English Literature

C

Modern Poetry

Two of the most remarkable poets of the modern period combined tradition and experiment in their work. The Irish writer William Butler Yeats was the more traditional. In his romantic poetry, written before the turn of the century, he exploited ancient Irish traditions and then gradually developed a powerfully honest, profound, and rich poetic idiom, at its maturity in The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933). The younger poet, T. S. Eliot, born in the United States, achieved more immediate acclaim with The Waste Land (1922), the most famous poem of the early part of the century. Through a mass of symbolic associations with legendary and historical events, Eliot expresses his despair over the sterility of modern life. His movement toward religious faith displayed itself in Four Quartets (1943). His surprising combination of colloquial and literary diction, his fusing of antithetical moods, and his startling, complex metaphorical juxtapositions relate him, among English poets, to John Donne. Eliot's style was intimately influenced by his study of such French poets as Jules Laforgue and Saint-John Perse. Eliot's essays, promulgating a style of poetry in which sound and sense are associated, were probably the most influential work in literary criticism in the first half of the century.

Both Yeats and Eliot exercised enormous influence on modern poets. A third influence was that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Victorian poet whose work was not introduced to the world until 1918. The conflict between his Roman Catholicism and his sense of the beauty of this world, and his complicated experiments in metrics and vocabulary have attracted much attention.

Of the many poets stimulated to indignant verse by World War I, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves rank among the most lastingly important. Graves's ability to produce pure and classically perfect poetry kept his reputation strong long after World War II. His historical novels, such as I, Claudius and Claudius the God (both 1934), also helped to maintain his popularity. The verse of Dame Edith Sitwell, who communicated her disdain of commonplace propriety as much by the aristocratic individualism of her personal attitudes as by her poetry, was first published during World War I; her experimentalism had little directly to do, however, with social problems. Extravagantly imaginative metaphors after the manner of the metaphysical poets, and conscious distortion of sense impressions, somewhat as in modern painting, were among her poetic devices. After World War II she wrote more compassionate and moving poetry, as in The Canticle of the Sun (1949) and The Outcasts (1962).

The succeeding generation of poets, identified in the popular consciousness with the depression and social upheaval of the 1930s, made use at first of so much private or esoteric symbolism as to render the poetry barely intelligible to any but a small coterie of readers. The best known of these—W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis—filled their earlier poetry with political and ideological discussion and with expressions of horror at bourgeois society and nascent totalitarianism. After such verse plays as The Ascent of F-6, written in 1936 in collaboration with Christopher Isherwood, Auden's poetry became more reflective in The Double Man (1941) and, later, City Without Walls (1969). So, too, Day Lewis moved from The Magnetic Mountain (1935) to a more personal lyricism in World Above All (1943). His Poetic Image (1947) was a prose exposition of the modern poetic ideal. The position of poet laureate, held by Day Lewis from 1968 to 1972, subsequently passed to Sir John Betjeman, popular for his nostalgic humor.

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Experimentalism continued in the exuberantly metaphorical poetry of the Welsh writer Dylan Thomas, whose almost mystical love of life and understanding of death were expressed in some of the most beautiful verse of the middle of the century. After Thomas's death in 1953, a new generation of British poets emerged, some influenced by him and some reacting against his influence. Among the leading poets of that generation were D. J. Enright, Philip Larkin, John Wain, Thom Gunn, and Ted Hughes. Although they had different styles, these poets constituted what became known as The Movement and sought to appeal to the common reader with a nonsentimental poetry of the everyday, written in colloquial language. Larkin (Collected Poems, 1988) often wrote of deprivation and absence. Hughes, whose poetry is noted for its depiction of the savagery of life, became one of England’s most significant poets and was made poet laureate in 1984 after the death of Betjeman. Poet and critic Andrew Motion was named poet laureate in 1999, following Hughes’s death.

Prominent British poets of the late 20th century included Craig Raine, Wendy Cope, James Fenton, and Seamus Heaney. Raine’s early collection, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), brings a fresh viewpoint to many topics. Wendy Cope’s witty insights appear in Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986). Fenton’s collection Out of Danger (1994) covers love, war, and the political violence he encountered as a war correspondent in southeast Asia. Heaney, from Northern Ireland, won the 1995 Nobel Prize in literature. Although his poetry appears simple in its language and flow, its structure and references are often complex.

D

Modern Drama

Aside from the later plays of George Bernard Shaw, the most important drama produced in English in the first quarter of the 20th century came from another Irish writer, Sean O'Casey, who continued the movement known as the Irish Renaissance. Other playwrights of the period were James Matthew Barrie, John Galsworthy, Somerset Maugham, and Sir Noel Coward. Beginning in the 1950s the so-called angry young men became a new, salient force in English drama. The dramatists John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Shelagh Delaney, and John Arden focused their attention on the working classes, portraying the drabness, mediocrity, and injustice in the lives of these people.

Although Harold Pinter and the Irish writer Brendan Behan also wrote plays set in a working-class environment, they stand apart from the angry young men. In such works as The Birthday Party (1957) and Betrayal (1979) Pinter seems to offer reasonable interpretations of his characters' behavior, only to withdraw the interpretations or set them slightly askew in an effort to keep the audience intent on every least hint in the action on stage. Outside the literary mainstream was the Irish-born novelist-dramatist Samuel Beckett, recipient in 1969 of the Nobel Prize in literature. Long a resident in France, he wrote his laconic, ambiguously symbolic works in French and translated them himself into English (Waiting for Godot, play, 1953; How It Is, novel, 1964).

Both English and American audiences have enthusiastically received the plays of Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1964), Loot (1967), and What the Butler Saw (1969) are farces dealing with the perverseness of modern morality; dazzling verbal ingenuity distinguishes Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Travesties (1974), and The Real Thing (1982). Stoppard’s inventiveness continued in his later plays that explore such nonliterary ideas as quantum mechanics (Hapgood, 1988) and entropy—nature’s tendency toward disorder—(Arcadia, 1993). Stoppard’s trilogy, The Coast of Utopia (2002), chronicled conflicting views among radicals in 19th-century tsarist Russia. Michael Frayn, best-known for his comedy Noises Off (1981) about the theater, based the play Copenhagen (1998) on a 1941 meeting between two physicists involved in atom-bomb research on opposite sides during World War II.

Other important British dramatists of the late century included Alan Ayckbourn, Caryl Churchill, and David Hare. Ayckbourn wrote farcical dramas about middle-class anxieties, including Absurd Person Singular (1973) and Communicating Doors (1995). Churchill focused on gender and economics in provocative plays such as Cloud 9 (1979) and Serious Money (1987) and presented a bleak future of barbarism in Far Away (2000). Hare’s politically engaged plays include Plenty (1978), a satire about postwar Britain, and The Judas Kiss (1998), about the downfall of playwright Oscar Wilde.

See also Drama and Dramatic Arts; separate articles on literary forms and movements.