose critical approach is markedly sociological. The Marxian critic of today is Terry Eaglcton.
The Moralists :•
Now we come to a group of literay critics of the present century whom Watson classifies as ”the moralists.”1 They include D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell, even F. R. Leavis, and Murry-with some others of less importance. The moralists are occupied with the problem of discriminating between good and bad in literature. They lack, however, the certitude of Dr. Johnson and the past critics of his ilk. Watson says: ”Modern moralism, by contrast, is more often agnostic, exploratory, and self-consciously elitist : its tone is not that of the common preacher anticipating assent: it is more often embktered and embattled”. D. H. Lawrence who in Leavis’ opinion, was the greatest literary critic of the present century, fought in his novels a savage battle against the taboos of society, civilisation, and Christianity. He brought
1. The Literary Critics, p. 196
Twentieth-Century English Literary Criticism / 547
something of the same fighting spirit to his critical works. The moralists are all fighters and disciple-makers, even when they find much difficulty in their way. They despise hoity-toity behaviour. Says Watson : ”George Orwell, aggressively pouring his tea into his saucer in the B. B. C. canteen may be taken as the eternal model of the modern English moralist.” The influence of the moralists is, however, now on the wane, though what they (particularly D. H. Lawrence) had to say is of the same significance today as it was when it was said. Eliot and Leavis :-
T. S.Eliot has been the most influential of the American-born literary critics of the present century. In his critical works he has thrown out, to quote G.S.Fraser, ”a number of suggestive or disturbing ideas-ideas often compressed into a single phrase–lhat have fertilized the thinking of other critics. Empson has wittily described him as a penetrating and inescapable influence, rather like an east wind.” His views regarding .tradition versus the individual talent, poetic drama, impersonality in poetry, the ”dissociation of sensibility,” and a hundred other themes and problems have to be taken cognizance of by every literary commentator worth the name. Much of Eliot’s literary criticism is, indeed, an extension of his poetry work-shop, for it deals with the issues he has to tackle as a poet. However, it has proved to be of much wider significance. Such twentieth-century literary phenomena as the ”revival” of Donne and Dryden and the devaluation of Milton, and such vogues as that of the placement of every writer and every writing with reference to a tradition, and that of the appreciation and admiration of ”difficult” poetry issue mainly from T. S. Eliot. The New Crilics aNn acknowledge their debt to Eliot.
F. R. Leavis is a controversial disciple of Eliot. He is to be acknowledged, however, as the most influential of the British-born literary critics of the present century. No doubt; he later quarrelled with even Eliot and rather spitefully affirmed that Lawrence was a better critic than he, but Eliot’s influence on him cannot be denied. Leavis is so influential that, to quote Watson, ”there are probably few Departments of English in the Commonwealth which do not boast, or conceal, at least one disciple.”2 His disparagement of Milton and Shelley, and exaltation of Pope and Marvell have wrought a change in the critical thinking of today. Among the English novelists, he points out Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad, and Lawrence as the ones
1. The Modem Writer and His World (Penguin), p. 373.
2.’ The Literary Critics, p.187
548’A History of English Literature
who make up The Great Tradition.” Leavis is extremely adept at verbal analysis which, however, is loot his usual, not to say the only, method. His approach is, fundamentally, that of a moralist who is carefully looking for reverence to life. G.S. Fraser says: ”The ’quality of life* is what Leavis is primarily interested in and in literature as serving that, but he is a moralist who refuses to generalize.” Leavis’ energetic responsiveness, his penetrative analysis, and intellectual alacrity are his great assets, but his rigidness and pontifical self-aggrandisement cannot be defended. Among his disciples the most important are David Daiches and L. C Knights (a really great critic in his own right), not to speak of the numerous band who wrote for Scrutiny.
As regards literary criticism, the scene today (1995) is a very confused one-one incapable of being reduced even to a semblance of order. We face a whole welter of literary theories and critical approaches. All of them make up a formidable body of literary aesthetics, but we have to wait long for their profitable application to actual literary works.