Modern English Poetry.

Tiago Cagliari

Introduction.

Language is an innate element of societies used to communicate a message. It naturally evolves as the people and communities where it is used will gradually develop new forms to convey information. Inside this communicative system, speech is defined as the oral expression of language, and writing as its physical representation.

Speech and writing are, therefore, the organic representation of thoughts and ideas embodied in information. All information created by a local group is transformed into knowledge, which becomes the tradition that helps to mould cultures.

Although its primary use is to impart knowledge, speech and writing are also a form of art, abstract art representing material concepts. They are a manner to express feelings which originates in careful introspection; the natural process of thinking and forming ideas. And this expression is what we call art used as entertainment.

Imagination is the art of expressing ideas or feelings creatively. Thus, speech and writing are used as imaginative and creative expression that entertains and enriches the communicative process. Here is where we find poetry.

A brief insight on Poetry.

Literature is the art of writing stories, novels, plays and poems; therefore, it is the general term for all these forms of art. Literature is art, the creation of works of imagination with excellent style for the expression of emotive themes, personal and social.

There is no simpler way to present the subject, poetry is a piece of writing that uses imagery in the shape of metrical structures and rhythmic words to evoke beautiful senses. The poet selects meaningful words by their phonic quality; the group of words are arrayed in metres and verses to create harmonic rhythms and musical patterns. 'The Raven'’s first and fifth stanzas, by Edgar Allan Poe (1845) are the perfect example:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “ “'Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this, and nothing more.”

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before; But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore!”

This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”— Merely this, and nothing more.

The senses are important for the creation of poems. The eyes and ears hold the inspiration we find in nature and people, the poet’s passion triggers the heart, which energetically pulses the feelings, while the brain digests and dictates to the hands that externalise and fill the paper with a story of mesmerising poetic effect.

We need to assimilate the elements of poetic composition that differentiate poetry from prose.

Dictionaries tell us that prose is all that is not poetry, precisely because the primal facet of prose is its ordinary language with a pragmatic focus, written with a natural flow of words that obey syntactic (the arrangement of words in a sentence) and semantic (the meaning of words) rules, established by conventions along the centuries. Prose is the literal and unpolished narration of everyday life.

Conversely, poetry does not follow the traditional grammatical rules like the order Subject + Verb + Complements, nor the literal semantic use of words; it’s a free flow of imaginative words and feelings. The poetic writing is expressive and lyrical, it provokes an emotional response from the reader.

Its main characteristics are:

-? the use of imagery capable of making readers picture the scene in their minds;

-? the use of figures of rhetoric twisting the typical word usage;

-? the use of metrical patterns such as metre and rhyme, defying the common syntax;

-? the polysemic use of words, bending their original, literal and pre-established meaning with new ones, and neologisms;

-? the use of uncountable shapes and types, such as Sonnets, Ballads, Haiku, Limerick, Ode, Free verse and Elegy.

To comprehend Modern English poetry, we need to dip our minds into the old poetry’s history, recollect the social issues that inspired literary movements, and understand how poetry has been transformed as the English language itself evolves with the sempiternal advancement of society, language and technology.

The myths and Heros.

Before the first poets, poetry had been orally used to inform, entertain and testify about events. It was inspired by its musical and incantatory resonance that carved itself into the memory of its listeners. This explains the origin of rhythm, metre and musical effects. And so this earliest era of poetic composition evinced the importance of storytelling and song, for it was through oral recitation that people could share ideas and knowledge before the invention of writing. These ancient song-tales were refined into scripts and structured into what was recognised as poetry.

The account of myths and heroic deeds appeared as the epic form of poetry, narrated by the bards who sang stories of gods and demigods, warriors defending populations, slaying monsters and journeying around and beyond the world. The themes touched on the supernatural, the mortal condition of humans and the admirable characteristics praised by the cultures, such as intelligence, altruism and bravery.

But there is no clear evidence for when the transcription of poetry started. In history, there are the ancient Greek epics, The Odyssey and The Iliad, ascribed to Homer, which date from the late 8th century; these epic poems, however, appeared in written form only during the 6th century. Other epic narratives like the Sumerian Gilgamesh and the Indian Arjun survived time and were bequeathed to the following generations.

Old English.

The beginning of English Literature dates to the period around 410 AD and 1066, in the Anglo-Saxon era called the Medieval Period. It was influenced by the ancient Classical traditions recited in the epic poems. The first literatures in English were spoken in the Old English. Only after a long time were the first stories and poems effectively penned down on parchments.

That epoch is stained with the blood of wars waged, and crusades clashed during invasions and conquests that edified Kingdoms and Empires throughout Europe. The power and significance of the Christian Church grew the patronage of poets by those nobles and monarchs.

Although the earliest poems are adrift in the tides of time, the substantial rise in poetic writing had its place among the storytelling and literature in prose during the years of Old English. And the commonest subject was the familiar themes of religion, war and oppression. After centuries of battles and the Norman conquest, the Old English was stoned into the Middle English around the late 1400s.

Middle English.

As the years passed and the dust of the battlefields settled, other themes began to flourish, giving life to the memory of legends and heroes from those old battles, such as ‘The Wanderer’, ‘The Seafarer’ and ‘Beowulf’ (the name of the hero of the anonymous epic poems composed round 700 - 1000). But when the heroes and legends of the long Old English poems perished, the Middle English literature brought the short, lyric poems of chivalric romances to convey the current feelings, from the late 12th century until the 1470s.

These wondrous poems tell the tales of medieval knights and women who began their participation as objects of desire and perfection. The story and myth of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in the Matter of Britain literature from the mid-12th century is an example of these tales.

Renowned poets wrote stories that mirrored the political, sociological, religious and ideological movements of that time. The Italian poet Dante Alighieri and his 'The Divine Comedy' (1321) gave us a vivid vision of the afterlife journey through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. The Italian Giovanni Boccaccio and his 'The Decameron' (1353) show a collection of tales of a group of young people fleeing from the Black Plague, exploring human vices and virtues, tragedies and triumphs, with sad and happy endings of ordinary people.

The English poet Geoffrey Chaucer presented 'The Canterbury Tales' (1392), also depicting a society in transition, the changing values, as the people themselves were changing. In this new social context, religion, war and knights were fading, surrendering space for social issues like personal conflicts, ambitions and love. John Gower (1325-1403) wrote poems on moral and political matters, but also about emotions and human weakness.

An anonymous poet wrote the chivalric, alliterative romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight during the late 14th century, one of the most important texts in Middle English of the Arthurian stories. It relates the quests and adventures accomplished excellently by Sir Gawain, who defies and beheads the Green Knight.

The prolific Italian-born French Christine de Pizan (1393 - 1430) wrote many poems, both prose and poetry, in defence of women.

Modern English.

English was developing as a Language and a Culture, and poems about social themes were binding the written books in Literature. England became a global influence, a powerful country. It naturally centralised the rebirth of the new world that wrote Modern English, the language as we know it today. Between 1500 and 1600 Europe was rediscovering new eyes and minds, new perspectives for seeing and thinking; new lands were stepped by Columbus, new mysteries and formulas uncovered by Galileo and Copernicus, the supremacy and dogmas of the Church challenged by Protestantism, and the circumnavigation of Magellan.

This turmoil began the modern world, delineating new geography, experimenting new science, organising new politics, praying new religions, expressing new arts and congregating new societies. Consequently, the Renaissance broke the bounds of Medieval values, caused by the increase of individualism, the contemplation of nature, the economic revolution, the social migration and humanism. It ensued from the Middle Ages to Modernity (14th to the 17th century), reformulating the ideals of the classical era (the antiquity period between the 8th century BC and the 5th century AD).

All forms of art began to echo these changes; more prominently were the visual arts in Italy, such as the Italian masterpieces of Sandro Botticelli, and literature in England, with William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser and John Milton. This era was themed with subjects such as individualism, secularism, humanism, and rationalism.

‘To be, or not to be: that is the question.’ From Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act III, Scene I, is the most famous quotation of literature. The figures of speech were intensely lapidated by Shakespeare’s works, like the famous chiasmus in his play As You Like It: ‘The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.’ And in Edmund Spenser’s ‘The Faerie Queene’: ‘For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.’

‘The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.’ by John Milton on Satan’s Reign in Hell is another example of the witty poetry of the Medieval era. Milton’s Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse eternalised by verses like ‘Solitude sometimes is best society’, and ‘This horror will grow mild, this darkness light.’

Gutenberg’s printing press invention revolutionised the publishing process of literature and poetry around 1440. It helped to nurture and to promote written art, carrying the author’s ideas around Europe. The prose narrative of novels and poetry collections emerged and gained audiences, popularising, and increasing the demand.

Accordingly, epic poems lost the vie for prose narratives, which became the predominant form of literature in England, like Daniel Defoe’s adventurer Robinson Crusoe (1719).

It was during this novelisation of the common human that enlightenment came, and philosophers, such as Voltaire, wittily satirised the conventions of the establishment, speaking of progress over traditions. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment in the 18th century, the literary world saw the rebirth of a new era transformed into an intellectual movement that brought concerns of rationality, nature, God and humanity. Centred on reason and understanding of the universe, it claimed the improvement of the human condition, and the traditional vision of life lost the protagonism for the Age of Reason, fomented by scientific advances that triggered the Industrial Revolution in 1760.

Between the 18th and 19th centuries, the Romantics condensed poetry into the pure, intense emotion. They strayed from poetic norms in metre and rhyme, today labelled a difficult read. The emphasis on feelings and sensibility is notable in poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (founder of the Romantic Movement), Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats (of the second generation of Romantic poets), William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe.

The first part of the poem Darkness by Lord Byron displays the elemental characteristics of Romanticism:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day…

The poem depicts emotion over reason, has freedom of form and the exploration of the Gothic and unknown.

In 'The Raven,' by Edgar Allan Poe, the bird repeats the word “Nevermore” to deepen a grief-stricken lover’s plunge into madness, blending the gothic and the insignificance of men when facing love and the unknown.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most memorable poem, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ narrates the mariner who kills an innocent albatross. The lines of the poem describe the intense emotions and tribulations of the personages:

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

‘She Walks in Beauty’ by Lord Byron, framed in rhyme, euphony and the constancy of symmetric lines:

She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes; Thus mellowed to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

The flowery Romantic movement in literature and poetry was succeeded by the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature and urban life of Realism in the 19th century. A strong antithesis of its previous movements, Realism avoids imaginative, dreamy and amorous idealization of the unreal life. Poets and novelists saw the necessary change to show the working class and the dark side of urban life, a social and political critique, shaping authentic depictions of human beings.

The simplicity of Wordsworth.

‘The Lyrical Ballads’ by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 at the outset of the English Romantic movement, Wordsworth objected to the erudite form of 18th-century English poetry in its appendix entitled ‘Poetic Diction’, advocating a simpler language that could reach the common person. His minimalist approach to poetry, now described as the plain English to academic writing and literature, defended the simplicity, clarity and conciseness of language.

The new poems were then an experimental form of poetry, expressed in vernacular language that later shaped modern literature. Wordsworth’s poem ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ demonstrates the use of clear wording and equilibrium:

A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.

The conversational mood in Wordsworth depicts the everyday life of prosaic people in plain words accessible to those of little literacy. His voice emphasised the unadorned verses and literal words, which still dressed the beauty of stylish poetry.

Modern English poetry.

Modernism arrives in the early 20th century. Industrialization of the economy and edification of the cities were prospering until the two World Wars left Europe economically and structurally destroyed. It was within this context that poetry abandoned the unreal, romantic portrayal of life and the dusty, gritty realism for a modern avenue to life. It required inventiveness to mirror the changing, urban world.

The American Ezra Pound is considered one of the most influential Modernist poets, who, along with the English poet Richard Aldington, founded the Imagist movement, a crisp poetry devoiced from sentimentalism and ideation, marked by frankness and simplicity, to unveil the essence of an image. In this new architecture, abstractism and formalism became also elements of the modernist movement.

Pound’s fourteen-word poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’, the new recipe for poetry is definite:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

The two-lined, verbless poem describes an instant inside the underground metro station in 1912 Paris, comparing the people’s faces with the petals in a bough. The depicted image is precise, metaphorical; the adjectives wet and black imply the human ephemeral existence, though they suggest the progression of generations to come.

In William Carlos Williams’ poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, we find another straightforward poem:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

The untitled poem brings sixteen words in free verse using strong imagism with enjambment, holding up the reader’s pace, inciting a complete absorption of the words to paint a little moment where one red wheelbarrow placed beside white chickens shines the wetness of rain.

Modern poetry is then noted by the fragmented, short phrases arranged without syntax; the vague references and the simplicity and clarity of words describe naturally the state and existence of things and people. The modern fashion finally disentangles itself from literary traditions, now stressing self-consciousness, fragmented memory and contemporary society; it uses allusion and symbolism to create an airy unconventional rhythm.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide.

This first stanza of Alfred E. Housman’s ‘Loveliest of Trees’ begins the imagery of the exquisite cherry blossoms, telling us the immediateness of life that passes fast, which is best lived intensely, savouring the seasons.

Among Modernists of the early 20th century, were surviving War Poets; others were Americans who spent most of their life in England. The English Madox Ford, Frank Stuart Flint and Thomas Ernest Hulme had a great influence on modernist poetry, as did the Irish James Joyce and the American T. S. Eliot. But the poem ‘Paris: A Poem’ by the British poet Hope Mirrlees is described as the masterpiece of English modernism, for it is an urban representation of the post-First World War Paris in 1919, with a detached overview immersing the reader in the streets of Paris.

The fragmented poem ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ by T. S. Eliot draws a vivid scene in a suburban environment; it elicits a lucid representation of alienation, a raw observation of past and present, a blunt metaphor of urban life.

Twelve o'clock.

Along the reaches of the street Held in a lunar synthesis, Whispering lunar incantations Dissolve the floors of memory And all its clear relations,

Its divisions and precisions, Every street lamp that I pass Beats like a fatalistic drum,

And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Scholars affirm that Modernism still permeates English poetry today, but late modernism saw its vivid words fading away, elbowed aside by another cultural transfiguration looming up by the mainstream culture and consumerist values, reaching the point of a postmodern society.

It was between 1960 and 1970 that the British Poetry Revival movement in the United Kingdom strived to muster pens and pages. Inspired by modernism, this movement started with Basil Bunting's works, aiming at the revival of modernist British poetry under a conservative approach. As a countermovement, the revival lost the feud against the new waves. But there’s no unanimity yet that labels modernism as dead and buried, as post-modernist poetry, has still not been chiselled in a complete sculpture; it’s still tracing the first words with ink black pen on the white pages of poetry.

Conclusion.

The poetic inspiration rises from the social context as a reactive necessity to express the feelings and the aspirations of those living in society, echoing social, political and cultural moods, singing songs in praise for the heroes or sorrow for the fallen. It was first expressed orally to relate past events and entertain the audience with stories mixed with words and melodies. Poetry is the innovative method of using words, the unruly, expressive creation of stories and the eternal tool for breaking the bounds of tradition. It’s the lyrical imagery that uses special words arranged in beautiful patterns that make the reader mentalise, and fantasise, conjuring an emotional response.

Literature and poetry followed the social evolutions and revolutions throughout history, forming, transforming and reforming the way written art is made. Middle English era rode knights that sought honour and devotion to God. Renaissance renewed the enthusiasm for classical culture and humanistic principles that moved away from the ancient religious vision to an anthropocentric concept.

The Romantic period expressed in profound sentiments the chivalrous emotions prompted by nature, honour and love, with a sense of individualism. It influenced poetry until the 20th century, when poets stood up for the demystification of poetry, and the Modernist movement brought intellect and innovation against emotion and nostalgia.

Modernism enrooted its feet as society progressed, science and technology advanced, renewing the inspiration and philosophy; in the late part of the 20th century, post-modernists were already rewriting the traits of the avant-garde English poetry that remains until these days.

Bibliographic references.

The Literature Book – 2016. Dorling Kindersley Limited.

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry - Peter Howarth. Cambridge University Press 2012. The Poetry Book – 2023. Published by DK

The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry, 2nd edition, 2013. Bloomsbury Publishing.