Riassunto esame Letteratura inglese, prof. Cavone, libro consigliato English Literature. A Short History, Bertinetti

The first half of the twentieth century

Modernism

The first years of the 20th century, the so-called Edwardian age, marked the peak of British imperial power. The reign of Edward VII, who came to the throne in 1901 after the death of Queen Victoria, was accompanied by a consolidation of the nation's economic, industrial and military fortunes. The working and living conditions of the labouring classes remained at times even inhuman (as shown, for example, in Shaw's unpleasant plays). But the dominant class, the bourgeoisie, could think of itself as the protagonist of an order that would last forever. The First World War was to destroy this illusion. The seeds of dissolution of this order were already present at the beginning of the century. It was evident that the old world of the 19th century would have to give way to the new world, to modernity. "Make it new" was the command issued by the American poet Ezra Pound. Essays, manifestos, magazines (such as Wyndham Lewis's entitled BLAST) had the task of sweeping away the literary conventions of the past.

Modernism was the name of the movement which, in the years before the war, destroyed everything that stood in the way of the foundation of the new world that was to come into the post-war period. Modernism went hand in hand, however, with the recovery of tradition: not recent tradition, but the tradition which constituted the golden treasury of European culture. For Pound, this started with Provencal poetry and Dante, for Eliot it went right back to Homer, as claimed in his essay Tradition and the individual talent: the modernist poet, said Eliot, needed to escape the provincial world of the insular culture of Britain, open up to international culture and come face to face with the inheritance of the European mind.

Post-World War I literary changes

After the end of the First World War, a number of writers felt that the changes that had taken place since the end of the 19th century, culminating in the war, had broken up that community of thought and feeling which had allowed the writer to represent reality with reliable criteria at hand with which to organise it. This had various consequences. On the one hand, the writer feels it was no longer possible to represent life in its completeness and might therefore choose to limit the matter of his narration to a few days or even a few hours, in the conviction that it was better to investigate a single fact, and that this fact, through its link with past experiences, could, perhaps, make visible the sense of a single life (Joyce's epiphanies representing sudden moments of revelation).

On the other hand, the choice might be to dissolve reality into multiple reflections of consciousness: this involved, as with Joyce, recourse to the stream of consciousness, the translation onto the page of the unconscious process of thoughts, associations and sensations passing through the mind. Or, as with Virginia Woolf, it might mean renouncing the narrator's point of view in favour of the adoption of a multiplicity of points of view. Some years earlier, writers such as Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, without adopting these new techniques, had nevertheless found their way to narrative solutions (the second narrator, the unreliable narrator) which in their way demonstrated the difficulty of storytelling in the traditional mode.

The loss of the centre was the denounce of the impossibility of telling a story in a linear way deriving from an ordered vision of the world, now that the world was no longer knowable in its totality. And this was true for poets as well as for novelists: "I can connect nothing with nothing," laments Eliot in The Waste Land. Confusion, lack of solid point of reference, but a simultaneous awareness of the necessity and possibility of representing unexplored dimensions of reality, translated into the literary flowering of the 1920s.

The Bloomsbury Group

A fundamental contribution was made by the Bloomsbury Group, formed by a group of people, each revolutionary in his field. The heart of the group was constituted by the economist John Keynes, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the art critic Roger Fry, and Leonard Woolf and the art historian Clive Bell, who married respectively the sisters Virginia and Victoria, daughters of Leslie Stephen, the literary critic at whose house the group was to meet. The Bloomsbury Group was noted for its rejection of Victorian sexual convention and it also promoted women's writing, contributing to the achievement of parity of expression for women writers in the early 20th century.

Among such writers, Katherine Mansfield stands out: she was born in New Zealand and throughout her work, her distant origins and her childhood had an important metaphorical value. She was the author of splendid short stories in which there's the influence of Chekhov; but her writing remains markedly original. She often manages without any definite plot and allows the sense of the story to emerge from an equilibrium of particulars, sensations and impressions, and a modernist recourse to multiple points of view.

Poetry in the early 20th century

For much of the first part of the 20th century, English critics concurred in a preference for a traditionalist form of poetry, such as that of the much admired John Masefield: this was a type of poetry which celebrated English tradition and rural life through easy and repetitive verse forms. The renewal of poetic language came partly through the lesson of French symbolism, but more important was imagism, the movement which had its foundation in the idea of a hard, dry image to counterpoise to the languor of late romantic poetry. The most influential promoter of this idea was Ezra Pound: he declared that the sugary mode in which, he said, English poetry remained stuck had to be got rid of and replaced by a poetic mode that was hard and clear. Narrative poetry in the Victorian style also had to give way to a short, intense and compact lyric form: "Less is more." So no more abundance of adjectives or metaphors, but rather a direct language, concentrated on putting forward the centrality of the image which would be capable of abolishing the distinction between poetry and prose and incorporating into poetry the language of the everyday.

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) came from a protestant family in Dublin. His father and his brother were both painters and he himself studied for 3 years at Dublin's Metropolitan School of Art. The relationship with this figurative arts was to remain a central element in his work throughout his career as a poet. At the outset of his career (last decades of the 19th century) Yeats was immersed in a late romantic atmosphere and his poetry had an elegiac character which found its inspiration in the legendary figures of ancient Ireland, in a natural beauty still uncontaminated by the industrial development (The Celtic twilight).

In this early period, he was already a formidable creator of a poetry with an imagery based on the simplest elements but capable of the most profound suggestiveness. The tone tended to be nostalgic, suggestive of a feeling of abandonment. An important influence on his mature poetry was provided by French symbolism; but what was decisive was his encounter with Pound, the chief proponent of literary modernism, while ideologically a crucial role was played by the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, out of which, as Yeats writes in his famous poem Easter 1916, "a terrible beauty" was born.

Abandoning the melancholic tones of his previous work, he turned to a more direct language incorporating the words of colloquial speech, exploiting the richness of all its expressive variants. At the same time, he left behind the tendency to merge the personal into the mythical and began to confront the dilemmas of the present. But this was a present to which he felt hostility. It is perhaps for this reason that the esoteric ideas that he cultivated assume such a major role in his work: they corresponded to an aspiration to discover, outside of time and history, the spiritual unity of the world that he found in Byzantine mosaics, works of art capable of letting us see the artifice of eternity. Yeats's modernist poetry covers the most diverse linguistic registers, it passes from the most exalted tones to the most tender, from enchantment to reflection. The Nobel Prize awarded to him in 1923 was a deserved recognition of the lyrical gift and richness of fantasy of one of the greatest European poets of the 20th century.

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965) was born in Missouri and studied at Harvard University, where he knew the work of the metaphysical poets and Dante, who were to remain the two fundamental reference points throughout his career as a poet and critic. Equally formative was the encounter with the best French poetry of the second half of the 20th century, the symbolists in particular. More important still was his meeting with Pound, who encouraged him to settle in London, where the young Eliot came into contact with the revolutionary art movements which had recently sprung up in the British capital.

In "BLAST" in 1915 Eliot published Rhapsody on a windy night, which already contains one of the thematic images central to his poetry, that of urban squalor. Two years later, with Pound's help, he prepared for press a collection of poems written between 1908 and 1915, entitled Prufrock and other observation, in which modernist poetic writing was put on display. On the linguistic side, there was a use of everyday language to portray the unpoetic reality of the contemporary world; philosophically, there was a response to the crisis of the self in the presentation of the fragmentation of consciousness. Linearity was replaced by a decomposition and dislocation and co-presence of different places and times. The recourse to satire and ironic characterises the whole of the first phase of Eliot's poetic work right up to The hollow man.

In 1922, again with a crucial editorial intervention of Pound, there appeared Eliot's masterpiece, The waste land, the poem which contains the most complete vision of the world offered by the modernist consciousness. The opening lines, with the cruel month of April "breeding lilacs out of the dead land", pre-announces the theme of the work, which is that of the crisis of western civilisation seen through the symbol of the loss of fertility. One of the central elements of the poem is that of the legend of the Fisher King, who has lost his virility, causing his people and his land to lose fertility. Another is the figure of Tiresias, whom Eliot himself sees is "the substance of the poem".

Tiresias, the androgyne with wrinkled female breasts, watches the loveless and passionless coupling of a typist and a small house agent's clerk: quick, mechanical, sterile, emblematic of a world incapable of procreation. Central is the image of the city: London is for Eliot the unreal city, a place of alienation and absolute anonymity, traversed by dead souls. Various moments of history, not in the form of complete acts but as fragments from different past eras of the most disparate cultures, co-exist in a desolate present, where a man encountered in the street can turn out to be a former fellow sailor from a naval battle. In the parallels between the present and the antique, the choice of allusive references plays a key role. Pound's intervention, which involved cutting Eliot's original text, was fundamental in giving salience to this aspect, by eliminating linking passages and descriptive interludes and giving the poem its structure in blocks and fragments whose intensity highlights the disturbing portrait of contemporary desolation.

Eliot's poetic choice, so revolutionary to his contemporaries, to focus on the most anguished, often squalid aspects of the reality of his time stemmed from a feeling of revulsion towards the modern world. However, Eliot's personal and poetic trajectory was marked by an overcoming of the negativity of his vision through the adoption of a religious perspective. In 1927 he was received into the Anglican church. The immediate consequence of this new perspective was Ash Wednesday – a purgatorio, that follows the inferno of The Waste Land and precedes the paradise of the Four Quartets. Ash Wednesday offers a new musicality, with a new verse pattern which makes frequent use of rhyme and the magic of a phrase recurring as in a religious chant. The external world has no purchase: all attention is directed towards the inner world.

Four Quartets is a poem in four parts: Burnt Norton, East Coker, The dry salvages and Little gidding. Each quartet starts with a reference to the poet's personal experience which gives its name to the title of the poem, and then develops with a reflection which is at the same time private and absolute, aiming at reveal the presence of the divine in our life and in history (the incarnation is a constant refrain). As the poem oscillates between the human and the transcendent, in the background there is the presence of war. The dramatic reality of those years contributed to the enthusiastic reception of a work whose language was in tune with the times. Four Quartets is a high point of the religious poetry of the 20th century and a masterly conclusion to Eliot's poetic career, from the anguish of The waste land to the serenity of transcendence.

Wystan Hugh Auden

In the 1930s many young intellectuals, in response to the political tragedies of the period (the rise of Nazism, the Spanish civil war), attached themselves to left-wing causes. Prominent among these was a group of poets whose leading exponent was Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 – 1973). Auden was a poet with an astounding facility for versification (he liked to think in verse) and very rapidly became famous for the originality of a verse language which mixed a great variety of metrical forms and poetic sources. His first volume, Poems, with the influence of Eliot and echoes of ancient English poetry, wished to reconnect with pre-modernist poetry. But its language is multi-faceted, full of elements stolen from a wide variety of expressive forms, not least the music hall and cabaret.

The Orators investigates British society in a mixture of poetry and prose, it's his proclamation for active intervention in a society marked by the depression and unemployment at the economic level and by Nazism and Fascist totalitarianism in politics. The political ideals of liberty and social justice underlying the denunciation of the current situation were the basis of the poetic production both of Auden and of his fellow-poets of the same generation (Stephen Spender, Louise MacNiece and Cecil Day-Lewis). Their involvement in the political battles fought by the Left was often naïve, but always animated by an aversion to a system of power experienced as unjust and illiberal. In Auden's case homosexuality, discriminated against and persecuted, was a further wellspring of rebellion against a critical establishment repressive towards the fact of their difference.

When the civil war broke out, Auden went out to Spain for two months to support the international brigades and wrote the poem Spain 1937. Returning to it in 1940, he thought it should be omitted from his collected works: for poetry itself no longer seemed to him a possible vehicle of change. In 1939 he went to live in the United States, where he published Another Time, followed by The double man: the theme, alongside the abandonment of political hypocrisy, is now that of the existential solitude of man, and gives ample space to religious reflection, intensified by the death of his mother, to whom he dedicated For the time being. Of his subsequent works, the most memorable is The shield of Achilles, with its denunciation of the ills of modern society. Even here, and in his later works, he never loses his ability to marry popular modes of expression with the highest forms of literary artifice. He never lost his gift of being able to master every metrical or poetic form and to invest traditional structures with the novelty of a language which is brilliant in its modernity.

Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953) was an eccentric personage of the British literary scene in the immediate post-war years. Very famous in the 1950s, in recent years he has been the victim of critical neglect. His poetic style, which made him famous, with its emphasis on direct access to the emotions and so different from that of Eliot or Auden, represents one of the most original contributions to English poetry of the 20th century. Thomas was very attentive to the sound of his verse but he was also a poetic technician, obsessive in polishing his text, as is evidenced by the tormented redraftings, full of corrections and rethinkings, of many of his poems. His main theme was that of the oneness of every form of life and of the continuity of life, death and new life. But equally important was his emphasis on the link between sexuality and religious myth.

From his youthful work (Eighteen Poems – The map of Love) onwards, his poetic style is marked by surrealist influence, but also by that of Blake and by the Welsh religious folklore tradition. This cultural baggage, unlike what often happens in Modernism, doesn't make itself a directly felt presence in the text; what happens rather is that he abandons himself to the creation of images that are both contrasting and interlaced with each other. This gift is particularly evident in the drama Under Milk Wood, published after his death.

Narrative: new and not so new

In the second half of the 19th century, French writers transformed the novel, first with Flaubert and Maupassant, with their attention to form and to the word, and then with Zola, with his revolutionary doctrine of naturalism. Henry James, the cosmopolitan American writer who settled in Europe in the late 1870s, was a force in convincing the English cultural world of the importance of this French revolution. The echoes of this revolution found their way into the novel in the 1890s, first with George Moore and then George Gissing and Somerset Maugham, whose novel Liza of Lambeth dates from 1897. The most successful novelists of the first years of the 20th century, Bennett, Wells and John Galsworthy, were all convinced of the need to get beyond the formal limits of the 19th century. Wells was in contact with Henry James and with Ford Madox Ford, and Joseph Conrad dedicated Nostromo to Galsworthy and The secret agent to Ford.