Lecture English Literature after World War I and World War II

Dylan Thomas became the greatest Welsh poet of the 1900s. Thomas was known for his lyrical poems, which expressed his passionate love of life in vivid images. Experimentalism was produced in the exuberantly metaphorical poetry of 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.
Thomas Sterns Eliot best summarized their despair in ‘The Waste Land’, the most influenced poem of the period. Its jagged style, complex symbols, and references to other literary works set a new pattern for poetry. Eliot was conservative in politics and religion.
3. The literature of World War II (1939-1945)
The outbreak of war in 1939, as in 1914, brought to an end an era of great intellectual and creative exuberance. Individuals were dispersed; the rationing of paper affected the production of magazines and books; and the poem and the short story, convenient forms for men under arms, became the favoured means of literary expression. It was hardly a time for new beginnings. The poets of the New Apocalypse movement (poetry is written in a surreal and rhetorical style) produced three anthologies. The representatives are Dylan Thomas, George Barker, David Gascoyne, Vernon Watkins. No important new novelists or playwrights appeared. Only three new poets, all of whom died on active service, Alun Lewis, Sidney Keyes, Keith Douglas gave detached accounts of the battlefield.
4.The literature after 1945
Increased attachment to religion most immediately characterized literature after World War II. This was particularly perceptible in authors who had already established themselves before the war. Wystan Hugh Auden turned to Christian commitment, expressed in poems that attractively combine classical form with vernacular relaxedness. Thomas Sterns Eliot and Christopher Fry’s verse was suffused with Christian beliefs. Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh’s Roman Catholicism was reflected in their novels. Eastern mysticism was found in Aldous Huxley’s works.