The Development of English Literature

Wilfrid Owen (1893-1918)

On August 4, 1914, the First World War broke out. The British young men viewed it as the coming test of their manhood in combat. They lined up at the recruiting stations to be among the first to enlist. This universal readiness to court death and danger, spawned by the long peace, is apparent in the letters, poems, and memoirs of the young men of the period. The most popular poet of the prewar era, Rupert Brooke, urged, “Come and die. It'll be great fun!” Among the middle and upper classes, the war was generally regarded as a new kind of “game”, which assisted to win honor and glorious name.

But after only six months of fighting, they understood, that the war was a huge killing machine, which did not spare anyone and anything. A radical transformation in the language, tone and subject matter of literature was taking place in the poetry of the young men serving in the front lines. Rejecting high-sounding abstractions like “glory”, “sacrifice”, and “honor” that no longer held any meaning for them, many of the soldier -poets adopted a colloquial, concrete, realistic style, bitter and deeply ironical in tone.

The most important poet produced by the war was Wilfrid Owen.

Dylan Thomas called him “a poet of all times, all places, and all wars.”

Wilfrid Owen went to France in December of 1916 to participate in some of the hardest fighting during the cold winter of 1917. In June of 1917 he was hospitalized and remained in England until September of 1918. The same year he volunteered to return to the front and met there his literary idol, Siegfried Sassoon and developed a supportive friendship with him.

Owen's poetry is blunt, and ironic. It is also stylistically distinctive in its use of multiple sound effects achieved through assonance, alliteration, and consonance.

A week before the Armistice of 1918 and two weeks after being deco-rated for gallantry, Wilfrid Owen was killed by machine-gun fire. He had published only four poems during his lifetime and was unknown as a poet, except to a few friends. Through the efforts of his mother and friends, eight of Owen's poems were published in periodicals in 1919. They were followed by the publication of his collected poems, in 1920, edited by Siegfried Sassoon. They have come to be praised as the work of the finest poet of World War I and of a major writer of this century.

In his poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, written in 1917, two stanzas of which you will read below, Wilfrid Owen describes the death of soldiers.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Nor in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of binds.

UNIT 9. TWENTIETH CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE (1915-2000)

1. The Twenties of the Twentieth century.

The 1920s were not a tranquil period for Britain. Massive unemployment was created by the return of hundreds of thousands of veterans to civilian life. English literature changed in both form and subject matter between the end of World War I in 1918 and the beginning of World War II in 1939. The terrible destruction of World War I left many people with the feeling that society was falling apart.

The 20th century English literature is remarkable for a great diversity of artistic values and artistic methods. Following the rapid introduction of new modes of thought in natural science, sociology and psychology, it has naturally reacted to absorb and transform this material into literary communication. Fundamental political, social and economic changes in the world and, particularly, in Great Britain deeply affected the creative writing of the new century. The works of such writers as H.F.Wells, Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennet, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield showed an earnest desire to express the feelings and thoughts of the British people. It was the basis of their approach to literature. That's why their works became a new investment in the heritage of English realism and stimulated its further development. In the short-story genre the art of Katherine Mansfield is a significant contribution to the traditions of English realism.

2. English Literature in the 1930s and 1940s

A new generation of realist writers, among them Richard Aldington, John Boynton Priestley and Archibald Joseph Cronin appeared on the literary scene between 1930 and World War II.

The world economic depression that began in the late 1920s had catastrophic effects in highly industrialized and heavily populated Britain. In two years exports and imports declined 35 percent, and unemployment reached three million. The Second World War, which began in September,1939, with Hitler's invasion of Poland, was disastrous for Britain and her allies. During 1939 and 1940 Nazi Germany mastered Europe. Only Britain under the leadership of Winston Churchill remained to oppose Hitler. But Britons heroically withstood the bombardment of their cities. With the entry of the United States into the war, and the failure of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the tide began to turn. Although Britain and her allies were eventually victorious, the postwar years were extremely hard. The country was nearly bankrupt, and recovery was slow. Of the new poets writing during this period, the most important and influencial was W.H.Auden. During the 1930s, which he characterized as a “low, dishonest decade,” Auden was the acknowledged leader of a circle of writers who aligned themselves with the political left and attempted to expose the social and economic ills of their country. Although they considered themselves the creators of a new poetic tradition, the influence of Hopkins, Yeats, and Eliot on these young writers is great. Especially, it may be observed in their use of precise and suggestive images, ironic understatement, and plain speech.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

William Butler Yeats is considered by many critics to be the greatest poet writing in English in the XX century. He provides a bridge from the Victorian Age into the twentieth century. His early Romantic work, produced before the century turned, gradually became more realistic.

W. B. Yeats, an Irish poet and dramatist, was born in Sandymount, Ireland. His father was a painter. Yeats attended school in Dublin. Begin-ning as an art student, he soon gave up art for literature. At twenty-one, he published his first work “Mosada”, a drama written in verse. During the 1890s and 1900s he published many volumes of poems, which were symbolic in manner, drawing his imagery from Irish myth and folklore. The most important collections of that period were: “The Wandering of Oisis” (1891), “The Wind Among the Reeds” (1899), “The Rose” (1903), “Green Helmet and Other Poems” (1912).

For centuries Ireland had been an English colony, its economy exploited and its native culture suppressed. Yeats's early poems and his book on Irish folk tales, “The Celtic Twilight” (1893), were in part political acts.

W.B.Yeats contributed a great deal to the Irish national theatre. Writing for the stage impressed Yeats with the importance of precise, spare language. His best known plays are “The Countess Cathleen” (1892), “Deirdre” (1907). The latter derived from Celtic mythology.

During the 1920s Yeats became more prominent in both policy and literature. He became a senator in the Irish Free state in 1922 and in 1923 received the Noble Prize for Literature. In 1925 Yeats published his major philosophical and historical prose work “A Vision”.

While many poets produce their finest work during their early years, Yeats was one of those rare poets who created their greatest poems after the age of fifty. He began his poetic career as a Romantic and finished it as a poet of the modern world. His early work was strongly influenced by Blake and Shelley, by the French Symbolists, and Irish mythology. These early poems were often simple, romantic, musical, and dreamlike. In the middle of his career, his poetry became less dreamlike and more realistic. His tone became more conversational and his imagery more economical. In the last stages of his poetic career, his interest in historical cycles became dominant. Thus, the evolution of Yeats's art never ceased. The poems written when he was an old man (“The Tower”, 1928, “The Winding Stair”, 1920) are the most audacious.

Below, you will read one of William Butler Yeats' poems. It is believed that Yeats wrote this poem for Major Robert Gregory, the son of his friend Lady Augusta Gregory. Major Gregory, an artist and aviator, was killed in action over Italy during World War I while flying for England's Royal Flying Corps.

An Irishman Foresees His Death

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love;¹¹ . Those that I guard I do not love: In the World War I Ireland was technically

neutral and was going on struggle for independence from England. But many

Irish volunteered to fight on the English side.

My country is Kiltarten²² . Kiltarten: a village near the estate of the Gregory family. Cross,

My countrymen Kiltarten's poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to my mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

“Modernist” Poetry and Prose

The achievement of modern British literature lies in the development of the short story, new movements in poetry, exciting experiments in fiction, and drama worthy of the nation that bred Shakespeare.

Modern literature is characterized by great differences from the past in both form and content. New rhythms, especially in free verse, were invented.

The development of psychology brought psychological realism into literature: writers attempted to show not only what their characters thought but how they thought. The stream-of-consciousness technique, and various modifications of it, created a new attitude toward writing and reading.

The subject matter of literature changed too. With the shocks of the wars, technological advances, and greater social freedom, writers realized that they could and should write about anything. No subject was too dignified or indignified, too familiar or remote, to appear in a modern poem or novel.

The revolution in poetry had its counterpart in fiction. The novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had written within a defined social context to an audience that shared similar values and beliefs. Modernist writers perceived human beings as living in private worlds and therefore took as their task the illumination of individual experience. Novelists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted to reproduce the authentic character of human subjectivity, the so-called stream of consciousness

Following World War I, writers such as T.S. Eliot, W.H.Auden, Dylan Thomas and their followers brought about a revolution in poetic taste and practice. Like the painters influenced by cubism and abstract expressionism or composers influenced by the atonal works of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartok, “modernist” poets developed new techniques to express their vision of the postwar world. While some of them are difficult, modern poetry as a whole employs the language of common speech to provide rich insights into the people and events of modern life.

Intellectual complexity, allusiveness and intricacy of form are charac-teristics of modern poetry. When you read these works you come across lines from foreign languages or allusions you don't recognize. For example, some of Eliots poems, such as “The Hallow Men” have epigraphs that need to be interpreted and applied to the poem. W.H. Auden, in his elegy “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”, presumes knowledge of the life of Yeats and political events of the 1930s. In such cases the footnotes help you by providing such information.

Modern poets usually use language that is fresh, exact, and innovative. In “Fern Hill”, for example, Dylan Thomas, regects cliche, and writes “once below a time” instead of “once upon a time” and “All the moon long” instead of “All the night long”.

Modern poetry is musical, sensual, and surprising. It also highly varied in subject matter. Modern poets have exercised the freedom to write about any subject they please. To compensate for the limitations of syllabic rhyme, they have resorted to frequent use of consonantal, assonantal, and half-rhymes. Modern poets have sought above all to create poetry that will be appreciated for its form and music as well as meaning.

Poet, critic, and dramatist, T.S.Eliot, was the leading spokesman for the modernist poetry that emerged in the 1920s. This poetry is characterized by intellectual complexity, allusiveness, precise use of images, and pessimism.

James Joyce (1882-1941)

James Joyce is regarded as the most original and influential writer of the twentieth century. Irishman by birth, he exercised a considerable influence upon modern English and American literature.

He was born in Dublin, the eldest of a family of ten children. His father was a civil servant, continually in financial difficulties. For several years Joyce attended Clongowes Wood College, before his family's increasing poverty made this impossible. He later attended University College, Dublin, where he was a brilliant scholar, accomplished in Latin, French, Italian and Norwegian.

While he was still an undergraduate he began writing lyrical poems, which were collected in “Chamber Music” (1907). Upon graduation from the University in 1902, Joyce lived for a time in Paris where he contributed book reviews to Dublin newspapers. After a brief return to Dublin for his mother's burial, he moved to the continent with Nora Barnacle to spend the rest of his life in Paris, Trieste, Rome and Zurich.

In 1909 and 1912, Joyce made his last two trips to Ireland to arrange the publication of a collection of fifteen stories “Dubliners”, the dominant mood of which is realistic. This work was published only in 1914. Joyce said that his purpose in writing the short stories collected in “Dubliners” was to produce “a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because the city seemed to me the center of paralysis”. He wanted to give “the Irish people ... one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass”. The style of “Dubliners” marks a sharp break with the fiction of the nineteenth century. Joyce located the center of the action in the minds of his characters. Incident and plot are subordinated to psychological revelation. Each word and detail has a calculated purpose, and the meaning of the story is presented as an epiphany - a moment of heightened awareness that can occur as a result of a trivial encounter, object, or event. For example, in “Araby”, one of “Dubliners” short stories, epiphany occurs in the final paragraph and runs as following “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

In 1916 his partly autobiographical novel “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and in 1922 his most famous novel “Ulysses” were published.

“Ulysses” is a dazzling original attempt to tell the story of group of Dubliners on a single day and at the same time present a symbolic view of human history. Seven hundred pages of the novel relate of one day in the life of two Dubliners who are not acquainted. Leopold Bloom, an advertising agent, and Stephen Dedalus, a poet and teacher, ramble in the streets of Dublin; the paths of these two men cross and re-cross through the day and finally they meet only for a leave-taking. The book is built on parallel from Homer's Odyssey, i.e. each chapter revives an incident from Homer's epic and each character has a Homeric prototype.

In “Ulysses”, rendering the workings of his character's minds, Joyce introduced the so-called stream-of-consciousness technique recording the flow of their thoughts and sensations with all the complex associations attached to them. The remaining seventeen years of his life Joyce worked on his next novel “Finnegans Wake” (1939). This book carried the stylistic experimentation of “Ulysses” further.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Virginia Woolf was born in a large and talented family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a distinguished literary critic and historian. She was educated at home by her father . After his death she moved to London with her brother and sister. Their homes in the Bloomsbury district, near the British Museum, became the meeting places of the so-called “Bloomsbury Group”, a famous group of intellectuals. One of the members of the group was the writer Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912. In 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, which published her books as well as those of a number of other important modern writers, like T.S.Eliot and E.M.Forster.

Virginia Woolf began her writing career as a literary critic. She used her reviews and essays to promote her opinions about what fiction should be. She thought that writers could get close to real life only by basing their work on their own feelings. In 1915 she began to put her theories into practice in her first novel “The Voyage Out”. This novel reveals signs of its author's search and experience to find new forms of expression. During the 1920s her work became increasingly experimental. Her stories and sketches “Monday or Tuesday (1921) show her developing an impressionistic style and bringing some of the techniques of lyrical poetry into prose. In novels like “Mrs. Dalloway” (1925), “To the Lighthouse” (1927), and “The Waves” (1931), she rebells against the social fiction of the prewar period with its emphasis on detailed descriptions of character and setting. Instead she attempted to express the timeless inner consciousness of her characters. Influenced by James Joyce's “Ulysses” she used the techniques of “stream of consciousness' and “interior monologue” moving from one character to another to variety of mental responses to the same event.

Thus, Woolf's work was a deliberate attempt to break conventions of fiction. She saw life not in neatly arranged series of major events, but in a process we live every day. That's why her fiction avoids plot and instead deals with the consciousness of characters and reveals the essence of their lives.

The outbreak of World War II was a shattering event for Woolf. Nevertheless, she managed to complete a brief, enigmatic final novel “Between the Acts” (1941). The book is about the eternal England, the beautiful threatened civilization which she had always loved. On March 28, 1941 Virginia Woolf, acutely depressed by the constant German bombing of England, committed suicide (drowned herself).

Katherine Mansfield (1888 - 1923)

Katherine Mansfield, the daughter of a wealthy banker, was born in New Zealand and educated in London at queen's College. A talented cellist, she studied music at the Royal Academy of Music, but later realized that her true calling was writing, not music. In 1911, through a chance meeting in Germany, she became friends with the well known literary critic and editor John Middleton Murry. They were married in 1918. By the end of the war, she had become an invalid, moving from climate to climate for relief from uncurable tuberculosis. She died in France on January 9,1923, at the age of thirty four.

She began to write at an early age. Her contribution to English Literature mainly makes the form of short stories. Katherine Mansfield's first stories and sketches were published in the periodical “The New Age”, to which she became a regular contributor. Her first story “Prelude” written in 1918 made her famous. Her second book, the collection of stories “Bliss and Other Stories” was published in 1921. Her third collection “The Garden Party and Other Stories” appeared a year later. Katherine Mansfield's style was often compared to that of Chekhov. Like him she wrote stories, which depended more on atmosphere, character, and nuances of language than on plot. The stories of Catherine Mansfield are not tales of action, nor have they complicated plots. She describes human conduct in quite ordinary situations. Yet, they are expressive of a vast range. Many of her stories center on children and on old people in isolated circumstances and are deeply affecting in their sympathetic portrayal of the lonely, the rejected, and the victimized.

For example, in her short story “The Doll's House” the author shows how the snobbery of the adults has intruded into the world of children and has made them selfish and cruel. The Kelvey girls are isolated from the other schoolgirls, because they are poor and their farther is in prison. The girls of the story (Emmie Cole, Isabel Burnell, Lena Logan, Jessie May) exhibit a high degree of class consciousness and snobbery. The isolation of the Kelveys is described in the following way: “Many of the children, including the Burnells, were not allowed even to speak to them. They walked past the Kelveys with their heads in the air, and as they set the fashion in all matters of behavior, the Kelveys were shunned by everybody. Even the teacher had a special voice for them, and a special smile for the other children when Lil Kelvey came up to her with a bunch of dreadfully common-looking flowers.” From all the girls only the Kelveys were not allowed to see the marvelous doll's house, which was presented to the Burnell children. “Only the little Kelveys moved away forgotten; there was nothing more for them to hear.” The story is very short but it provokes a deep feeling of sympathy in the hearts of progressive minded readers. The social cruelty to which the Kelveys are subjected by the children and adults around is represented skillfully.

Katherine Mansfield regarded Chechov as her literary teacher. In collaboration with Kotelansky she translated Chechov's diaries and letters into English. Once she called herself “the English Chekhov”. But differing from Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield declares that life must be taken as it is. She does not see any necessity to change it.

Her writing is objective, but the reader can easily feel her sympathies and antipathies. She is very sensitive to class distinctions, and her sympathy is always on the side of the poor. Any kind of selfishness and pretence on the part of the rich people is treated with ironic objectivity. Her short story “A Cup of Tea” is an example of it.

“A Cup of Tea”

The principal character of the story is Rosemary Fell. The author cha-racterizes her in the following way:

“Rosemary Fell was not exactly beautiful. No, you couldn't have called her beautiful. Pretty? Well, if you took her to pieces... But why be so cruel as to take anyone to pieces? She was young, brilliant, extremely modern, exquisitely well dressed, amazingly well read in the newest of the new books, and her parties were the most delicious mixture of the really important people...

Rosemary had been married two years. She had a duck of a boy. No, not Peter-Michael. And her husband absolutely adored her. They were rich, really rich, not just comfortably well off...”

Thus, Rosemary is so rich, that can buy anything, and can go anywhere she wants. Once, returning home after shopping, she meets a girl. In contrast to Rosemary, the girl is absolutely poor and helpless. She has nothing even to eat:

“... a young girl, thin, dark, shadowy - where had she come from? - was standing at Rosemary's elbow and a voice like a sigh, almost like a sob, breathed: “Madam, may I speak to you a moment?”

“Speak to me?” Rosemary turned. She saw a little battered creature with enormous eyes, someone quite young, no older than herself, who clutched at her coat-collar with reddened hands, and shivered as though she had just come out of the water.

“M-madam,” stammered the voice. “Would you let me have the price of a cup of tea?”

“A cup of tea?” There was something simple, sincere in that voice; it wasn't in the least the voice of a beggar. “Then have you no money at all/” asked Rosemary.

“None, madam,” came the answer.

“How extraordinary!” Rosemary peered through the dusk and the girl gazed back at her. How more than extraordinary! And suddenly it seemed to Rosemary such an adventure. It was like something out of a novel by Dosto-yevsky, this meeting in the dusk. Supposing she took the girl home? Supposing she did do one of what would happen? It would be thrilling. And she heard herself saying afterwards to the amazement of her friends: “I simply took her home with me,” as she stepped forward and said to that dim person beside her: “Come home to tea with me.”

Rosemary brings the poor girl home to let her have a cup of tea there. But after a remark made by her husband that the girl is pretty, Rosemary's helpfulness disappears. Her sympathy to the poor girl is showy, superficial, not real. She wants to help the poor thing only because she wants to boast of her generous gestures.

William Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965)

William Somerset Maugham is one of the best known English writers of the present day. He was not only a novelist of considerable rank, but also one of the most successful dramatists and short story writers. His first novel “Liza of Lambeth” came out in 1897, and he went on producing books at the rate of at least one a year. But he used to say “I have always had more stories in my head than I ever had time to write”.

Somerset Maugham was a keen observer of life and individuals. He has written twenty four plays, nineteen novels and a large number of short stories, in addition to travel works and an autobiography. The most mature period of Maugham's literary career began in 1915, when he published one of his most popular novels, “Of Human Bondage”. The author himself described this work as an “autobiographical novel”.

The next well known novel written by S. Maugham is “The Moon and Sixpence” (1919). In this novel the writer makes use of some out-standing incidents in the life of the artist Paul Gauguin, (though it cannot be regarded as his biography). The hero of the novel, Charles Strickland, is a prosperous stock-broker. All those who came in touch with the Stricklands were taken by surprise and puzzled when they learned that Charles Strickland, at the age of forty, had given up his wife and children and gone to Paris to study art. Strickland's life in Paris was “a bitter struggle against every sort of difficulty”, but the hardships which would have seemed horrible to most people did not affect him. He was indifferent to comfort. Canvas and paint were the only things he needed. Strickland did not care for fame. Nor did he care for wealth. He never sold his pictures. He lived in a dream, and reality meant nothing to him. His only aim in life was to create beauty. The reader dislikes Strickland as a human being: he is selfish, cruel, pitiless and cynical. He loves no one. He ruined the life of Dirk Stroeve and his wife who had nursed him when he was dangerously ill. He did not care for his wife and children, and brought misfortune to all the people who came in touch with him. But on the other hand, the reader appreciates him as a talented artist, creator of beauty. His passionate devotion to his art arouses admiration.

Other most prominent works by Somerset Maughan are the novels: “Cakes and Ale” (1930), “ Theatre” (1937) and the “Razor's Edge” (1944). His most popular stories are “Rain”, “The Unconquered”, “Gigolo and Gigolette”, “The Man with Scar”, “The Luncheon”. Maugham's short stories are usually very sincere, interesting, well constructed and logically developed.

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)

A great many of modern English writers and critics recognize in T.S. Eliot the most influential of the English poets of the 20^th century. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, where his grandfather had founded Washington University. Eliot received his first university training at Harvard; later he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, and Oxford. Settled in London in 1914. First drafts of some of his best early poems, like “The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, were written while Eliot was still at Harvard, but the style and tone were so new that he did not manage to get anything published till 1915. His first volume of poems, “Prufrock and Other Observations” was published in 1917, but it didn't attract wide attention. At that time Eliot was working in a bank and also reviewing for “the Times Literary Supplement” and for some little magazines. His first volume of criticism, “The Sacred Wood” (1920), became suddenly influential and his poem, ”The Waste Land” (1922), made him famous, though it infuriated conservative critics.

Many of Eliot's views on literature appeared in “The Criterion”, a literary magazine he edited from 1922 to 1939. The main subject of his earlier poetry is that of a civilization doomed to an inglorious end. From the French symbolists he had borrowed the idea that the only reality in life was the inner reality that the world of the poet was superior to the world of common experience that poetry should not work by direct statement of description, but by indirect image and suggestion.

Eliot served as a director of a London publishing house from 1925 until his death. His most important creations of that time were “The Hollow Men” (1925), “Ash Wednesday” and “Four Quartets” (1930). “The Hollow Men” is a devastating portrayal of human beings devoid of spiritual substance. This poem consists of five sections, the first of which is given below:

I

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken grass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without color,

Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

Remember us - if at all - not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

In this work Eliot portrays people of the post-World-War I as hollow men. He depicts hollow men as walking corpses: their mind is detached from reality, they are cut off from one another. Their voices are whispers, “quite and meaning-less”. They are detached from nature, and live in a place which is devoid of any spiritual presence, a “dead land”, a “cactus land”, “a valley of dying stars”, hollow like the men themselves. Eliot's last major poem “Four Quartets” is deeply religious.

Eliot's poetry makes a great demand on the reader's erudition, on his capacity to understand the complex literary, philosophical and mythological allusions that characterize Eliot's verse. His great achievement was to create rhythms and images corresponding to the tensions and stresses of modern life. He is the person most directly responsible for changing the course of literary style and taste in English literature.

T.S. Eliot also wrote several verse dramas. His dramatic poem “Murder in the Cathedral”(1935) and four tragicomedies, “The Family Reunion” (1939), “The Cocktail Party” (1950), “The Confidential Clerk” and “The Elder Statesman”, held a much wider audience than his non-dramatic works.

Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907- 1973)

Literary critics consider, that after W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden is the most influential English poet in the modern period. Auden spent the first thirty-two years of his life in England and most of the remainder part in the United States. Like T.S.Eliot, W.H.Auden is often regarded as both an English and an American writer.

W.H. Auden was born in York in the family of a distinguished physician. He was educated at Oxford where he read English specializing in Anglo-Saxon literature. After graduating from Oxford in 1928, Auden spent a year in Berlin where he was strongly influenced by contemporary German literature.

His public reputation as a poet began with the publication of “Poems” in 1930. Auden earned his leaving by teaching at schools in England and Scotland. In 1937 he went to Spain, where he drove an ambulance for the Republicans.

In 1939 Auden moved to the United States and gave frequent lectures at American universities. In 1946, seven years after his arrival, he became an American citizen. At that period, he published his volumes of poems “For the Time Being” (1945) and “The Age of Anxiety (1948). The postwar period has come to be known as “The Age of Anxiety”, from the title of his volume. Beginning with 1948, he divided his time between New York and Europe. In 1972 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In 1972 he transferred his winter residence from New York to Oxford, where his college had provided him with a small house. He died in Vienna in 1973.

His most important volumes of poems of later period were “The Shield of Achilles” (1959), “Homage to Clio” (1960), “About the House”(1966), and “City Without Walls” (1970). Auden has also written a great deal of literary criticism and opera libretti.

Auden's poetry is experimental and innovating in an attempt to render the spirit of the age of Anxiety by departing from old poetical conventions. Auden delighted in playing with words, in employing a variety of rhythms, and creating striking literary effects. But he was also insistent that “Art is not enough”; poetry must also fulfill a moral function, principally that of dispelling hate and promoting love. The paradoxes in his works make the readers think and be analytical. In his sonnet “Who's Who” Auden gives the opposition of a great man and ordinary one and approaches certain modern values ironically.

Who's Who

A shilling life will give you all the facts:

How Father beat him, how he ran away,

What were the struggles of his youth, what acts

Made him the greatest figure of his day:

Of how he fought, fished, hunted, worked all night,

Though giddy, climbed new mountains; named a sea;

Some of the last researchers even write

Love made him weep his pints like you and me.

With all his honors on, he sighed for one

Who, say astonished critics, lived at home;

Did little jobs about the house with skill

And nothing else; could whistle; would sit still

Or potter round the garden; answered some

Of his long marvelous letters but kept none.

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Dylan Thomas, a Welsh poet, is the author of some of the most stirring, passionate and eloquent verse in modern literature. He was born in Swansea, Wales. His father was a schoolteacher and poet whose readings of Shakespeare, the Bible, and other poets stimulated Thomas's early fascination with words.

Thomas left school at 16 and spent fifteen months as a newspaper reporter, but poetry writing was more to his taste. He published his first volume of poetry at the age of nineteen and continued to publish books of verse during the 1930s. He published “Eighteen Poems” in 1934 and “Twenty-Five Poems” in 1936. The literary critics consider the poems of these two collections frustratingly difficult. Dylan Thomas himself wrote to a friend: ”I like things that are difficult to write and difficult to understand. ... I like contradicting my images, saying two things at once in one word, four in two and one in six”. His most famous collection of poems `Deaths and Entrances” (1946), reveals a movement away from obscurity to a simpler, more direct, yet ceremonial style.

A collection of stories about his childhood and youth “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog” appeared in 1940. During World War II Thomas worked for BBC as a documentary film editor and also as a radio broadcaster.

Another book of boyhood reminiscences “Quite Early One Morning” (1954), and a verse play, “Under Milk Wood' (1954), were published after his death

Dylan Thomas's poems written in earlier period and later period greatly differ in their approach to life and mortality. Young Dylan Thomas was obsessed with mortality, an awareness that “the force” that gives life to plants and people is also the “destroyer”, the later Thomas came to the realization that “...death shall have no dominion” in a cosmos in which all living things exist in a perpetual cycle of change and rebirth. Here is one of his poems written at later period:

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

There frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Richard Aldington (1892 - 1962)

Richard Aldington was born in Hampshire and educated at Dover College and the university of London, which he left without taking any degree. Richard Aldington began his literary work in the years preceding the First World War. His first poems appeared in the years 1909-1912 and a book of verse “Images Old and New” was published in 1915. By 1916 Aldington was in the army in France, from where he returned with a bad case of shell-shock. For several years, until he recovered his health, he earned a living by translations and literary journalism. In his early poetry Aldington often opposes mythological images of Ancient Greece to unlovely pictures of life in industrial cities. The harmony and beauty of Greek art he sees as an ideal lacking in contemporary reality. The war became a major experience for the young poet. In 1919 he published a new book of poetry “Images of War”. War is shown here as a crime against life and beauty.

In later years Aldington devoted himself more to press and produced several successful novels: “Death of a Hero” (1929), “The Colonel's Daughter” (1931), “All Men are Enemies” (1933), “Very Heaven” (1937) and some other books.

“Death of a Hero” (1929) dedicated to the so-called “lost generation” is his first and most important novel. (“Lost generation” is an expression widely used about the generation that had taken part in World War I or suffered from its effect.) Aldington's “Death of a Hero” is regarded as one of the most powerful antiwar novels of the period. The writer shows his deep concern for the post-war “lost generation” in his collections of stories “Roads to Glory”(1930), and “Soft Answers” (1932) as well. He is also the author of several biographies. Among his last works, the best novel is “Lawrence of Arabia” (1955). Basically his art is strongly linked with the traditions of the nineteenth century critical realism.

Agatha Christie (1891-1976)

Agatha Christie, a prominent detective writer, was born at Torquay, Devonshire. She was educated at home and took singing lessons in Paris. Her creative work began at the end of World War I. Her first novel, “The Mesterious Affair at Styles” appeared in 1920. Here she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian detective, the most popular sleuth in fiction since Sherlock Holmes. General recognition came with the publication of her sixth work “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” (1926).

With “Murder at the Vicarage” (1930) Agatha Christie began a series of novels featuring Miss Marple, a lady detective who won a universal appeal for her wise but unusual methods of unraveling a crime.

Beginning with 1952 Agatha Christie enjoyed another run of success with theatre adaptations of her fiction and plays. Many of her stories have been filmed including “The Secret Adversary”, “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd' (cinema title “Alibi”), “Ten Little Niggers”, “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Witness for the Prosecution”.

Agatha Christie also wrote six romantic novels under the penname Mary Westmacott. Her last Poirot book “Curtain” appeared shortly before her death (though it was written in the 1940th) and her last Miss Marple story “Sleeping Murder” and her “Autobiography” were published posthumously.

She is the author of seventy-seven detective novels and books of stories that have been translated into every major language. Agatha Christie's success with millions of readers cannot be accounted only for the good entertainment; the explanation lies in her ability to combine clever plots with excellent character drawing, and a keen sense of humour with great power of observation. Besides her books proclaim that justice will win and evil will be conquered. Her works defend rationality and never go beyond those aspects of human nature that are our common stock.

John Boynton Priestley (1894-1984)

John Boynton Priestley was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in the family of a schoolmaster. He was educated in his native town, and after army service in the First World War he returned to study at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In 1922 he began to work in London as a reviewer, essayist and literary journalist. During the Second World War he won his countrymen's affection as a patriotic broad-caster of the BBC.

Priestley's career as a novelist began in 1927 with the publication of “Benighted”. In 1929 he published “The Good Companions” which was awarded the James Tait Black Prize and was a popular success as well. His novels written over a period of almost fifty years include “Angel Pavement” (1930), “The Wonder Hero” (1933), They Walk in the City” (1936), “Let the People Sing “ (1939), “Black-Out in Gretley” (1942), “Daylight on Saturday” (1943), “Bright Day” (1946), “Festival of Fairbridge” (1951), “The Magicians” (1954), Sir Michael and Sir George” (1964), The Lost Empires (1965), Salt is Living (1966), “It's an Old Country” (1967), “The Image Men” (1968-69). These books are extremely varied in kind and quality but they are all united by their author's concern for humanity, for the happiness of men and women. His books present a wide view of mid-20th century life in England.

In 1930s Priestley began a new career as a playwright with a dramatization of “The Good Companions” (1931) which was followed by a series of plays valuable as contributions to the social history of England. Among these plays “Dangerous Corner”(1932), “Time and Conways” (1937), “An Inspector Calls (1946)“ show Priestley's detestation of the inhumanity in the existing social system and sympathy for common English people.

J.B.Priestley's list of published works also include literary history( e.g. “Figures in Modern Literature” “The English Comic Characters”, George Meredith”, “Literature and Western Man”), social criticism (e.g.” Man and Time”, “Victoria in Heyday”, “The English”) and philosophical essays (e.g. “Apes and Angels', “Delight”, “The Moments - and Other Pieces”).

Archibald Joseph Cronin (1896 - 1981)

Archibald Joseph Cronin is considered a very prominent representa-tive of critical realism. He was born at Cardross, Dumbartonshire, Scotland, educated at Dumbarton Academy and in 1914 began to study medicine at Glasgow University. But his studies were interrupted by World War I, when he served in the Navy as a surgeon sub-lieutenant. In 1919 he graduated from the Glasgow University. After graduation from the University he started practice first in Scotland and later in South Wales and the West End of London. While working in South Wales, Cronin studies hard to receive higher medical degree. He was awarded his M.D. by the Glasgow Uni-versity.

In 1930 Cronin's health broke down. Being unable to practice medicine any longer, he decided to try his hand at literature. “Hatter's Castle”, written in 1931 was his first novel and unassuming honesty of his work won him fame and recognition. At the age of thirty he had won a gold medal in a nation-wide competition for the best historical essay of the year.

“Hatter's Castle” is an extremely gloomy novel. The plot centres round the life of the Brodie family. The head of the family, Mr.Brodie, is a rich farmer, a proud, selfish, wicked man. His cruelty and vanity ruin the life of his wife and children. The end of the book is tragic. The novel is talented and exciting, but the events and characters are shown in the naturalistic manner, that is they lack the critical interpretation of the events. The author does not go deep into the social causes which give rise to such vicious characters as Mr.Brodie.

The next novel “The Stars Look Down” (1935) marks the beginning of Cronin's most mature period. The book deals with the burning problems of life: labour and capital, politics, economics, strikes in coalmines, educat-ion, marriage and so on. The action takes place in the North of England during World War I. The central conflict of the novel is the fight of the miners against the pit-owners. Cronin does not support the revolutionary struggle of the workers (in his opinion it is inevitably doomed to failure), but his sympathy with the working people is quite evident. The charm of “The Stars Look Down” lies in a realistic portrayal of the characters and a truthful description of the hard life of the miners. The novel is justly considered one of he best works of Critical Realism.

In “The Citadel” (1937), as in many novels of the later period, Cronin deals with the life and work of an intellectual (usually a medical man). He shows that the profession of a doctor is honourable and important, but it is often regarded only as a means of taking money. Thus a physician faces an alternative, either to prosper at the expense of others or to do his best to help poor suffering humanity and so to be doomed to poverty. Andrew Manson, the main character of “The Citadel”, has to face this alternative. “The Cita-del” is a social novel. It is considered to be Cronin's masterpiece. The book describes different aspects of life in the first half of the 20th century, which the author knew well from his own experience.

3. Modern Literature (after World War II)

The fear of a German invasion and the aerial bombardments of heavily industrialized areas united the country and forged a spirit of comradeship among the British people. England's most notable postwar achievement was the peaceful liquidation of its once vast empire. This imperial loss and domestic economic problems caused British statesmen to develop a new approach in world affairs. Seeking closer ties with Europe, England accepted an invitation to join the common Market.

Some of the poetry of the period, particularly, the work of Dylan Thomas, was marked by an extravagant, romantic rhetoric. The works of Ted Hughes were simpler in style, but his poetry powerfully evokes the world of nature, using a richly textured pattern of metaphor and mythic suggestiveness for its effects.

English drama experienced a renaissance in the 1950s and 1960s. It was stimulated by the presence of large numbers of first-rate actors and directors and the works of playwrights like John Osborne, John Arden, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and Edward Bond.

In the 20th century in English Literature appeared such young writers like Graham Greene, Charles Percy Snow, Norman Lewis, and James Aldridge, who created their works in the spirit of optimism. They are mature writers with anti-imperialist and anti-colonial point of view. In the fifties there appears a very interesting trend in literature the followers of which were called “The Angry Young Men”. The post-war changes had given a chance to a large number of young people from the more democratic layers of the society to receive higher education at universities. But on graduating, these students found they had no prospects in life. Unemployment had increased after the war. No one was interested to learn what their ideas on life and society were. They felt deceived and became angry. Works dealing with such characters, angry young men, who were angry with everything and everybody. Outstanding writers of this trend were John Wain, Kingsley Amis, John Brain, Colin Wilson and the dramatist John Osborne. It is important to note that they did not belong to a clearly defined movement. They criticized one another in press. But they had one thing in common - an attitude of unconformity to the established social order. Through their characters these writers were eager to express their anger with society.

Modern literature that began in the sixties saw a new type of criticism in the cultural life of Britain. This criticism was revealed in the “working-class novel”, as it was called. These novels deal with characters coming from the working class. The best-known writers of this trend are Sid Chaplin (1916-1986), the author of “The Last Day of the Sardine” (1961), and Allan Sillitoe, the author of the well-known novel “Key to the Door” (1963).

A great deal of contemporary English fiction and drama is dedicated to the subject of man's search for identity, and the stress is not so much on political or social issues as on moral problems. The problem of identity is closely linked with one of the most influential philosophical trends of the 20th century - existentialism. According to it man must live and make his choice, must come to terms with his own existence and the true meaning of everything around him. The influence of existentialist ideas left a profound impression on the work of Iris Murdoch.