british poetry in the age of modernism

whiteness of the sun has here become evidence of divine wrath; the reader can only speculate about the fury of those calmly gray ...

I might still arise, Go forth, and stand And prophesy in the land), I feel the shake Of wind and earthquake And consuming fire N ...

Where I could not follow With wing of swallow To gain one glimpse of you ever anon! ‘Anon’ may be shorthand for ‘henceforth’, or ...

The comma at the first line-break suggests that perhaps they not only did not speak of the past, but were not speaking at all. T ...

‘You may miss me then’, she says, alternating between possibility and a rather bossy permission: But I shall not know How may ti ...

Perhaps ‘The Walk’, one of Hardy’s most beautiful and painful poems, puts this state of mind most clearly: You did not walk with ...

happened. The very indifference of gate, hill or tree is noticeable because it should not be so, and the same charge is tacitly ...

lifelong commitment of marriage – but making her life a ‘round’ means her grave is continuous with that childhood, and nothing h ...

What have you now found to say of our past – Scanned across the dark space wherein I have lacked you? It is angry, but in every ...

mixture of the evanescent and the enduring comes to a head in the last stanzas, when the formal design of the poem shows through ...

You have really said a good deal and diagnosed the trouble with nearly all the art and literature of the past thirty years. I ou ...

chapter 6 Going over the top: the passions of Wilfred Owen What did Wilfred Owen feel about the First World War? If this sounds ...

thereby gains a peculiar character of its own. Asking what Owen felt about the war he was fighting in is not such a simple quest ...

extraordinary style, for the remarkable division between the form of his poems and their content is a protest against and a symp ...

treading blood, or the gorier moments of vengeance in the Old Testament (Psalms 58 : 10 , Isaiah 63 : 2 – 4 ) where the feet are ...

of war, Owen ends his anti-war protest by setting its spirit against Prussia, thus neatly stepping back inside military orthodox ...

simultaneously, this connotes sacrifice, killing, offering to God, all the things Owen protests against in ‘The Parable of the O ...

job to dispense. Owen’s sense of distortion turns out to be within the beauty itself, rather than in opposition to it. If Owen r ...

conflation of aesthetic enjoyment and disgust, the artificial and the direct. ‘Insensibility’ dramatises the conflict: The front ...

‘Is Owen over-doing it here?’ I would ask. ‘Inside five lines we have “devil’s sick of sin”, “gargling”, “froth-corrupted”, “bit ...