|
Master
Poets of the
20th Century
By Moira Clark
It was T E Hulme, the influential literary journalist, who was the father of Imagism. He wanted to move away from the romantics and their 'sloppiness which doesn't consider a poem is a poem unless it is whining or moaning about something or other'. He called for tougher, more disciplined verse of a 'dry hardness' that captured 'the exact curve of the thing'. Thus the Imagist school was founded and it was to have a profound effect on the poetry of the twentieth century.
Four poets emerged -, W B Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Ezra Pound and T S Eliot.
W B Yeats
Born in 1865, William Butler Yeats might be considered by many to be the greatest poet of our time, because the variety and range of his work far exceeds that of Hardy, Pound and Eliot.
His poetry began by echoing Shelley and Spenser but his aims were to write for and about his native Ireland. He drew on the fairy and folk tales and was active in creating the movement known as the Irish Literary Renaissance.
Yeats became involved with nationalist elements in Ireland as he tried to impress the beautiful Maud Gonne. Alas he did not succeed and much of his early poetry was dominated by this unhappy time in his life.
But, by the time of the publication of The Wind Among the Reeds, he had moved a long way from his early desire to write popular poetry. He had gone through a period of learning his craft, discussing techniques with fellow poets and his writing became intense, yet delicately beautiful.
In 1903 Maud Gonne married, and Yeats was deeply hurt. He found he could only record memories. In a superb series of poems, The Green Helmet and Other Poems, he compares her with Helen of Troy; beyond praise or comment. The poems are simple for Yeats was preoccupied with his ambition to create an Irish theatre: with the help of Lady Gregory, the Abbey theatre was born and he became a director.
His volume of poetry in 1914 Responsibilities contained changed poetry, the antithesis of his early work, stripped of decoration and mystery. He turned to savage satire, defending great art against the philistines but behind all of it was his frustrated love for Maud Gonne. When her husband was executed as an Easter Rising revolutionary, he proposed to her. She refused and a year later he married Georgie Hyde-Lees whom he had known for some years.
Yeats became a Senator of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the following year he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature.
Filled with energy, Yeats fought death to the end. He hated old age, writing Under Ben Bulben as his own epitaph and elegy with all the passion and indomitable qualities that make him a great Irish poet. He died in Roquebrune in 1939 and his body was taken back to Ireland.
Top
Thomas Hardy
Though some of Hardy's poems are romantic in character, he nevertheless finds that 'exact curve' with a toughness quite foreign to the Victorian poets. Born in Higher Bockhampton in 1840 of Dorset working-class family, Hardy became an architect before devoting himself to a full-time literary career. No other English writer has made a region so distinctively his own.
He spent his early years writing novels where, with his knowledge of rural 'Wessex', his characters and scenes are so vividly created. It wasn't until he was nearly sixty that he considered himself a poet but during the last thirty years before his death in 1928, he had over 1,000 poems published.
Many of his best lyrical poems, such as During Wind and Rain, stem from his heritage of music. He was a talented amateur musician, well versed in church music, and he had a wide knowledge of Dorset airs and ballads.
Hardy himself said that he aimed to give his work 'poetic texture rather than poetic veneer' and he was constantly experimenting. Although he wrote quite a lot of 'public' verse, including The Convergence of the Twain - Lines on the Loss of the Titanic, his greatest works were written after the death of his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford.
Hardy's work has a power which seems to derive from his extraordinary awareness, allowing him to explore and express feelings with honesty and sincerity.
Top
Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound, born in Idaho, USA in 1885, moved to London in 1908 and set about correcting the work of Yeats. He might have made enemies with his boundless self-confidence but his exuberance and dedication to literature had a magnetic power.
He quickly associated himself with other poets inspired by Hulme's ideals and is credited with inventing the Imagists, but all too soon he found their aims limited and frigid.
Pound, like Shelley, seems to have been convinced that poets 'are the unacknowledged legislators of the world'. In Mauberly he critiques the late nineteenth and early twentieth century England in which only minor art is valued.
He was an aggressive critic who violently attacked all systems and academic institutions as over-formalised. 'Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree', was his famous definition.
Both Yeats and Eliot were prepared to accept Pound's advice and admitted their debt to his literary judgement.
Pound died in 1972, taking his place with Eliot as one of the great innovators of the twentieth century.
Top
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888. An American, he was educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Merton College, Oxford before becoming a British subject in 1927. Many of his vivid lines and images derive from his childhood memories of summer holidays spent on the New England coast.
He was extremely well-read drawing particularly from Dante and Shakespeare. Like Milton he is a poet to be read out loud, for much of his verse is inherently musical.
The title poem of Eliot's first book of poems Prufrock and Other Observations, gives a good introduction to themes and attitudes which appear in later works. The Waste Land established him as a major figure on the contemporary scene, although some thought it to be a literary hoax.
In 1927 he became an Anglican and his poems reflect his new belief. He uses well-known prayers from Christian sources especially in Ash Wednesday but the poem is haunted by dreamlike images far removed from the church.
His poetry profoundly influenced his own and a younger generation and his Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats has endeared him to many readers.
Like his contemporaries, and unlike the Romantics - Byron, Shelley, Coleridge and Keats - Eliot lived into his seventies enabling him to explore his full potential. He died in 1965 at the age of seventy-six.
Eliot along with Hardy, Yeats and Pound take their places amongst the master poets of the twentieth century.
This article was taken from an issue of
Poetry Now
Magazine.
Top
|
