british poetry in the age of modernism

Here the phrase ‘the names’ itself becomes what it describes, a name whose repeated turning-over thickens it into a thing itself ...

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me Remembering again that I shall die And ne ...

Thomas was picking up a theme of the poem ‘Liberty’ written a few weeks beforehand: And yet I still am half in love with pain, W ...

Thomas’s criticism of Pater’s ideas, which homes in on the latter’s insistence that art is a matter of self-conscious selection. ...

this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits; for habit is relative to a st ...

where lives no poems tho’ without great scent or audible music [sic]. Rather is the mystic to be found among those who would wri ...

Words are public things with meanings beyond the power of the private individual. But Pater distrusted anything beyond himself: ...

‘Some goal / I touched then’; Davies and de la Mare have attained poetry precisely because they resist such Nietzschean self-ass ...

ecstasy in poetry ‘Words’ ends ‘as poets do’, which might be glossed as ‘as we poets do’, or ‘as I do when being a poet’, or equ ...

the lines appear to come as free verse does, without overt reference to what has gone before or suggesting what will come. When ...

Was vain: no more could the restless brook Ever turn back and climb the waterfall To the lake that rests and stirs not in its no ...

This heart, some fraction of me, happily Floats through the window even now to a tree ‘The Wasp Trap’ is also about such uninten ...

All happiness is a state of suspension in this poem. Grammatically, the last stanza might be a statement of what happened, but e ...

Soar in lone flight So far, Like a black star He seems – A mote Of singing dust Afloat Above, That dreams And sheds no light. I ...

Poetry involves an inevitable difference between words and mind that speech cannot override; indeed, itdependson the disparity b ...

The truth of speech in poetry is there when it is being overheard by someone else, and so many of Thomas’s poems begin as if the ...

And all was earth’s, or all was sky’s; No difference endured between The two. A dog barked on a hidden rise; A marshbird whistle ...

As the bird’s own song appeared ‘seeming far-off [.. .] as if the bird or I were in a dream’, so the rhythm can be traced behind ...

The road enables him to experience a complete lack of relation with what he passes, a placelessness which ironically resembles t ...

which means that they have recently returned from winter in southern Europe, so evidently the one nationality he shares with the ...