The Twenties of the Twentieth century. English Literature in the 1930s and 1940s William Butler Yeats

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;¹
My country is Kiltarten² 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.