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The Anglo-Saxon Or Old-English Period (670-1100)
The earliest phase of English literature started with Anglo-Saxon literature of the Angles and
Saxons (the ancestors of the English race) much before they occupied Britain
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Before they occupied Britain they lived along the
coasts of Sweden and Denmark, and the land which they occupied was called Engle-land
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Like other nations they sang at their feasts about
battles, gods and their ancestral heroes, and some of their chiefs were also bards
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Though much of this Anglo-Saxon poetry is lost, there are still some fragments left
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The most
important poem of this period is Beowulf
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There
is thus an historical background
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After the Anglo-Saxons embraced Christianity, the poets took up religious themes as the subjectmatter of their poetry
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The two
important religious poets of the Anglo-Saxon period were Caedmon and Cynewulf
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Cynewulf‘s most important poem is the Crist, a metrical narrative of leading events of Christ‘s
ministry upon earth, including his return to judgment, which is treated with much grandeur
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It is the poetry
of a stern and passionate people, concerned with the primal things of life, moody, melancholy
and fierce, yet with great capacity for endurance and fidelity
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The Anglo-Saxon period was also marked by the beginning of English prose
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In
fact, unlike poetry, there was no break in prose of Anglo-Saxon period and the Middle English
period, and even the later prose in England was continuation of Anglo-Saxon prose
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The great success of Anglo-Saxon prose is in
religious instructions, and the two great pioneers of English prose were Alfred the Great, the
glorious king of Wessex, who translated a number of Latin Chronicles in English, and Aelfric, a
priest, who wrote sermons in a sort of poetic prose
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Unlike the Romans who came as
conquerors, these tribes settled in England and made her their permanent home
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The Anglo-Saxon kings, of whom Alfred the Great
was the most prominent, ruled till 1066, when Harold, the last of Saxon kings, was defeated at
the Battle of Hastings by William the Conqueror of Normandy, France
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The Angles and Saxons combined in
themselves opposing traits of character—savagery and sentiment, rough living and deep feeling,
splendid courage and deep melancholy resulting from thinking about the unanswered problem of
death
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To these brave and fearless fighters, love of untarnished glory,
and happy domestic life and virtues, made great appeal
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All these principles are reflected in their literature
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Thus we read in Beowulf:
Music and song where the heroes sat—
The glee—wood rang, a song uprose

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The Anglo Saxon language is only a branch of the great Aryan or Indo-European family of
languages
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And it is
this old vigorous Anglo-Saxon language which forms the basis of modern English
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Middle-English Or Anglo-Norman Period (1100-1500)

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The Normans, who were residing in Normandy (France) defeated the Anglo-Saxon King at the
Battle of Hastings (1066) and conquered England
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The Anglo-Saxon authors were then as suddenly and permanently displaced
as the Anglo-Saxon king
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The foreign types of literature introduced after the
Norman Conquest first found favour with the monarchs and courtiers, and were deliberately
fostered by them, to the disregard of native forms
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Throughout the whole period, which we call the Middle English period (as belonging
to the Middle Ages or Medieval times in the History of Britain) or the Anglo-Norman period, in
forms of artistic expression as well as of religious service, the English openly acknowledged a
Latin control
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But one cannot deny that the Normans came to
their land when they greatly needed an external stimulus
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The people were suddenly inspired by a new vision of a greater
future
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In course of time the Anglo-Saxons lost their
initial hostility to the new comers, and all became part and parcel of one nation
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The great difference between the two periods—Anglo-Saxon period and Anglo-Norman period,
is marked by the disappearance of the old English poetry
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The later religious poetry has little in it to
recall the finished art of Cynewulf
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It seems that Anglo-Saxon poetry grows to rich maturity, and then disappears, as with the new
forms of language and under new influences, the poetical education started again, and so the
poetry of the Anglo-Norman period has nothing in common the Anglo-Saxon poetry
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For centuries
Latin had been more or less spoken or written by the clergy in England
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Still more important, as a result of foreign sentiment in court and castle, it
caused writings in the English vernacular to be disregarded, and established French as the natural
speech of the cultivated and the high-born
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In spite of the English language having been thrown into the background, some works were
composed in it, though they echoed in the main the sentiments and tastes of the French writers,
as French then was the supreme arbiter of European literary style
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Of the many who wrote the names of but few are
recorded, and of the history of these few we have only the most meagre details
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(a) The Romances
The most popular form of literature during the Middle English period was the romances
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These romances are notable
for their stories rather than their poetry, and they, like the drama afterwards, furnished the chief
mental recreation of time for the great body of the people
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They deal with the stories of King Arthur, The War of
Troy, the mythical doings of Charlemagne and of Alexander the Great
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From the growth and
development of the Bible story, scene by scene, carried to its logical conclusion, this drama—
developed to an enormous cycle of sacred history, beginning with the creation of man, his fall
and banishment from the Garden of Eden and extending through the more important matters of
the Old Testament and life of Christ in the New to the summoning of the quick and the dead on
the day of final judgment
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Another form of drama which flourished during the Middle Ages was the Morality plays
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The personages were abstract virtues, or vices, each acting and
speaking in accordance with his name; and the plot was built upon their contrasts and influences
on human nature, with the intent to teach right living and uphold religion
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In these moral plays the protagonist is always an
abstraction; he is Mankind, the Human Race, the Pride of Life, and there is an attempt to
compass the whole scope of man‘s experience and temptations in life, as there had been a
corresponding effort in the Miracle plays to embrace the complete range of sacred history, the

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life of Christ, and the redemption of the world
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?)
One of the greatest poets of the Middle Ages was William Langland, and his poem, A Vision of
Piers the Plowman holds an important place in English literature
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This poem, which is a satire on the corrupt religious
practices, throws light on the ethical problems of the day
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He represents the dissatisfaction of the lower and the more thinking classes of English society, as
Chaucer represents the content of the aristocracy and the prosperous middle class
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The
feudal system is his ideal; he desires no change in the institution of his days, and he thinks that
all would be well if the different orders of society would do their duty
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(d) John Gower (1325?—1408)
Gower occupies an important place in the development of English poetry
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Gower represents the English culmination of that courtly medieval poetry which had its
rise in France two or three hundred years before
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Gower is mainly a narrative poet and his most important work is Confession Amantis, which is in
the form of conversation between the poet and a divine interpreter
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Throughout the collection of stories
which forms the major portion of Confession Amantis, Gower presents himself as a moralist
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Up to their time, the literary
production of England had been exceedingly rudimentary and limited
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(e) Chaucer (1340?
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Unlike the poetry of his predecessors and contemporaries, which is
read by few except professed scholars, Chaucer‘s poetry has been read and enjoyed continuously
from his own day to this, and the greatest of his successors, from Spenser and Milton to
Tennyson and William Morris, have joined in praising it
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He disregarded altogether the old English tradition
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Part of it came from French and Italian literatures, but part of it came
from life
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Like Shakespeare and
Milton, he was, on the contrary, a man of the world and of affairs
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These pilgrims represent different sections of contemporary English society, and in
the description of the most prominent of these people in the Prologue Chaucer‘s powers are
shown at their very highest
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The Canterbury Tales is a landmark in the history of English poetry because here Chaucer
enriched the English language and metre to such an extent, that now it could be conveniently
used for any purpose
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Also, by drawing finished and various
portraits in verse, he showed the way to the novelists to portray characters
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During the first period he imitated French models,
particularly the famous and very long poem Le Roman de la Rose of which he made a
translation—Romaunt of the Rose
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During this period he also wrote the Book of the Duchess, an elegy,
which in its form and nature is like the Romaunt of the Rose; Complaint unto Pity, a shorter
poem and ABC, a series of stanzas religious in tone, in which each opens with a letter of the
alphabet in order
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In this period he wrote The Parliament of
Fowls, which contains very dramatic and satiric dialogues between the assembled birds; Troilus
and Criseyde, which narrates the story of the Trojan prince Troilus and his love for a damsel,
Creseida; The Story of Griselda, in which is given a pitiful picture of womanhood; and The
House of Fame, which is a masterpiece of comic fantasy, with a graver undertone of
contemplation of human folly
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In the Legend of Good Woman he employed for
the first time the heroic couplet
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Here we find his gentle,
kindly humour, which is Chaucer‘s greatest quality, at its very best
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He thus brought back the old classical principle of the direct imitation of nature
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The years from
1400 to the Renaissance were a period bereft of literature
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The main cause of the decline of literature during this period was
that no writer of genius was born during those long years
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They all did little but copy him, and
they represent on era of mediocrity in English literature that continues up to the time of the
Renaissance
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The middle Ages in Europe were followed by the Renaissance
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With the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A
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by the invasion of the Turks, the Greek scholars
who were residing there, spread all over Europe, and brought with them invaluable Greek
manuscripts
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The essence of this movement was that ―man discovered
himself and the universe‖, and that ―man, so long blinded had suddenly opened his eyes and
seen‖
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Along with the Revival of Learning,
new discoveries took place in several other fields
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Books were printed, and philosophy, science, and art were systematised
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Scholars flocked to the universities, as
adventurers to the new world of America, and there the old authority received a death blow
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The chief characteristic of the Renaissance was its emphasis on Humanism, which means man‘s
concern with himself as an object of contemplation
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In England it became popular during the Elizabethan period
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The first in importance was the rediscovery of classical antiquity, and
particularly of ancient Greece
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With
the revival of interest in Greek Classical Antiquity, the new spirit of Humanism made its impact
on the Western world
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His Utopia, written in Latin, was suggested by Plato‘s Republic
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The second important aspect of Humanism was the discovery of the external universe, and its
significance for man
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In the medieval
morality plays, the characters are mostly personifications: Friendship, Charity, Sloth,
Wickedness and the like
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Moreover, the revealing of the writer‘s own
mind became full of interest
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In drama Marlowe probed down into the deep recesses of
the human passion
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Faustus and Barabas, the Jew of Malta, are
possessed of uncontrolled ambitions
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His genius, fed by the spirit of the Renaissance, enabled him to see life whole, and
to present it in all its aspects
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Another aspect of Humanism was the enhanced sensitiveness to formal beauty, and the
cultivation of the aesthetic sense
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An Italian diplomat and man of letters, Castiglione, wrote a treatise entitled Il
Cortigiano (The Courtier) where he sketched the pattern of gentlemanly behaviour and manners
upon which the conduct of such men as Sir Phillip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh was modelled
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Though it suffered from exaggeration and pedantry, yet it introduced order and balance in
English prose, and gave it pithiness and harmony
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Instead of looking up to some higher authority, as was done in The Middle Ages, during the
Renaissance Period guidance was to be found from within
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Sidney wrote his Arcadia in the form of fiction in

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order to expound an ideal of moral excellence
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Though we do not look
for direct moral teaching in Shakespeare, nevertheless, we find underlying his work the same
profoundly moral attitude
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One of the results of the humanist
teaching in the schools and universities had been a great development of the study of Latin
drama and the growth of the practice of acting Latin plays by Terence, Plautus and Seneca, and
also of contemporary works both in Latin and in English
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Their significance lies in the fact
that they brought the educated classes into touch with a much more highly developed kind of
drama, than the older English play
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The three important
plays of this type are Nicholas Udall‘s Ralph Roister Doister, John Still‟s Grummar Gurton‟s
Needle, and Thomas Sackville‘s Gorbuduc or Ferrex and Porrex—the first two are comedies
and last one a tragedy
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The second period of Elizabethan drama was dominated by the ―University Wits‖, a professional
set of literary men
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Lyly (1554-1606)
The author of Euphues, wrote a number of plays, the best known of them are Compaspe (1581),
Sapho and Phao (1584), Endymion (1591), and Midas (1592), These plays are mythological and
pastoral and are nearer to the Masque (court spectacles intended to satisfy the love of glitter and
novelty) rather than to the narrative drama of Marlowe
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Though the verse is simple and charming prose is marred by exaggeration, a
characteristic of Euphuism
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He was an actor as well as writer of plays
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His earnest work is The Arraignment of Paris, (1584); his most famous is David and Bathsheba
(1599)
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David and Bathsheba contains many beautiful lines
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Thomas Kyd (1558-95)
Achieved great popularity with his first work, The Spanish Tragedy, which was translated in
many European languages
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Though he is always
violent and extravagant, yet he was responsible for breaking away from the lifeless monotony of
Gorboduc
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His plays comprise Orlando
Furioso, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Alphonsus King of Aragon and George a Greene
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Its variety of interest
and comic, relief and to the entertainment of the audience
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Greene also achieves distinction by the vigorous
humanity of his characterisation
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Of all the members of the
group Marlowe is the greatest
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Tamburlain was succeeded
by The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, in which Marlowe gave an old medieval legend a
romantic setting
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Marlowe‘s Faustus is the
genuine incarnation of the Renaissance spirit
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His last play, Edward II, is his
best from the technical point of view
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Marlowe‘s contributions to the Elizabethan drama were great
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He introduced heroes who were men of great strength and vitality,
possessing the Renaissance characteristic of insatiable spirit of adventure
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He made the blank verse supple
and flexible to suit the drama, and thus made the work of Shakespeare in this respect easy
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He also gave beauty and
dignity and poetic glow to the drama
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Thus he has been rightly called ―the Father of English Dramatic Poetry
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As we do not know much about his life, and it is certain that he did not have
proper training and education as other dramatists of the period had, his stupendous achievements
are an enigma to all scholars up to the present day
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Endowed with a marvellous imaginative and creative mind, he
could put new life into old familiar stories and make them glow with deepest thoughts and
tenderest feelings
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In spite of the meagre material we have got about his life, we
can surmise that he must have undergone proper training first as an actor, second as a reviser of
old plays, and the last as an independent dramatist
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He must have studied deeply and observed minutely the people he came
in contact with
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Besides non—dramatic poetry consisting of two narrative poems, Venice and Adonis and The
Rape of Lucrece, and 154 sonnets, Shakespeare wrote 37 plays
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This work is generally
divided into four periods
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To this period belong the revision of old plays
as the three parts of Henry VI and Titus Andronicus; his first comedies—Love‟s Labour Lost,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night‟s Dream; his
first chronicle play—Richard III; a youthful tragedy—Romeo and Juliet
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These plays reveal Shakespeare‘s great development as a thinker and technician
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(iii) 1601-1608
To the third period belong Shakespeare‘s greatest tragedies and sombre or bitter comedies
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He is
more concerned with the darker side of human experience and its destructive passions
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The plays of this period are—
Julius Caesar, Hamlet, All‟s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure; Troilus and Cressida,
Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens
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Here the clouds seem to
have been lifted and Shakespeare is in a changed mood
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The tone of
the plays is gracious and tender, and there is a decline in the power of expression and thought
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The plays of Shakespeare are so full of contradictory thoughts expressed so convincingly in
different contexts, that it is not possible to formulate a system of philosophy out of them
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His style and versification are of the
highest order
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His plays are full of a large number of exquisite songs, and
his sonnets glowing with passion and sensitiveness to beauty reach the high water mark of poetic
excellence in English literature
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Words and images seem to flow from his brain spontaneously and they are clothed in a
style which can be called perfect
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Even after the lapse of three centuries his importance, instead of decreasing, has
considerably increased
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the appeal of Shakespeare is perennial
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Ben Jonson (1573-1637)
Ben Jonson a contemporary of Shakespeare, and a prominent dramatist of his times, was just the
opposite of Shakespeare
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In his
comedies he tried to present the true picture of the contemporary society
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Unlike Shakespeare who
remained hidden behind his works, Jonson impressed upon the audience the excellence of his
works and the object of his plays
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Jonson was mainly a writer of comedies, and of these the four which attained outstanding
success are Volpone; The Silent Woman; The Alchemist; and Bartholomew Fair
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The Alchemist, which is the most perfect in structure, is
also the most brilliant realistic Elizabethan comedy
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Bartholomew Fair presents a true picture of Elizabethan ‗low life‘
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Ben Jonson
wrote two tragic plays
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Ben Jonson was a profound classical scholar who wanted to reform the Elizabethan drama, and
introduce form and method in it
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He was an intellectual and satirical writer
unlike Shakespeare who was imaginative and sympathetic
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In this
way he created a new type of comedy having its own methods, scope and purpose
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In this way Jonson broke from the Romantic tendency of Elizabethan drama
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It was the poetry of the new age of discovery,
enthusiasm and excitement
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The poetry of the Elizabethan age opens with publications of a volume known as Tottel‟s
Miscellany (1577)
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Wyatt and
Surrey wrote a number of songs, especially sonnets which adhered to the Petrarcan model, and
which was later adopted by Shakespeare
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They also experimented a great
variety of metres which influenced Spenser
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Another original writer belonging to the early Elizabethan group of poets who were mostly
courtiers, was Thomas Sackville (1536-1608)
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Sackville, unlike Wyatt and Surrey, is not
a cheerful writer, but he is superior to them in poetic technique
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He was a manysided person and a versatile genius—soldier, courtier and poet—and distinguished himself in all
these capacities
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Johnson and Byron he stood in symbolic relation to his times
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Queen Elizabeth called him one of the jewels of her crown, and at
the age of twenty-three he was considered ‗one of the ripest statesmen of the age‘
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His prose works are
Arcadiaand the Apologie for Poetrie (1595)
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Though written in prose it is strewn with love songs and sonnets
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His greatest work, of course, is in poetry—the sequence of sonnets
entitled Astrophel and Stella, in which Sidney celebrated the history of his love for Penelope
Devereax, sister of the Earl of Essex,- a love which came to a sad end through the intervention of
Queen Elizabeth with whom Sidney had quarrelled
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Their greatest merit is their sincerity
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Here we find the fruit of experience, dearly bought:
Desire; desire; I have too dearly bought
With price of mangled mind
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Too long, too long, asleep thou hast me brought,
Who should my mind to higher prepare
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Spenser (1552-1599)
The greatest name in non-dramatic Elizabethan poetry is that of Spenser, who may be called the
poet of chivalry and Medieval allegory
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As
Spenser was in sympathy with both the old and the new, he tried to reconcile these divergent
elements in his greatest poetic work—The Faerie Queene
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We forget the harsh realities of life, and lifted into a fairy land where we see the knights
performing chivalric deeds for the sake of the honour Queen Gloriana
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Though Spenser‘s fame rests mainly on The Faerie Queene, he also wrote some other poems of
great merit
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Consisting of
twelve parts, each devoted to a month of the year, here the poet gives expression to his unfruitful
love for a certain unknown Rosalind, through the mouth of shepherds talking and singing
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The same type of
conventional pastoral imagery was used by Spenser in Astrophel (1586), an elegy which he
wrote on the death of Sidney to whom he had dedicated the Calendar
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His
Amoretti, consisting of 88 sonnets, written in the Petrarcan manner which had become very
popular in those days under the influence of Italian literature, describes beautifully the progress
of his love for Elizabeth Boyle whom he married in 1594
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The greatness of Spenser as a poet rests on his artistic excellence
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There is no harsh note in all his
poetry
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Above all, he
was the poet of imagination, who, by means of his art, gave an enduring to the offsprings of his
imagination
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It is used by Thomson in The Castle
of Indolence, by Keats in The Eve of St
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On account of all these factors, Spenser has been a potent
influence on the English poets of all ages, and there is no exaggeration in the remark made by
Charles Lamb that ―Spenser is the poets‘ poet
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(c) Elizabethan Prose

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During the
reign of Elizabeth prose began to be used as a vehicle of various forms of amusement and
information, and its popularity increased on account of the increased facility provided by the
printing press
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Though there were a large number of prose-writers, there were only two-Sidney
and Lyly who were conscious of their art, and who made solid contributions to the English prose
style when it was in its infancy
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They took
delight in the use of flowery words and graceful ,grandiloquent phrases
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The
Elizabethans loved decorative modes of expression and flowery style
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It was read and copied by
everybody
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The style of Euphues has three main characteristics
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In other words, it consists of two equal parts
which are similar in sound but with a different sense
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The second
characteristic of this style is that no fact is stated without reference to some classical authority
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Besides these classical allusions, there is also an abundance
of allusion to natural history, mostly of a fabulous kind, which is its third characteristic
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‖
The purpose of writing Euphues was to instruct the courtiers and gentlemen how to live, and so it
is full of grave reflections and weighty morals
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Though Puritanic in tone, it inculcates, on the whole,
a liberal and humane outlook
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The story related in Arcadia in the midst of
pastoral surrounding where everything is possible, is long enough to cover twenty modern
novels, but its main attraction lies in its style which is highly poetical and exhaustive
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It is also full of
pathetic fallacy which means establishing the connection between the appearance of nature with
the mood of the artist
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Two other important writers who, among others, influenced Elizabethan prose were: Malory and
Hakluyt
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It was by virtue of the simple directness of the language, that it
proved an admirable model to the prose story-tellers of the Renaissance England
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The writer was conscious of only that he had something to tell that was
worth telling
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The Seventeenth Century was marked by the decline of the Renaissance spirit, and the writers
either imitated the great masters of Elizabethan period or followed new paths
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There is a marked
change in temperament which may be called essentially modern
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This spirit may be defined as the spirit of observation and of
preoccupation with details, and a systematic analysis of facts, feelings and ideas
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In
the field of literature this spirit manifested itself in the form of criticism, which in England is the
creation of the Seventeenth Century
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They also
analysed, classified and systematised it
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One very important and significant feature of this new spirit of observation and analysis was the
popularisation of the art of biography which was unknown during the Sixteenth Century
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Autobiography also came in the wake of biography, and later on keeping of
diaries and writing of journals became popular, for example Pepy‘s Diary and Fox‘s Journal
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This newly awakened
taste in realism manifested itself also in the ‗Character‘, which was a brief descriptive essay on a
contemporary type like a tobacco-seller, or an old shoe-maker
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In satire, it were not the
common faults of the people which were ridiculed, but actual men belonging to opposite political
and religious groups
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The Seventeenth Century upto 1660 was dominated by Puritanism and it may be called the
Puritan Age or the Age of Milton who was the noblest representative of the Puritan spirit
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Though the
Renaissance brought with it culture, it was mostly sensuous and pagan, and it needed some sort
of moral sobriety and profundity which were contributed by the Puritan movement
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The Puritan movement stood for liberty
of the people from the shackles of the despotic ruler as well as the introduction of morality and
high ideals in politics
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In other words, it aimed at making men honest and free
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Moreover, though they were profoundly religious, they did not form a separate
religious sect
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They
were the real champions of liberty and stood for toleration
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As King Charles I and his councillors,
as well as some of the clergymen with Bishop Laud as their leader, were opposed to this
movement, Puritanism in course of time became a national movement against the tyrannical rule
of the King, and stood for the liberty of the people
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So when Charles I was defeated and beheaded in 1649 and Puritanism
came out triumphant with the establishment of the Commonwealth under Cromwell, severe laws
passed
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But when we criticize the Puritan for his
restrictions on simple and innocent pleasures of life, we should not forget that it was the same
very Puritan who fought for liberty and justice, and who through self-discipline and austere way
of living overthrew despotism and made the life and property of the people of England safe from
the tyranny of rulers
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The medieval standards of chivalry, the impossible loves and romances which we find in Spenser
and Sidney, have completely disappeared
...
The literary achievements of this socalled gloomy age are not of a high order, but it had the honour of producing one solitary master
of verse whose work would shed lustre on any age or people—John Milton, who was the noblest
and indomitable representative of the Puritan spirit to which he gave a most lofty and enduring
expression
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(a) Puritan Poetry

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(i) The School of Spenser
The Spenserians were the followers of Spenser
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The most thorough-going disciples of Spenser during the reign of James I were Phineas Fletcher
(1582-1648) and Giles Fletcher (1583-1623)
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Phineas Fletcher wrote a number of Spenserian pastorals and allegories
...
Though the poem follows the allegorical pattern of the Faerie Queene, it does not lift us
to the realm of pure romance as does Spenser‘s masterpiece, and at times the strain of the
allegory becomes to unbearable
...
His Christ‟s Victorie and Triumph in Heaven and Earth over and after Death (1610),
which is an allegorical narrative describing in a lyrical strain the Atonement, Temptation,
Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Christ, is a link between the religious poetry of Spenser and
Milton
...

Other poets who wrote under the influence of Spenser were William Browne (1590-1645)
...

Browne‘s important poetical work is Britannia‟s Pastorals which shows all the characteristics of
Elizabethan pastoral poetry
...
It is a story of wooing and adventure, of the nymphs
who change into streams and flowers
...

The same didactic tone and lyrical strain are noticed in the poetry of George Wither
...
Most of Wither‘s poetry is pastoral which is used by
him to convey his personal experience
...
He often dwells on the charms of nature and consolation provided by songs
...

Drummond who was a Scottish poet, wrote a number of pastorals, sonnets, songs, elegies and
religious poems
...
His indebtedness to Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare in the matter of
fine phraseology is quite obvious
...
His well-known poems are Tears on the Death of Maliades (an elegy), Sonnets,
Flowers of Sion and Pastorals
...

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The leader of this school was Donne
...
It was Dr
...
There he wrote:
―About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed
the metaphysical poets
...
‖
Though Dr
...
One
important feature of metaphysical school which Dr
...
‖ Moreover, he was absolutely right when he
further remarked that the Metaphysical poets were perversely strange and strained: ‗The most
heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for

16

illustrations, comparisons, and allusions… Their wish was only to say what had never been said
before‖
...
Johnson, however, did not fail to notice that beneath the superficial novelty of the
metaphysical poets lay a fundamental originality:
―If they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out
unexpected truth; if the conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage
...
‖
The metaphysical poets were honest, original thinkers
...
They were also aware of the life, and were concerned
with death, burial descent into hell etc
...

John Donne (1537-1631),
The leader of the Metaphysical school of poets, had a very chequered career until be became the
Dean of St
...
Though his main work was to deliver religious sermons, he wrote poetry of a
very high order
...
His poetry can be divided into three parts: (1) Amorous (2)
Metaphysical (3) Satirical
...
His metaphysical and satirical works which from a major portion of
his poetry, were written in later years
...
A good illustration of his satire is his
fourth satire describing the character of a bore
...

Donne has often been compared to Browning on account of his metrical roughness, obscurity,
ardent imagination, taste for metaphysics and unexpected divergence into sweet and delightful
music
...
Donne is a poet of
wit while Browning is a poet of ardent passion
...

His influence on the contemporary poets was far from being desirable, because whereas they
imitated his harshness, they could not come up to the level of his original thought and sharp wit
...

Thus with Donne, the Elizabethan poetry with its mellifluousness, and richly observant
imagination, came to an end, and the Caroline poetry with its harshness and deeply reflective
imagination began
...


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Robert Herrick (1591-1674) wrote amorous as well as religious verse, but it is on account of
the poems of the former type—love poems, for which he is famous
...

Thomas Carew (1598-1639), on whom the influence of Donne was stronger, was the finest lyric
writer of his age
...
Moreover, though possessing the strength and vitality of Donne‘s verse,
Carew‘s verse is neither rugged nor obscure as that of the master
...

Richard Crashaw (1613?-1649) possessed a temperament different from that of Herrick or
Carew
...
Though
less imaginative than Herrick, and intellectually inferior to Carew, at times Crashaw reaches the
heights of rare excellence in his poetry
...
Though lacking the vigour of Crashaw, Vaughan is more uniform and
clear, tranquil and deep
...
This is due to the clarity of his expression and the
transparency of his conceits
...
Mixed with the didactic strain there is also a current of quaint humour in his poetry
...
Moreover, he was the first poet to use the
metre which was made famous by Tennyson in In Memoriam
...
Cowley is famous for his
‗Pindaric Odes‘, which influenced English poetry throughout the eighteenth century
...
Waller was the first to use the ‗closed‘ couplet which
dominated English poetry for the next century
...
Sometimes like the Elizabethans they sing of making the
best of life as it lasts—Gather ye Rosebuds while ye may; and at other times they seek more
permanent comfort in the delight of spiritual experience
...

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(iii) The Cavalier Poets

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Jonson followed the classical method in his poetry as in his drama
...
But though his verse
possess classical dignity and good sense, it does not have its grace and ease
...
Whereas Shakespeare‘s songs are pastoral, popular and
‗artless‘, Jonson‘s are sophisticated, particularised, and have intellectual and emotional
rationality
...
The followers of Ben
Jonson were not all royalists, but this label once used has stuck to them
...
Some Cavalier poets like Carew,
Suckling and Lovelace were also disciples of Donne
...
These are, therefore, not two distinct schools, but they
represented two groups of poets who followed two different masters—Donne and Ben Jonson
...
The Cavalier poets normally wrote about trivial
subjects, while the Metaphysical poets wrote generally about serious subjects
...
Though they wrote
generally in a lighter vein, yet they could not completely escape the tremendous seriousness of

18

Puritanism
...
Sir John Suckling (1609-1642), a courtier of Charles I, wrote poetry because it was
considered a gentleman‘s accomplishment in those days
...
Sir Richard Lovelace (1618-1658) was another follower of King Charles I
...

(iv) John Milton (1608-1674)
Milton was the greatest poet of the Puritan age, and he stands head and shoulders above all his
contemporaries
...
Paying a just tribute
to the dominating personality of Milton, Wordsworth wrote the famous line:
They soul was like a star, and dwelt apart
...
We do not find the exuberance of Spenser in his poetry
...
In his verse, which is harmonious and musical, we find no trace of the
harshness of Ben Jonson
...

Being a deeply religious man and also endowed with artistic merit of a high degree, he combined
in himself the spirits of the Renaissance and the Reformation
...

Milton was a great scholar of classical as well as Hebrew literature
...
As an artist he may be called the last Elizabethan
...
‖
Milton‘s early poetry is lyrical
...
The Hymn,
written when Milton was only twenty-one, shows that his lyrical genius was already highly
developed
...
L‟Allegro represents the poet
in a gay and merry mood and it paints an idealised picture of rustic life from dawn to dusk
...
In it the poet praises the passive joys of the
contemplative life
...
In these two poems, the lyrical genius of Milton is
at its best
...
It was written to
mourn the death of Milton‘s friend, Edward King, but it is also contains serious criticism of
contemporary religion and politics
...
The Puritanic element antagonistic to the prevailing
looseness in religion and politics becomes more prominent
...

Besides these poems a few great sonnets such as When the Assault was intended to the City, also
belong to Milton‘s early period
...

When the Civil War broke out in 1642, Milton threw himself heart and soul into the struggle
against King Charles I
...

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Finding himself unfit to fight as a soldier he became the
Latin Secretary to Cromwell
...
But when he returned to poetry
to accomplish the ideal he had in his mind, Milton found himself completely blind
...

His own wife and daughters turned against him
...

―The subject-matter of Paradise Lost consists of the casting out from Heaven of the fallen
angels, their planning of revenge in Hell, Satan‘s flight, Man‘s temptation and fall from grace,
and the promise of redemption
...
‖ On
account of the richness and profusion of its imagery, descriptions of strange lands and seas, and
the use of strange geographical, names, Paradise Lost is called the last great Elizabethan poem
...
In Paradise Lost the
most prominent is the figure of Satan who possesses the qualities of Milton himself, and who
represents the indomitable heroism of the Puritans against Charles I
...

It is written in blank verse of the Elizabethan dramatist, but it is hardened and strengthened to
suit the requirements of an epic poet
...
Not so sublime as Paradise Lost, It has a
quieter atmosphere, but it does not betray a decline in poetic power
...
The central figure is Christ, having the Puritanic austere and stoic qualities
rather than the tenderness which is generally associated with him
...
This tragedy,
which is written on the Greek model, is charged with the tremendous personality of Milton
himself, who in the character of the blind giant, Samson, surrounded by enemies, projects his
own unfortunate experience in the reign of Charles II
...

The magnificent lyrics in this tragedy, which express the heroic faith of the long suffering
Puritans, represent the summit of technical excellence achieved by Milton
...

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The heights reached by Shakespeare could not be kept by later dramatists, and drama
in the hands of Beaumont and Fletcher and others became, what may be called, ‗decadent‘
...
For example, sentiment took the place of character; eloquent and moving
speeches, instead of being subservient to the revelation of the fine shades of character, became
important in themselves; dreadful deeds were described not with a view to throwing light on the
working of the human heart as was done by Shakespeare, but to produce rhetorical effect on the
audience
...
Whereas Shakespeare
and other Elizabethan dramatists took delight in action and the emotions associated with it, the
Jacobean and Caroline dramatists gave expression to passive suffering and lack of mental and
physical vigour
...
Instead of
devoting all their capacity to fully illuminating the subject in hand, they made it as an instrument
of exercising their own power of rhetoric and pedantry
...

The greatest dramatist of the Jacobean period was Ben Jonson who has already been dealt with in
the Renaissance Period, as much of his work belongs to it
...


M
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...
His melodramas Antonia and Mellida
and Antonia‟s Revenge are full of forceful and impressive passages
...
His best play is Eastward Hoe, an admirable comedy of manners, which portrays
realistically the life of a tradesman, the inner life of a middle class household, the simple honesty
of some and the vanity of others
...
St

Thomas Dekker, unlike Marston, was gentle and free from coarseness and cynicism
...

He is more of a popular dramatist than any of his contemporaries, and he is at his best when
portraying scenes from life, and describing living people with an irresistible touch of
romanticism
...
In Old Fortunates
Dekker‘spoetical powers are seen at their best
...
His best-known work,
however, is The Honest Whore, in which the character of an honest courtesan is beautifully
portrayed
...
This play is characterised by liveliness, pure sentiments and poetry
...
He wrote a
large number of plays—two hundred and twenty—of which only twenty-four are extant
...
In The Foure Prentices of London, with the Conquest of
Jerusalem, he flatters the citizens of London
...
In the Fair Maid of the West,
which is written in a patriotic vein, sea adventures and the life of an English port are described in
a lively fashion
...
Instead of the spirit of vengeance as
generally prevails in such domestic plays, it is free from any harshness and vindictiveness
...
On account of his instinctive
goodness and wide piety, Heywood was called by Lamb as a ―sort of prose Shakespeare
...
But instead
flattering the citizens, he criticised and ridiculed their follies like Ben Jonson
...
They are full of swindlers and dupes
...
In his later years
Middleton turned to tragedy
...
Some tragedies or romantic dramas as A Faire Quarrel, The
Changeling and The Spanish Gipsie, were written by Middleton in collaboration with the actor
William Rowley
...
His two gloomy dramas
are: The Revenge Tragedies, and The Atheist‟s Tragedie, which, written in a clear and rapid
style, have an intense dramatic effect
...
His best-known plays
are The White Devil or Vittoria Corombona and the Duchess of Malfi which are full of physical
horrors
...
The Duchess of Malfi is the tragedy of the young widowed duchess
who is driven to madness and death by her two brothers because she has married her steward
Antonio
...
Though a melodrama full of
horror and unbearable suffering, it has been raised to a lofty plane by the truly poetic gift of the
dramatist who has a knack of coining unforgettable phrases
...
He then exploited his reputation to the
fullest extent by organising a kind of workshop in which he wrote plays more rapidly in
collaboration with other dramatists in order to meet the growing demand
...
The Knight of the Burning Pestle is the gayest and
liveliest comedy of that time and it has such freshness that it seems to have been written only
yesterday
...

Fletcher alone wrote a number of plays of which the best known are The Tragedies of
Vanentinian, The Tragedie of Bonduca, The Loyal Subject, The Humorous Lieutenant
...


M
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...
St

Philip Massinger wrote tragedies as Thierry and Theodoret and The False One; comedies as
The Little French Lawyer, The Spanish Curate and The Beggar‟s Bush, in collaboration with
Fletcher
...
It was Massinger
who dominated the stage after Fletcher
...

In his comedies we find the exaggerations or eccentricities which are the characteristics of Ben
Jonson
...
But the most individual quality of
Massinger‘s plays is that they are plays of ideas, and he loves to stage oratorical debates and long
pleadings before tribunals
...
The Main of Honour, The Bond-Man, The Renegado, The Roman Actor, and
The Picture
...
All the
plays of Massinger show careful workmanship, though a great deterioration had crept in the art

22

of drama at the time when he was writing
...

John Ford, who was the contemporary of Massinger, collaborated with various dramatists
...
Besides the historical play, Perkin
Warbeck, he wrote The Lover‟s Melancholy, „Tis Pity Shee‟s a Whore, The Broken Heart and
Love‟s Sacrifice, all of which show a skilful handling of emotions and grace of style
...

James Shirley, who as Lamb called him, ‗the last of a great race‘, though a prolific writer,
shows no originality
...
He also wrote tragi-comedies or romantic
comedies, such as Young Admirall, The Opportunitie, and The Imposture
...

Besides these there were a number of minor dramatists, but the drama suffered a serious setback
when the theatres were closed in 1642 by the order of the Parliament controlled by the Puritans
...


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...
The great prose writers were Bacon, Burton, Milton, Sir Thomas
Browne, Jeremy Tayler and Clarendon
...
For the first time the great
scholars began to write in English rather than Latin
...
So the Bible became the
supreme example of earlier English prose-style—simple, plain and natural
...


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Bacon belongs both to the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods
...
Ben Jonson wrote of him, ‗no man ever coughed
or turned aside from him without a loss‖
...
He has the knack of compressing his wisdom in epigrams which contain the quintessence
of his rich experience of life in a most concentrated form
...
It lacks spaciousness, ease and
rhythm
...

Bacon is best-known for his Essays, in which he has given his views about the art of managing
men and getting on successfully in life
...
The tone of the essay is that of a worldly man who wants to secure
material success and prosperity
...

Besides the Essays, Bacon wrote Henry VII the first piece of scientific history in the English
language; and The Advancement of Learning which is a brilliant popular exposition of the cause
of scientific investigation
...
On account of his being the intellectual giant of his
time, he is credited with the authorship of the plays of Shakespeare
...
In it he has analysed human melancholy, described its effect
and prescribed its cure
...
It is written in a
straightforward, simple and vigorous style, which at times is marked with rhythm and beauty
...
With him the
manner of writing is more important than the substance
...
Being a physician
with a flair for writing, he wrote Religio Medici in which he set down his beliefs and thoughts,
the religion of the medical man
...
Every
sentence has the stamp of Browne‘s individuality
...
He is greater as an artist than a thinker, and his prose is highly
complex in its structure and almost poetic in richness of language
...
Most of Milton‘s prose writings are concerned with the questions
at issue between the Parliament and the King
...
His most famous prose work is Areopagitica which was occasioned by a
parliamentary order for submitting the press to censorship
...
Though as a pamphleteer Milton at times indulges in downright
abuse, and he lacks humour and lightness of touch, yet there is that inherent sublimity in his
prose writings, which we associate with him as a poet and man
...

Opposed to Milton, the greatest writer in the parliamentary struggle was the Earl of Clarendon
(1609-1674)
...


M
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...
St

Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), a bishop, made himself famous by his literary sermons
...
His best prose
famous book of devotion among English men and women
...

The Restoration Period (1660-1700)
After the Restoration in 1660, when Charles II came to the throne, there was a complete
repudiation of the Puritan ideals and way of living
...

It is called the Age of Dryden, because Dryden was the dominating and most representative
literary figure of the Age
...
All restraints and discipline were thrown to the
winds, and a wave of licentiousness and frivolity swept the country
...
They renounced old ideals and demanded that English
poetry and drama should follow the style to which they had become accustomed in the gaiety of
Paris
...

The result was that the old Elizabethan spirit with its patriotism, its love of adventure and
romance, its creative vigour, and the Puritan spirit with its moral discipline and love of liberty,
became things of the past
...
But then the writers of the period began to evolve
something that was characteristic of the times and they made two important contributions to
English literature in the form of realism and a tendency to preciseness
...
They were more concerned with vices rather than with virtues
...
Later this tendency to realism became more
wholesome, and the writers tried to portray realistically human life as they found it—its good as
well as bad side, its internal as well as external shape
...
It emphasised directness and simplicity
of expression, and counteracted the tendency of exaggeration and extravagance which was
encouraged during the Elizabethan and the Puritan ages
...
The Royal Society, which was established during this period enjoined on all
its members to use ‗a close, naked, natural way of speaking and writing, as near the
mathematical plainness as they can‖
...
Under his guidance, the English
writers evolved a style—precise, formal and elegant—which is called the classical style, and
which dominated English literature for more than a century
...

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The Restoration poetry was mostly satirical, realistic and written in
the heroic couplet, of which Dryden was the supreme master
...
In the
field of poetry he was, in fact, the only poet worth mentioning
...
But in his later years he emancipated himself from the false taste and
artificial style of the metaphysical writers, and wrote in a clear and forceful style which laid the
foundation of the classical school of poetry in England
...
Of his political satires, Absolem and Achitophel and The Medal
are well-known
...
It contains powerful character studies of Shaftesbury and of the Duke of
Buckingham who is represented as Zimri
...
It also contains a scathing personal attack on Thomas
Shadwell who was once a friend of Dryden
...
These
poems are neither religious nor devotional, but theological and controversial
...
The second written
when Dryden had become a Catholic, vehemently defends Catholicism
...

The Fables, which were written during the last years of Dryden‘s life, show no decrease in his
poetic power
...
The Palamon and Arcite, which is based on Chaucer‘s Knight‟s
Tale, gives us an opportunity of comparing the method and art of a fourteenth century poet with
one belonging to the seventeenth century
...
His Alexander‟s Feast is one of the
best odes in the English language
...
It does not have the poetic glow, the spiritual fervour, the
moral loftiness and philosophical depth which were sadly lacking in the Restoration period
...
Though Dryden does not reach great poetic heights, yet here
and there he gives us passages of wonderful strength and eloquence
...
In fact in these two capacities he is still the greatest
master in English literature
...


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...
St

In 1642 the theatres were closed by the authority of the parliament which was dominated by
Puritans and so no good plays were written from 1642 till the Restoration (coming back of
monarchy in England with the accession of Charles II to the throne) in 1660 when the theatres
were re-opened
...
Moreover, it was greatly affected by the
spirit of the new age which was deficient in poetic feeling, imagination and emotional approach
to life, but laid emphasis on prose as the medium of expression, and intellectual, realistic and
critical approach to life and its problems
...
The result was that
unlike the Elizabethan drama which had a mass appeal, had its roots in the life of the common
people and could be legitimately called the national drama, the Restoration drama had none of
these characteristics
...

As imagination and poetic feelings were regarded as ‗vulgar enthusiasm‘ by the dictators of the
social life
...
The most popular form of drama was the Comedy of
Manners which portrayed the sophisticated life of the dominant class of society—its gaiety,
foppery, insolence and intrigue
...
The
general tone of this drama was most aptly described by Shelley:
Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds humour; we laugh from self-complacency and
triumph; instead of pleasure, malignity, sarcasm and contempt, succeed to sympathetic
merriment; we hardly laugh, but we smile
...

These new trends in comedy are seen in Dryden‘s Wild Gallant (1663), Etheredge‘s (1635-1691)
The Comical Revenge or Love in a Tub (1664), Wycherley‘s The Country Wife and The Plain
Dealer, and the plays of Vanbrugh and Farquhar
...
He well-known comedies are Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700)
...
No English dramatist has even written such fine prose for the stage as Congreve did
...
As the plays of Congreve reflect the fashions and foibles of the upper classes
whose moral standards had become lax, they do not have a universal appeal, but as social
documents their value is very great
...

In tragedy, the Restoration period specialised in Heroic Tragedy, which dealt with themes of epic
magnitude
...
The purpose of this tragedy
was didactic—to inculcate virtues in the shape of bravery and conjugal love
...
In it declamation took the place of natural dialogue
...
As it was not based on the observations of life, there was no realistic characterisation,
and it inevitably ended happily, and virtue was always rewarded
...
Under his leadership the heroic
tragedy dominated the stage from 1660 to 1678
...

But then a severe condemnation of this grand manner of writing tragedy was started by certain
critics and playwrights, of which Dryden was the main target
...

Dryden‘s altered attitude is seen more clearly in his next play All for Love (1678)
...
‖ He shifts his ground from the typical
heroic tragedy in this play, drops rhyme and questions the validity of the unities of time, place
and action in the conditions of the English stage
...

Another important way in which Dryden turns himself away from the conventions of the heroic
tragedy, is that he does not give a happy ending to this play
...

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Of course, it cannot be said that the Restoration prose enjoys absolute supremacy in
English literature, because on account of the fall of poetic power, lack of inspiration, preference
of the merely practical and prosaic subjects and approach to life, it could not reach those heights
which it attained in the preceding period in the hands of Milton and Browne, or in the succeeding
ages in the hands of Lamb, Hazlitt, Ruskin and Carlyle
...
For the first time a prose style was evolved which could be used for plain narrative,
argumentative exposition of intricate subjects, and the handling of practical business
...
The epigrammatic style of
Bacon, the grandiloquent prose of Milton and the dreamy harmonies of Browne could not be
adapted to scientific, historical, political and philosophical writings, and, above all, to novelwriting
...

As in the fields of poetry and drama, Dryden was the chief leader and practitioner of the new
prose
...
He
wrote in a plain, simple and exact style, free from all exaggerations
...
This style is, in fact,
the most admirably suited to strictly prosaic purposes—correct but not tame, easy but not
slipshod, forcible but not unnatural, eloquent but not declamatory, graceful but not lacking in
vigour
...
On the whole, for general
purposes, for which prose medium is required, the style of Dryden is the most suitable
...
Another famous writer of the period was Thomas Sprat who is better
known for the distinctness with which he put the demand for new prose than for his own
writings
...
‖ The Society expected from all its
members ―a close, natural way of speaking—positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness
bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of
artisans, country men and merchants before that of wits and scholars
...
That is why the prose
of the Restoration period is free from monotony
...

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Next to Dryden, Bunyan was the greatest prose-writer of the period
...
To him also goes the credit of being the
precursor of the English novel
...
Just as Milton wrote
his Paradise Lost ―to justify the ways to God to men‖, Bunyan‘s aim in The Pilgrim‟s Progress
was” ―to lead men and women into God‘s way, the way of salvation, through a simple parable
with homely characters and exciting events‖
...
Both were deeply religious, and both, though
they distrusted fiction, were the masters of fiction
...

In The Pilgrim‟s Progress, Bunyan has described the pilgrimage of the Christian to the Heavenly
City, the trials, tribulations and temptations which he meets in the way in the form of events and
characters, who abstract and help him, and his ultimately reaching the goal
...
The style is terse, simple and vivid, and it appeals to the cultured as well as to
the unlettered
...
Johnson remarked: ―This is the great merit of the book, that the most
cultivated man cannot find anything to praise more highly, and the child knows nothing more
amusing
...
It has a good story; the characters are interesting and possess individuality and
freshness; the conversation is arresting; the descriptions are vivid; the narrative continuously
moves towards a definite end, above all, it has a literary style through which the writer‘s
personality clearly emanates
...

Bunyan‘s other works are: Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), a kind of spiritual
autobiography; The Holy War, which like The Pilgrim‟s Progress is an allegory, but the
characters are less alive, and there is less variety; The Life and Death of Mr
...


M
O
C

...
He was neither a scholar, nor did he belong to any literary school; all that
he knew and learned was derived straight from the English Bible
...
What he wrote came straight from his heart, and he wrote in the
language which came natural to him
...
It is quite
true to call him the pioneer of the modern novel, because he had the qualities of the great storyteller, deep insight into character, humour, pathos, and the visualising imagination of a dramatic
artist
...
St

Eighteenth-Century Literature
The Eighteenth Century in England is called the Classical Age or the Augustan Age in literature
...
Though Dryden belonged to the
seventeenth century, he is also included in the Classical or Augustan Age, as during his time the
characteristics of his age had manifested themselves and he himself represented them to a great
extent
...

Johnson, and so the Classical Age is divided into three distinct periods—the Ages of Dryden,
Pope and Dr
...
In this chapter which is devoted to the eighteenth-century literature in
England, we will deal with the Ages of Pope and Johnson
...
‖
The Eighteenth Century is called the Classical Age in English literature on account of three
reasons
...
This term was first applied to the works of the great Greek and Roman
writers, like Homer and Virgil
...
In the second place, in every national literature there is a period when a large
number of writers produce works of great merit; such a period is often called the Classical Period

29

or Age
...
As during the eighteenth century in
England there was an abundance of literary productions, the critics named it the Classical Age in
English literature
...
In this they were
influenced by French writers, especially by Boileau and Rapin, who insisted on precise methods
of writing poetry, and who professed to have discovered their rules in the classics of Horace and
Aristotle
...
But as the eighteenth century writers in England followed the ancient classical
writers only in their external performance, and lacked their sublimity and grandeur, their
classicism is called pseudo-classicism i
...
, a false or sham classicism
...
This term was chosen by
the writers of the eighteenth century themselves, who saw in Pope, Addison, Swift, Johnson and
Burke the modern parallels to Horace, Virgil, Cicero, and other brilliant writers who made
Roman literature famous during the reign of Emperor Augustus
...
But these terms—the Classical
Age and the Augustan Age-have become current, and so this age is generally called by these
terms
...
They began
to think that undue respect for authority of the Ancients was a great source of error, and therefore
in every matter man should apply his own reason and commonsense
...
Though in the seventeenth century Sir
Thomas Browne who stood against Ancient Authority in secular matters, declared that in religion
―haggard and unreclaimed Reason must stoop unto the lure of Faith‖
...
He declared in An
Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (1690), ―Faith is nothing but a firm assent of the
mind; which if it be regulated as is our duty, cannot be afforded to anything but upon good
reason; and so cannot be opposite to it
...
So the need of the expert or specialist vanishes
...
That conclusion was
believed to have universal value and direct appeal to everyone belonging to any race or age
...
When Pope said of wit that it is ―Nature to advantage
dress‘d, what oft was thought but n‘er so well express‘d,‖ and when Dr
...

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This was the temper of the eighteenth century
...
It was an age which took a legitimate pride in modern discoveries based
upon observation and reason, and which delighted to reflect that those discoveries had confirmed
the ancient beliefs that there is an order and harmony in the universe, that it is worked on rational
principles, that each created thing has its allowed position and moved in its appointed spheres
...
‖
Now let us consider the literary characteristics of this age
...
Now, for the first time in
the history of English literature, prose occupies the front position
...
In fact the prose writers of this age excel the poets in every respect
...
In fact, poetry also had become
prosaic, because it was no longer used for lofty and sublime purposes, but, like prose, its subjectmatter had become criticism, satire, controversy and it was also written in the form of the essay
which was the common literary from: Poetry became polished, witty and artificial, but it lacked
fire, fine feelings, enthusiasm, the poetic glow of Elizabethan Age and the moral earnestness of
Puritanism
...
The chief literary glory of the age was, therefore, not poetry, but
prose which in the hands of great writers developed into an excellent medium capable of
expressing clearly every human interest and emotion
...
They are found in their excellent form in the
poetry of Pope, who perfected the heroic couplet, and in the prose of Addison who developed it
into a clear, precise and elegant form of expression
...
The wings and the Tories—members of two important political parties
which were constantly contending to control the government of the country—used and rewarded
the writers for satirising their enemies and undermining their reputation
...
Thus the literature of the age, which is mainly satirical
cannot be favourably compared with great literature
...

Another important feature of this age was the origin and development of the novel
...
The realism of the age and the development
of an excellent prose style greatly helped in the evolution of the novel during the eighteenth
century
...
Goldsmith and Sheridan were the
only writers who produced plays having literary merit
...

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In the later part of it—the Age of Johnson—cracks began to appear in the
edifice of classicism, in the form of revolts against its ideals, and a revival of the Romantic
tendency which was characteristic of the Elizabethan period
...

The Age of Pope (1700-1744)
The earlier part of the eighteenth century or the Augustan Age in English literature is called the
Age of Pope, because Pope was the dominating figure in that period
...
Moreover, he represented in himself all the main
characteristics of his age, and his poetry served as a model to others
...

K

It was the Classical school of poetry which dominated the poetry of the Age of Pope
...
Moreover, they had no sympathy for the fanaticism and
religious zeal of the Puritans who were out to ban even the most innocent means of recreation
...
They insisted on the role of intelligence in everything
...
Dominated by intellect, poetry of
this age is commonly didactic and satirical, a poetry of argument and criticism, of politics and
personalities
...
They have no sympathy for the humbler aspects of life—the life of the villagers, the
shepherds; and no love for nature, the beautiful flowers, the songs of birds, and landscape as we
find in the poets of the Romantic period
...
Naturally they had no regard
for the great poets of the human heart—Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton
...

Spenser, therefore, did not find favour with them
...
This love of superficial
polish led to the establishment of a highly artificial and conventional style
...
Naturally poetry became monotonous,
because the couplet was too narrow and inflexible to be made the vehicle of high passion and
strong imagination
...

Prose being the prominent medium of expression, the rules of exactness, precision and clarity,
which were insisted in the writing of prose, also began to be applied to poetry
...
The result was that
the quality of suggestiveness which adds so much to the beauty and worth of poetry was sadly
lacking in the poetry of this age
...

Alexandar Pope (1688-1744)
...
He
is ‗prince of classicism‘ as Prof
...
He was an invalid, of small sature and delicate

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Moreover, being a Catholic he had to labour under various restrictions
...
He was highly intellectual, extremely ambitious and capable of tremendous
industry
...

The main quality of Pope‘s poetry is its correctness
...
In this essay Pope insists on following the rules discovered by the
Ancients, because they are in harmony with Nature:
Those rules of old discovered, not devised
Are Nature still, but Nature methodised
...
It is ‗mock heroic‘
poem in which he celebrated the theme of the stealth, by Lord Petre of lock of hair from the head
of Miss Arabella
...

By this time Pope had perfected the heroic couplet, and he made use of his technical skill in
translating Homer‘s Illiad and Odyssey which meant eleven years‘ very hard work
...
This is Pope‘s greatest satire in which he attacked all sorts of
literary incompetence
...
His next great
poem was The Essay on Man (1732-34), which is full of brilliant oft-quoted passages and lines
...

Though Pope enjoyed a tremendous reputation during his lifetime and for some decades after his
death, he was so bitterly attacked during the nineteenth century that it was doubted whether Pope
was a poet at all
...
He is the supreme master of the epigrammatic style, of
condensing an idea into a line or couplet
...
The result is that many of them
have become proverbial sayings in the English language
...

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man
...

Minor Poets of the Age of Pope
...
There
were a few minor poets—Matthew Prior, John Gay, Edward Young, Thomas Pernell and Lady
Winchelsea
...

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These are serious
poems, but the reputation of Prior rests on ‗light verse‘ dealing with trifling matters
...

John Gay (1685-1732) is the master of vivid description or rural scenes as well of the delights of
the town
...
As a writer of lyrics, and in the

33

handling of the couplet, he shows considerable technical skill
...

Prior and Gay were the followers of Pope, and after Pope, they are the two excellent guides to
the life of eighteenth century London
...

Edward Young (1683-1765) is his Universal Passions showed himself as skilful a satirist as
Pope
...

Thomas Parnell (1679-1718) excelled in translations
...

Lady Winchelsea (1660-1725), though a follower of Pope, showed more sincerity and genuine
feeling for nature than any other poet of that age
...

To sum up, the poetry of the age of Pope is not of a high order, but it has distinct merits—the
finished art of its satires; the creation of a technically beautiful verse; and the clarity and
succinctness of its expression
...

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(b) Prose of the Age of Pope

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The prose of
this period exhibits the Classical qualities—clearness, vigour and direct statement
...
He wrote on
all sorts of subjects—social, political, literary, and brought out about 250 publications
...
As a journalist he was fond of writing about the
lives of famous people who had just died, and of notorious adventurers and criminals
...
It was followed by other works of
fiction—The Memoirs of a Cavalier, Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, Roxana
and Journal of the Plague Year
...
That is why they are appropriately called by Sir Leslie Stephen as ‗Fictitious
biographies‘ or ―History minus the Facts‘
...
They follow no system and are narrated in a haphazard manner which give them a
semblance of reality and truth
...
Here his homely and colloquial style came to his help
...
As a writer of
prose his gift of narrative and description is masterly
...

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was the most powerful and original genius of his age
...
He took delight in flouting conventions, and undermining the
reputation of his apponents
...
The Tale of a Tub which, like Gulliver‟s
Travels, is written in the form of an allegory, and exposes the weakness of the main religious
beliefs opposed to Protestant religion, is also a satire upon all science and philosophy
...

Swift was a profound pessimist
...
As a master of prose-style, which is simple, direct and colloquial, and free from the
ornate and rhetorical elements, Swift has few rivals in the whole range of English literature
...
Though apparently supporting a cause
which he is really apposing, he pours ridicule upon ridicule on it until its very foundations are
shaken
...
The mock heroic
description of the great battle in the King‘s Library between the rival hosts is a masterpiece of its
kind
...

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Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) who worked in collaboration,
were the originators of the periodical essay
...
This was
followed by the most famous of them The Spectator, is which Addison, who had formerly
contributed to Steele‘s Tatler, now became the chief partner
...
In its complete form it contains
635 essays
...

The Characters of Steele and Addison were curiously contrasted
...
What
there is of pathos and sentiment, and most of what there is of humour in the Tatler and the
Spectator are his
...
He was shy, austere, pious and righteous
...

The purpose of the writings of Steele and Addison was ethical
...
They set themselves as moralistic to break down two
opposed influences—that of the profligate Restoration tradition of loose living and loose
thinking on the one hand, and that of Puritan fanaticism and bigotry on the other
...
They made
the people laugh at their own follies and thus get rid of them
...
Their
aim was moral as well as educational
...
For example, it was by his series of eighteen articles on Paradise Lost, that Addison
helped the English readers have a better appreciation of Milton and his work
...
Their character studies
in the shape of the members of the Spectator Club—Sir Roger de Coverley and others—

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Both Steele and Addison were great masters of prose
...
Of the two, Addison was a greater master of the
language
...

Dr
...
‖ And again he said: ―Give nights and days, Sir, to the study of Addison if you mean to
be a good writer, or what is more worth, an honest man
...
Samuel Johnson, is called
the Age of Johnson
...
Even
during the Age of Johnson, which was predominantly classical, cracks had begun to appear in the
solid wall of classicism and there were clear signs of revolt in favour of the Romantic spirit
...
Most of the poets belonging to the Age of Johnson
may be termed as the precursors of the Romantic Revival
...

(a) Poets of the Age of Johnson

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Its history is the history of the struggle
between the old and the new, and of the gradual triumph of the new
...
Johnson himself, and he was supported by Goldsmith
...
As Macaulay said, ―Dr
...
‖ Johnson‘s
two chief poems, Londonand The Vanity of Human Wishes, are classical on account of their
didacticism, their formal, rhetorical style, and their adherence to the closed couplet
...
All that was required of the poets was
to imitate those standards
...
‖ In his
opposition to the blank verse, Goldsmith showed himself fundamentally hostile to change
...
They are written in the closed couplet, are
didactic, and have pompous phraseology
...

Before we consider the poets of the Age of Johnson, who broke from the classical tradition and
followed the new Romantic trends, let us first examine what Romanticism stood for
...
For instance, the main characteristics
of classical poetry were: (i) it was mainly the product of intelligence and was especially deficient

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The new poetry which showed romantic leanings was opposed to all these points
...

The poets who showed romantic leanings, during the Age of Johnson, and who may be described
as the precursors or harbingers of the Romantic Revival were James Thomson, Thomas Gray,
William Collins, James Macpherson, William Blake, Robert Burns, William Cowper and George
Crabbe
...

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James Thomson (1700-1748) was the earliest eighteenth century poet who showed romantic
tendency in his work
...
In The Seasons he gives fine sympathetic descriptions of the fields, the woods, the
streams, the shy and wild creatures
...
In The Castle of Indolence, which is written in form of dream
allegory so popular in medieval literature, Thomson uses the Spenserian stanza
...


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‖ Unlike classical poetry which was characterised by
restraint on personal feelings and emotions, this poem is the manifestation of deep feelings of the
poet
...
It contains
deep reflections of the poet on the universal theme of death which spare no one
...
Of these The Bard is more original and
romantic
...
All these poems of Gray follow the classical model so far as form is concerned,
but in spirit they are romantic
...
Like the poetry of Gray, Collin‘s poetry exhibits deep feelings of
melancholy
...
His best-known poems are the odes To Simplicity, To Fear, To the Passions, the small
lyric How Sleep The Brave, and the beautiful “Ode to Evening”
...
Collins
in his poetry advocates return to nature and simple and unsophisticated life, which became the
fundamental creeds of the Romantic Revival
...
In spite of this Macpherson exerted a considerable influence on contemporary
poets like Blake and Burns by his poetry which was impregnated with moonlight melancholy and
ghostly romantic suggestions
...
In the poetry of Blake we find a complete break from classical
poetry
...
In other poems such as The Book of Thel, Marriage of Heaven and Hell,
it is the prophetic voice of Blake which appeals to the reader
...
Some of his lyrics are, no
doubt, the most perfect and the most original songs in the English language
...
He has summed up his poetic creed in the following stanza:
Give me a spark of Nature‟s fire,
That is all the learning I desire;
Then, though I trudge through dub and mire
At plough or cart,
My Muse, though homely in attire,
May touch the heart
...
Most of his songs
have the Elizabethan touch about them
...

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His poetry, much of which is of autobiographical interest, describes
the homely scenes and pleasures and pains of simple humanity—the two important
characteristics of romanticism
...
It is
replete with description of homely scenes, of woods and brooks of ploughmen and shepherds
...


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George Crabbe (1754-1832) stood midway between the Augustans and the Romantics
...
Most of his poems are written in
the heroic couplet, but they depict an attitude to nature which is Wordsworthian
...
His
well-known poem
...
He
shows that the lives of the common villager and labourers are full of romantic interest
...

Another poet who may also be considered as the precursor of the Romantic Revival was Thomas
Chatterton (1752-70), the Bristol boy, whose The Rowley Poems, written in pseudo-Chaucerian
English made a strong appeal of medievalism
...

(b) Prose of the Age of Johnson

38

In the Age of Johnson the tradition established by prose writers of the earlier part of the
eighteenth century—Addison, Steele and Swift—was carried further
...
This aristocracy was no less in the sphere of the intellect than in
that of politics and society
...
In the field of prose the leaders of this
group established a literary style which was founded on the principles of logical and lucid
thought
...
It avoided all impetuous
enthusiasm and maintained an attitude of aloofness and detachment that contributed much to its
mood of cynical humour
...

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was the literary dictator of his age, though he was not its greatest
writer
...
He was an intellectual giant, and a man of sterling
character, on account of all these qualities he was honoured and loved by all, and in his poor
house gathered the foremost artists, scholars, actors, and literary men of London, who looked
upon him as their leader
...
He contributed a number of
articles in the periodicals, The Rambler, The Idler and Rasselas
...
Though in the preceding generations Dryden, Addison,
Steele and Swift wrote elegant, lucid and effective prose, none of them set up any definite
standard to be followed by others
...
This is what was actually done by Johnson
...
In
doing so he preserved the English prose style from degenerating into triviality and feebleness,
which would have been the inevitable result of slavishly imitating the prose style of great writers
like Addison by ordinary writers who had not the secret of Addison‘s genius
...

Though Johnson‘s own style is often condemned as ponderous and verbose, he could write in an
easy and direct style when he chose
...
The chief characteristic of
Johnson‘s prose-style is that it grew out of his conversational habit, and therefore it is always
clear, forceful and frank
...


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...
St

Burke (1729-1797) was the most important member of Johnson‘s circle
...
A man of vast knowledge, he was the greatest political philosopher that ever
spoke in the English Parliament
...
The
earliest of them were Thoughts on the Present Discontent (1770)
...
When the

39

American colonies revolted against England, and the English government was trying to suppress
that revolt, Burke vehemently advocated the cause of American independence
...
On American Taxation (1774) and on
Conciliation with America, in which are embodied true statesmanship and political wisdom
...
Here Burke shows
himself as prejudiced against the ideals of the Revolution, and at time he becomes immoderate
and indulges in exaggerations
...
His last speeches
delivered in connection with the impeachment of Warren Hastings for the atrocities he
committed in India, show Burke as the champion of justice and a determined foe of corruption,
high-handedness and cruelty
...
Though he dealt in them with events which happened during his
day, he gave expression to ideas and impulses which were true not for one age but for all times
...
The prose of Burke is full of fire and enthusiasm, yet supremely logical;
eloquent and yet restrained; fearless and yet orderly; steered by every popular movement and yet
dealing with fundamental principles of politics and philosophy
...


M
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...

His greatest historical work—The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is an
authoritative and well-documented history, can pass successfully the test of modern research and
scholarship
...
It is finished, elegant, elaborate and exhaustive
...

The Eighteenth Century Novel

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The novel in its
elementary form as a work of fiction written in prose was at first established in England by two
authors—Bunyan and Defoe, who took advantage of the public interest in autobiography
...
Bunyan endeavours to interest his readers not in
the character of some other person he had imagined or observed, but in himself, and his
treatment of it is characteristic of the awakening talent for fiction in his time
...

But it was Defoe who was the real creator of autobiographical fiction as a work of art
...
Moreover, he was the
first to introduce realism or verisimilitude by observing in his writing a scrupulous and realistic
fidelity and appropriateness to the conditions in which the story was told
...
Besides
introducing the elements of autobiography and realism, Defoe also fixed the peculiar form of the
historical novel—the narrative of an imaginary person in a historical setting as in his Memories

40

of a Cavalier
...

In spite of this, it can be safely said that until the publication of Richardson‘s Pamela in 1740, no
true novel had appeared in English literature
...
During the eighteenth
century a number of English novelists—Goldsmith, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne—all
developed simultaneously the form of the novel as presenting life, as it really is, in the form of a
story
...
Moreover, on account of the spread of education and the
appearance of newspapers and magazines there was an immense increase in the reading public to
whom the novelist could directly appeal without caring for the patronage of the aristocratic class
which was losing power
...
The novelists of the eighteenth
century told the common people not about the grand lives of knights, princes and heroes, but
about their own plain and simple lives, their ordinary thoughts and feelings, and their day-to-day
actions and their effects on them and others
...


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...
In Robinson Cruso, Defoe, has described the experiences of Alexander Selkirk who spent
five years in solitude in the island of Juan Fernandez
...
From that point of
view we can say that in Robinson Cruso Defoe brought the realistic adventure story to a very
high stage of its development, better than in his other works of fiction Captain Singleton, Moll
Flanders and Roxana which are just like picaresque stories (current at that time, about the
adventures of rogues) to which were added unnatural moralising and repentance
...


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It tells the trials, tribulations and the final happy marriage of a young girl
...
But the merit of it lies in the fact that it was the first book which told in a realistic manner
the inner life of a young girl
...
Richardson here gave too much importance to physical chastity, and ‗prudence‘ which
was the key to the middle class way of life during the eighteenth century
...

Richardson‘s second novel, Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady, is also written in the form
of letters and is as sentimental as Pamela
...
In his
next novel, Sir Charles Grandison, which is also written in the form of letters, Richardson told
the story of an aristocrat of ideal manners and virtues
...
He probed
into the inner working of the human mind
...
Johnson say of
Richardson that he ―enlarged the knowledge of human nature, and taught the passions to move at
the command of virtue‖
...
‖ Richardson‘s main contribution to the English novel
was that for the first time he told stories of human life from within, depending for their interest
not on incidents or adventures but on their truth to human nature
...
He wrote his
first great novel Joseph Andrews in order to satirise and parody the false sentimentality and
conventional virtues of Richardson‘s heroine, Pamela
...
He is
also exposed to the same kinds of temptations, but instead of being rewarded for his virtues, he is
dismissed from service by his mistress
...
Instead of the sentimentality and
feminine niceties of Richardson, in Fielding‘s novel we find a coarse, vigorous, hilarious and
even vulgar approach to life
...
The characters in the novels are drawn from all classes of society,
and they throb with life
...
His greatest novel, The History of Tom Jones, a Founding (1746-1749), has epic as well
as dramatic qualities
...
Behind all chance happenings,
improbabilities and incogruities there exists a definite pattern which gives the complicated plot
of Tom Jones a unity which we find nowhere in English novel or drama except in Ben Jonson‘s
The Alchemists
...
It is the generous impulses, rooted in unselfishness and respect for others, which are
the best guarantee of virtue
...
Here instead of showing a detached and coarse
attitude to life, Fielding becomes soft-hearted and champions the cause of the innocent and the
helpless
...

Fielding‘s great contribution to the English novel is that he put it on a stable footing
...
He is called the Father of the English novel, because he was the first
to give genuine pictures of men and women of his age, without moralising over their vices and
virtues
...


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...
St

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) followed the example of Fielding in writing picaresque novels,
which are full of intrigue and adventure
...
Instead of Fielding‘s broad
humour and his inherent kindness, we find horrors and brutalities in the novels of Smollett,
which are mistaken for realism
...
In all these novels Smollet excites continuous laughter by farcical situations and

42

exaggeration in portraying human eccentricities
...

Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768) was the opposite of Smollet in the sense that whereas we find
horrors and brutalities in the novels of Smollett, in Sterne‘s we find whims, vagaries and
sentimental tears
...
The former was started in 1760; its nineth volume appeared in 1767,
but the book was never finished
...
The main achievements of this book lie in the
brilliancy of its style and the creation of eccentric characters like Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim
...

These novels are written in the first person, and while Sterne speaks of one thing, it reminds him
of another, with which it has no apparent, logical connection
...
This method is very much like
that of the Stream of Consciousness novelists, though there is a difference, because the hero in
Sterne‘s novels is Sterne himself
...

Whenever he makes us smile, he hopes that there will be a suspicion of a tear as well
...


M
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...
St

Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) wrote only one novel—The Vicar of Wakefield
...
It is free from that vulgarity and coarseness which we find in the novels of Smollett and
Sterne
...
It is the story of Dr
...
Without introducing romantic passion,
intrigue and adventure which were freely used by other novelists, Goldsmith by relating a simple
story in a simple manner has presented in The Vicar of Wakefield the best example of the novel,
the new literary form which was becoming immensely popular
...
Defoe gave it the
realistic touch; Richardson introduced analysis of the human heart; Fielding made it full of
vitality and animal vigour; Smollett introduced exaggerated and eccentric characters; Sterne
contributed sentimentality and brilliancy of style; and Goldsmith emphasised high principles and
purity of domestic life
...

The Eighteenth Century Drama

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The dramatic literature of the eighteenth century was not of a high order
...
One of the reasons of the decline of drama during the eighteenth century was the
Licensing Act of 1737 which curtailed the freedom of expression of dramatists
...
Moreover, the new commercial middle classes which were coming

43

into prominence imposed their own dull and stupid views on the themes that would be acceptable
to the theatre
...

In the field of tragedy two opposing traditions—Romantic and Classical—exercised their
influence on the dramatists
...

Those who followed this tradition made use of intricate plots and admitted horror and violence
on the open stage
...
The traditional English pattern of drama was
exemplified by Otway‘s Venice Preserved, while the Classical tradition was strictly upheld in
Addison‘s Cato (1713), which is written in an unemotional but correct style, and has a
pronounced moralising tone
...
Johnson‘s Irene (1749)
...
Though a
very large number of tragedies were written during the eighteenth century, they had literary, but
no dramatic value
...

In the field of comedy, the same process of disintegration was noticeable
...
Moreover, sentimentality which was opposed to the authority of reason,
came to occupy an important place in comedy
...
These comedies have
had of late great success, perhaps from their novelty, and also from their flattering every man in
his favourite foible
...
If they happen to have faults or foibles, the spectator is
taught, not only to pardon, but to applaud them, in consideration of the goodness of their hearts;
so that folly, instead of being ridiculed, is commended, and the comedy aims at touching our
passions without the power of being truly pathetic
...
In his plays,
such as The Funeral, The Lying Lover, The Tender Husband, The Conscious Lovers, Steele
extolled the domestic virtues
...
In his plays in which tears of pity and emotion flowed
profusely, Steele held that Simplicity of mind, Good nature, Friendship and Honour were the
guiding principles of conduct
...
In their hands comedy was so much drenched in emotions and sentiments that the
genuine human issues were completely submerged in them
...

The two great dramatists of the eighteenth century, who led the revolt against sentimental
comedy were Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74) and Richard Sheridan (1751-1861)
...
Though the play is a
feeble one, his intentions of mocking the excess of false charity are obvious
...
It has always

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remained one of the half-dozen most popular comedies in the English language
...
Here there is no artificiality of
sentimental comedy
...
They are at once types and individuals
...
She Stoops to Conquer went a long way in restoring comedy to
its own province of mirth and laughter and rescuing it from too much sentimentality
...
Sheridan brought back the brilliance of the witty and elegant
Restoration comedy, purged of its impurities and narrowness
...
His characters are as
clearly drawn as those of Ben Jonson, but they move in a gayer atmosphere
...

The intrigue in The Rivals, though not original, is skilfully conducted
...
Malaprop, Sir Anthony, and Bab Acres
...
Here the dialogue has the exquisite Congrevelike precision, and wit reigns supreme
...

Though the main characters, the quarrelsome couple and the plotting brothers; the ‗scandal-club‘
of Lady Sneerwell; and the intrigue leading inevitably to the thrilling resolution in the famous
screen scene, are all familiar, and can be found in many other plays, yet they are invested with
novelty
...
He had no message to convey, except that the most
admirable way of living is to be generous and open-hearted
...

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The revolt
against the Classical school which had been started by writers like Chatterton, Collins, Gray,
Burne, Cowper etc
...

This period starts from 1798 with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and
Coleridge, and the famous Preface which Wordsworth wrote as a manifesto of the new form of
poetry which he and Coleridge introduced in opposition to the poetry of the Classical school
...
―The majority of the
following poems‖, he writes ―are to be considered as experiments
...
‖ In the longer preface to the second
edition of the Lyrical Ballads, where Wordsworth explains his theories of poetic imagination, he
again returns to the problem of the proper language of poetry
...
‖
Wordsworth chose the language of the common people as the vehicle of his poetry, because it is
the most sincere expression of the deepest and rarest passions and feelings
...
The other point at
which Wordsworth attacked the old school was its insistence on the town and the artificial way

45

of life which prevailed there
...

A longing to be rid of the precision and order of everyday life drove him to the mountains,
where, as he describes in his Lines written above Tintern Abbey
...

By attacking the supremacy of the heroic couplet as the only form of writing poetry, and
substituting it by simple and natural diction; by diverting the attention of the poet from the
artificial town life to the life in the woods, mountains and villages inhabited by simple folk; and
by asserting the inevitable role of imagination and emotions in poetry as against dry
intellectualism which was the chief characteristic of the Classical school, Wordsworth not only
emancipated the poet from the tyranny of literary rules and conventions which circumscribed his
freedom of expression, but he also opened up before him vast regions of experience which in the
eighteenth century had been closed to him
...
Just
as liberty of the individual was the watchword of the French Revolution, liberty of a nation from
foreign domination was the watchword of the American War of Independence; in the same
manner liberty of the poet from the tyranny of the literary rules and conventions was the
watchword of the new literary movement which we call by the name of Romantic movement
...
belonged to the literature of the
Elizabethan Age which can be called as the first Romantic age in English literature
...

The poets of the Romantic periods, therefore, always looked back to the Elizabethan masters—
Shakespeare, Spenser and other —and got inspiration from them
...

In the poems which were contributed in the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworthdealt with events of
everyday life, by preference in its humblest form
...
To the share of
Coleridge fell such subjects as were supernatural, which he was ―to inform with that semblance
of truth sufficient to procure for those shadows of imagination that willing suspension of
disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith
...

Wordsworth‘s naturalism included love for nature as well for man living in simple and natural
surroundings
...

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Coleridge‘s supernaturalism, on the other hand, established the connection between the visible
world and the other world which is unseen
...

Associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge in the exploration of the less known aspects of
humanity was Southey who makes up with them the trail of the so-called Lake Poets
...
‖ Walter Scott, though he was not intimately associated
with the Lake poets, contributed his love for the past which also became one of the important
characteristics of the Romantic Revival
...
Though they
were in their youth filled with great enthusiasm by the outburst of the French Revolution which
held high hope for mankind, they became conservatives and gave up their juvenile ideas when
the French Republic converted itself into a military empire resulting in Napoleonic wars against
England and other European countries
...
Thus these
poets of the first romantic generation were not in conflict with the society of which they were a
part
...

The second generation of Romantic writers—Byron, Shelley, Keats, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt and
others—who came to the forefront after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, revolted
from the reactionary spirit which was prevailing at that time in England against the ideals of the
French Revolution
...
Moreover, the victorious
struggle with the French empire had left England impoverished, and the political and social
agitations which had subsided on account of foreign danger, again raised their head
...
In such an atmosphere the younger romantic generation
renewed the revolutionary ardour and attacked the established social order
...
Both Byron and Shelley rebelled against
society and had to leave England
...
They were all innovators in the forms well as in the substance of their poetry
...
They rebelled against
the tyranny of the couplet, which they only used with Elizabethan freedom, without caring for
the mechanical way in which it was used by Pope
...

The prose-writers of the Romantic Revival also broke with their immediate predecessors, and
discarded the shorter and lighter style of the eighteenth century
...
Much of the prose of the Romantic period was devoted to the
critical study of literature, its theory and practice
...

As the Romantic Age was characterised by excess of emotions, it produced a new type of novel,
which seems rather hysterical, now, but which was immensely popular among the multitude of

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readers, whose nerves were somewhat excited, and who revelled in extravagant stories of
supernatural terror
...
Anne Radcliffe was one of the most successful writers of the school of
exaggerated romances
...
Jane
Austen, however, presents a marked contrast to these extravagant stories by her enduring work in
which we find charming descriptions of everyday life as in the poetry of Wordsworth
...

The mind of the artist came in contact with the sensuous world and the world of thought at
countless points, as it had become more alert and alive
...
The poets began to draw inspiration from
several sources—mountains and lakes, the dignity of the peasant, the terror of the supernatural,
medieval chivalry and literature, the arts and mythology of Greece, the prophecy of the golden
age
...

That is why some critics call the Romantic Revival as the Renaissance of Wonder
...
The greatest poets of the romantic revival strove to capture and convey
the influence of nature on the mind and of the mind on nature interpenetrating one another
...
They result
was that during the Romantic period the young enthusiasts turned as naturally to poetry as a
happy man to singing
...
In fact, poetry was so popular that Southey had to write in verse in
order to earn money, what he otherwise would have written in prose
...
It is the product of the fusion of two faculties of the artist—his
sensibility and imagination
...
Thus Romantic literature is a
genuinely creative literature calling into play the highest creative faculty of man
...

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Unlike
Classical poets who agreed on the nature and form of poetry, and the role that the poet is called
upon to play, the Romantic poets held different views on all these subjects
...
But it is difficult to find a common
denominator which links such poets as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats
...
No age in English
literature produced such great giants in the field of poetry
...
The
evenness, equanimity and uniformity of the Classical age was broken, and it was replaced by
strong currents of change flowing in various directions
...
Thus each poet of the Romantic period
stands for himself, and has his own well-defined individuality
...

In fact the most distinctive mark which distinguished the Romantic poets from the Classical
poets was the emphasis which the former laid on imagination
...
For Pope, Johnson and Dryden the poet
was more an interpreter than a creator, more concerned with showing the attractions of what we
already know than with expeditions into the unfamiliar and the unseen
...
But for the Romantics
imagination was fundamental, because they thought that without that poetry was impossible
...
On the contrary, they thought that to curb it was to deny
something vitally necessary to the whole being
...
They endeavoured to explore
the mysteries of life, and thus understand it better
...
They appealed not to the logical
mind, but to the complete self, in the whole range of intellectual faculties, senses and emotions
...
They varied in the degree of
importance which they attached to the visible world and in their interpretation of it
...
It was the task of the poet to transform it by his power of
imagination, to bring the dead world back to life
...
He was fascinated by the notion of unearthly powers at work
in the world, and it was this influence which he sought to catch
...
Just as God creates this
universe, the poet also creates a universe of his own by his imagination
...
He agreed with Coleridge that this activity resembles that of God
...
So
he explains that the imagination:
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind
And Reason in her most exalted mood
...
For him the world is
not dead but living and has its own soul
...

Nature was the source of his inspiration, and he could not deny to it an existence at least as
powerful as man‘s
...

Shelley was no less attached to the imagination and gave it no less a place in his theory of poetry
...
He
called poetry ―the Expression of the Imagination‖, because in it diverse things are brought
together in harmony instead of being separated through analysis
...
For him the ultimate reality is the eternal
mind, and this holds the universe together
...
He believed that the task of the imagination is to create shapes by which

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this reality can be revealed
...

But he had a conviction that the ultimate reality is to be found only in the imagination
...

Through the imagination Keats sought an ultimate reality to which a door was opened by his
appreciation of beauty through the senses
...

Thus the great Romantic poets agreed that their task was to find through the imagination some
transcendental order, some inner and ultimate reality which explains the outward appearance of
things in the visible world and the effect which they produce on us
...
Each set forth his
own vision through the power of his imagination
...
They refused to accept the ideas
of other men on trust or to sacrifice imagination to argument
...
They tried to show that mere reason is not sufficient to
understand the fundamental problems of life; what is required is inspired intuition
...

Poets of the Romantic Age

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The poets of the Romantic age can be classified into three groups— (i) The Lake School,
consisting of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey; (ii) The Scott group including Campbell and
Moore; and (iii) The group comprising Byron, Shelley, and Keats
...

(a) The Lake Poets
The Lake Poets formed a ‗school‘ in the sense that they worked in close cooperation, and their
lives were spent partly in the Lake district
...
Linked together by friendship, they were still further
united by the mutual ardour of their revolutionary ideas in youth, and by the common reaction

50

which followed in their riper years
...

Wordsworth and Coleridge lived together for a long time and produced the Lyrical Ballads by
joint effort in 1798
...
The literary
revolution which is associated with their name was accomplished in 1800, when in the second
edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge explained further their critical
doctrines
...
Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversation turned
frequently on two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a
faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the
modifying colours of imagination…The thought suggested itself that a series of poems may be
composed of two sorts
...

In this idea originated the plan of Lyrical Ballads, in which it was agreed that my endeavour
should be directed to persons and characters supernatural…Mr
...

This was the framework of the Lyrical Ballads
...

Wordsworth thus registered a protest against the artificial ‗poetic diction‘ of the classical school,
which was separated from common speech
...
‖ Thus it was in the
spirit of a crusader that Wordsworth entered upon his poetic career
...

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was the greatest poet of the Romantic period
...
He refused to abide by any poetic convention
and rules, and forged his own way in the realm of poetry
...

He declared: ―A poet is a man endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and
tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than
are supposed to be common among mankind
...
By defining poetry as ―the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling‖ he revolted
against the dry intellectuality of his predecessors
...

Wordsworth wrote a large number and variety of lyrics, in which he can stir the deepest
emotions by the simplest means
...
Language can scarcely be at once more

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simple and more full of feeling than in the following stanza from one of the ‗Lucy poems‘:
Thus Nature spoke—The work was done,
How soon my Lucy‟s race was run
...

Besides lyrics Wordsworth wrote a number of sonnets of rare merit like To Milton, Westminster
Bridge, The World is too much with us, in which there is a fine combination of the dignity of
thought and language
...
In the Immortality Ode, Wordsworth
celebrates one of his most cherished beliefs that our earliest intuitions are the truest, and that
those are really happy who even in their mature years keep themselves in touch with their
childhood:
Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither
...

But Wordsworth was not merely a lyrical poet; he justly claims to be the poet of Man of Nature,
and of Human Life
...
In the simple pieties of rustic life he began to find a surer foundation for faith in
mankind than in the dazzling hopes created by the French Revolution
...
It is when man lives in the lap of
nature that he lives the right type of life
...

According to Wordsworth man is a part of Nature
...

Besides the harmony between Man and Nature, the harmony of Wordsworth‘s own spirit with
the universe is the theme of Wordsworth‘s greatest Nature poems: Lines composed a few miles
above Tintern Abbey, Yew Trees and The Simplton Pass
...
His longer
poems contain much that is prosy and uninteresting
...
The Prelude, treating of the growth of
poets‘ mind, was to introduce this work
...
In his later years, Wordsworth wrote much poetry

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which is dull and unimaginative
...
‖
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
...
While Wordsworth dealt with naturalism which was an important aspect of the
Romantic movement, Coleridge made the supernatural his special domain, which was an equally
important aspect
...
He gave poetic
expression to his political aspiration in Religious Musings, Destiny of Nations and Ode to the
Departing Year (1796)
...
This change of thought is shown in his beautiful poem France: an
Ode (1798) which he himself called his ‗recantation‘
...

Coleridge was a man of gigantic genius, but his lack of will power and addiction to opium
prevented him from occomplishing much in the realm of poetry
...
It was, however, in the fields of theology, philosophy and literary
criticism that he exercised a tremendous and lasting influence
...
In
these two poems Coleridge saved supernaturalism from the coarse sensationalism then in vogue
by linking it with psychological truth
...

In the Ancient Mariner, which is a poetic masterpiece, Coleridge introduced the reader to a
supernatural realm, with a phantom ship, a crew of dead men, the overwhelming curse of the
albatross, the polar spirit, the magic breeze, and a number of other supernatural things and
happenings, but he manages to create a sense of absolute reality concerning these manifest
absurdities
...
The whole poem is
wrought with the colour and glamour of the Middle Ages and yet Coleridge makes no slavish
attempt to reproduce the past in a mechanical manner
...
But in spite of its wildness,
its medieval superstitions and irresponsible happening, The Ancient Mariner is made actual and
vital to our imagination by its faithful pictures of Nature, its psychological insight and simple
humanity
...
He prayeth best who loveth best is not an artificial ending of the poem in the
form of a popular saying, but it is a fine summing up in a few lines of the spirit which underlies
the entire poem
...

Christabel, which is a fragment, seems to have been planned as the story of a pure young girl
who fell under the spell of a sorcer in the shape of the woman Gerldine
...
The whole
poem is suffused in medieval atmosphere and everything is vague and indefinite
...

Kubla Khan is another fragment in which the poet has painted a gorgeous Oriental dream picture
...

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Though Coleridge wrote a number of other poems—Love, The Dark Ladie, Youth and Age,
Dejection: an Ode, which have grace, tenderness and touches of personal emotion, and a number
of poems full of very minute description of natural scenes, yet his strength lay in his marvellous
dream faculty, and his reputation as a poet rest on The Ancient Mariner, Christabel and Kubla
Khan where he touched the heights of romantic poetry
...
Unlike Wordsworth
and Coleridge he lacked higher qualities of poetry, and his achievement as a poet is not much
...
His most ambitious poems Thalaba, The
Curse of Kehama, Madoc and Roderick are based on mythology of different nations
...
) But he wrote far better prose than poetry, and his admirable
Life of Nelson remains a classic
...

(b) The Scott Group
The romantic poets belonging to the Scott group are Sir Walter Scott, Campbell and Thomas
Moore
...

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was the first to make romantic poetry popular among the masses
...
But in his poetry we do not find the deeply
imaginative and suggestive quality which is at the root of poetic excellence
...
That is why they are more
popular with young readers
...
His best
known poems are The Lady of the Last Ministrel, Marmion, The Lady of the Lake, Rokeby, The
Lord of the Isles
...
After 1815 Scott wrote little poetry and turned to prose
romance in the form of the historical novel in which field he earned great and enduring fame
...
Campbell wrote
Gertrude of Wyoming (1809) in the Spenserian stanza, which does not hold so much interest
today as his patriotic war songs—Ye Mariners of England, Hohenlinden, The Battle of the Baltic,
and ballads such as Lord Ullin‟s Daughter
...
He wrote a long series of Irish Melodies, which are musical
poems, vivacious and sentimental
...
Though Moore enjoyed immense popularity during his time, he is now
considered as a minor poet of the Romantic Age
...

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They represent the
second Flowering of English Romanticism, the first being represented by Wordsworth, Coleridge
and Southey
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They were the children of the revolution and their humanitarian ardour affected even Keats who

54

was more of an artist
...
It is not without significance that Byron and Shelley lived their best years,
and produced their best poetry in Italy; and Keats was more interested in Greek mythology than
in the life around him
...
So the spirit of
youthful freshness is associated with their poetry
...
This was
mainly due to the force of his personality and the glamour of his career, but as his poetry does
not possess the high excellence that we find in Shelley‘s and Keats‘, now he is accorded a lower
positions in the hierarchy of Romantic poets
...
That is why, he is called the ‗Romantic
Paradox‘
...
This work made him instantly famous
...
‖ In it he described the
adventures of a glamorous but sinister hero through strange lands
...

Such a hero, called the Byronic hero, became very popular among the readers and there was
greater and greater demand for such romances dealing with his exploits
...
But whereas these romances made
his reputation not in England alone but throughout Europe, the pruder section of the English
society began to look upon him with suspicion, and considered him a dangerous, sinister man
...

It was during the years of his exile in Italy that the best part of his poetry was written by him
...
He also wrote two sombre and self-conscious
tragedies—Manfred and Cain
...
Of these Don Juan, which is a scathing criticism of
the contemporary European society, is one of the greatest poems in the English language
...
It is written in a conversational style which subtly produces comic as well as satirical effect
...
In all his poems his personality obtrudes
itself, and he attaches the greatest importance to it
...
His last great act, dying on his way to take part in the Greek War of Independence,
was a truly heroic act; and it vindicated his position for all times and made him a martyr in the
cause of freedom
...
He
was too much in a hurry to revise what he had written, and so there is much in his poetry which
is artistically imperfect
...

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(ii) Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Whereas Byron was the greatest interpreter of revolutionary iconoclasm, Shelley was the
revolutionary idealist, a prophet of hope and faith
...
Unlike Byron‘s genius which was destructive, Shelley‘s was constructive and he
incarnated that aspect of the French Revolution which aimed at building up a new and beautiful
edifice on the ruins of the old and the ugly
...

In his early days Shelley came under the influence of William Godwin‘s Political Justice
...
So he began to imagine the new world which would come into existence
when all these forms of error and hatred had disappeared
...
In his first long poem, Queen Mab, which he wrote when he
was eighteen, he condemns kings, governments, church, property, marriage and Christianity
...
In
1820 appeared Prometheus Unbound, the hymn of human revolt triumphing over the oppression
of false gods
...
Here Prometheus stands forth as the prototype of mankind in its long struggle
against the forces of despotism, symbolised by love
...

Shelley‘s other great poems are Alastor (1816), in which he describes his pursuit of an
unattainable ideal of beauty; Julian and Meddalo (1818) in which he draws his own portrait
contrasted with last of Byron; The Cenci, a poetic drama which deals with the terrible story of
Beatrice who, the victim of father‘s lust, takes his life in revenge; the lyrical drama Hallas in
which he sings of the rise of Greece against the Ottoman yoke; Epipsychidion in which he
celebrates his Platonic love for a beautiful young Italian girl: Adonais, the best-known of
Shelley‘s longer poems, which is an elegy dedicated to the poet Keats, and holds its place with
Milton‘s Lycidas and Tennyson‘s In Memoriam as one of the three greatest elegies in the English
language; and the unfinished masterpiece, The Triumph of Life
...

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He is in fact the greatest lyrical
poet of England
...

In the whole of English poetry there is no utterance as spontaneous as Shelley‘s and nowhere
does the thought flow with such irresistable melody
...
It is in fact on the
foundation of these beautiful lyrics, which are absolutely consummate and unsurpassed the
whole range of English lyrical poetry, that Shelley‘s real reputation as a poet lies
...
He is not content, like Wordsworth, merely to love and revere Nature; his very
being is fused and blended with her
...
Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one
...
He was not only the last but the most perfect
of the Romanticists
...
Unlike Wordsworth
who was interested in reforming poetry and upholding the moral law; unlike Shelley who
advocated impossible reforms and phrophesied about the golden age; and unlike Byron who
made his poetry a vehicle of his strongly egoistical nature and political discontents of the time;
unlike Coleridge who was a metaphysician, and Scott who relished in story-telling, Keats did not
take much notice of the social, political and literary turmoils, but devoted himself entirely to the
worship of beauty, and writing poetry as it suited his temperament
...
His nature was entirely and essentially poetical and the whole of his vital
energy went into art
...
But his medical studies
did not stand in the way of his passion for writing poetry which was roused by his reading of
Spenser‘s The Faerie Queene, which revealed to him the vast world of poetry
...
His first volume of poems appeared in 1817 and his first long
poem Endymion in 1818, which opened with the following memorable lines:
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us; and sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and healthy, and quiet breathing
...

Besides this a number of other calamities engulfed him
...
All these misfortunes were intensified by his disappointment in love for Fanny Brawne
whom Keats loved passionately
...
) The Poems of 1820 are Keats‘ enduring
monument
...
Agnes and Lamia: the
unfinished epic Hyperion; the Odes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and a few sonnets
...
In Lamia Keats narrated the story of a beautiful
enchantress, who turns from a serpent into a glorious woman and fills every human sense with
delight, until as the result of the foolish philosophy of old Apollonius, she vanishes for ever from
her lover‘s sight
...
Agnes, which is the most perfect of Keat‘s medieval poems, is
surpassingly beautiful in its descriptions
...
This poem shows the influence of
Milton as Endymion of Spenser
...
Though small, it is a most perfect work of art
...
In Ode to a Nightingale we find a love of sensuous

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beauty, and a touch of pessimism
...
It is this Ode which ends with the following most memorable lines in the
whole of Keats‘s poetry
...

The Ode to Autumn, in which Keats has glorified Nature, is a poem which for richness and
colour has never been surpassed
...
For a long time his poetry was considered merely as sensuous having no
depth of thought
...
He was not an escapist who tried to run away
from the stark realities of life, but he faced life bravely, and came to the conclusion that
sufferings play an important part in the development of the human personality
...
As an artist
there are few English poets who come near him
...

He wanted to become the poet of the human heart, one with Shakespeare
...
‖
And Keats sincerely and persistently lived up to these high ideals
...


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Prose-Writers of the Romantic Age

Though the Romantic period specialised in poetry, there also appeared a few prose-writersLamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey who rank very high
...

Whereas many eighteenth century prose-writers depended on assumptions about the suitability of
various prose styles for various purposes which they shared with their relatively small but
sophisticated public; writers in the Romantic period were rather more concerned with subject
matter and emotional expression than with appropriate style
...
There was also an indication of a growing distrust of the sharp distinction between
matter and manner which was made in the eighteenth century, and of a Romantic preference for
spontaneity rather than formality and contrivance
...
Though some Romantic poets—Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron—wrote excellent
prose in their critical writings, letters and journals, and some of the novelists like Scott and Jane
Austen were masters of prose-style, those who wrote prose for its own sake in the form of the
essays and attained excellence in the art of prose-writing were Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey
...
He lived a very
humble, honest, and most self-sacrificing life
...
In his Essays of Elia (1823) and Last Essays (1833), in which is
revealed his own personality, he talks intimately to the readers about himself, his quaint whims
and experiences, and the cheerful and heroic struggle which he made against misfortunes
...

Lamb belongs to the category of intimate and self-revealing essayists, of whom Montaigne is the
original, and Cowley the first exponent in England
...
He writes always in a gentle, humorous way
about the sentiments and trifles of everyday
...
Though in his essays he
plays with trivialities, as Walter Pater has said, ―We know that beneath this blithe surface there is
something of the domestic horror, of the beautiful heroism, and devotedness too, of the old
Greek tragedy
...
One can easily trace in his English the imitations of the 16th and
17th century writers he most loved—Milton, Sir Thomas Browne, Fuller, Burton, Issac Walton
...
That is why, in every essay Lamb‘s style changes
...
His style is also full
of surprises because his mood continually varies, creating or suggesting its own style, and calling
into play some recollection of this or that writer of the older world
...
His essays are true to Johnson‘s definition; ‗a loose sally of the mind
...
They, therefore, give us an excellent picture of Lamb and of humanity
...
It is this wonderful combination of
personal and universal interest together with his rare old style and quaint humour, which have
given his essays his perennial charm, and earned for him the covetable title of ―The Prince
among English Essayists‖
...

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He was a man of violent temper, with
strong likes and dislikes
...
During the time when England was engaged in a bitter
struggle against Napoleon, Hazlitt worshipped him as a hero, and so he came in conflict with the
government
...

Hazlitt wrote many volumes of essays, of which the most effective is The Spirit of the Age
(1825) in which he gives critical portraits of a number of his famous contemporaries
...
Though at times he is misled by his prejudices, yet taking his criticism
of art and literature as a whole there is not the least doubt that there is great merit in it
...
In his interpretation of life in the general and proper sense, he shows an
acute and accurate power of observation and often goes to the very foundation of things
...

The style of Hazlitt has force, brightness and individuality
...
It is the reflection of Hazlitt‘s personality—outspoken, straightforward
and frank
...
Above all, it vibrates with the vitality and force of his personality, and so never
lapses into dullness
...
He shared the reaction of his day
against the severer classicism of the eighteenth century, preferring rather the ornate manner of
Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne and their contemporaries
...
The reader is irresistibly attracted by the splendour of his style
which combines the best elements of prose and poetry
...
There is revealed in them the beauty of the
English language
...
But in spite of these
defects his prose is still among the few supreme examples of style in the English language
...
Mostly he wrote in
the form of articles for journals and he dealt with all sorts of subjects—about himself and his
friends, life in general, art, literature, philosophy and religion
...
He wrote fine
biographies of a number of classical, historical and literary personages, of which the most
ambitious attempt is The Caerars
...
His essays
on principle of literature are original and penetrating
...
On the Knocking at the
Gate in Macbeth is the most brilliant
...
Besides these he wrote a number of essays on science and theology
...
The result is that
we cannot rely on his judgment entirely
...
Moreover, the
splendour of his ‗poetic prose‘ which is elaborate and sonorous in its effects, casts its own
special spell
...

Novelists of the Romantic Age

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The great novelists of the Romantic period are Jane Austen and Scott, but before them there
appeared some novelists who came under the spell of medievalism and wrote novels of ‗terror‘
or the ‗Gothic novels‘
...
Here the story in set in medieval Italy and it includes a
gigantic helmet that can strike dead its victims, tyrants, supernatural intrusions, mysteries and
secrets
...


(i) The Gothic Novel

60

The most popular of the writers of the ‗terror‘ or ‗Gothic‘ novel during the Romantic age was
Mrs
...
She initiated the mechanism of the ‗terror‘ tale as practiced by Horace
Walpole and his followers, but combined it with sentimental but effective description of scenery
...
He keeps her in a grim and isolated castle full of
mystery and terror
...
Radcliffe became very popular, and they influenced some
of the great writers like Byron and Shelley
...

Though Mrs
...
They were Mathew Gregory (‗Monk‘)
Lewis (1775-1818)
...
But the most
popular of all ‗terror‘ tales was Frankestein (1817) written by Mrs
...
It is the story of a
mechanical monster with human powers capable of performing terrifying deeds
...


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Giving a loose rein to their imagination the
novelist of the period carried themselves away from the world around them into a romantic past
or into a romantic future
...
It, therefore, needed
castigation and reform which were provided by Jane Austen
...

She did for the English novel precisely what the Lake poets did for English poetry—she refined
and simplified it, making it a true reflection of English life
...
Radcliffe and her school
...
She is one of
the sincerest examples in English literature of art for art‘s sake
...
Of these Pride and Prejudice is the best
and most widely read of her novels
...
From purely literary point of view Northanger Abbey
gets the first place on account of the subtle humour and delicate satire it contains against the
grotesque but popular ‗Gothic‘ novels
...
She was the daughter of a humble clergyman
living in a little village
...
The chief duties of these people were of the household, their chief pleasures were
in country gatherings and their chief interest was in matrimony
...
But in spite of these limitations she has achieved wonderful

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Her circumstances helped her
to give that finish and delicacy to her work, which have made them artistically prefect
...
She
knew precisely what she wanted to do, and she did it in the way that suited her best
...

Among her contemporaries only Scott, realised the greatness and permanent worth of her work,
and most aptly remarked: ―That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and
feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with
...
Whereas
she painted domestic miniatures, Scott depicted pageantry of history on broader canvases
...
Jane Austen
deals with the quiet intimacies of English rural life free from high passions, struggles and great
actions; Scott, on the other hand, deals with the chivalric, exciting, romantic and adventurous life
of the Highlanders—people living on the border of England and Scotland, among whom he spent
much of his youth, or with glorious scenes of past history
...
The novels which have a local colour and are based on personal observations are Guy
Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality and The Heart of Midlothian
...
He returned to Scottish antiquity from time to time as in The
Monastery (1820) and St
...

In all these novels Scott reveals himself as a consummate storyteller
...

Without being historical in the strict sense he conveys a sense of the past age by means of a
wealth of colourful descriptions, boundless vitality and with much humour and sympathy
...
Besides these
he has given us a number of imperishable portraits of the creatures of his imagination
...

The novels of Scott betray the same imaginative joy in the recreation of the past as his poetry,
but the novel offered him a more adaptable and wider field than the narrative poem
...

Scott is the first English writer of the historical novel, and he made very enduring contributions
to its development in England as well as in Europe
...
In the first place he had acquired a profound
knowledge of history by his copious reading since his earliest youth
...
He had an
innate sense of the picturesque, developed by his passion for antiquarianism
...

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In the Romantic age, Scott was romantic only in his
love of the picturesque and his interest in the Middle Ages
...
He
knew Scotland, and loved it, and there is hardly an event in any of his Scottish novels in which
we do not breathe the very atmosphere of the place, and feel the presence of its moors and
mountains
...

Though the style of Scott is often inartistic, heavy and dragging; the love interest in his novels is
apt to be insipid and monotonous; he often sketches a character roughly and plunges him into the
midst of stirring incidents; and he has no inclinations for tracing the logical consequences of
human action—all these objections and criticisms are swept away in the end by the broad,
powerful current of his narrative genius
...
Carlyle very
pertinently remarked about Scott‘s novels: ―These historical novels have taught this truth
unknown to the writers of history, that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living
men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and abstractions of men
...

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The Victorian Age in English literature began in second quarter of the nineteenth century and
ended by 1900
...
From the year 1798 with the publication of the Lyrical
Ballads till the year 1820 there was the heyday of Romanticism in England, but after that year
there was a sudden decline
...

Coleridge wrote no poem of merit after 1817
...
The Romantic poets of the younger generation
unfortunately all died young—Keats in 1820, Shelley in 1822, and Byron in 1824
...
The years 1820-1832 were the years of
suspended animation in politics
...
The first Reform Act of 1832 was
followed by the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 which gave an immense advantage to the
manufacturing interests, and the Second Reform Act of 1867
...
As has already been pointed out, there was sudden
decline of Romantic literature from the year 1820, but the new literature of England, called the
Victorian literature, started from 1832 when Tennyson‘s first important volume, Poems,
appeared
...
The literary career of Thackeray began about 1837, and Browning published his
Dramatic Lyrics in 1842
...

The Victorian Age is so long and complicated and the great writers who flourished in it are so
many, that for the sake of convenience it is often divided into two periods—Early Victorian
Period and Later Victorian Period
...
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1832 to 1870
...
All these poets, novelists and prose-writers form, a
certain homogenous group, because in spite of individual differences they exhibit the same
approach to the contemporary problems and the same literary, moral and social values
...
In poetry
Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris were the protagonists of new movement called the PreRaphaelite Movement, which was followed by the Aesthetic Movement
...
In prose Newman tried to revolutionise Victorian thought by turning it back
to Catholicism, and Pater came out with his purely aesthetic doctrine of ‗Art for Art‘s Sake‘,
which was directly opposed to the fundamentally moral approach of the prose-writers of the
earlier period—Carlyle Arnold and Ruskin
...

But the difference between the writers of the two periods is more apparent than real
...
They were all the children of the new age of
democracy, of individualism, of rapid industrial development and material expansion, the age of
doubt and pessimism, following the new conceptions of man which was formulated by science
under the name of Evolution
...
All of them were the critics of their age, and instead of being in sympathy
with its spirit, were its very severe critics
...
Most of them
favoured the return to precision in form, to beauty within the limits of reason, and to values
which had received the stamp of universal approval
...

All the great writers of the Victorian Age were actuated by a definite moral purpose
...
Even the novel broke away from Scott‘s
romantic influence
...
For this reason the Victorian Age was
fundamentally an age of realism rather than of romance
...
If they had lived longer, the Age of
Romanticism would have extended further
...
The result was that the
spirit of Romanticism continued to influence the innermost consciousness of Victorian Age
...
Even its adversaries, and those who would escape its
spell, were impregnated with it
...
In fact after 1870 we find that the
romantic inspiration was again in the ascendent in the shape of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic
movements
...
There is
no doubt that the Reform Act set at rest the political disturbances by satisfying the impatient
demand of the middle classes, and seemed to inaugurate an age of stability
...

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Moreover, with the advent to power of a
middle class largely imbued with the spirit of Puritanism, and the accession of a queen to the
throne, an era of self-restraint and discipline started
...
But no sooner had the
political disturbances subsided and a certain measure of stability and balance had been achieved
then there was fresh and serious outbreak in the economic world
...
From 1840 to 1850 in
particular, England seemed to be on the verge of a social revolution, and its disturbed spirit was
reflected, especially in the novel with a purpose
...
The combined effect of all these causes was the survival and prolongation of
Romanticism in the Victorian Age which was otherwise opposed to it
...
The very exercise of reason and the pursuit of scientific studies which promoted the spirit
of classicism, stirred up a desire for compensation and led to a reassertion of the imagination and
the heart
...
This fear obsessed the minds of those writers of the
Victorian Age, to whom feelings and imagination were essentials of life itself
...

The Victorian Age, therefore, exhibits a very interesting and complex mixture of two opposing
elements—Classicism and Romanticism
...


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Poets of the Early Victorian Period
The most important poets during the early Victorian period were Tennyson and Browning, with
Arnold occupying a somewhat lower position
...
With the abatement of the revolutionary fervour,
Wordsworth‘s inspiration had deserted him and all that he wrote in his later years was dull and
insipid
...
The result was that from 1820 till the publication of
Tennyson‘s first important work in 1833 English poetry had fallen into the hands of mediocrities
...
‖ Browning‘s
recognition by the public came about the same time, with the appearance of Dramatic Lyrics
(1842), although Paracelsus and Sordello had already been published
...

The early poetry of both Tennyson and Browning was imbued with the spirit of romanticism, but
it was romanticism with a difference
...
It had itself become a convention
...
Though the writers
of the new age still persisted in deriving inspiration from the past ages, yet under the spell of the
marvels of science, they looked forward rather than backward
...
‖ Tennyson found spiritual consolation in contemplating the
One far off divine event
To which the whole creation moves
...

Doubt, scepticism and questioning became the main characteristic of the later Victorian Age
...
His poetry is a record of the
intellectual and spiritual life of the time
...
Darwin‘s theory of
Evolution which believed in the ―struggle for existence‖ and ―the survival of the fittest‖ specially
upset and shook the foundations of religious faith
...
These two voices of the Victorian age are
perpetually heard in Tennyson‘s work
...
Though he is greatly
disturbed by the constant struggle going on in Nature which is ―red in tooth and claw‖, his belief
in evolution steadies and encourages him, and helps him to look beyond the struggle towards the
―one far off divine event to which the whole creation moves
...
Thus his Lockslay Hall of1842 reflects the restless spirit of ‗young
England‘ and its faith in science, commerce and the progress of mankind
...
In The Princess, Tennyson dealt with an important problem of the day—that of the higher
education of women and their place in the fast changing conditions of modern society
...
In Idylls of
Kings, in spite of its medieval machinery, contemporary problems were dealt with by the poet
...

Taking Tennyson‘s poetry as a whole, we find that in spite of varieties of moods, it is an
exposition of the cautions spirit of Victorian liberalism
...
He was a great admirer of English traditions, and though he believed
in divine evolution of things:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfills himself in many ways
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world,
he was, like a true Englishman, against anything that smacked of revolution
...
The ideas
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a shallow thinker
...
He is, perhaps, after Milton, the
most conscientious and accomplished poetic artist in English literature
...
Moreover, there is an exquisite and varied music in his verse
...

As an artist, Tennyson has an imagination less dramatic than lyrical, and he is usually at his best
when he is kindled by personal emotion, personal experience
...
Some of his shorter pieces, such as
Break, break, break; Tear, idle tears; Crossing the Bar are among the finest English songs on
account of their distinction of music and imagery
...

Words can hardly be more beautiful or more expressive than in such a stanza as this:
A land of stream! some, like a downward smoke,
Slow-dropping, veils of thinnest lawn did go;
And some thro‟ wavering lights and shadows broke,
Rolling a slumberous sheet of foam below
...

Up clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse
...
But
with the passage of time Tennyson‘s poetry regained its lost position, and at present his place as
one of the greatest poets of England is secure mainly on account of the artistic perfection of his
verse
...

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Browning and Tennyson were
contemporaries and their poetic careers ran almost parallel to each other, but as poets they
presented a glaring contrast
...
Tennyson always writes about subjects which are dainty and comely; Browning,
on the other hand, deals with subjects which are rough and ugly, and he aims to show that truth
lies hidden in both the evil and the good
...
Tennyson‘s message reflects the growing order of the age, and is summed up in the word
‗law‘
...

There is a note of resignation struck in his poetry, which amounts to fatalism
...
In his opinion self is
not subordinate but supreme
...
It is in fact
because of his invincible will and optimism that Browning is given preference over Tennyson
whose poetry betrays weakness and helpless pessimism
...
It is his firm belief in the immortality of the soul which
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67

Passes:
The year‟s at the spring,
And day‟s at the morn;
Morning‟s at seven;
The hill side‟s dew pearled;
The lark‟s on the wing;
The snails on the thorn,
God‟s in his heaven—
All‟s right with the world
...

The last of life, for which the first was made
...
Whereas Tennyson‘s genius is
mainly lyrical
...
Being chiefly interested in the study of the human soul, he
discusses in poem after poem, in the form of monologue or dialogue, the problems of life and
conscience
...
His first poem Pauline (1833) which is a monologue addressed to Pauline,
on ―the incidents in the development of a soul‘, is autobiographical—a fragment of personal
confession under a thin dramatic disguise
...
Paracelsus has the ambition
of attaining truth and transforming the life of man
...
Browning in this poem also uses the hero as a
mouthpiece of his own ideas and aspiration
...
It narrates in heroic verse the life of a little-known Italian poet
...
In Pipa Passes (1841)
Browning produced a drama partly lyrical and consisting of isolated scenes
...

It was with the publication of a series of collections of disconnected studies, chiefly monologues,
that Browning‘s reputation as a great poet was firmly established
...
The dramatic lyrics in these collections
were a poetry of a new kind in England
...
Some of them are historical, while others are the product of
Browning‘s imagination, but all of them while unravelling the tangled web of their emotions and
thoughts give expression to the optimistic philosophy of the poet
...
All of them have won for Browning
the applause of readers who value ―thought‖ in poetry
...
Here different persons
concerned in a peculiarly brutal set of murders, and many witnesses give their own versions of
the same events, varying them according to their different interests and prejudices
...
The ten long successive
monologues contain the finest psychological studies of characters ever attempted by a poet
...

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Though they do not
have much poetic merit, yet they all give expression to his resolute courage and faith
...
He is the poet of love, of life, and of the will to live, here and beyond the grave, as he says
in the song of David in his poem Soul:
How good is man‟s life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy
...
This is mainly due to the fact that his thought
is often so obscure or subtle that language cannot express it perfectly
...
Thus in order to understand his poems,
the reader has always to be mentally alret; otherwise he fails to understand his fine shades of
psychological study
...
But in spite of his obscurity, Browning is the most stimulating
poet, in the English language
...
His strength, his joy of
life, his robust faith and his invincible optimism enter into the life of a serious reader of his
poetry, and make him a different man
...
In
the opinion of some critics he is the greatest poet in English literature since Shakespeare
...

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Unlike Tennyson and Browning who came under the influence of
Romantic poets, Arnold, though a great admirer of Wordsworth, reacted against the ornate and
fluent Romanticism of Shelley and Keats
...
He gave emphasis on ‗correctness‘ in poetry, which meant a scheme of literature
which picks and chooses according to standards, precedents and systems, as against one which
gives preference to an abundant stream of original music and representation
...

Though Arnold‘s poetry does not possess the merit of the poetry of Tennyson and Browning,
when it is at its best, it has wonderful charm
...
Among his early poems the sonnet on
Shakespeare deserves the highest place
...
Another poem of great charm and beauty is Requiescat, which is an
exquisite dirge
...
It is the same lyrical note in the poems—The
Forsaken Morman, which is a piece of exquisite and restrained but melodious passionate music;
Dover Beach which gives expression to Arnold‘s peculiar religious attitude in an age of doubt;
the fine Summer Night, the Memorial Verses which immediately appeals to the reader
...
Being distressed by the unfaith,
disintegration, complexity and melancholy of his times, Arnold longed for primitive faith,
wholeness, simplicity, and happiness
...


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Even in his nature poems, though he was influenced by the ‗healing power‘ of Wordsworth, in
his sterner moods he looks upon Nature as a cosmic force indifferent to, or as a lawless and
insidious foe of man‘s integrity
...

His attitude to life is very much in contrast with the positive optimism of Browning whose Ben
Ezra grows old on the belief that ―The best is yet to be!‖
As a critic Arnold wants poetry to be plain, and severe
...
He looks for ‗high
seriousness‘ in poetry, which means the combination of the finest art with the fullest and deepest
insight, such as is found in the poetry of Homer, Dante and Shakespeare
...
In setting
forth his spiritual troubles Arnold seeks first of all to achieve a true and adequate statement,
devoid of all non-essential decorations
...
It is the result of intellectual effort and hard labour
...


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Of these Mrs
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Elizabeth Berrett (180661) became Mrs
...
Before her marriage she had won fame by writing poems
about the Middle Ages in imitation of Coleridge
...
But she produced her best work after she
came in contact with Browning
...
The rigid limit of the sonnet form helped her to keep the exuberance of her passion under
the discipline of art
...
Written in blank verse which is of unequal quality, the poem is full of long
stretches of dry, uninteresting verse, but here and there it contains passages of rare beauty, where
sentiment and style are alike admirable
...
He searched for a moral law which was in
consonance with the intellectual development of the age
...
His best
known work, however, is The Bothie of Toberna Vuolich, in which he has given a lively account
of an excursion of Oxford students in the Highlands
...
The importance of Clough as a poet lies mainly in
the quality of his thought and the frank nobility of his character which is beautifully expressed in
the following memorable lines:
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll:
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul!

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Novel-reading was one of the chief
occupations of the educated public, and material had to be found for every taste
...
A number of brilliant novelists showed that it was
possible to adapt the novel to almost all purposes of literature whatsoever
...

We need hardly go outside the sphere of fiction
...
The theatre which could rival fiction had fallen on evil
days, and it did not revive till the later half of the nineteenth century
...

The two most outstanding novelists of the period were Dickens and Thackeray
...
Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, Charles Reade, Wilkie Collins and Trollope
...
In the first place, they identified themselves with
their age, and were its spokesmen, whereas the novelists of the latter Victorian period were
critical, and even hostile to its dominant assumptions
...
It was the source alike
of their strengths and their weaknesses, and it distinguished them from their successors
...
They accepted the society in which they criticised it as
many of their readers were doing in a light hearted manner
...

Now let us examine these general assumptions of the early Victorians which these novelists
shared
...

Another important view which these novelists shared with the public was the acceptance of the
idea of respectability, which attached great importance to superficial morality in business as well
as in domestic and sexual relations
...
Their attitude to sex had
undergone a great change
...

Fielding‘s Tom Jones was kept out of way of women and children, and in 1818 Thomas Bowlder
published his Family Shakespeare which contained the original text of Shakespeare‘s plays from
which were omitted those expression which could not be with propriety read aloud in a family
...
Trollop wrote in his
Autobiography:
The writer of stories must please, or he will he nothing
...
How shall he teach lessons of virtue and at the same time make himself a delight to
his readers? But the novelist, if he have a conscience, must preach his sermons with the same
purpose as the clergymen, and must have his own system of ethics
...
Carlyle need not call him distressed…
I think that many have done so; so many that we English novelists may boast as a class that such

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has been the general result of our own work…I find such to have been the teaching of
Thackeray, of Dickens and of George Eliot
...
As the novelist themselves shared the same views of
‗respectability‘ with the public, it gave them great strength and confidence
...
Moreover, as they shared
the pre-occupations and obsessions of their time, they produced literature which may be termed
as truly national
...
It was at the age of twenty-five with the publication of Pickwick Papers
that Dickens suddenly sprang into fame, and came to be regarded as the most popular of English
novelists
...
Like Smollett‘s novels they are mere bundles of adventure
connected by means of character who figure in them
...
It was in Bleak House (1852-53) that he succeeded in gathering
up all the diverse threads of the story in a systematic and coherent plot
...
But, on the whole Dickens was not every successful in
building up his plots, and there is in all of them a great deal of mere episodical material
...
The novels which during the Romantic
period and passed through a phase of adventure, reverted in the hands of Dickens to the literature
of feeling
...
His novels are full of pathos, and there are many passages of studied and
extravagant sentiment
...
Like a true idealist Dickens seeks to embody in his art the inner life of man with a
direct or implied moral purpose
...
He values qualities like honour, fidelity, courage
magnanimity
...
‖
Another phase of Dickens‘s idealism was his implicit belief that this is the best of all possible
worlds
...
He shared to the full, the
sanguine spirit of his age, and despite the hardness of heart and the selfishness of those in high
places, their greed and hypocrisy, and the class prejudices which had divided man from man,
Dickens believed that the world was still a very good world to live in
...
All his characters come out of the pit of suffering and distress as better men,
uncontaminated and purer than before
...
It is clearly manifest in his first novel, Pickwick, and in the succeeding novels it

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broadened and deepended
...
The best examples of Dickens pure comedy are the Peggotty and Barkis
episodes in David Copperfield
...
Like
Smollett he was on the lookout for some oddity which for his purpose he made more odd than it
was
...
The number
of these humorous types that Dickens contributed to fiction runs into thousands
...

Besides being an idealist, Dickens was also a realist
...
This same reportorial air is about his long novels, which are groups of incidents
...
It is his personal experiences which
underlie the novels of Dickens, not only novels like David Copperfield where it is so obvious,
but also Hard Times where one would least expect to find them
...

It was Dickens‘s realism which came as a check to medievalism which was very popular during
the Romantic period
...

The novels of Dickens were full of personal experiences, anecdotes, stories from friends, and
statistics to show that they were founded upon facts
...
They were
replaced by agricultural labourers, miners, tailors and paupers
...
From first to last he was a novelist with a purpose
...
It is, therefore, no
exaggeration to say that humanitarianism is the key-note of his work, and on account of the
tremendous popularity that he enjoyed as a novelist, Dickens may justly be regarded as one of
the foremost reformers of his age
...

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He was more interested in the manners and morals of the aristocracy
than in the great upheavals of the age
...
But whereas Dickens, in spite of his bitter
experiences retained a buoyant temperament and a cheerful outlook on life, Thackeray, in spite
of his comfortable and easy life, turned cynical towards the world which used him so well, and
found shames, deceptions, vanities everywhere because he looked for them
...
The main reason of this fundamental difference between the two was not, however,
of environment, but of temperament
...
Thus if we take the novels of both together, they
give us a true picture of all classes of English society in the early Victorian period
...
As he says of himself, ―I have no
brains above my eyes; I describe what I see
...
As he possesses an excessive sensibility, and a
capacity for fine feelings and emotions like Dickens, he is readily offended by shams, falsehood
and hypocrisy in society
...
But his satire is always tempered by
kindness and humour
...

In all his novels he definitely aims at creating a moral impression and he often behaves in an
inartistic manner by explaining and emphasising the moral significance of his work
...
As a writer of pure, simple and charming prose
Thackeray the reader by his natural, easy and refined style
...
In this respect he stands
supreme among English novelists
...

It was with the publication of Vanity Fair in 1846 that the English reading public began to
understand what a star had risen in English letters
...
In 1852 appeared the marvellous historical novel of
Henry Esmond which is the greatest novel in its own special kind ever written
...
In his next novel Newcomes (1853-8) he returned to modern times, and displayed his
great skill in painting contemporary manners
...
His next novel, The Virginians, which is a sequal of Esmond, deals with the third
quarter of the eighteenth century
...
Every act, every scene, every person in his novels is real with a reality which
has been idealised up to, and not beyond, the necessities of literature
...


M
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...
St

Among the minor novelists of the early Victorian period, Benjamin Disraeli, the Brontes, Mrs
...

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) wrote his first novel Vivian Grey (1826-27), in which he gave the
portrait of a dandy, a young, intelligent adventurer without scruples
...

Being a politician who became the Prime Minister of England, he has given us the finest study of
the movements of English politics under Queen Victoria
...

The Bronte Sisters who made their mark as novelists were Charlotte Bronte (1816-55) and
Emily Bronte (1818-48)
...
She brought lyrical warmth and the
play of strong feeling into the novel
...
Her other novels are The Professor, Villette and Shirley
...


74

Emily Bronte was more original than her sister
...
It is a tragedy of love at once fantastic and powerful, savage
and moving, which is considered now as one of the masterpieces of world fiction
...
Gaskell (1810-65) as a novelist dealt with social problems
...
Her novels Mary
Barton (1848) and North and South (1855) give us concrete details of the miserable plight of the
working class
...
Gaskell shows the same sympathy for unfortunate girls
...

Charles Kingsley (1819-75) who was the founder of the Christian Socialists, and actively
interested in the co-operative movement, embodied his generous ideas of reform in the novels
Yeast (1848) and Alton Locke (1850)
...
In Westward Ho! (1855) he commemorated the adventurous
spirit of the Elizabethan navigators, and in Hereward the Wake (1865) of the descendants of the
Vikings
...

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Charles Reade (1814-84) wrote novels with a social purpose
...
His A
Terrible Temptation is a famous historical novel
...


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His best-known novels are The Woman in
White and The Moonstone in which he shows his great mastery in the mechanical art of plot
construction
...
His important novels are The Warden (1855), Barchester Towers
(1857) and The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) in which he has given many truthful scenes of
provincial life, without poetical feeling, but not without humour
...
His novels present a true picture
of middle class life, and there is neither heroism nor villainy there
...

Prose-Writers of the Early Victorian Period
The early Victorian prose is in keeping with the energetic temperament of the time
...

This energetic mood prescribes the inventiveness and fertility of the prose-writers of the period
and explains the vitality of so many of their works
...
Their prose is not, as a rule, flawless in

75

diction and rhythm, or easily related to a central standard of correctness or polished to a uniform
high finish, but it is a prose which is vigorous, intricate and ample, and is more conscious of
vocabulary and imagery than of balance and rhythm
...

As the number of prose-writers during the period is quite large, there is a greater variety of style
among them than to be found in any other period
...
Victorian individualism, the ‗Doing
As One Likes‘, censured by Matthew Arnold, reverberates in prose style
...
Though
Romanticism gave a new direction to English poetry between 1780 and 1830, its full effects on
prose were delayed until the eighteen-thirties when all the major Romantic poets were either
dead or moribund
...
In fact it were the romantic elements—
unevenness, seriousness of tone, concreteness and particularity—which constitute the underlying
unity of the prose of the early Victorian period
...


M
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...
He made his influence felt in every
department of Victorian life
...
In his youth he suffered from doubts which
assailed him during the many dark years in which he wandered in the ‗howling wilderness of
infidelity,‘ striving vainly to recover his lost belief in God
...
The history of these years of struggle and conflict and the ultimate triumph of his spirit
is written with great power in the second book of Sartor Restartus which is his most
characteristic literary production, and one of the most remarkable and vital books in the English
language
...

Basically Carlyle was a Puritan, and in him the strenuous and uncompromising spirit of the
seventeenth century Puritanism found its last great exponent
...
He wanted people
to be sincere and he hated conventions and unrealities
...
To him history was the revelation
of God‘s righteous dealings with men and he applied the lessons derived from the past to the
present
...
He believed in the ‗hero‘ under whose guidance and
leadership the masses can march to glory
...
He proclaimed a spiritual standard of life to a generation which had started
worshipping the ‗mud-gods of modern civilisation‘
...
He preached to his contemporaries in a most forceful manner
that spiritual freedom was the only life-giving truth
...

Carlyle‘s style is the reflection of his personality
...
He twists the language to suit
his needs
...
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use of foreign words or literal English translations of foreign words
...
His personifications and
abstractions sometimes become irritating and even tiresome
...
He is in fact the most irregular and erratic of English
writers
...
In his mastery of vivid and telling phraseology he is unrivalled and his
powers of description and characterisation are remarkable
...

(b) John Ruskin (1819-1900)
In the general prose literature of the early Victorian period Ruskin is ranked next to Carlyle
...
Being one of the greatest masters of English he became interested in
art and wrote Modern Painters (1843-1860) in five volumes in order to vindicate the position of
Turner as a great artist
...
Examination of
the principles of art gradually led Ruskin to the study of social ethics
...
In his The Seven Lamps of
Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851-53) he tried to prove that the best type of
architecture can be produced only in those ages which are morally superior
...
From this
time onward he wrote little on art and devoted himself to the discussing of the ills of society
...
In his later
books—Sesame and Lilies (1865) and The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), Ruskin showed himself
as a popular educator, clear in argument and skilful in illustration
...

Ruskin was a great and good man who himself is more inspiring than any of his books
...
‖
It was with this object that leaving the field of art criticism, where he was the acknowledged
leader, he began to write of labour and justice
...
He is both a great artist as well as a great
ethical teacher
...

The prose of Ruskin has a rhythmic, melodious quality which makes it almost equal to poetry
...
In his economic essays he tried to mitigate the evils of the
competitive system; to bring the employer and the employed together in mutual trust and
helpfulness; to seek beauty, truth, goodness as the chief ends of life
...


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(c) Thomas Babington Lord Macaulay (1800-59)
Though Carlyle and Ruskin are now considered to be the great prose-writers of the Victorian
period, contemporary opinion gave the first place to Macaulay, who in popularity far exceeded

77

both of them
...
He could
repeat from memory all the twelve books of Paradise Lost
...
Besides biographical and
critical essays which won for him great fame and popularity, Macaulay, like Carlyle; wrote
historical essays as well as History of England
...
‖ That power of imagination he possessed and exercised so delightfully that his
History was at once purchased more eagerly than a poem of romance
...
But his popularity was based mainly on
the energy and capacity of his mind, and the eloquence with which he enlivened whatever he
wrote
...

The chief quality which makes Macaulay distinct from the other prose writers of the period is the
variety and brilliance of details in his writings
...
Though he may be more extravagant and profuse in
his variety of details than is consistent with the ‗dignity‘ of history, this variety is always
supported by a structure of great plainness
...
His short sentences, and his
description of particular interference with the flow of the narrative, and so the cumulative effect
of the story is not always secured
...
But on the whole he still remains as one of the most enjoyable of all Victorian prosewriters
...

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He was also a great
literary as well as social critic
...

According to him, the Englishmen needed classical qualities in order to attain harmonious
perfection in morals and in literature
...

In literature Arnold strove to rehabilitate and to propagate the classical spirit in his country
...
‖ From 1855 onwards Arnold wrote incessantly
in order to raise the intellectual and cultural level of his countrymen
...
Being a poet himself,
he looked upon poetry as ―a criticism of life‖, and laid great emphasis on the part it played in the
formation of character and the guidance of conduct
...
Arnold
also attempted to eliminate the dogmatic element from Christianity in order to preserve its true
spirit and bring it into the line with the discoveries of science and the progress of liberal thought
...
As a writer of prose he is simply superb
...
As his object was to bring home to his
countrymen certain fundamental principles of cultured and intellectual life, he has the habit of
repeating the same word and phrase with a sort of refrain effect
...
His
loud praise of ‗sweetness‘ and ‗culture‘, his denunciation of the ‗Philistine‘, the ‗Barbarian‘, and
so forth, were ridiculed by some unkind critics
...

When Arnold returned from religion and politics to his natural sphere of literature, then the
substance of his criticism is admirably sound and its expression always delightful and
distinguished
...
It is almost perfectly clear with a
clearness rather French than English
...
Such a style was eminently fitted for the purposes of criticism
...
He may not be
considered as one of the strongest writers of English prose, but he must always hold a high rank
in it for grace, for elegance, and for an elaborate and calculated charm
...

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(a) Pre-Raphaelite Poets

d
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It was called the Pre-Raphaelite Movement and was
dominated by a new set of poets-Rossetti, Swinburne and Morris, who were interested simply in
beauty
...

They were not interested in the contemporary movements of thought which formed the substance
of Arnold‘s poetry, and had influenced Tennyson a good deal
...

There was no conscious theory underlying their work as there was in the case of Arnold‘s poetry
...
He along with his friends, Millais and D
...
Rossetti, who were also
painters, determined to find a club or brotherhood which should be styled Pre-Raphaelite, and
whose members should bind themselves to study Nature attentively with the object of expressing
genuine ideas in an unconventional manner, in sympathy with what was ‗direct and serious and
heart-felt‘ in early Italian painting before the artificial style of Raphael
...
D
...
Rossetti who was a painter as well as poet, introduced these principles in the
field of poetry also
...

Rossetti displayed in those earliest pieces the passion for material beauty, and the love of rich
language, magnificent even in simplicity, which were always to characterise his poetry
...
Being a
painter he was able to express his poetic genius more exclusively concentrated on the hues and
forms of phenomena, than any other English poet
...
His
earliest volume of Poems (1870), which spread thrills of aesthetic excitement far and wide,
attracted a number of young enthusiasts, in spite of some faint protests by the older generation
against the ‗Fleshly School‘ of English poetry
...

The Pre-Raphaelite school of poetry did not regard poetry as being prophetic, or as being mainly
philosophical
...
Thus it divided itself sharply from the great writers of
the time—Tennyson, Browning and Arnold
...
Moreover, it gave greater importance to personal feeling over thought
...
The fleshly images used by the Pre-Raphaelite poets were
full of mysticism, but the Victorians who considered them as merely sensuous were shocked by
them
...

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(i) Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

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Rossetti was the chief force behind the Pre-Raphaelite movement
...
D
...

Rossetti studied drawing, and as a young man became one of the most enthusiastic members of
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was at the middle of the century to convert England from
conventional art
...
Though his drawings were severely criticised, no one with eyes could
doubt the magnificence of his colour
...

In his poetry Rossetti assumes for ever the reality and immanence of spiritual and moral world
...
On the other hand, the form and substance of his
utterance are so perfected in truth and virility of thought, in majesty and grace of speech, that the
reader is unconsciously affected by them
...
In the House of Life sonnets, Dante at Verona,
The Streams Secret, The Portrait, and many of the shorter lyrics, the personal note of love or
grief, of memory or hope, is wholly dominant
...
In the
second group, in the great romantic ballads, in Rose Mary, and The Blessed Damozel, in The
White Ship and The King‟s Tragedy, in The Bride‟s Pleasure and Sister Helen, the imagination
takes a higher and larger range
...

Rossetti was a supreme master of rhythm and music
...
But whether

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As a poet, he is neither less nor more pre-Raphaelite than as painter
...

(ii) Christiana Rossetti
Though Christiana Rossetti naturally displayed a temperament akin to her brother‘s and
sometimes undoubtedly wrote to some extent under his inspiration, large parts, and some of the
best parts, of her poetical accomplishments, are quite distinct from anything of his
...
But her a
lyrics have lighter, more bird-like movement and voice than the stately lyrics of Rossetti
...
She had, unlike Mrs
...
Moreover, her pathos has never been surpassed except
in the great single strokes of Shakespeare
...
The great devotional poets of the seventeenth century, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert are more
artificial than she is in their expression of this
...
Later her verse was collected more than once, and it was
supplemented by a posthumous volume after her death
...


M
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...
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(iii) William Morris (1834-96)

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William Morris who was an eminent designer and decorator besides being a poet, was chiefly
interested in the Middle Ages
...
His object of writing
poetry was to revive the true Gothic spirit, and these poems interpreted ardours and mysteries of
the Middle Ages which the Victorians had forgotten
...
Morris, on the other hand tried to bring back to life the true spirit of the Middle
Ages
...
When he did resume his literary work,
his style had entirely changed
...
In it he followed Chaucer
whom he knew and loved best
...
These stories which are in Medieval setting, are written in an easy and
simple style, and their diction is always graceful and suited to the subject
...
Tales such as the ‗Lover of Gudrun‘ which are derived from the mythologies of
northern Europe are treated in a different manner
...
He translated the ‗Grettis and Volsunga‘
Sagas; but the new spirit is found at its best in the poems Sigured the Volsung
...
He is a past master in producing languorous effects bathed in an atmosphere of serenity
and majesty
...
His poems have a harmonious and musical flow, the variety and
suppleness of which recall at once the styles of Chaucer and Spenser
...
In all his poetry the love of
adventure, the attraction of an imaginary world, where beautiful human lives bloom out in open
nature and unrestricted liberty, where unhappiness, suffering and death have themselves a dignity
unknown in the real world made ugly by industrialisation, inspired Morris
...
His poetry is the result of the
reaction of a wounded sensibility against the sordidness and ugliness of the real world
...
Unlike the other members of the group, Swinburne
was a musician rather than a painter
...
Swinburne‘s poetry lacks the firms contours and sure outlines of the
poetry of Rossetti and Morris, but it has the sonority of the rhymes which links the verses
together
...
It is in fact in the music of verse that Swinburne is pre-eminent
...
‖ This claim, though made in all simplicity, is quite justified,
and there is no doubt that Swinburne is one of the great masters in metrical technique
...

Swinburne‘s poetry deals with great romantic themes—like Shelley‘s revolt against society, the
hatred of kings and priests and the struggle against conventional morality
...
The appearance of his Poems and Ballads
in 1866 created great excitement
...
Arnold found many of his lines meaningless, and called him ―a
young pseudo-Shelly‖
...
His violent
paganism was the first far-heard signal of revolt that was to become general till a generation
later
...

Swinburne first became known by his Atalanta in Calydon (1865), a poetic drama, distinguished
by some great choruses, especially the one that opens, ‗Before the beginning of the years‟
...
Dramatic movement and
the creation of characters were outside Swinburne‘s range
...
But, above all, Swinburne is a lyrical poet and he never surpassed or equalled the
Poems and Ballads, (1886)
...
These songs of love were succeeded by poems dedicated to national

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liberty, especially that of Italy, for Swinburne was an ardent admirer of Mazzini
...
Two other volumes of Poems and Ballads appeared in 1878 and 1889
...
A Century of Roundels (1883) and Tristram of Lyonesse (1882)
show more of metrical skill than lyrical power
...
His love of liberty, hatred of
tyranny in all forms and voluptuous paganism were quite genuine impulses which inspired much
of his poetry
...

(b) The Decadent or Aesthetic Movement

The Pre-Raphaelite Movement in English poetry was followed by Decadent or Aesthetic
Movement, though it is not so well defined
...
They were obviously influenced by Walter Pater and the French authors like
Baudelaire and Verlaine, who tried to break with conventional values
...
They sought themes from pleasures which
the virtuous forbid, and inflicted agonies upon themselves to achieve perfection of form
...
They found this conception not only in
the study of French models but in the critical work of Walter Pater, and their adherence to these
self-imposed limitations separates them from earlier English romanticism and from preRaphaelite verse
...
The Decadents, on the other hand, were not interested in any great subject,
theme or idea
...
Moreover, they emphasised the passion rather than the intellect
...
First, there accompanies
life an inevitable mortality, ―the undefinable taint of death is upon all things‖; and, secondly,
―out of life may be seized some few moments of deep passion or high intellectual endeavour
...
In fact they were pitted against all conventional morality and rebelled
against established social and moral laws
...
Their object was to afford the readers merely
aesthetic pleasure
...

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Though in his early
poems he had dealt with religious and spiritual experiences, in New Helen he declared himself as
the votary of Beauty
...

In The Garden of Eros he reaffirmed his belief that the pursuit of beauty is the only desirable
form of human activity
...

In the short poem, Panthea, Wilde almost gives a paraphrase of Pater‘s aesthetic creed:
Nay, let us walk from fire to fire,
From passionate pain to deadlier delight
...


M
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...
He
came under the influence of Rossetti, Swinburne and the French romanticists who believed in the
doctrine of Art for Art‘s sake
...
He dealt
mainly with the theme of the brevity of life and the fading of things that once were beautiful:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate;
I think they have no portions in us after we pass the gate
...
He also possessed an unusual prosodic skill
...
His
central poetic theme is most profoundly treated in Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration knowing that
the ‗world is wild and passionate; and that the rose of the world would fade‘, the poet views with
sad admiration those whose ascetism allows them to stand aside and make their nights and days,
‗Into a long returning rosary‘:
Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent walls,
These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray;
And it is one with them when evening falls,
And one with them the cold return of day
...
St

(iii) Lionel Pigot Johnson (1867-1902)

Lionel Johnson was an associate of Oscar Wilde and Dowson who created the aesthetic poetry of
the eighteen nineties
...


84

(iv) Arthur Symons

Next to Dowson the most consistent follower of the Aesthetic Movement was Arthur Symons
...


(c) Other Important Poets

Other important poets of the Later Victorian Period were Patmore, Meredith and Hardy, though
the last two are better known as novelists
...
His most popular poem is The Angel in
the House which contains some very fine things
...

Though Geroge Meredith was associated with Rossetti and Swinburne, as a poet he had nothing
in common with the pre-Raphaelite group except his belief that art should not be the handmaid of
morality
...
The
tremendous vigour and metrical skill of his long lyrics—The Lark Ascending and Love in the
Valley remind one of Swinburne
...
It is no doubt the
most successful long poem written during the later Victorian period
...
His greatest
work, The Dynasts, is written in the form of an epic in which the immense Napoleonic struggle
unrolls itself as drama, novel, tragedy, and comedy
...
Moments of Vision, the title of one of his volume,
in an apt description of his poems as a whole, because most of them give us visions of emotional
moments charged with the inheritance of past ages of emotions, combined with irrational halfconscious feelings which are recognized by the contemplative mind as being part of every-day
experience
...

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George Eliot was the first to write novels in the modern
style
...
The year 1859 saw the
publication not only of George Eliot‘s Adam Bede but also of Meredith‘s The Ordeal of Richard
Feveral
...

The novelists of the early Victorian period—Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and others—had
followed the tradition of English novel established by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding
...
‖ Set against this innocent
notion of the novelist‘s function, the new novelists of England as well of other countries of
Europe, began to have high ambitions of making the novel as serious as poetry
...
Flaubert especially
arrogated to himself the rights and privileges of the poet, and he talked about his talent and
medium as seriously as poets do theirs
...
It is perhaps an absurd
idea
...
These words of Flaubert show
that the European novelists in the middle of the nineteenth century were making the same claims
about their vocation as the Romantic poets in England did in the beginning of the century
...
Both of them were intellectuals and philosophers and
had associates among such class of people
...
George Eliot lived in a much larger world of ideas
...
Meredith who
was partly educated in Germany and was influenced by French writers, developed a highly
critical view of England and its literature
...
They were
followed by Hardy who extended the scope of the novel still further
...

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For a long time her writings was
exclusively critical and philosophic in character, and it was when she was thirty-eight that her
first work of fiction Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) appeared
...

George Eliot was born in Warwickshire, where she lived till her father‘s death in 1849
...
Gifted with a wonderful faculty of
observation, she could reproduce faithfully the mannerism of rustic habit and speech
...
Moreover, she could beautifully portray the
humour and pathos of these simple folk as no English novelist had done before
...

In George Eliot the novel took its modern form
...
The
different episodes are all related to one another and subordinated to the main story
...
This unity of plot construction was lacking in the English novel before
George Eliot appeared on the scene
...
Another important feature of George Eliot‘s novels is that they reflect more
clearly than any other Victorian novels the movement of contemporary thought
...
The mood of much of
her work is like that of Matthew Arnold‘s poems
...


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In her novels George Eliot takes upon herself the role of a preacher and moraliser
...
In all her novels she shows in individuals the play of universal moral forces, and
establishes the moral law as the basis of human society
...
It
is to her as inevitable and automatic as gravitation and it overwhelms personal freedom and
inclination
...
She represents in them,
like Browning in his poetry, the inner struggle of a soul, and reveals the motives, impulses and
hereditary influences which govern human action
...
Moreover, the characters in her novels,
unlike in the novels of Dickens, develop gradually as we came to know them
...
For instance, in Romola we find that Tito degenerates steadily
because he follows selfish impulses, while Romola grows into beauty and strength with every act
of self-renunciation
...

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(b) George Meredith (1829-1909)

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Another great figure not only in fiction, but in the general field of literature during the later
Victorian period, was Meredith who, though a poet at heart expressed himself in the medium of
the novel, which was becoming more and more popular
...
He did not follow any established tradition, nor did he
found a school
...
He confined
himself principally to the upper classes of society, and his attitude to life is that of the thinker
and poet
...
Comedy he conceives of as a Muse
watching the actions of men and women, detecting and pointing out their inconsistencies with a
view to their moral improvement
...
Meredith loves to trace the calamities
which befall those who provoke Nature by obstinately running counter to her laws
...

The Ordeal of Richard Feveral, which is one of the earliest of Meredith‘s novels, is also one of
his best
...
In spite of his best intentions, the father adopts
such methods as are unsuited to the nature of the boy, with the result that he himself becomes the
worst enemy of his son, and thus an object of ridicule by the Comic Spirit
...
Evan Harrington (1861) is full of humorous
situations which arise out of the social snobbery of the Harrington family
...
In all of them Meredith shows himself as
the enemy of sentimentality
...
The complete discomfiture of Sir
Willoughby Patterne, the egoist, is one of the neatest things in English literature
...
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87

contains Meredith‘s some of the best drawn characters—the Egoist himself, Clara Middleton,
Laetitia Dale, and Crossjay Patterne
...
He tries to unravel the mystery of the human
personality and probe the hidden springs there
...
A master of colour and melody when he wills,
Meredith belongs to the company of Sterne, Carlyle and Browning who have whimsically used
the English language
...
Like Browning, Meredith preaches an
optimistic and positive attitude to life
...
This process can be accelerated by individual men
and women by living a sane balanced and healthy life
...
On account of this bracing and
refreshing philosophy, the novels of Meredith, though written in a difficult style, have a special
message for the modern man who finds himself enveloped in a depressing atmosphere
...
Like Meredith, he was at
heart a poet, and expressed himself also in verse
...
Hardy thinks that there is some malignant power which controls this universe,
and which is out to thwart and defeat man in all his plans
...
Thus his novels and poems are, throughout, the
work of a man painfully dissatisfied with the age in which he lived
...
In his books, ancient and modern are constantly at war, and none is happy
who has been touched by ‗modern‘ education and culture
...

Hardy passed the major portion of his life near Dorchester, and his personal experiences were
bound up with the people and customs, the monuments and institutions of Dorest and the
contiguous countries of south-western England, which he placed permanently on the literary map
by the ancient name ―Wessex‘
...
No
other novelist in England has celebrated a region so comprehensively as Hardy has done
...

On account of Hardy‘s philosophy of a malignant power ruling the universe which thwarts and
defeats man at every step, his novels are full of coincidences
...
For this Hardy has been blamed by some critics who believe that he deliberately
introduces coincidences which always upset the plans of his characters
...

The great novels of Hardy are The Woodlanders, The Return of the Native, Far From the
Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D‟Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure
...
The last chapter of Tess outraged the religious conscience of
1891; to-day it offends the aesthetic conscience by its violation of our critical sense of order and
imaginative sufficiency
...

As it stands, the novel is a masterpiece, but it is scarred by an unhappy final stroke, the novel is a
masterpiece, but it is scarred by an unhappy final stroke
...
At no time are Sue and Jude permitted to

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escape the shadowing hand of malignant destiny
...

As a writer of tragedies Hardy can stand comparison with the great figures in world literature,
but he falls short of their stature because he is inclined to pursue his afflicted characters beyond
the limits of both art and nature
...
As for Hardy‘s style,
his prose is that of a poet in close contact with things
...
He describes
characters and scenes in such a manner that they get imprinted on the memory
...
His novels can be
favourably compared to great poetic tragedies, and the characters therein rise to great tragic
heights
...
If at times he transgressed the limits of art, it was mainly on account of his
deep compassion for mankind, especially those belonging to the lower stratum
...
Of these Stevenson and Gissing are quite well-known
...

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(i) Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94)

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Stevenson was a great story-teller and romancer
...
His first romance entitled Treasure Islandbecame very popular
...
In Dr
...
Hyde he departed from his usual manner to write a modern allegory
of the good and evil in the human personality
...
At his death he was working on unfinished novel, Weir of
Hermiston, which is considered by some critics as the most finished product of his whole work
...

The contribution of Stevenson to the English novel is that he introduced into it romantic
adventure
...
He gave a wholly new literary dignity and impetus to light fiction whose main aim is
entertainment
...
St

(ii) George Gissing (1857-1903)
Gissing has never been a popular novelist, yet no one in English fiction faced the defects of his
times with such a frank realism
...
Working
under the influence of French realists and Schopenhauer‘s philosophy, he sees the world full of
ignoble and foolish creatures
...

Under such circumstances it is the intellectuals who suffer the most, because they are more
conscious of the misery around them
...
One can guess the subjects treated in
them from their titles
...
He drew his inspiration from Dickens, but he made the mistake of
omitting altogether that which is present in Dickens even to excess-the romance and poetry of
poverty
...
In his later years he discovered his mistake, and in 1903 he brought out The Private
Papers of Henry Ryecroft, a great autobiographic fiction, which is written in a most delightful
manner revealing his inner life
...
Newman
was the central figure of the Oxford Movement, while Pater was an aesthete, who inspired the
leaders of the Aesthetic Movement in English poetry
...
England had become a
Protestant country in the 16th century under the reign of Elizabeth, and had her own Church,
called the Anglican Church, which became independent of the control of the Pope at Rome
...
The Anglican Church insisted on simplicity, and did
not encourage elaborate ceremonies
...
Especially in the eighteenth century in England religion began to be ruthlessly
attacked by philosophers as well as scientists
...
They wished
to recover the connection with the continent and with its own past which the English Church had
lost at the Reformation in the sixteenth century
...
They,
therefore, made an attempt to restore those virtues by turning the attention of the people to the
history of the Middle Ages, and by trying to recover the rituals and art of the medieval Church
...
It
sought to revive the ancient rites, with all their pomp and symbolism
...
Instead of being inspired by the doctrines of
liberalism which were being preached in the Victorian period, it resumed its connection with the
medieval tradition
...

The aesthetic aspect of the Oxford Movement, or the Catholic Reaction, had a much wider
appeal
...
The lofty cathedrals aglow with the colours
of painting, stately processions in gorgeous robes , and all the pomp and circumstance of a
ceremonial religion, attract even such puritanic minds as Milton‘s and are almost the only
attraction to the multitudes whose God must take a visible shape and be not too far removed
from humanity
...

The germ of the Oxford Movement is to be found in 1822 in Wordsworth‘s Ecclesiastical
Sketches
...
He regretted the suppressions of the ritual, lamented the dissolution of the monasteries, the
end of the worship of saints and the virgin, the disappearance of the ancient abbeys, and admired
the splendours of the old Cathedrals
...

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The first
impulse towards reaction was given by his sermon on ‗national apostasy‘ in 1833
...
The first was the High Church revival
within the framework of the Anglican Church
...

But both laid emphasis on ceremonies, dogmatism and attachment to the past
...
B
...
(In fact this movement was called the Oxford Movement, because its main supports
came from Oxford
...
B
...

John Henry Newman (1801-90) who joined later, became soon the moving force in the
movement
...
Froude
calls him the ‗indicating number‘, all the rest but as ciphers
...
It was
he who went to the length of breaking completely with Protestantism and returning to the bosom
of the Roman Church
...
He dreamt of a free and powerful Church, and aspired to a return to the spirit
of the Middle Ages
...
Universality and the
principle of authority he could find only in Rome
...
In 1879 he was made a Cardinal
...
His greatest contribution to English prose is his
Apologia, in which he set forth the reasons for his conversion
...
From
first to last it is written in pure, flawless and refined prose
...
Refinement, severity, strength, sweetness, all of these words are truly descriptive of
the style as well as of the character of Newman
...
He can express himself in any manner he pleases, and that most naturally
and almost unconsciously
...
His art of prose writing is,
therefore, most natural and perfectly concealed
...

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He was also the leader of
the Aesthetes and Decadents of the later part of the nineteenth century
...
He was curiously interested in the phases of history; and chiefly
in those, like the Renaissance and the beginnings of Christianity, in which men‘s minds were
driven by a powerful eagerness, or stirred by proud conflicts
...
From these studies – Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), Greek Studies and
others – it becomes clear that Pater considered that the secret principle of existence that actually
possesses and rules itself is to gather as many occasions of psychial intensity which life offers to
the knowing, and to taste them all at their highest pitch, so that the flame of consciousness
should burn with its full ardour
...
Pater‘s most ambitious and, on the whole, his greatest work, Marius

91

the Epicurean, the novel in which most of his philosophy is to be found also spiritualises the
search for pleasure
...

As a critic Pater stands eminent
...
His approach is always intuitional and personal, and, therefore, in his case
one has to make a liberal allowance for the ‗personal equation‘
...
But few writers have written more wisely upon style, and
the sentence in which he concentrates the essence of his doctrine is unimpeachable: ―Say what
you have to say, what you have a will to say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact manner
possible, and with no surplusage; there is the justification of the sentence so fortunately born,
entire, smooth and round, that it needs no punctuation, and also (that is the point) of the most
elaborate period, if it be right in its elaboration
...
According to him the essential
elements of the romantic spirit are ―curiosity and the love of beauty,‖ that of the classical spirit –
―a comely order‖
...
But he attempts to make romantic more classical, to
superimpose the ―comely order‖ upon beauty, so that its strangeness may be reduced
...

As a writer of prose, Pater is of the first rank, but he does not belong to the category of the
greatest, because there is such an excess of refinement in his style that the creative strength is
impoverished
...
His chief merit, however, lies in details, in the perfection of single pages,
though occasionally some chapters or essays are throughout remarkable for the robustness of
ideas
...
He is capable of producing more intense and
acute effects in his poetic prose than other great masters of this art – Sir Thomas Browne, De
Quincey and Ruskin
...


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Modern Literature (1900-1961)
The Modern Age in English Literature started from the beginning of the twentieth century, and it
followed the Victorian Age
...
The young people during the fist decade of the present
century regarded the Victorian age as hypocritical, and the Victorian ideals as mean, superficial
and stupid
...
Nothing was
considered as certain; everything was questioned
...
Standards of artistic workmanship and of aesthetic
appreciations also underwent radical changes
...
The Victorians accepted the Voice of Authority, and
acknowledged the rule of the Expert in religion, in politics, in literature and family life
...
They showed readiness to accept their words at face value

92

without critical examinations
...
They believed in
the truths revealed in the Bible, and accepted the new scientific theories as propounded by
Darwin and others
...

Another characteristic of Victorianism was an implicit faith in the permanence of nineteenth
century institutions, both secular and spiritual
...
This Victorian idea of the Permanence of Institutions was replaced
among the early twentieth century writers by the sense that nothing is fixed and final in this
world
...
G
...
The simple faith of the Victorians was replaced by the
modern man‘s desire to prob and question, Bernard Shaw, foremost among the rebels, attacked
not only the ‗old‘ superstitions of religion, but also the ‗new‘ superstitions of science
...
He was responsible for producing the interrogative habit of the mind
in all spheres of life
...

Andrew Undershift declares in Bernard Shaw‘s Major Barbara: ―That is what is wrong with the
world at present
...
Such a
radical proclamation invigorated some whereas others were completely shaken, as Barbara
herself: ―I stood on the rock I thought eternal; and without a word it reeled and crumbled under
me
...
The social and religious
reformers at first raised this complaint, and they were followed by men of letters, because they
echo the voice around them
...
But there was felt the need of a change in the sphere of literature also because the
idiom, the manner of presentment, the play of imagination, and the rhythm and structure of the
verse, of the Victorian writers were becoming stale, and seemed gradually to be losing the old
magic
...

Thus a reaction was even otherwise overdue in the field of literature, because art has to be
renewed in order to revitalise it
...
It had relapsed into life of the common day, and could
not give the reader a shock of novelty
...

Besides the modern reaction against the attitude of self-complacency of the Victorians, there was
also failure or disintegration of values in the twentieth century
...
Material prosperity had become the
basis of social standing
...
Johnson affirmed that ‗opulence excludes but one
evil Poverty‘, in 1863, Samuel Butler who was much ahead of his time, voiced the experience of
the twentieth century, when he wrote: ―Money is like antennae; without it the human insect loses
touch with its environment
...
In order to make the best of himself, the average youth must first make money
...
‖
Besides the immense importance which began to be attached to money in the twentieth century,
there was also a more acute and pressing consciousness of the social life
...

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They realised every day that man was more of a social being than a spiritual being, and
that industrial problems were already menacing the peace of Europe
...
A number of twentieth century writers began to study and ponder seriously over the
writings of Karl Marx, Engels, Ruskin, Morris, and some of them like Henry James, discussed
practical suggestions for the reconstruction of society
...
Young men and women who realised the prospect of financial
independence refused to submit to parental authority, and considered domestic life as too narrow
...
So love became much less of a
romance and much more of an experience
...
The
result was that the modern writers could no longer write in the old manner
...
Even if they treated the same themes, they had to do it in a
different manner, and evoke different thoughts and emotions from what were normally
associated with them
...

The impact of scientific thought was mainly responsible for this attitude of interrogations and
disintegration of old values
...
In an age of mass education, they began
to appeal to the masses
...
They began to look upon Nature not as a
system planned by Divine Architect, but as a powerful, but blind, pitiless and wasteful force
...
A number of writers bred and brought up in such an atmosphere began to voice these
ideas in their writings
...
Machinery has, no doubt, dominated
every aspect of modern life, and it has produced mixed response from the readers and writers
...
Others, however, being impressed by the spectacle of mechanical power producing a sense
of mathematical adjustment and simplicity of design, and conferring untold blessings on
mankind, find a certain rhythm and beauty in it
...
The various scientific appliances confer freedom and
enslavement, efficiency and embarrassment
...
All
these ideas are found expressed in modern literature, because the twentieth century author has to
reflect this atmosphere, and he finds little help from the nineteenth century
...
In order to meet their demand for reading the
publishers of the early twentieth century began whole series of cheaply reprinted classics
...

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But these failed to appeal to the
new cheaply educated reading public who had no share in the inheritance of those ideals, who
wanted redistribution of wealth, and had their own peculiar codes of moral and sexual freedom
...
So they demanded a literature
which suited the new atmosphere
...
The temptation
to do so was great and it was fraught with great dangers, because the new reading public were
uncertain of their ideologies, detached from their background, but desperately anxious to be
impressed
...
The result was that some of the twentieth
century authors exploited their enthusiasm and tried to lead their innocent readers in the quickest,
easiest way, by playing on their susceptibilities
...
Such was the power wielded by the reading
public
...
This was not so during the Victorian period, where
the authors and the reading public understood each other, and had the common outlook on and
attitude to life and its problems
...
Some lament the passing of old values, and
express a sense of nostalgia
...
Some concentrate on sentiment, style or diction in order to
recover what has been lost
...

The twentieth century literature which is the product of this tension is, therefore, unique
...
It is not easy to divide it into school and types
...
But there is an undercurrent in it which runs parallel to the turbulent current of ideas
which flows with great impetuosity
...


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Modern Poetry
Modern poetry, of which T
...
Eliot is the chief representative, has followed entirely a different
tradition from the Romantic and Victorian tradition of poetry
...

These preconceptions about poetry during the nineteenth century were mainly those which were
established by great Romantic poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats
...

That is why Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton were given a higher place as poets than Dryden
and Pope, who were merely men of wit and good sense, and had nothing of the transcendentally
sublime or pathetic in them
...


95

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden and Pope and all their school is
briefly this; their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits; genuine poetry is conceived
and composed in the soul
...
‖ It was generally assumed that poetry must be the direct
expression of the simple, tender, exalted, poignant and sympathetic emotions
...

Besides these preconceptions, a study of the nineteenth century poetry reveals the fact that its
main characteristic was preoccupation with a dream world, as we find in Keats‘s La Belle Dame
Sans Merci, Tennyson‘s The Lady of Shalott and Rossetti‘s The Blessed Damozel
...


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But they could not find favour with the poets and critics of the
twentieth century on account of the radical changes that had taken place
...
Though during the
Victorian period Tennyson was aware of the new problems which were creeping in on account of
scientific and technical discoveries, yet under the impact of the popular conception of poetry, and
also because of his own lack of intellectual vigour, he expressed in his poems more of a spirit of
withdrawal and escape, rather than of facing squarely the problems confronting his age
...
The explicit moral of the poem is that an escape from
worldly problem is of no avail; but instead of effectively conveying this moral, the poem stands
for withdrawal and escape
...

The Victorian poetry was obviously other-worldly
...
For him the past was out of date, the future was not yet born, and not
much could be done
...
In his own poems like A Summer Night, where he
refers to the disease of modern life, he slips away from ‗this uncongenial place, this human life‘
into the beautiful moon-lit region, and forgets the iron time in the midst of melodious sentiments
...
Browning on the other
hand, though a greater poet, was unaware of the disharmonies of his time
...
He was a poet of simple

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He was also, therefore, not in a
position to provide the impulse to bring back poetry to the proper and adequate grappling with
the new problems which had arisen
...
Moreover, some
of the distinguished authors like Meredith and Hardy turned to the novel, and during the early
part of the twentieth century it was left to the minor poets like Houseman and Rupert Brooke to
write in the poetic medium
...
For generations owing to the reaction of aesthetes against the new scientific, industrial
and largely materialistic world, the people in England had become accustomed to the idea that
certain things are ‗not poetical,‘ that a poet can mention a rose and not the steam engine, that
poetry is an escape from life and not an attack on life, and that a poet is sensitive to only certain
beautiful aspects of life, and not the whole life
...


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...
The importance of T
...
Eliot lies in the fact that, gifted with a mind of rare
distinction, he has solved his own problem as a poet
...
It is mainly due to him that all serious modern poets and critics have
realised that English poetry must develop along some other line than that running from the
Romantics to Tennyson, Swinburne and Rupert Brooke
...
He was an expert literary technician, and it was his ―inexhaustible satisfaction of form‖
which led him to poetry
...
He was convinced that it was only
through the revival of the principle of quantitative stress that any advances in English
versification could be expected
...
E
...
W
...
Yeats,
the founder of the Celtic movement in poetry and drama, a phase of romanticism which had not
been much exploited hitherto, gave expression to the intellectual mood of his age
...
Poetry to them was not a medium for philosophy and other extraneous
matters; nor was it singing for its own sake
...
Thus the problem before each of them was how to
arrive at a completely individual expression of oneself in poetry
...
On account of the change in
the conceptions of the function of poetry, it was essential that a new technique of communicating
meaning be discovered
...

Symbolism was first started in France in the nineteenth century
...
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adapted to convey his essential quality without caring for the conventional metres and sentence
structures
...
The imagists, on the other hand, aim at clarity of expression through hard,
accurate, and definite images
...
This purpose of poetry
can be best served by images which by their rapid impingement on the consciousness, set up in
the mind fleeting complexes of thought and feeling
...
In it suggestion plays the paramount part and there is no room for patient, objective
descriptions
...
S
...
But it had actually started right during the Victorian Age, which is evident from the
poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), a Jesuit priest whose poems were published thirty
years after his death
...
S
...

The technique of the symbolist is impressionistic and not representational
...
There is also in symbolist poetry a strong element of
charm or incantation woven by the music of words
...

But the repetitive rhythms which the symbolists use have in them a hypnotic quality
...

The symbolists also give more importance to the subjective vision of an object or situation rather
than the object or the situation itself
...
, the symbolists
find beauty in every detail of normal day-to-day life
...
Moreover, besides including all sorts of objects and situations in the poetical fold, the
symbolist has broken fresh grounds in language also
...
For him the language of
poetry is not different from that of prose
...
Thus the symbolist does not consider any
particular topic, diction or rhythm specially privileged to be used in poetry
...

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Robert Bridges (1840-1930)

Robert Bridges, though a twentieth century poet, may be considered as the last of the Great
Victorians as he carried on the Victoriantradition
...
Belonging to the aristocracy his work is also concerned with the
leisured and highly cultivated aristocratic class of society
...
The world that he depicts is haunted by memories of the classics, of music and poetry
and decorous love making
...
We do not find in his poetry any
bold attempt to face the critical problems facing his generation
...
That is why
Yeats remarked that there is emptiness everywhere in the poetry of Bridges
...
He was
lover of old English music and many of his early lyrics are obviously influenced by the
Elizabethan lyricists, especially Thomas Campion
...
He was tireless experimenter in verse form
...
‖ Working under the
influence of his friend, Hopkins, to whom he dedicated the second book of shorter poems,
Bridges wrote his poems following the rules of new prosody
...
‖ And it was a definite
contribution to the development of English verse
...
In the sonnets of The Growth of Love, we find the calm, the mediative strain of
Victorian love poetry
...
In his greatest poem, The Testament of Beauty, he has given beautiful expression to
his love for ‗the mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things‘ which he received from Keats
...
‘ In his poetry
Bridges thus transcended rather than solved the modern problems by his faith in idealism and the
evolutionary spirit
...
Bridges is,
therefore, rightly called the last Great Victorian, and his greatest poem, The Testament of Beauty,
the final flower of the Victorian Spirit
...

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Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Hopkins who died in 1889, but whose poems were not issued during his lifetime, and who only
became widely known after his friend Robert Bridges edited the collection in 1918, exerted a
great influence on modern English poetry
...
Hopkins had tried to revive the
‗sprung rhythm‘, the accentual and alliterative measure of Langland and Skelton, which had
dropped out of use since the sixteenth century
...
This effect is produced by inducing the
metre to run back on itself, sometimes making a second line reverse the movement of one before;
sometimes in the same line confronting a metric foot by its opposite, for instance, an iambic
followed by a trochee
...
This rhythm follows the system of beats and stresses
unlike the quantitive metres where every syllable is counted
...
That is why it

99

has appealed to the modern poets who in their poetry attempt to convey the everyday experience
of modern life and its multifarious problem in a most natural manner
...
Of course he was not the first
to invent it; there are examples of it in the poetry of all great poets, especially Milton
...

Hopkins, like Keats, was endowed with a highly sensuous temperament, but being a deeply
religious man having an abiding faith in God, he refined his faculty and offered it to God
...
He could perceive God in every object, and tried to find its
distinctive virtue of design of pattern the inner kernel of its being, or its very soul which was
expressed by its outer form
...
For example, the inscape of the flower called ‗blue bell‘, according to Hopkins, is mixed
strength and grace
...
This ‗inscape Hopkisn
expressed in a style also which was peculiar to himself, because he could not be satisfied with
the conventional rhythms and metres which were incapable of conveying what came straight
from his heart
...
His greatest poem is The Wreck of Deutschland, which is full of storm and
agony revealing the mystery of God‘s way to men
...
Some of his lyrics are sublime, but the majority of his poems are obscure
...


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3
...
E
...
He wrote much of his poetry about
Shorpshrie, which like Hardy‘s Wessex, is a part of England, full of historic memories and still
comparatively free from the taint of materialism
...
His most celebrated poem, Shorpshire Lad, which is a
pseudo-pastoral fancy, deals with the life of the Shorpshire lad who lives a vigorous, care-fee
life
...
However, in some of his
poems he gives an effective and powerful expression to the division in the modern consciousness
caused by the contrast between the development of the moral sense and the dehumanised world
picture provided by scientific discoveries
...
But he was on the whole a minor poet who could not
attain the stature of T
...
Eliot or W
...
Yeats
...
The ―Georgian‖ Poets

Besides Bridges and Houseman, who did not belong to any group, there was in the first quarter
of the twentieth century a group of poets called the ―George Group:‖ These poets flourished in
the reign of George V (1911-1936)
...
In reality they were imitators of the parts, who shut
their eyes against the contemporary problems
...
Robert Graves who first claimed to belong to this group,
and subsequently broke away with it, wrote about the Georgian poets
...
Georgian poets were to be English but not aggressively imperialistic,
pantheistic rather than atheistic; and as simple as a child‘s reading book
...
‖
This is rather a severe account of the Georgian poets but it is not wholly unjustified
...
The
poets generally attributed to this group are roughly those whose work was published in the five
volumes of Georgian Poetry, dated respectively 1911-12, 1913-15, 1916-17, 1918-19 and 192022
...
K
...
H
...
E
...
W
...
H
...

Among these the poets whose work has some lasting value are Walter De la Mare, W
...
Davis,
Laurence Binyon and John Masefield
...
His poetry has the
atmosphere of dreamland, as he himself says in his introduction to Behold, This Dreamer:
―Every imaginative poem resembles in its onset and its effect the experience of dreaming
...

Besides this he has great skill in the management of metre, and successfully welding the
grotesque with the profoundly pathetic
...
Being
immensely interested in Nature, the experiences which he describes about natural objects and
scenes are authentic
...
Though living in
the twentieth century, he remained wholly unsophisticated, and composing his poems without
much conscious effort, he could not give them polish and finish
...

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), a scholar and poet who translated Dante into English had a sense
of just word and its sound
...
The most notable of such
poems is his Attila, a dramatic poem which is a well-constructed play
...
The First World War stirred him to
profound feelings and he wrote some very moving poems, for example, the one beginning with
the unforgettable line—
They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old
...

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They were posthumously published in 1944 under the title The Burning of the Leaves and other
Poems
...

John Masefield (born 1878) who has been Poet Laureate since 1930, has been composing poems
for the last forty years, but he has not attained real greatness as a poet
...
The poems which give expression to this experience are contained in the volumes
Salt Water Ballads (1902) and Ballads (1906)
...
After that he gave up writing on imaginative themes, and produced poems
dealing with the graver aspects of modern life in a realistic manner, e
...
The Everlasting Mercy
(1911), The Widow in the Bye-Street Dauber (1913), The Daffodil Fields (1913)
...
Now he is looked upon as one of the
‗prophets‘ of modern England
...
The Imagists

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...
Their activities extended for about ten years—from 1912 to 1922
...
At its best it
displayed both power and individuality, but it did not alter the fact that each of the Georgian
poets was content to delimit or modify the poetic inheritance of the nineteenth century rather
than abandon it in favour of a radically different approach
...

The poetic revolution engineered by the Imagists, which began in the years immediately
preceding the First World War, and which was both produced and further encouraged by T
...

Eliot‘s The Waste Land, preferred the older tradition in English poetry to the Victorian Romantic
tradition
...
For them poetry was a means of self-expression and they appealed to the cultivated
sensibility of their reader
...
That is why the Victorian poetry
especially had a tendency of running to elegy
...
According to them poems
are works of art and not pieces of emotional autobiography or rhetorical prophecy
...
There must be the fusion of thought and
emotion which is found among the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century
...
Therefore,
he must use the language in order to build up rich patterns of meaning which required very close
attention before they were communicated
...

The new movement began with a revolt against every kind of sweet verbal impression and
romantic egotism which persisted throughout the nineteenth century
...
E
...
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who was killed in war in 1917, in an article which he wrote in 1909, declared his preference for
precise and disciplined classicism to sloppy romanticism
...
He with the help of Ezra Pound, who had come from America, founded the movement
called Imagism
...
‖ Giving a fuller statement of
the aims of the Imagist movement, F
...
Flint pointed out in 1913 that three rules the Imagists
observed were—(a) ―direct treatment of the ―thing‖, (b) ―to use absolutely no word that did not
contribute to the presentation‖, and (c) ―to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in
sequence of a metronome
...

The Imagist movement spread in England and America, and it was helped by the seventeenth
century metaphysical poetry and the nineteenth century symbolists, who contributed their
techniques and attitudes to the revolution
...
Other poets who were included in this group were F
...
Flint, Richard Aldington, F
...
Hueffer, James Joyce, Allan Upward, H
...
(Hilda Doolittle),
Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Instead of imitating the English romantics like the
Georgians, the Imagists attempted to reproduce the qualities of Ancient Greek and Chinese
poetry
...
Their aims which were expressed in the introduction to Some Imagist
Poets (1915), can be summarised as follows:
(1) To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly
exact, nor the merely decorative word
...

(3) To create new rhythms and not to copy old rhythms which merely echo old ones
...
It was the complete absence of any sign of
laxness in Hopkins‘ poetry, the clear signs of words and rhythms which were perfectly controlled
by the poet to produce the desired effect, with no dependence at all on the general poetic feeling,
which made an immediate appeal to the new poets
...
They gave up the old pretence that humanity was steadily
progressing towards a millennium
...
This attitude seems to be similar to that of the aesthetes
of the last decade of the nineteenth century, but it is not so
...
Opposed to the romantic view of
man as ―an infinite reservoir of possibilities‖, they looked upon him as a very imperfect creature
―intrinsically limited but disciplined by order
...
They
did believe in the words of Hulme, in ―no universal ego, but a few definite persons gradually
built up‖
...

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W

d
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...
‖
The Imagists could not adequately tackle the contemporary problems, because they lived too
much among books, were rather irresponsible in their conduct, did not possess sharp intellect,
and were not in close contact with actualities
...
But they certainly deserve the credit of
showing that English poetry needed a new technique, and that unnecessary rules and a
burdensome mass of dead associations must be removed
...
Ezra Pound is a poet of real originality, but his too much and rather undigested
learning which he tries to introduce in his poems, makes them difficult to understand, and also
gives them an air of pedantry
...
S
...

The most important writer, who in spite of his being not a regular member of their group, was
directly connected with the Imagists, was David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930)
...
Most of his mature poetry deals with the
theme of duel of sex, a conflict of love and hate between man and wife, and expresses an
annihilation of the ego and a sort of mystical rebirth or regeneration
...

K

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o
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All men detach themselves and become unique;
Every human being will then be like a flower, untrammelled,
Every movement will be direct
Only to be will be such delight, we cover our faces when we think of it,
Lest our faces betray us to some untimely end
...
St

The poems which he wrote in the last year of his life when he was dying of consumption, deal
with the themes of death and eternity
...

―The essence of poetry with us in this age of stark unlovely actualities is a stark directness,
without a shadow of a lie, or a shadow of deflection anywhere
...
”
6
...
‖ The
war poetry was in continuation of Georgian poetry, and displayed its major characteristics,
namely, an escape from actuality
...
W
...

Away upon the Downs
...
Following the Georgian tradition with
its fanciful revolution from the drabness of urban life and its impressionistic description of the

104

commonplace in a low emotional tone, a number of poets who wrote about the war, described
incidents of war and the ardours and pathos of simple men caught in the catastrophe
...

Out of a number of these war poets, only two—Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen – attained
some poetic standard
...
He looked upon him as
a decent chap
Who did his work and hadn‟t much to say
(A Working Party)
In his Suicide in Trenches he described the horrors of trench warfare
...
Sassoon, who is still living, wrote some poems between the two great wars, in
which he attacked the shallow complacency of his contemporaries, and gave voice to the
disillusionment
...
He admired Sassoon because
the latter expressed in a harsh manner the truth about war
...
My subject is War and the poetry of War
...
That is why the true poets must be
truthful
...
His poems are free from bitterness and he rejoices in
the exultation of battle as well as in the fellowship of comrades
...

The following remarkable lines in his poem Strange Meeting reveal Owen‘s typical approach to
War
...

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As an experimenter in metre Owen‘s contribution to modern English poetry is great
...
And above all, he
brought a new dignity to war poetry
...
W
...
Yeats (1865 – 1939)
William Butler Yeats was one of the most important of modern poets, who exerted a great
influence on his contemporaries as well as successors
...
By temperament he was a dreamer, a
visionary, who fell under the spell of the folk-lore and the superstitions of the Irish peasantry
...
Naturally with such a type of temperament, Yeats felt himself a stranger in the
world dominated by science, technology and rationalism
...
Thus he went deeper and farther in the range of folk-lore and mythology
...

Yeats was anti-rationalist
...
He thus led
the ‗revolt of the soul against the intellect‘, in the hope to acquire ‗a more conscious exercise of
the human faculties‘
...
Therefore, he tried to rediscover those symbols which had a popular
appeal in ancient days, and which can even now touch man‘s hidden selves and awaken in him
his deepest and oldest consciousness of love and death, or his impulse towards adventure and
self-fulfillment
...

All these factors inclined Yeats towards symbolism
...
He liked
Shelley‘s poetry because of the symbolism inherent in the recurrent images of leaves, boats,
stars, caves, the moon
...
Coming
under the influence of French Symbolists like Verlaine, Macterlinck, he tried to substitute the
wavering, meditative and organic rhythms, which are the embodiment of imagination, for those
energetic rhythms as of a running man which are not suited to serious poetry
...
The result is that sometimes the symbols used by him are not
clear as they have been derived from certain obscure sources
...

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W
W
W

In most of his poems, however, the symbols used by Yeats are obvious
...

Yeats, therefore, tried to reform poetry not by breaking with the Past, but with the Present
...
His early poems, like The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), express Yeats‘
deepest idealism in the simple outlines of primitive tales
...
But up to this time Yeats had not found himself; he was groping in the dreamland for
wisdom and illumination
...
These conflicts, of course, did not completely efface his dreams,
but they turned his eyes from mythology to his own soul which was divided between earthly
passions and unearthly visions
...
The Anti-self is our
soaring spirit which tries to rise above the bondage of our mental habits and associations
...
Here he gave a very satisfying
presentation of the wholeness of man—his Self and Anti-self
...
Instead of serving as symbols and having certain indefinite

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associations, his last poems expressed ‗Cold passion‘ in images which are chastened and welldefined
...
A Thought from Propertius is in every respect an Imagist poem
...
In Second Coming he describes what
lies at the root of the malady;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold…
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
For about half a century Yeats exerted a tremendous influence on modern poetry on account of
his utter sincerity and extraordinary personality and genius
...

8
...
S
...

K

Thomas Stearns Eliot is the greatest among the modern English poets, and he has influenced
modern poetry more than any other poet of the twentieth century
...
He is a great poet as well a great critic; he is a traditionalist
rooted in classicism as well as an innovator of a new style of poetry; he is a stern realist acutely
conscious of modern civilisation with its manifold problems as well as a visionary who looks at
life beyond the limits of time and space
...
S
...
S
...
He was educated at Harvard University
...
He came into prominence as a poet in the decade following the First World War i
...
,
between 1920 and 1930, during which period he wrote the poems for which he is best known
...
Being himself a great classical scholar, and finding around him petty poets of the Georgian
group, he set himself to establish principles of a sound classicism
...
It is a tradition not established by the authority of Aristotle or any other ancient critic, but
by the whole body of great writers who have contributed to it in the course of centuries
...
The
modern poet, according to Eliot, should carry on that process, follow the permanent spirit of that
tradition, and thus create fresh literature by expressing the present on a new and modified
manner
...
To him classicism means a sort of
training for order, poise and right reason
...
‖
But the surprising thing about Eliot is that in spite of his being a professed classicist and an
uncompromising upholder of tradition, he was the man who led the attack on the writing of
―traditional‘ poetry, and come out as the foremost innovator of modern times
...
So
he rejected it outright
...
The

W
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...

In his attempt to find a new medium for poetry Eliot became interested in the experiments of
Ezra Pound, the leader of the Imagists
...
But Eliot is different from Pound in this respect that having a
profound knowledge of classical literature he can, whenever he likes, borrow phrases from wellknown poets and thus create an astonishing effect
...

Eliot is acutely aware of the present and the baffling problems which face mankind in the
modern times
...
Alfred Prufrock (1917)
express the disillusion, irony and disgust at the contemplation of the modern world which is
trivial, sordid and empty
...
He relentlessly uncovers its baffling contrasts and
looks in vain for a meaning where there is only
A heap of broken images, where the sun heats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water
...

But it is not merely the present with which Eliot is preoccupied
...
His aim is to look beyond the instant,
pressing moment, and think of himself as belonging to what was best in the past and may be
prolonged into the future
...
In order to experience it one should surrender one‘s ego and relax in a mood
of humble receptivity
...
It is in this mood that his later poems published together in Four Quartets,
consisting of Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little
Gidding (1942) are written
...

Burnt Norton begins with the significant lines
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past
...
S
...
He is a
classicist, innovator, critic, poet, social philosopher and mystic—all combined into one
...
The soul of man finds itself in horror and loneliness in the Waste Land unless it is
redeemed by courage and faith
...
And he has
expressed his ideas and feelings in a language which is devoid of all superfluous ornamentation
and is capable of conveying the bewildering and terrifying aspects of modern life
...

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9
...
S
...
S
...
It is headed by W
...
Auden, and the other leading poets of this group are
Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis
...
S
...
These poets are conscious of the bareness
of modern civilisation and strive to find a way out of the Waste Land
...

The most original and the most poetically exciting among the modern poets is W
...
Auden who
settled in America shortly before the Second World War
...
S
...
He is greatly distressed by the upper and lower classes
...

In his later poetry Auden has given up the psychological-economic diagnosis of the troubles of
the times, and developed a more sober, contemplative and religious approach to life
...
But whatever he writes is full
of symbols and images derived not from mythology as in the case of Yeats and Eliot, but from
the multifarious of everyday life
...

But in his later poetry he has developed his own quiet, autobiographical style, which is unlike the
style of any modern poet
...

Long struggle with men
And climbing,
After continual straining
I should grow strong;
Then the rocks would shake
And I should rest long
...

Cecil Day Lewis also wrote his early poetry under the influence of Auden
...
Moreover, he has adopted the Victorian
diction
...
In his poems the imagery is primarily rural and his tone is elegiac
...

K

W
W
W

d
u

...

Other important English poets of the present age are Louis Mac Niece, Edith Sitwell, Robert
Graves, Roy Campbell, Geoffrey Grigson, George Barker and Dylan Thomas
...
S
...
They do not give so much importance to ‗dry,
hard‘ images, and being visionary rather than speculative, their presiding genius is Blake rather
than Donne
...
Death
does not mean destruction, but a guarantee of immortality, of perpetual life in cosmic eternity:
And death shall have no dominion
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not,
And death shall have no dominion
...
All modern poetry
possesses intellectual toughness and there is no attempt to return to the melodious diction of
Tennyson and Swinburne or to the imaginative flights of Shelley
...


M
O
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...
St

After the death of Shakespeare and his contemporaries drama in England suffered a decline for
about two centuries
...
It was
revived, however, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and then there appeared dramatists
who have now given it a respectable place in English literature
...
One was the
influence of Ibsen, the great Norwegian dramatist, under which the English dramatists like
Bernard Shaw claimed the right to discuss serious social and moral problems in a calm, sensible
way
...
The first factor gave rise to the
Comedy of Ideas or Purpose, while the second revived the Comedy of Manners or the Artificial
Comedy
...
He had taught men that the real drama must deal with human
emotions, with things which are near and dear to ordinary men and women
...
This treatment of actual life
made the drama more and more a drama of ideas, which were for the most part, revolutionary,
directed against past literary models, current social conventions and the prevailing morality of
Victorian England
...
The characters in their plays are constantly questioning,
restless and dissatisfied
...

Following the example of Nora, the heroine in Ibsen‘s A Doll‟s House, who leaves her dull
domineering husband who seeks to crush her personality and keep her permanently in a
childlike, irresponsible state, the young women in these plays join eagerly the Feminist
movement and glory in a new-found liberty
...
They looked upon it
as a biological phenomenon directed by Nature, or the ‗life force‘ as Bernard Shaw calls it
...

In the new drama of ideas, where a number of theories had to be propounded and explained,
action became slow and frequently interrupted
...

The new researches in the field of psychology helped the dramatist in the study of the ‗soul‘, for
the expression of which they had to resort to symbols
...
The emphasis on the inner conflict
led some of the modern dramatists to make their protagonists not men but unseen forces, thereby
making wider and larger the sphere of drama
...
The modern period, to a great extent, is like the Augustan period, because of the return
of the witty, satirical comedy which reached its climax in the hands of Congreve in 1700
...
Mainly it is
satirical because with the advancement of civilisation modern life has become artificial, and
satire flourishes in a society which becomes over-civilised and loses touch with elemental
conditions and primitive impulses
...

Shaw was the greatest practitioner of the Comedy of Idea, while Wilde that of the new Comedy
of Manners
...
Wilde, on the other hand, lived a life of luxury and frivolity, was not a deep thinker as
Shaw was; and his attitude to life was essentially a playful one
...
Wilde may be considered, therefore, as the father of the comedy of pure
entertainment as Shaw is the father of the Comedy of Ideas
...
But the artificial comedy of
the last fifty years in England does not compare well with the artificial comedy of the
Restoration
...
Moreover, social manners change so rapidly in the
modern time, that the comedy of manners grows out of date more rapidly than any other type of
drama
...
The result is that the appeal of such plays is not lasting, and many of them
are no longer appreciated now though in their own day they were immensely successful and
powerful
...
George Bernard Shaw, the father

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of the comedy of ideas, was a genius
...
He alone had understood the greatness of Ibsen, and he decided that like
Ibsen‘s his plays would also be the vehicles of ideas
...
He also had a genuine artistic gift
for form, and he could not tolerate any clumsiness in construction
...
In each of his plays he presented a certain
problem connected with modern life, and his characters discuss it thoroughly
...
The main burden of his plays is that the civilised man must either develop or perish
...
Shaw laughed at and ridiculed even things which others respected or held
sacred
...
Other modern dramatists who
following the example of Bernard Shaw wrote comedies of ideas were Granville Barker,
Galsworthy, James Birdie, Priestley, Sir James Barrie and John Masefield, but none of them
attained the standard reached by Shaw
...
B
...
The two important dramatists belonging to this movement are J
...

Synge and Sean O‘Casey
...
S
...
Other modern dramatists who have also
written poetic plays are Christopher Fry, Stephen Philips and Stephen Spender
...


M
O
C

...
St

1
...
He was born and brought
up in Ireland, but at the age of twenty in 1876 he left Ireland for good, and went to London to
make his fortune
...

Then he began to take part in debates of all sorts, and made his name as the greatest debator in
England
...

He was also a voracious reader, and came under the influence of Samuel Butler whom he
described as the greatest writer of the latter half of the nineteenth century
...
According
to Butler, Darwin had banished mind from the universe by banishing purpose from natural
history
...
‘ Shakespeare
had described it as ‗divinity that shapes our ends‘
...

Two other writers who provoked the critical mind of Shaw during his formative period were
Ibsen, a Norwegian dramatist; and Friedrish Nietzche, a German philosopher
...
Ibsen whose doctrine, ‗Be Thyself,‘ which was very much like
Nietzche‘s theory of the Superman who says ‗Yea to Life‘, gave a dramatic presentation of it by
picturing in his plays the life of the middle class people with relentless realism
...
He showed men and women in society
as they really are, and evoked the tragedy that may be inherent in ordinary, humdrum life
...
With that end in view he studied the stage through and through, and came
out with his plays which were theatrically perfect and bubbling with his irrepressible wit
...

Shaw wrote his plays with the deliberate purpose of propaganda
...
‖
He prepared the minds of the audience by written prefaces to his plays which are far more
convincing than the plays themselves
...

In most of his plays, Shaw himself is the chief character appearing in different disguises
...
The only exceptions are Candida,
Saint Joan and Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House
...
In all his plays he is a propagandist
or prophet
...
As his plays are concerned with ideas, and he is a
staunch enemy of sentimentalism, he passes by the subtler, finer elements in the individual, and
fails to arouse emotions
...
His
frankness and sincerity compelled the people to listen to him even when he provoked,
exasperated and shocked many of them
...
In Mrs
...
In Widower‟s House he again put the blame on society, and not on the individual
landlord for creating abuses of the right to property
...
In Getting Marriedhe showed the unnaturalness of the
home-life as at present constituted
...
In John Bull‟s other Island, the hero talks exactly like Shaw, and the
Englishman represents the worst traits in English character
...
In
The Apple Cart Shaw ridiculed the working of democratic form of government and hinted that it
needed a superman to set things right
...
It was in St
...


M
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...
St

2
...
It was only during the last five years of his life that he
turned his attention to writing for the stage
...
But their important was
exaggerated, because they are merely the work of a skilled craftsman
...

Oscar Wilde had the tact of discovering the passing mood of the time and expressing it
gracefully
...
The situations he presents in his plays are hackneyed, and borrowed from
French plays of intrigue
...
The first three
plays are built on the model of the conventional social melodramas of the time
...
The Importance of Being Earnest,
on the other hand, is built on the model of the popular farce of the time
...
It is successful because of its detachment from all meaning ad
models
...
The playfulness of the farce helped
Wilde to comment admirably on frivolous society
...


M
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C

...
John Galsworthy (1867-1933)

P
w
o
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y

Galsworthy was a great dramatist of modern times, who besides being a novelist of the first rank,
made his mark also in the field of drama
...
According to him, ―Naturalistic art is like a steady lamp, held up from time to
time, in whose light things will be seen for a space clearly in due proportion, freed from the mists
of prejudice and partisanship
...
Of course his delicate sympathies
for the poor and unprivileged classes make his heart melt for them, and he takes sides with them
...
The Skin Game (1920), and
The Silver Box
...
Strife deals with the
problem of strikes, which are not only futile but do immense harm to both the parties
...
Justice is a severe criticism of the prison administration of
that period
...

Though the plays of Galsworthy are important on account of the ideas which they convey, they
are no less remarkable for their technical efficiency
...
But sometimes he carries
simplicity of aim and singleness of purpose too far and the result is that his plays lack human
warmth and richness which are essential elements in literature
...
St

4
...
Though he wrote a number of plays of different sorts in
collaboration with other playwrights, he occupies his place in modern drama mainly as a writer
of four ―realistic‘ plays—The Marrying of Anne Leete (1899), The Voysey Inheritance (1905),
Waste (1907) and The Madras House (1910)
...

The Marrying of Anne deals with the Life Force, and attacks the convention and hypocrisy
surrounding the social culture of the time The Voysey Inheritance deals, like Shaw‘s Mrs
...
In Waste, Granville-Barker again deals
with the problem of sex
...
The hero,
Trebell, who suffers on account of his wife‘s misdoings, possesses tragic majesty of
Shakespeare‘s heroes
...

The importance of Granville-Barker in the twentieth century drama lies in his fine delineation of
character and realistic style
...
The dialogue is very natural and near to ordinary conversation
...


5
...

K

Another dramatist belonging to the same school as Galsworthy and Granville-Barker is
Masefield
...
Though he clings to the
natural world and is a confirmed realist, he is wrapped in the spirit of mysticism
...
The social forces do not play any significant part in it
...
But in spite of the supernatural and imaginative cast of the play, the story is one of
unflinching realism
...
Harrison
...
The Campden Wonder and Mrs
...


W
W
W

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d
u

...
J
...
Barrie (1860-1937)

J
...
Barrie did not belong to any school of dramatists
...
His most characteristic and original play is The
Admirable Crichton (1902), a drawing-room comedy in which the family butler is the hero
...
This is exactly what we find in this play
...
Three other plays Peter Pan, The Golden Bird
and The Golden Age have the children story-book characters in them, who are brought to life by
the writer‘s skill
...
In all these plays Barrie shows himself as a pastmaster in prolonging our
sense of expectancy till the end of the last act
...

Barrie‘s last and most ambitious drama was The Boy David (1936) in which he has given a fine
picture of the candid soul of boyhood
...

On the whole, Barrie is a skilled technician
...
He
discovered that in an age of affectations and pretensions, the theatre-goers needed the sincerity
and innocence of childhood, and he earned his popularity by giving them what they needed
...
The Irish Dramatic Revival

One of the important dramatic movement of modern times was the Irish Dramatic Revival
...
The protagonists of this new
movement—Lady Gregory, W
...
Yeats, and J
...
Synge, were all Irish dramatists who wanted
to introduce flavour richness and poetry into drama
...
According to them, such plays dealing with the
profound and common interests of life and full of poetic speeches would be different from the
intellectual plays of Ibsen and Shaw, which dealt with the realities of life, only of the urban
population, in a dry and joyless manner
...

The leader of the new movement was William Butler Yeats
...
Under the inspiration of the
Gaelic movement, Yeats was convinced that through a wide dissemination of these Celtic myths,
not alone Ireland but the whole world might be stimulated
...
But as commercial theatre with its elaborately decorated stage and
other technical devices was unsuited to his simple, poetical and symbolical plays, he, with the
help of Lady Gregory, established the Irish Literary Theatre
...
Here the play was the
main thing, and the stage setting comparatively unimportant
...
But the popularity of these
plays depended more upon poetic charm and strangeness than upon dramatic power
...
The poetic element obtrudes too much and prevents the
creation of the illusion of possible people behaving credibly and using an appropriate speech
medium
...
The fact is that Yeats was essentially as romantic lyric
poet and, therefore he did not handle the dramatic form with ease
...
Like Yeats she drew

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much of her material from the folk-lore of her country, and also wrote Irish historical plays
...
The characters in her plays, who are mostly
peasants, are more human than in the plays of Yeats or Synge, and the audience get a thrill of joy
on account of the sweet savour of the dialogue
...
With them he lived like a peasant, using their language, learning
their tales, and observing closely their customs and characters, until he started writing his plays
which, in the opinion of some critics, are second only to Shakespeare‘s
...
The
result is that sometimes his humour becomes too grim and his tragedy bitterly painful
...
His Riders to the Sea (1909), which is one of the greatest tragedies written in the
twentieth century, is considered by some critics as too harrowing and ruthless
...
The people of Ireland could not tolerate this as they thought
that Irish women were more virtuous than English women
...
But it proved to be very popular because it gives an impressive representation of
Irish peasant phrases which the author had heard on the roads, or among beggar women and
ballad-singers around Dublin
...
In the younger generation the most prominent dramatist is Sean
O‘Casey
...
Mostly he draws material for his plays, in which there
is a mixture of tragedy and comedy, from the grim slum-dwellings and the recent history of
Ireland
...
These plays are written in
the language of the slums, but it is full of beauty
...
He is at his best in the portrayal of women
...


M
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...
St

8
...
This was a reaction against the prose plays of Shaw
and others, which showed a certain loss of emotional touch with the moral issues of the age
...
He felt that in the past people had a higher tradition of
civilisation than in our own time
...
On the other hand, the drama of entertainment, or the artificial comedy, was becoming dry
and uninteresting
...

It was under these circumstances that some modern writers who had made reputation as poets
made the attempt in the 1930‘s and 1940‘s to revive the tradition of the poetic drama which had
been dead since the Restorations
...


117

T
...
Eliot commenced his career as a practical dramatist by writing a pageant play called, The
Rock, to encourage the collection of funds for the building of new London churches
...
It was written to be performed in
Canterbury Cathedral at the yearly Canterbury Festival, commemorating the death of St
...
Obviously the impulse behind this play was also religious rather
than a properly theatrical one, as in the case of The Rock
...
Here T
...
Eliot has made a very effective use of the chorus
which is made up of the women of Canterbury, who are presented very realistically
...
Thomas,
though a dignified and impressive character, is more of a symbol than a person
...
The most important
‗action‘ in the play is St
...
Thus Murder in the Cathedral is strictly ‗interior‘, and the outward value of the play is
rather that of a spectacle and a commemorative ritual
...
S
...
Its primary aim is not
edification or commemoration
...
But Harry feels restless as he is obsessed with the ideas of
having killed his wife, and on account of that he is pestered by Furies
...
This fact is
revealed to Harry by his aunt Agatha
...
His mother is so much shocked by Harry‘s decision that she dies
...
S
...
But on account of this The Family Reunion conveys the illusion of reality
...
Moreover, T
...

Eliot has deliberately written it in a plain manner in order to convince his audience of the reality
of what they are listening to
...
S
...
The play begins with a cocktail party which has been arranged by the
wife, and the husband does not know all the guests
...
When the party is over, one of the guests, who is psychiatrist,
stays behind
...
The husband does not love his wife, and has a mistress
...
The psychiatrist solves the tangle by advising the husband and
wife that they should not expect too much from each other
...
So they are reconciled to each other
...
The yongman who has been in
love with her as well as with the wife joins film industry in Hollywood
...
S
...
Moreover, he has managed to write a play which at once keeps us continually
amused and expectant
...
On the whole, The Cocktail Party is the
most successful of T
...
Eliot‘s plays from the theatrical point of view
...

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His most important
play is The Trail of a Judge
...
But the Fascists who are in power, charge him
with Communistic leanings, and he is disgraced, imprisoned and killed
...
He embodies in himself permanent human values
...
On account of these reason The Trial of a
Judge is one of the most effective pieces of poetic drama in the modern age
...
H
...
One of their
important plays is The Dog Beneath the Skin—a gay, satirical farce
...

Besides these, another poet who has written poetic plays is Christopher Fry
...
g
...
In his plays there is a fantastic wealth of language which reminds us of young
Shakespeare of Love‟s Labour‟s Lost
...


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...
Historical and Imaginative Plays
...
The
exploitation of historical themes is the result of a deliberate endeavour to escape from the
trammels of naturalism and to bring back something of the poetic expression to the theatre
...
Drinkwater‘s Abraham Lincoln (1918) was such a great success
that it made the author internationally famous
...
Lee (1923)
...
Lincoln pursues war against the Southern States
resolutely but not vindictively
...
In Oliver Cromwell and Robert E
...
In Mary Stuart, he gives us a subtle study of a woman who cannot find any one man
great enough to satisfy her soul‘s love
...
The Immortal Lady (1931), and The Rose Without the Thorn (1932)
...

Besides Drinkwater and Bax, other dramatists who have written historical and imaginative plays,
are Ashley Dukes and Rudolf Besier
...
Browning), their elopement and marriage, is the most successful of
all the historical plays produced in the twentieth century
...
The naturalistic method of Shaw still makes an appeal; there are dramatists like Somerset
Maugham who have written very successful comedies of manners; and at the same time the new
experiments in non-realistic and imaginative drama also excite the audience
...
St

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tendencies are found in modern drama, and no one in particular holds the predominant place at
present
...
It is the only
literary form which can compete for popularity with the film and the radio, and it is in this form
that a great deal of distinguished work is being produced
...
Poetry which had for many centuries held the supreme place in the
realm of literature, has lost that position
...

The main reason for this change is that the novel is the only literary form which meets the needs
of the modern world
...
It provides compression of meaning through metaphorical expression
...
But this compression of metaphor is dependent upon a certain compression in the
society
...
For example the word ‗home‘
stood for a settled peaceful life with wife and children, during the Victorian home
...
But in the twentieth century when on account of so many divorces and domestic
disturbances, home has lost its sanctity, in English society, the word ‗home‘ cannot be used by
the poet in that sense because it will convey to different readers different meanings according to
their individual experiences
...
The metaphors or ‗ambiguities‘ which lend subtlety to poetic
expression, are dependent on a basis of common stimulus and response which are definite and
consistent
...

The modern period in England is obviously not such a period when society is functioning on the
basis of certain fundamental values
...
Old
values have been discarded and they have not been replaced by new values
...
It is the conflict between the two that the common basis of
poetry has disappeared
...
Meanings that are taken for granted in one group
are not understood in another
...
It is difficult for him to choose between
communism and capitalism, between belief in God and scepticism, confidence in science and
fear of the atomic bomb, because every belief is riddled with doubts
...
In the absence of any common
values compression of meaning is impossible
...
Sometimes the
isolation of the poet is so extreme that his writing cannot be understood by anyone but himself
...
But the very reasons which make
the writing of poetry difficult have offered opportunity to fiction to flourish
...

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Those things which are no longer assumed can be easily explained in
a novel
...
Science, which is
playing a predominant role today, and which insists on the analytical approach, has also helped
the novel to gain more popularity, because the method of the novel is also analytical as opposed
to the synthetical
...
He prefers the novel form
because here the things are properly explained and clarified
...
This is possible only in the novel form
...
In the first place, we can say
that it is realistic as opposed to idealistic
...
The modern
novelist is ‗realistic‘ in this sense and not in the sense of an elaborate documentation of fact,
dealing often with the rather more sordid side of contemporary life, as we find in the novels of
Zola
...
Tolstoy‘s
War and Peace and George Eliot‘s Middle March had proved that the texture of the novel can be
made as supple and various as life itself
...
Under the influence of
Flaubert and Turgeniev, some modern novelists like Henry James have taken great interest in
refining the construction of the novel so that there will be nothing superfluous, no phrase,
paragraph, or sentence which will not contribute to the total effect
...
They have introduced into the novel subtle points of
view, reserved and refined characters, and intangible delicacies, of motive which had never been
attempted before by any English novelist
...
The psychological problem concerns the
nature of consciousness and its relation to time
...
He tends rather to see it as altogether fluid, existing simultaneously at several
different levels
...
People
are what they are because of what they have been
...
This method to describe
this consciousness in operation is called the ‗stream of consciousness‘ method
...
In this kind
of a novel a character‘s change in mood, marked externally by a sigh or a flicker of an eyelid, or
perhaps not perceived at all, may mean more than his outward acts, like his decision to marry or
the loss of a fortune
...
Everything about the
character is always there, at some level of his consciousness, and it can be revealed by the author
by probing depthwise rather than proceeding lengthwise
...
It therefore means that ‗reality‘

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itself is a matter of personal impression rather than public systematisation, and thus real
communication between individuals is impossible
...
This idea is
further strengthened on account of disintegration of modern society in which there is no common
basis of values
...
D
...
Lawrence believes that true love begins with the lover‘s recognition of each
others‘ true separateness
...
Dalloway rejected Peter Welsh, the man she
really loved, because of the fear that his possessive love would destroy her own personality
...
Previously two different methods were adopted by the novelists in
the delineation of character
...
The first method we see in
Hardy‘s The Mayor of Casterbridge, where in the beginning there is no hint of Michael‘s real
nature or personality
...
The second method is seen in
Trollope‘s Barchester Towers, where in the early chapter we get general sketches of the
characters of Dr
...
Proudie, and in the later chapter we see the application to
particular events of the general principle already enunciated
...
Though the methods adopted in all
these cases are different, we find that consistent character-portrait emerges
...
He has
realised that it is impossible to give a psychologically accurate account of what a man is at any
given moment, either by static description of his character, or by describing a group of
chronologically arranged reactions to a series of circumstances
...
For him the present moment is sufficiently specious, because it denotes the
ever fluid passing of the ‗already‘ into the ‗not yet‘
...

His technique, therefore, is a means of escape from the tyranny of the time dimension
...

This ‗stream of consciousness‘ technique not only helps to reveal the character completely,
historically as well as psychologically, it also presents development in character, which is in
itself very difficult
...
Similarly Virginia Woolf in Mrs
...
Dalloway‘s character, but
also she has made the reader feel by the end of the book that he knows not only what Mrs
...
Thus what the traditional method achieves by extension, the
‗stream of consciousness‘ method achieves by depth
...
It first separates the presentation of consciousness from the
chronological sequence of events, and then investigates a given state of mind so completely, by

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pursuing to their end the remote mental associations and suggestions, that there is no need to
wait for time in order to make the potential qualities in the character take the form of activity
...
This was rather an inevitable result of the acceptance of the ‗stream of consciousness‘
technique
...
H
...
An elaborate technique for catching the flavour of every moment
helps to avoid coming into grips with acute problems facing the society
...
The result
is that whereas the earlier English novel generally dealt with the theme of relation between
gentility and morality, the modern novel deals with the relation between loneliness and love
...
E
...
Forster calls it the ‗little society‘ as
opposed to the ‗great society‘
...
H
...
He deals with social problems as individual problems
...
Thus the novel in the hands of James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D
...
Lawrence, Dorothy Richardson or Katherine Mansfield,
borrowed some of the technique of lyrical poetry on account of emphasis on personal experience
...


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The Ancestors

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(i) H
...
Wells (1866-1946)

Among the writers of twentieth century Herbert George Wells was the greatest revolutionary,
and like Barnard Shaw, he exerted a tremendous influence on the minds of his contemporaries
...
He insisted that classical humanism should be discarded
in favour of science, and that Biology and World History should take the place of Latin and
Greek
...
He
was untouched by sentiment and had no loyalty to the past, with the result that he rejected what
was hitherto considered sacred and part of the English cultural inheritance
...
First he wrote the scientific romances; next he tried
his hand on the domestic novel, with its emphasis on character and humour; and then when he
had gained sufficient fame as a writer, he wrote a series of sociological novels in which he
showed his concern with the fate of humanity as a whole
...
He looks at life on earth from a higher level by projecting himself to a distant standpoint,
to the moon, the future, the air, or another planet
...

His first scientific romance was The Time Machine (1895), in which the hero invents a ‗time
machine‘, which enables him to accelerate the time consciousness and project himself into the
future
...
His next
work, The War of the Worlds (1898), deals with the theme of the invasion of the earth by the
people living on the planet Mars
...
In this way the earth is
saved
...
Moreau (1896),
When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The First Man in the Moon (1901) and The Food of the Gods
(1904)
...

From fantastic romances, Wells then turned to domestic fiction
...
The hero Kipps, rises from the position of a draper‘s assistant to a man of fortune
...
This novel is full of satire
and humour typical of Wells
...
In Anna Veronica (1909) which is the full-length study of a modern young woman
...
In Love
and Mrs
...
Polly (1910), Wells gives us realistic,
humorous and sympathetic studies of the lower middle class life, with which he was quite
familiar
...
He then started a series of novels
dealing with great social problems confronting the men of his time
...
Britling sees it Through (1916), a study of the reaction of the people to the First
World War; The Undying Fire (1919) which is a religious and satiric fantasy; Mr
...
Parham (1930), an attack on capitalism
...
He also visualised a Words State to which nations must owe allegiance
...
His greatest weakness was that
being too much scientific minded, he lacked spiritual wisdom
...


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...
St

(ii) Arnold Bennett (1867-1931)

Unlike Wells, Bennett was more concerned with the craft of fiction and was not disposed to
preach in his novels
...
He looked at
the world as a spectacle and recorded in his novels his impressions with complete detachment
...
He was a copyist of life, and only indirectly did he
play the role of a commentator, an interpreter, or an apologist
...
The reason is that the purpose of a purely ‗naturalistic‘ novelist is to be as dispassionate
and detached as a camera, but Bennet even while desisting from utilizing his novels as an
instrument of moral and social reforms was compelled to select certain things as relevant and
significant, and reject certain others as irrelevant and insignificant, in order to determine the
nature of his picture of life
...
No doubt, he looked at life as a spectacle, but sometimes that
spectacle became for him so wonderful thrilling and awesome that he could no longer remain
detached as a mere spectator
...
On the other
hand he interprets it romantically as ‗sweet, exquisite, blissful, melancholy
...
On the contrary, he
finds sufficient grandeur in the modern everyday life of the Five Towns, his native district,
which he has made as famous in English fiction as Hardy‘s Wessex
...
His other novels are
Buried Alive (1908), and The Card (1911), which are first-rate humorous character novels; and
The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), which provides good entertainment
...
The readers become familiar not only with the principal streets and buildings and
landmarks, but also with the men and women who walked the streets
...
Though ugliness and
coarseness are also presented in that otherwise pleasant picture, they, however make it more true
to real life
...
Moreover, he illumines his books
with a sense of beauty and universal sympathy which are indispensable to creative artist
...
No doubt, Bennett won the hearts of his
readers and became the most popular novelist of his time
...

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It
was, perhaps, because of his foreign origin, that Henry James was untouched by the pessimism
of the age, whereas almost all his contemporaries who tried to investigate the human mind
showed unmistakable signs of depression
...
The emphasis is more on their mental and emotional
reactions
...
In his next important novel, What Masie Knew
(1897), he gives us an exquisitely delightful picture of the young American girls brought up in
the sentimental Victorian surroundings, and introduced to a modern society entirely devoid of
sentiment
...
The Golden Bowl (1905) for instance, deals with the interactions
of five characters—the American millionaire and his daughter, the Italian noble whom she
marries, her penniless friend who has a love-affair with the Italian, and an elderly friend of both
girls
...
Everything is narrated in a quiet

125

undertone, and it is the nobility and decency which all the characters preserve in their behaviour,
which gives a unity to the novel
...

The main contribution of Henry James to the technique of the novel is his use of narrative at
second hand
...
The
reader is permitted only vague glimpses even of what the character thinks
...
As a stylist, James
aims at expressing the exact shade of emotion or apprehension which he wishes to convey
...


(iv) Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

Chief among those who used the technique of Henry James was Conrad, a Pole, who wrote
exquisite English
...
Being a sailor he spent twenty
years of strenuous life in the ship or the port
...
As his own
sailor‘s life provided him with the memory of mistakes, humiliations and corrections under
authority, he took a sort of morbid interest in people whose souls are harassed and tormented by
other
...

Conrad developed the plots of his novels through a third person as if in conversation, in which
the voice and personality of the narrator becomes extremely suggestive quite apart from the story
he is telling
...
He learned
the attitude of detachment and an acute observation of environment from the French novelists,
Flaubert and Maupassant
...
But unlike these great novelists,
Conrad had neither the experience nor the opportunity to examine such characters as social types
or psychological puzzles
...
For
example, Lord Jim, hero of the novel of same name, seems to feel himself always under a cloud
...
Unlike some of the
contemporary novelists he scorned to expose social abuses, or laugh at social prejudices
...
He was thus always true
to himself and to the characters he created
...
These series cover an immense range of human activity
...
The characters in them are not refined or fashionable people; they
become slaves to their peculiar idiosyncrasies
...
Conrad‘s greatest merit in these novels lies in his descriptive power by which he, like
Milton, can make us see the unseen as he can see it
...
Moreover, Conrad in all his novels exhibits

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the great ideals of impartiality, practical wisdom, sense of fitness and freedom sentimentality,
which earned for him the admiration of his English readers
...
Like Conrad, he
very much admired the strong, brave, silent man, but unlike Conrad‘s his is the slightly wistful
admiration of the intellectual, who has wanted very much to be a man of action, and never
succeeded in becoming one
...
He
derived the material for his early stories—Plain Tales from the Hills, Under the Deodars
...
Of his novels, the important are The Light that
Failed (1890), The Naulakha (1892), Captain Courageous (1897), and Kim (1901)
...
The
Naulakha deals with the life of a medical missionary in India, and its moral is that woman‘s
place is in the home
...
Kim is a
long story in which a well-defined central character travels through circumstances towards a
goal
...

His knowledge is very superficial and he looks at everything from the point of the view of
British rulers
...
Like Defoe, he borrowed from all great writers, and his opening sentences are the
most wonderful in literature
...

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He
was exactly the contemporary of Arnold Bennet, but unlike him Galsworthy belonged to the
upper class, and was most at his ease describing the life of the country gentry or people of
inherited wealth living in London
...

Galsworthy found in English society that majority of people clung to old established traditions,
while a small minority wanted change
...
In his preface to The Island
Pharisees, Galsworthy contrasts these opposite elements in society
...
In the first novel of this
group, The Man of Property (1906), he holds the balance between the mechanical mind of
Soames Forsyte and the impulsive Irene; in The Country House (1907), which is the most
attractive of all his novels, between the unimaginative Squire and his perceptive, compassionate
wife; in Fraternity (1909) and in The Patrician (1919) between the tolerant and the advocates of
‗an eye for an eye‘
...

But the First World War effected a change in the attitude of Galsworthy
...
On
the other hand, he lost sympathy with the young, restless troublous spirits in whose life he found
no aim
...
In these novels it appears that Galsworthy
the pioneer and humanist has been replaced by Galsworthy the moralist and disciplinarian
...
But in spite of
this change in his attitude, he gets the credit of awakening the Edwardian England from
intellectual lethargy
...


(vii) E
...
Forster (1879-1970)

Forster belonged to the group of elder novelists of the twentieth century and occupied an
exceptional place in the history of the modern novel
...

Though he was the most popular of all living novelists, yet his production had been small
...

Forster‘s earliest novel Where Angles Feared to Tread appeared in 1905
...
By this time Forster‘s reputation
had been firmly established
...
His last great novel, A Passage to India, appeared in 1924
...
In his early years he admired
the liberal tradition of Western civilisation, which had given opportunities for leisure and
personal relations
...
When after the First World War, Fascism and
Communism came to the forefront in many European countries, he saw that the way of life
which he had favoured might be an oasis rather than an enduring possibility
...

In all Forster‘s novels there is a conflict between good and evil, between what is cruel, philistine
and unperceiving, and the good which is lively, entertaining and sensitive
...
He believes that the
aim of the civilised life is to enhance the quality of personal relation
...

Feeling that Europe was degenerating to barbarism
...

In all the novels of Forster we find an extraordinary lightness of touch, and a sensitive spirit, but
he is never weak or sentimental
...
Death destroys a man; the idea of Death saves him
...
But his morality is individual,
and his philosophy has a mystical background
...
‘
Forster possessed gift of rhythmic prose, rarely possessed by a novelist and an ironic spirit which
he exercised with the skill of Meredith
...
This became
clear from his first novel—Where Angels Fear to Tread
...

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In The Longest Journey (1907) contrast appears again
...
In A Room with a View (1908) Forster reached his full maturity
...
In Howard‟s End (1910) Forster reached
his highest achievement as a novelist
...
This novel, which has a great variety in incident and character, is
made by Forster as symbol of his plea that it is the people gifted with insight and understanding
on whom civilisation really depends
...

Here he emphasised on personal relations, which had been his theme in all his previous novels
...

In all his novels Forster had expressed and strongly affirmed his faith in the individual, and it is
this fundamental element in his philosophy which has given him a place of exceptional honour
among the modern English novelists
...

K

2
...
In
fiction James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Adlous Huxley and Somerset Maugham played the
prominent part
...
St

James Joyce was a novelist of unique and extraordinary genius
...
Most of his life was spent in retirement
in Paris
...
By
temperament he was an artist and symbolist
...
He leant from the psychologists and biologists of his day that our
speech occupies the dominant ‗association area‘ in the brain
...
Himself a born linguist,
Joyce looked upon language as a sixth sense, that machinery through which the human organism
reveals its inner processes, an instinctive and therefore truthful comment on experience
...
As it was an unexplored
field, and offered a new world for the artist to conquer, Joyce who was in search of a new
medium, took it up, and did the pioneering work in the ‗stream of consciousness‘ technique
...
Of these Ulysses is his masterpiece
...
In Ulysses the artist is shown at one with humanity

129

through insight into the psychology of speech, our most intimate faculty, in which all men share
and have shared
...
But
whereas Homer dwells on the adventures, and has very little to say about reactions of the
adventurer, Joyce lays emphasis on the speeches of the hero, because according to him, speech,
not action, is the token of humanity
...

Unlike great novels, Ulysses does not present truth to life
...
His is a pioneering work, because
here he showed to the novelists to explore a new field—‗the stream of consciousness‘, which
was so far hidden from their view
...


(ii) Virgina Woolf (1882-1941)

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...
She was greatly
impressed by Ulysses, in which Joyce had found an alternative to the well-made plot and external
characterisation
...
This method suited
her admirably because having a purely literary background, much of her experience had come
from books rather than from actual life
...

Working under the influence of Joyce, and of the French novelist, Proust, who conceived
personality as a continued process of decantation from state to state, Virginia Woolf ignored the
outer personality regarding it simply as the ‗semi-transparent envelope‘, through which she could
study the ‗reality‘, namely, the thoughts, feelings and impressions as they quickened into life
...
‖ She depicts in her novels the stuff of life—the thought,
feelings, impressions—steeped in the richest dyes of her imagination and turned into images by
her poetic sensibility
...
Here she relates the story of a young and inexperienced girl who comes to learn
something of life and the relations between the sexes, falls in love and dies of tropical fever
before she can realise herself
...
Her second novel, Night and Day (1919), offers an elaborate long
drawn-out study of Katherine Hilberry, an intelligent young woman of the middle class and her
relation with her mother and four friends
...

Her next novel, Jacob‟s Room (1922), represents her first serious experiment in the stream of
consciousness‘ technique
...
Here
the sunlit streams of youth are overshadowed by time
...
In this novel, Virginia Woolf‘s quest for the meaning of
human experience goes on but the mystery is not yet solved
...
Dalloway (1925) she
explores and recreates the personality of a middle-aged woman, Mrs
...
Here she sets

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The day in her life is expressed in terms of a long interior monologue, the smooth
flowing of the stream of consciousness, which is interrupted by the striking hours of the clock
...
Here the scene is set on an unnamed island, and the Lighthouse symbolize in
some queer way the ‗reality‘ which is never experienced
...
Orlando, which is
liveliest of all, relates in a series of vivid scenes and dramatic climaxes the mental experiences of
a poet while writing a prize poem
...
It is the novel of the generations in which the fortunes of a middle-class
family from 1880 to the present time are rather sketchily represented
...


(iii) Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

As a novelist Aldous Huxley is concerned with the search for a workable faith in the bewildering
world of today, and being pre-eminently an intellectual, whatever faith he finally accepts must be
one justifiable by logical argument, not merely by appeals to feeling or tradition
...
Though he lacks the imaginative power of Lawrence, and
the poetic sensitivity of Virginia Woolf, he is better intellectually equipped than either
...

In his early novels Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923) and Those Barren Leaves (1925),
Huxley presented the dangerously attractive doctrine of hedonism, that is, pleasure is the greatest
thing in life
...
The characters in these novels include middle-aged
cultured voluptuaries who ask little more of life than readable books, amusing conversation, art
and quiet comfortable life
...
Antic Hay which is the liveliest of the three, is a rollicking satire on
the life-worshippers
...
They take it for granted that the universe has no meaning and therefore the
only thing to do is to enjoy oneself and take no thought for the marrow
...

In his next novel, Point Counter Point, Huxley studies the frustration brought about by the
conflict between passion and reason
...
There is thus a self-division in human personality
...
The rational intellectual with his analytic
reason destroys spontaneity and the power to feel and sympathise
...
The
total effect of Point Counter Point is one of bitter disillusionment with society
...
Here he searches for a new faith in spiritualism and Eastern philosophy
...
Into such a world Huxley introduces the
Savage John, who represents the old world of religion and cultural values
...


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In Brave New World, Huxley is clearly on the side of the angels of death so long as he can have
the assurance of the reality of the spirit
...
Here he reveals a deeper concern for the quality of human
personality
...
Huxley derived these mainly from Hindu philosophy with its emphasis on nonattachment and universal pity
...
Here he accepts the existence of supramundane reality
...
These ideas are very much akin to the philosophy of the Bhagwad Gita
...
The biologist believes that eternity is a mere extension of
physical life
...

Huxley did not make any notable contribution to the technique of the novel
...
But he did for the
novel what Shaw did for the drama; that is, he made the novel a form capable of propagating
great ideas and thus making an appeal to the intellect rather than the emotions of the reader
...

(iv) D
...
Lawrence (1885-1930)

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Lawrence was a great and original writer who brought a new kind of poetic imagination to
English fiction
...
But he himself
said, ―I, who loathe sexuality so deeply am considered a lurid sexuality specialist‘ Lawrence was
a passionate Puritan, and his sexual idea was high and lofty
...
―Once a man establishes a full dynamic
communication at the deeper and the higher centres, with a woman, this can never by
broken…very often not even death can break it
...
Sex is the door
...
Beyond lies the service of
God
...
H
...
His first novel, The White Peacock (1911) struck the lyrical note of much of
his best work; his second The Trespasser (1912), was more melodramatic
...
In this novel, in which he describes the boy‘s life in the miner‘s
househood and his wonderful relationship with his mother, has been recognised as one of the
great pieces of English autobiographical fiction
...
His
next novel, Woman in Love (1921), is rather obscene
...
In Aeron‟s Rod (1922) he discusses the theme of male comradeship
and leadership, which is continued in the Australian novels, Kangaroo (1923) and The Bay in the
Bush (1924)
...
In his last great novel
...

Regarding the relation between the sexes, Lawrence resents man‘s subjection to woman, not
woman‘s subjection to man
...
Unless man is supreme, the
relation that he develops with the woman is a filial relation, which amounts to incest
...
Without the restoration of that contact society will perish
...
We should have
more trust in our flesh and blood rather than in intellect
...

Lawrence was a rebel, and he continued, and perhaps, won the fight for freedom which began
with Hardy
...
The Moderns
Among the moderns the most important novelist is Somerset Maugham (1874), who is equally
famous as a dramatist and short story writer
...
His important novels are Liza of Lambath (1897),
Of Human Bondage (1915), Cakes and Ale (1930) and The Rozor‟s Edge
...
Here he gives us a picture of life which has
long ceased to be, but in spite of this the novel remains remarkably fresh
...
Though the views
expressed by him in it are outdated, yet it has got its value because here the author expressed his
honest, unflinching acceptance of his belief in the meaninglessness of life
...
Cakes and Ale which is a witty, malicious, satirical comedy, is highly entertaining
...

J
...
Priestley (1894) is another important novelist, who revived the sane and vital telling of a
story in The Good Companions, which in spite of its having the defect of being too sentimental,
is a great novel in the English tradition
...

Though there are a large number of minor modern novelists, the well-known among them are the
followings;
(a) Charles Morgan, who is philosophical in his approach
...
Chief
among his books are Problem of Pain, The Screwtapa Letters, The Great Divorce and Miracles;
(c) Herbert Ernest Bates, who has evolved a use of English which will be effective in the
development of prose style
...
Behind this is a
pattern of life on a structure of religion against which human life is thrown in relief
...

His well-known novels are On the Night of the Fire, The Sound of Winter, a Fragment of Glass,
Mist on the Waters;
(e) In Graham Greene‘s novels ‗culture‘ is a living force
...
His important novels are The Man Within, Stamboul Train, England
Made Me, Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter;
(f) Frank Swinnerton, who gives in his novels a detached but amiable appreciation of people, and

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whose treatment of life and its significance are quite satisfying
...
His important
novels are High Summer, The Porch, The Room Within, The Sampler and The Other Side
...
Then came up
after about half a century the, magic term, ―post-modern,‖ meaning the period after the modern
...
For how many ―post‖ will have to be used for
the further periods of literary history to follow? Since our purpose here is limited to writing the
―history‖ of literature, we shall not go on with the issue, leaving the matter for the more qualified
critics to give it a thought
...
The period of the ―post-modern‖ is said to date from the mid-sixties - some
critics push it even further to the nineteen eighties
...

Once removed by some distance, the outline comes out clearly
...
Perhaps
we shall have to wait another half a century or so to be able to make greater generalizations
about the later half of the twentieth century
...

In his essay ―The Post-Modern Condition,‖ Krishan Kumar has clarified some confusion about
the meaning of post-modernism:
Most theories claim that contemporary societies show a new or heightened degree of
fragmentation, pluralism, and individualism
...
Political, economic, and cultural life is now strongly
influenced by developments at the global level
...

Post-modernism proclaims multi-cultural and multi-ethnic societies
...
‘
The debate about contemporary society being ―post-industrial,‖ ―post-modern,‖ ―poststructuralist,‖ ―post-colonial,‖ ―pluralistic,‖ ―multi-cultural,‖ ―fragmented,‖ etc
...
The fact of the matter is that the theoretical
discussion of the subject has been self-generative, proliferating all over the space, pushing
literature to the periphery, leaving not much space for actual human narratives in the privileged
domain
...
Until the time of the Modernists like Pound and Eliot,
literary theory came from the leading literary writers
...
Hence the problem of its meaningful application to
literary works
...

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In the absence of a more useful concept, therefore, as also because now the concept of postmodernism has come to stay, we have no choice but to go on with it, leaving the problems it has
raised to time for whatever solution will become possible tomorrow
...

The growth of post-modernism, in the words of Charles Jencks, a major theorist of architecture
and the originator of the term, has been ―a sinuous, even tortuous, path
...
‖ (What is Post-Modernism? London: Academy Editions, 1986, p
...
We may cite and
examine any number of definitions (out of the innumerable available to us), post-modernism
proves slippery like a snake whose twists and twirls are impossible to pin down
...
How then do we go about
understanding the term, making sense of all that it has accumulated? As Tim Woods has rightly
observed:
The prefix ‗post‘ suggests that any post-modernism is inextricably bound up with modernism,
either as a replacement of modernism or as chronologically after modernism
...
The
relationship is something more akin to a continuous engagement, which implies that postmodernism needs modernism to survive, so that they exist in something more like a host-parasite
relationship
...
(Beginning post-modernism
...
6)
Seen from the viewpoint suggested above, one can see how post-modernism is a sort of knowing
modernism, or a self-reflective modernism
...
Rather than lament the loss of the past, the
fragmentation of life, and the collapse of civilization as well as selfhood, postmodernism
embraces these phenomena as a new form of social existence and behaviour
...

One core issue of this debate between postmodernism and modernism is the extent to which the
Enlightenment values are still valuable
...
The
modernist philosophers later raised doubts about man‘s ability to do so
...
As Sabina Lovibond has
observed:
The Enlightenment pictured the human race as engaged in an effort towards universal moral and
intellectual self-realization, and so as the subject of a universal historical experience; it also
postulated a universal human reason in terms of which social and political tendencies could be

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assessed as ‗progressive‘ or otherwise
...
It refuses to conceive of humanity as a unitary subject
striving towards the goal of perfect coherence (in its common stock of beliefs) or of perfect
cohesion and stability (in its political practice)
...
Postmodernism has pitted reasons in the plural, that is
fragmented and incommensurable
...
It no longer
believes that reasoning subjects can act as vehicles for historically progressive change
...
Postmodernity is used to describe the socio-economic, political and cultural condition of the presentday West; where people are living in post-industrial, ‗service-oriented‘ economies; where human
dealings like shopping are mediated through the computer interface, where communication is
done through e-mail, voice-mail, fax, teleconference on video-link; where the wider world is
accessed via the net; where the choice of entertainment falls on high-speed image bombardment
of the pop video, etc
...

Postmodernism on the other hand describes only the aesthetic and intellectual beliefs and
attitudes often presented in the form of theory
...
Thus,
rejecting belief in the infinite progress of knowledge; in infinite moral and social advancement;
in rigorous definition of the standards of intelligibility, coherence and legitimacy;
postmodernism seeks local or provisional, rather than universal and absolute, forms of
legitimation
...

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The philosopher who is said to have put the first post-modern cat among the modernist pigeons
was Jean-Francois Lyotard, whose The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)
occupies a special place among a set of books which launched an attack on modernity
...
Instead, he would wish to substitute ad hoc tactical manoeuvres as
justification for what are generally considered eccentricities
...
As he puts it, ―Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not
to find truth, but to augment power,‖ (Postmodern Condition, p
...
In his considered view,
beneath the facade of objectivity there always is a hidden and dominant discourse of realpolitik:
―The exercise of terror‖ (p
...
Thus, any kind of legitimation is nothing but an issue of power
...


136

Lyotard identifies ―an equation between wealth, efficiency, and truth,‖ and contends that it
continually remains a question of: ―No money, no proof—and that means no verification of
statements and no truth
...
45)
...
What ho longer makes the grade is
competence as defined by other criteria true/false, just/unjust, etc
...
51)
...
In his argument,
Modernism is:
an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one
...

The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in
presentation itself, that which denies itself the solace of good forms
...

Thus, to sum up Lyotard‘s view of Postmodernism, it is, first of all, a distrust of all
metanarratives; it is also anti-foundational
...
Thirdly, it does not
seek to present reality but to invent illusions to the conceivable which cannot be presented
...
Lastly, it challenges
the legitimation of positivist science
...

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Jean Baudrillard (1929—)

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According to Baudrillard,
postmodernity is also characterized by ―simulations‖ and new forms of technology of
communication
...
Our lives today are increasingly being shaped by simulated events and opportunities
on television, computer shopping at ―virtual stores,‖ etc
...
In his view, the demarcation between
simulation and reality implodes; and along with this collapse of distinction between image and
reality, the very experience of the real world is lost
...
In that case,
we are left with only simulacra
...
In these messages, self-referential signs lose contact with the things they signify,
leaving us witness to an unprecedented destruction of meaning
...
The manipulated simulation, manufacturing motivated reality, ignores or overlooks the
harsh or unpleasant aspects associated with an image—say New York or New Delhi
...
His conclusion is that TV is the principal embodiment of these aesthetic

137

transformations, where the implosion of meaning and the media result in ―the dissolution of TV
into life, the dissolution of life into TV‖ (Simulations, New York, 1983, p
...
Baudrillard was
the one who contributed to the Guardian of 11 January, 1991, the well-known article ―The Gulf
War Did Not Take Place
...
The publication of the three of his
books in 1967, namely Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, and Of Speech and
Phenomena, laid the foundation of the theory of Deconstruction
...
Although notoriously difficult and elusive, Derrida‘s views can be summarised as
under:
He insists that all Western philosophies and theories of knowledge, of language and its uses, of
culture, are LOGOCENTRIC
...
Using a phrase from Heidegger, he
says that they rely on ―the metaphysics of presence
...

Derrida‘s explanation for ―logo‖ or ―presence‖ is that it is an ―ultimate referent‖, a self-certifying
and self-sufficient ground, or foundation, which is available to us totally outside the play of
language itself
...
As a result, it suffices
to fix the bounds, coherence, and determinate meanings of any spoken or written utterance
within the foundation in God as the guarantor of its validity
...
Still another is Hegelian ―telos‖ or goal toward which all process
strives
...
Derrida questions these
philosophies and shows how untenable these premises are
...

Derrida‘s most influential concept has been that of DIFFERANCE
...
Thus, meanings of words are relational (in
relation to other words)
...
In any case, there are no absolute meanings,
nor are the meanings of words stable, as words always defer their meanings
...

This view of language and meaning has had great impact on both literary criticism as well as
literary writing
...


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Some of Derrida‘s sceptical procedures have been quite influential in deconstructive literary
criticism as well as in feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist creative compositions
...
—which are essential structural elements in
logocentric language
...
What Derrida does is to invert the hierarchy, by showing that
the secondary term can be made out to be derivitative from, or a special case of the primary term
...

Derrida had not thought of Deconstruction as a mode of literary criticism
...
But more than any other discipline of knowledge it is literary criticism
which has adopted his theory of Deconstruction as a critical tool of literary analysis
...
The most influential of these
has been Paul de Man whose Allegories of Reading (1979) was the earliest application of
Derrida‘s concepts and procedures
...
Later, J
...


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As he himself described, Foucault was a ―specialist in history of systems of thought‖, although
we often call him a French philosopher and historian
...
In the book listed last, Foucault explores how madness is socially
constructed by a wide variety of DISCOURSES that give rise to collective attitudes or
mentalities defining insanity
...

Foucault‘s major works examine the question why, in any given period, it is necessary to think in
certain terms about madness, illness, sexuality or prisons
...
The effect of Foucault has been to
view with distrust all that has been passing in the name of essentials, universals, or natural, and
take all these as social constructs reflecting the values of different cultures and societies
...
For Foucault knowledge is
always a form of power
...
The
modern psychiatrist assumes the role of medieval priest, seeking confessions, imposing the
values of the empowered
...
These views have

139

led to the challenging of all sorts of political, social, and gender constructs, taken as networks of
power to repress the weak, the individual, the disadvantaged, the female, etc
...
Although made an icon of
QUEER THEORY, Foucault‘s contribution has been valuable to all the Postmodern critical
approaches including the Feminist, Postcolonial, Poststructuralist, etc
...
His principal concern, despite his varied writings, remains with the
relationship between language and society, and with the literary forms that mediate between the
two
...
Hence, study of a text will be
useful if it is done in relation to other contemporary practices of the same culture—even fashions
of dress, cigarette smoking, or styles of wrestling
...

Barthes‘s famous work Mythologies (1957), as well as his very first essay on writing in 1953,
demonstrates that no form or style of writing is a free expression of an author‘s subjectivity, that
writing is always marked by social and ideological values, that language is never innocent
...
Barthes‘s other books include Elements of Semiology (1964), Writing
Degree Zero (1953), The Pleasure of the Text (1975), and ―The Death of the Author‖ (1968),
later included in Image-Music-Text (1977) ed
...
In his essay mentioned last,
Barthes pleads for abandoning the conventional author-and-works approach in favour of an
anthropological and psycho-analytical reading of canonical texts
...

His ideas about language and author and their relation with social world promoted cultural
studies as well as reader-response theory
...

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Most of his important writings are included in his Ecrils (1966)
...
His
notion of the Fragmented Body clearly shows his debt to surrealism
...
He also heavily relies on
Jackbson‘s work of Phoneme analysis and Metaphor/Metonymy
...
In other words,

140

meaning insists in and through a chain of signifiers, and does not reside in any one element
...


Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)

A Russian literary theorist, Bakhtin has been a great influence on the contemporary theory of
Discourse analysis
...
In these studies, there is a critique of Russian Formalism and an
outline of his characteristic theme of ―dialogism
...
This critique is then extended to linguistics, especially the
Saussurean
...
It tends to isolate linguistic units or literary texts from their social context,
having no analysis to offer of the relations that exist between both individual speakers and texts
...
In his later work, Bakhtin
develops his historical poetics into a theory of ―speech genres‖ or ―typical forms of utterances
...
Although his speech theory remains incomplete, Bakhtin was ambitious to apply it to
everything from proverbs to long novels by analysing their common verbal nature
...
Mostly used as a periodising concept to mark literature in the later half of the twentieth
century, Postmodernism is also used, as we have earlier discussed, as a description of literary and
formal characteristics such as linguistic play, new modes of narrational self-reflexivity, and
referential frames within frames
...


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Post-War Novel

After Hitler‘s devastation of Britain, the country was literally in ruins, torn apart by years of
bombardment
...
It was a landscape which provided
a metaphor for broken lives and spirits
...
The novel‘s London is not only post-War but also
post-Eliotic: ―Here you belong; you cannot get away, you do not wish to get away, for this the
maquis that lies about the margins of the wrecked world, and here your feet are set
...
‘ But you can say, you can guess, that it is you yourself, your own roots, that clutch

141

the stony rubbish, the branches of your own being that grow from it and nowhere else
...
Another female novelist of the period, Elizabeth
Bowen (1899-1973), also gave powerful expression to the post-War experience in her The Death
of the Heart (1938), Look at all those Roses (1941), The Demon Lover (1945), The Heat of the
Day (1949), and The Little Girls (1964)
...
With her pen-name derived from an Ibsen play, and actively involved in the
feminist cause, West wrote on political climate of the cold-war era
...
He emerged a popular writer with his very first novel, The
Comedians (1965)
...
He remained a Roman Catholic since
1926 when he was admitted to the Roman Church
...
Although Greene produced as many as twenty six novels, those necessary to know are
The Power and the Glory (1940), focused on the character of a Whisky-priest in anti-clerical
Mexico; The Ministry of Fear (1943) and The End of the Affair (1951) both of which are located
in the twilit, blitzed London; The Heart of the Matter (1948), focused on the flyblown, ratinfested, and war-blitzed West-African colony; The Quiet American (1955), set in Vietnam, and
Our Man in Havana (1955), set in Cuba, both expose the American imperialism
...


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Anthony Powell

Another notable novelist of the period was Anthony Powell, whose sequence of 12 novels
collectively named A Dance to the Music of Time ―is neither a fictionalized war memoir, nor a
prose elegy for the decline and fall of a ruling class
...
‖
NOVELISTS OF THE 1950’S
Samuel Beckett
The most important writer who emerged in mid-50‘s was Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), who was
an Irish by birth but remained in Paris and wrote in French much of his dramatic and fictional
work
...

His famous trilogy was published in London in 1959, whose English titles are Molloy, Malone
Dies, and The Unnamable
...

Another, and early, notable work of Beckett was a volume of interconnected short stories put
together under the title More Pricks than Kicks (1934), in which he had already presented the
typical, unconventional, absurdist hero
...
For a summing up of
Beckett‘s concerns in his work, an excerpt from Martin Esslin would do more justice to the
novelist than any fresh attempt:
The search for man‘s own identity—not the finding of the true nature of self which for Beckett
will remain ever elusive, but the raising of the problem of identity itself, the confrontation of the
audience with the existence of its own problematical and mysterious condition; this
fundamentally is the theme of Beckett‘s plays, novels, prose, sketches, and poems
...


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...
In his work the text is maintained as an object of questioning, the
working of codes, rather than a series of situations and allusions to a subtext which the reader or
audience ought to feel
...
Beckett‘s experiments with the
technique of the novel, and with the dis-integration of its conventions, were followed, though not
as ruthlessly, by some of the writers of popular fiction, such as Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990)
...
He is best known by what is called ―Alexandria Quartet‖ - Justine (1957), Balthazar
(1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960)
...
St

William Golding

A novelist better known than Durrell was William Golding (1911-1993), who came into
prominence with the publication of his Lord of the Flies (1954)
...
Here lands on the island a marooned party of boys from
an English cathedral choir-school
...
The novel is actually a moral allegory, making
a systematic undoing of R
...
Ballantyne‘s adventure story, The Coral Island (1857)
...
In a sort of
deconstruction of the Victorian novel, an interrogation of the conventional values and attitudes,
Golding‘s novel reflects the spirit and mood of Postmodernism
...
Golding‘s other novels include The
Inheritors (1964), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Spire(1964), and The Pyramid
(1967) His Darkness Visible (1979) is once again dependent for its title on Milton‘s Paradise
Lost, where the blind epic poet uses the expression for Hell
...
Of these Rights of Passage has been most successful
...
‖ In a sense, the central concern in Golding‘s fiction remains
what T
...
Eliot puts down in his Gerontion: ―After such knowledge what forgiveness
...

Angus Wilson
While there has been a continuation of modernist experimentation with the narrative technique
and novel‘s form among the writers of the fifties, there has also been a reaction, rather strong,
against experimentalism
...
Adopting the realism of
Zola and comic sense of Dickens, he produced a large body of fiction, including The Wrong Set
(1949), which is a collection of short stories, and Such Darling Dodos (1950), yet another
volume of stories
...
Eliot (1958), Last Call (1964), Old Men at the
Zoo (1961) and As If By Magic (1973)
...
Anglo-Saxon Attitudes has become a sort of
classic
...


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The most philosophic among the novelists of the fifties was, of course, Iris Murdoch (19191999), although she followed the conventional novel form
...
Her moral philosophy is best illustrated by
her The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992)
...
Her other novels include They
Flight from the Enchanter (1955), The Sea (1978), The Philosopher‟s Pupil (1983), The Bell
(1958), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), The Black Prince (1973), The Time of the Angels
(1966), The Sand Castle (1957), A Severed Head (1961), An Unofficial Rose (1962), The Unicom
(1963), The Italian Girl (1964), The Red and The Green (1965), The Nice and The Good (1968),
An Accidental Man (1971)
...
‖ Like the modernists, she seems firmly to believe in the
salvaging power of art
...
We surrender ourselves to its authority with a love which is unpossessive
and unselfish
...
Art pierces the veil and
gives sense to the notion of a reality which lies beyond appearance; it exhibits virtue in its true
guise in the context of death and chance
...
Her The Time of the Angels is still rated by some as her best,

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although there is no critical unanimity in her case
...
1918), who also
shares with Murdoch and Golding, a firm commitment to moral issues in relation to fictional
form
...
This writer, Caroline Rose, is determined to write a novel about writing a
novel
...
She not only made a
critical study of Mary Shelly (Child of Light), but also wrote some novels in the Gothic style,
namely Memento Mori (1959), The Ballad of Lekham Rye (1960), and The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie (1961)
...
Among her later novels figure Not To Disturb
(1971), which has its opening quotation from The Duchess of Malfi, and The Abbess of Crewe
(1974), making an investigative study of a convent, but avoiding all Gotihc temptations
...

A not-so-well-known novelist of the 1950‘s was Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972)
...


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The novelists of the 1950‘s that we have discussed so far did not constitute any group or
movement
...
There was, however, during the same prolific fifties, a definite group of
writers who consciously and deliberately followed an agenda in their novels (in some cases, also
plays)
...
It was John Osborne‘s
play Look Back in Anger (performed in 1956, published in 1957) which supplied the tone and
title for the movement
...
These ―angry young men‖ belonged to the middle or lower-middle
sections of society, educated not in Oxford or Cambridge, but in what are called Red-brick
universities
...

Their anger was directed against the old establishment, the liberal-human, largely upper-middle
class, Bloomsbury intelligentia (Virginia Woolf, E
...
Forster, Lytton Strachey) symbolized by
Horizen
...
However, the anger they displayed in their
novels (and plays) was not of a very serious order
...
H
...
The anger or protest of these young men of the 50‘s was rather of a lower order, closer
to an ordinary disgruntlement
...
Once that was extended to them, the anger was soon subsided
...


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Among these ―angries‖ Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) is considered the leading novelist
...
It is also a campus novel, which exposes the academic racket in the British
universities, their social pretentions and pseudoculture that so often accompany it
...
Jim Dixon, the hero of Lucky Jim, remains a representative angry young man of the
1950‘s
...
Like other
protagonists of the 1950‘s, this one is actually an anti-hero, who wishes to opt out of the society
he despises and yet stays in it without any commitments
...
As Charles
Lumbey, the protagonist of Hurry on Down, reflects at the end of the novel, ―Neutrality; he had
found it at last
...
‖ The novels
by Wain include The Contenders (1952), A Travelling Woman (1959), Strike the Father
Dead(1962), and the short stories Nuncle (1960) - the Fool in King Lear calls Lear ‗nuncle‘
...

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John Braine

Still another ―angry‖ novelist of the group is John Braine (b
...
Depicting the no-holdsbar race for material prosperity and social status, these novels show that when one has made it to
the top, he only finds himself trapped and lonely, conscious of the social contempt he has earned
...
Similarly, the need of such a lot for pretending eternal youth and reassure oneself
by promiscuity is at the heart of his The Crying Game (1968), The Queen of a Distant Country
(1972), and Waiting for Sheila (1976)
...
St

Alan Sillitoe
Another significant novelist of the period is Alan Sillitoe (b
...
He depicts the working-class characters, still haunted by the Great
Depression of the 1930‘s
...

Anthony Burgess
Yet another notable writer of this terrific decade - perhaps, no other decade in the history of the
English novel can claim such a huge crop of fiction - was Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
...
What made him famous,

146

however, were his later novels, namely A Clockwork Orange (1962), The Wanting Seed (1962),
and The Clock-work Testament (1974)
...
There is in all the narratives a hovering sense of
doom and nothingness (nadsat)
...
Their little narratives and dark humour reflect the typical mood and spirit of
Postmodernism
...
A ―New Morality‖ emerged to challenge the
established values and perceptions of gender, sexuality, marriage, etc
...
One of the most inspiring books in the feminist movement came from Germaine Creer (b
...
‖ One of the male
characters in Doris Lessing‘s novel The Golden Notebook (1962) echoes the phrase Creer has
used here: ―The Russian revolution, the Chinese Revolution - they‘re nothing at all
...
‖ For both of these women writers that revolution was to be
perceived in the female sensitivity to the unfair or highly limited roles of women, to their
restricted representation in society and its literature
...
She had experienced
the colonial situation in that part of Africa
...
This English woman in East Africa is shown growing from
childhood to youth to age, experiencing the acute and complex problems of race and class
...
Lessing
calls her fiction, and its type, ―inner space fiction,‖ by which she means a fiction that has
methodically moved in a different direction from conventional realism
...
The significance of her central
work, The Golden Notebook, lies in relating her concept of mental fragmentation to the
disintegration of fictional form
...
As the novel‘s heroine, Anna Wulf, reflects, ―women‘s emotions are all still fitted
for a kind of society that no longer exists
...

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She is best known by her novel The Passion of New Eve (1977) and the two
volumes of Gothic tales, Fireworks (1974) and The Bloody Chamber (1979)
...
Her later work includes two major theatrical novels, Nights at the Circus (1984) and

147

Wise Children (1991)
...
1939), whose very first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) registered a new
presence
...
Still better than her first novel is Jerusalem the
Golden (1967), which, too, focuses on the same themes, but comes out more assured and less
jerky
...
Her favourite themes include corruption, IRA
bombs, broken marriages, alienations of upward social mobility, etc
...

OTHER NOVELISTS IN LATER DECADES
John Fowles

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...
The narrator, protagonist is a rather repressed, butterfly collecting clerk, an
anti-hero
...
A similar theme of psychic and sexual liberation is also dealt with
in his next novel, Mantissa (1982)
...
His most popular novel, and most
admired, has been The French Lieutenant‟s Woman (1969), where again juxtaposition of
repression and release is set up
...
We can see reflected in his work the influence of Lacanian psychology, which is
post-Freudian
...
St

Fraser And Farrell

There are some novelists whose work is of special interest to the Indian readers, because it
relates the Indian situation during the British Raj
...
1925) and James
Gordon Farrell (1935-1979) are among these writers
...
Fraser has to his credit ten volumes of the so-called ―Flashman Paper,‖
dealing with the imagined career of the ex-villain of Tom Brown‟s Schooldays
...
The various themes in these volumes concern the Afgan war
of 1842, the British acquisition of Punjab, and the Indian Mutiny of 1857
...
On our side, the event is called the first
War of Independence
...
If does, however raise questions about the British imperial mission in the colonies
...
M
...
Here, there is lack of depth of understanding of characters as
well as the situation
...

Paul Scott

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Of all the British novelists who wrote about India, Paul Scott‘s ―Raj Quartet‖ offers the most
comprehensive treatment of the subject
...
Collectively called the Raj Quartet, the sequence consists
of The Jewel in the Crown (1966), A Day of the Scorpion(1968), The Towers of Silence (1971),
and A Division of the Spoils (1975)
...
Scott‘s last novel, Staying On (1977),
also deals with India, covering the post-Independence period
...
Scott may not be as great as Forster,
but he is decidedly superior to Fraser and Farrell
...

POST-WAR POETRY
Surrealism
Between the Auden group of poets of the 1930‘s and the Movement poets of the 1950‘s, there
are some poets of the forties who do not constitute any group or movement
...
In the later years of 1930‘s there
emerged the movement of Surrealism in Europe,—including England
...
One way of defining Surrealism is to see it
in relation to Romanticism
...

Another way to define it is to relate it to Realism
...
For, after all, dreams, nightmares, daydreams, emotionalism, irrationalism are also a
part of ―real‖ life that we live, and it is these very aspects of life that constitute the stuff of
Surrealism
...
1916), who also
wrote A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935)
...

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Andrew Sanders is one such critic
...
He was, however, decidedly a poet who thought in images
...
‖ One of the popularly known poems of Thomas is ―The Force that through the Green
Fuse drives the Flower,‖ considered an example of his pantheism and mysticism; also an
example of Blakean symbolism, such as the following:
And I am dumb to tell the lover‘s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm
...

Thomas and other poets of the forties are called neo-romantics, having greater affinity with
Blake, Yeats, Lawrence, etc
...
Some other poems of Thomas to
remember are ―The Hunchback in the Park,‖ ―After the Funeral,‖ ―Over Sir John‘s Hill,‖ ―Fern
Hill,‖ and ―Do not go gentle into that good night
...
Thomas
resisted the literary traditionalism of the Eliot school; he wanted no part of it
...
‖ Thomas is also known for his catchy, parodic, title Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
(1940), his book of autobiographical short stories
...
His best known volume of poems remains Deaths and
Entrances (1946)
...


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...
This, too, was conscious and deliberate just as its
counterpart movement was in fiction
...
These manifestoes were published in
D
...
Enright‘s anthology, Poets of the 1950‟s, which included Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin,
Robert Conquest, etc
...
At least I hope nobody wants them
...
To me the whole of the ancient world, the
whole of classical and biblical mythology meant very little, and I think that using them today not
only fills poems full of dead spots but dodges the writer‘s duty to be original
...
‖
On the one hand, it was a reaction against the mythical new classicism of the 1920‘s, on the
other, it was opposed to the neo-romanticism of the 1940‘s
...
The
Movement poets shut their eyes to whatever lurked beyond the tangible present and the mundane
multitude
...
After the War, which was between the
European nations primarily, the reaction to Continentalism of the Modernists sounded perhaps
unpatriotic
...
As Calvin Bedient puts it, ―The English poetic ‗Movement‘ of the Fifties (the very
name suggesting an excess of dull plainness) did much to fix the image of contemporary British
poetry as deliberately deficient, moderate with a will
...
‖ Thus, the anti-modernism of Larkin and his fellow poets
reflected the Postmodernist spirit of problematising Modernism
...
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going beyond modernism
...
He still remains the best known of the group
...
It has been rightly remarked that ―English poetry has never been so persistently out of
the cold as it is with Philip Larkin
...

Faces in those days sparked
The whole shooting-match off, and 1 doubt
If ever one had like her:
But it was the friend I took out,

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...
Larkin represents the post-War mood of depression
...
‖ His other novel is A Girl in
Winter (1947)
...
Note, for instance, the following:
‗This was Mr
...
He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him
...
St

Such small things, studded with care on the small canvas, came out with a certain care for the
small and the underdog
...
These two qualities always come out:
I was sleeping, and you woke me
To walk on the chilled shore
Of a night with no memory
Till your voice forsook my ear
Till your two hands withdrew
And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold bill of stars
...
His poetry, no wonder, became the truly representative of the post-War outlook
on life and cosmos
...

Donald Davie

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Another ―Movement‖ poet, Donald Davie (b
...
He lays a
good deal of emphasis on ―unbanity,‖ which Larkin rather repudiated
...
‖ However, as Calvin Bendient has observed, ―But the
truth is that reality does not appear in his work at all
...
No longer Appearance, it becomes a storehouse of signs, of
which the meanings are moral abstractions
...
As he
argues, linguistic urbanity lies in ―the perfection of a common language
...
‖ No wonder
that he wrote his critical book Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952)
...
Decidedly,
to achieve that goal a lot of ―ore‖ of reality will have to be removed from the pure metal, and so
Davie does
...
the tense
Stillness did not come,
The deer did not, although they fed
Perhaps nearby that day,
The liquid eye and elegant head
No more than a mile away
...

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Some other notable poems of Davie include ―The Cypress Avenue,‖ ―After an Accident
...
An interesting poem of Davie (recalling Joyce and Thomas) is ―Portrait of the Artist as
a Farmyard Fowl,‖ where the monologue proceeds on such a pace as the following:
A conscious carriage must become a strut;
Fastidiousness can only stalk
And seem at last not even tasteful but
A ruffled hen too apt to squawk
...
St

Davie‘s notable works include Six Epistles to Eva Hesse (1970), The Forests of Lithuania
(1959), A Winter Talent (1957) and Events and Wisdoms (1964): while some more notable
poems include ―Creon Mouse,‖ ―North Dublin,‖ ―Cherry Ripe,‖ ―A Meeting of Cultures,‖ ―New
York in August,‖ ―In California,‖ ―The Prolific Spell,‖ ―Viper Man,‖ etc
...
But there is, for sure, an integrity in his leanness which, the
more one reads his poetry, the more one learns to admire
...

Robert Conquest and D
...
Enright
Still another of the group of poets covered under the term ―Movement‖ is Robert Conquest (b
...
The subject-matter, in the true spirit of the
―Movement,‖ remains reality, that is, the commonplace, but his approach is rather intellectual
...
One more of the core group, so to say, of the
―Movement,‖ is J
...
Enright (b
...
His own poems are included in his Language Hyena
(1953), Some Men are Brothers (1960), and The Old Adam (1965)
...
But he always upholds individual dignity, reiterates strong faith in it
...
His is
a style marked by ironical disgust of hypocrisy and cruelty
...
1927)
...
However, each of these poets have their individual
versions of reality
...
His outwardness, however, need not be confused with superficiality
...
‖ One can see something of
Wordsworth in him, his wise passivity, his reflections within the bounds of reality
...
Note, for
instance, the following from ―The Gossamers‖:
Autumn
...
This one lit
The thread of gossamers
That webbed across it
Out of shadow and again
Through rocking spaces which the sun
Claimed in the leafage
...
Undefined
The haze of autumn in the mind
Is gold, is glaze
...

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His poetry consists of several volumes that came out at different
dates, namely, Relations and Contraries (1951), The Necklace (1955), Seeing is Believing
(1958), A Peopled Landscape (1962), American Scenes (1966), The Way of the World (1969),
Written on Water (1972), The Way In and Other Poems (1974), The Flood (1981), The Return
(1987), The Door m the Wall (1992) and Jubilation (1995)
...
Like the other
poets of the Movement Group, he, too, recalls us to the life of the moment conceived as an end in
itself
...

R
...
Thomas
A notable Welsh poet after Dylan Thomas is Ronald Stuart Thomas (b
...
His poetry is both sensual as well as

153

sensitive, which quickly engages both eye and emotion equally intensely
...

She thinks she knows, a place that exists
In her memory only
...
Has Thomas not heard of ‗modern‘ poetry
and its difficulty? Has he no embarrassment before the primary emotions? Never mind; nothing
vital is missing from such a poem
...
‖ Thomas, evidently, shares with the poets of the 1950‘s
their key emphases on simple, clean, and clear diction; direct and straight syntax; no use of
mythology or tradition; no reliance on ambiguity or paradox
...
His poetry is strongly marked as much by
moral quality as by aesthetic
...
There is, in that sense, something of Whitman in Thomas, without, of course,
the former‘s bombastic optimism
...
Note, for instance, the following:
I am the farmer, stripped of love
And thought and grace by the land‘s hardness;
But what I am saying over the fields‘
Desolate acres, rough with dew,
Is, Listen, listen, I am a man like you
...

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‖ Writing about the repressed and marginalized (peasants have been one such class) is
in keeping with the philosophy of Postmodernism
...
‖ His choice of animals as the themes of his poems is, of course,
not without the reverse side of his choice
...
He was highly
influenced by the German philosopher, Schopenhauer, the only one, he says, he ―ever really
read
...
‖
Ted Hughes can be appropriately said to be the poet of that condition, and in that role, he is
rather a hangman than a priest
...
My memory goes back pretty clearly to my third year, and by then I had so many of the
toy lead animals you could buy in shops that they went right round our flat-topped fireplace

154

fender, nose to tail
...

In his poetry, animals are presented, not as playthings, but as lords of life and death
...
They are presented superior to men, with their lack of selfconsciousness, and sickness of the mind
...
With their focused life, with all the innocence of man‘s
corruptions, they emerge, like Adam and Eve in Paradise, in a state before the Fall
...
Note, how man is placed below the animal in the hierarchy Hughes builds up in his
poems:
I drown in the drumming ploughland
...

His other volumes of poems include Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Crow Wakes (1971), Eat
Crow (1972), Cave Birds (1975), Season Songs (1976), Moortowm (1979), Wolf-watching
(1989), Shakespeare and the Goddess of Being (1992) - a prose work, Tales from Ovid (1997),
and Birthday Letters(1998)
...
Although composed much earlier, he chose to make them public near his own end
...

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Although he had been included in the Movement authologies along with Larkin, Tom Gunn (b
...
He had resolved rather
early in his career to seek out the heroic in the experience of nihilism
...
No
doubt, he views human existence as full of pain and suffering, lovelessness and meaninglessness,
but he still finds solace in the tenderness of man‘s essentially animal nature
...
One notices in these poems his
love and admiration for a certain masculinity, a type of manly energy, which is rather aggressive
...
His other volumes of
poetry include The Sense of Movement (1957), My Sad Captains (1961), Touch (1967), Moly
(1971), Jack Straw‟s Castle (1976), The Passages of Joy (1982) and The Man With Night
Sweats(1992)
...
But there are others less
sympathetic who find him often committed to a kind of nihilistic glamour for which, it is alleged,
he is not able to convincingly apologise
...
‖ Both Ted Hughes and Tom Gunn, by glorifying
animals or animal-energy in man, with sardonic humour spared for mankind, reflect the
Postmodernist inglorious conception of human nature
...
St

Seamus Heaney
An Irish by birth, and acutely conscious of his country‘s long history of hostility towards
England, Seamus Heaney (1939-2000) counted himself among the ―colonials
...
and
the English tradition is not ultimately home
...
‖ That other ―hump,‖
we know, is no other but Ireland, or more precisely the rural Ulster, which, like the Wessex of

155

Thomas Hardy, occupies a central place in his poetry
...
Heaney has been known as a
peasant as well as a patriotic poet of Ireland
...
In a poem called ―At a Potato Digging,‖ for
instance, he writes:
Flint-white, purple, they lie scattered
like inflated pebbles
...
Split
by the spade, they show white as cream
...

Compose in darkness
...

Keep your eye clear
As the bleb of the icicle,
Trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known
...

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It deliberately chose to remain level, everyday, matter of fact,
narrow, and, like the poetry of Hardy and Frost, solid and specific, serious and cynical
...

Postmodern Drama (The New Theatre)
Drama of the post-war period shares, in some ways, the dominant spirit of the age we have
witnessed in novel and poetry from the 1950‘s onward
...

The central stance in all the literary forms seems to be to face the stark realities of life, to take
suffering as it comes, and to learn to accept the unheroic status man seems to have been assigned
in the absurd universe in which he is condemned to live
...
And to
do that, drama of this period has been more daring than the other two; it has been more

156

innovative in technique, more shocking in defying social and moral conventions
...
The
play was published in 1957
...
The play shook the middle-class values of the ―well-made
play‖ founded by Ibsen and practiced in England by Shaw and Galsworthy
...
‖ What was new
about this drama was neither its politics, nor its technique so much as its alarm in rancour,
language, and setting
...
It introduced instead the provincial bed-sitter with its abusive noises
and its ironing-board
...
There may not have been any change in the social class of these characters, but there had,
decidedly, come about a change in their assumptions and conversations
...
1958), The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961),
Inadmissible Evidence (1964), A Party for Me (1965), West of Suez (1971), A Sense of
Detachment (1972) and Watch It Come Down (1976)
...


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...
St

Although considered a foreign influence (because Waiting for Godotreached England via
France), Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was, in fact, the real pioneer of the New Theatre in
Europe, including England
...
His Waiting for Godot was staged in Paris in 1953, and
then in London (at the small Arts Theatre) in 1955, and had created sensations all over Europe,
which must have influenced the composition of Osborne‘s play as weli
...
Earlier, he had worked with his fellow Irish writer
James Joyce and his Parisian circle, becoming a part of the polyglot and polyphonic world of
literary innovation
...
His Come and Go (1967) is a stark
‗dramaticale‘ with three female characters and a text of 121 words
...

There is also a play called Not I (1973), a brief, fragmented, disembodied monologue by an actor
of indeterminate sex of whom only the ‗Mouth‘ is illuminated
...

Beckett‘s interest in the functioning and malfunctioning of the human mind, reflected by gaps,
jumps, and lurches, remains at the centre of his fiction as well as drama
...
We see voices both interrupting and inheriting
trains of thought begun elsewhere or nowhere
...
Beckett‘s dialogue, for which his Waiting
for Godot is especially remarkable, remains the most energetic
...
His settings are bare, just as his language is bald
...
The tree
gets only four leaves in the second act
...
As for characters,

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there are only two pairs who occupy the stage by turns all through the play
...

Beckett uses blindness and other disadvantages, as he does in both Endgame and Waiting for
Godot, suggesting that one kind of deprivation may sharpen the other organs of perception in a
character
...
He presents the time
present as broken, inconsistent and inconsequential
...
It is, of course, never a flashback
...
He also shares with
his mentor, Proust, an antipathy to literature that describes
...
As Beckett affirms, again echoing the mentor, ―there is no escape from yesterday because
yesterday has deformed us, or been deformed by us
...
As his inviolable and unsentimental Krapp also seems to have discovered, a
path forward lay in exploring the resonances of the circumambient darkness
...

While Beckett remained in popular perception a ‗foreign‘ influence, Osborne emerged as a rebel
within Britain‘s own established tradition
...
Osborne responded to the native social and
moral issues of his time, and without the burden of philosophy and symbolism
...
It became the launcher of the movement
called ―Angry Young Men
...
‖
Jimmy Porter, the play‘s hero, is a young man of 25, presented as ―a disconcerting mixture of
sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting; restless, importunate, full of pride, a
combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike
...
He is
said to be ―born out of his time
...
He loudly and bitterly protests against the establishment values, against his
wife‘s middle-class ex-Indian army parents; against his Member of Parliament brother-in-law;
against bishops and church bells; against Sunday newspapers, English music, and English
literature including Shakespeare, Eliot, and ―Auntie Wordsworth
...

Osborne‘s Luther (1961), which too has for its title character an ―angry young man,‖ who makes
a strong assertion of his identity when he says, ―Here I stand; God help me; I can do no more
...
‖ Osborne also wrote his
autobiography, A Better Class of Person (1981), which is both pungently observant and spiteful
...
Thus, in a way, Beckett and Osborne complemented each other: while the former
innovated new technique, the latter exploded conventional social norms
...

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1930) emerged in the 60‘s as a representative
of the new generation of writers who were provocative, argumentative and Anglo-Brechtian
...


158

Arden‘s first play, Live Like Pigs (1958), presents the plight of gypsies, explores their anti-social
behaviour, and seems to suggest that ―respectability‖ and its guardians, the police, ultimately
prove far more damaging to a society‘s health than the unconventional style of living of the
gypsies
...
His other plays include Left-Handed Liberty (1965),
The Hero Rises Up (1968), and The Island of the Mighty (1972)
...

Arnold Wesker
Another playwright of the period is Arnold Wesker (b
...
It is largely based on the playwright‘s own
experience in Royal Airforce Service
...
And when it comes to
doing that, they have nothing to fall back upon but their proletarian vigour and innate emotional
richness; and his famous trilogy—Chicken Soup and Barley (1958), Roots (1959), I‟m Talking
About Jerusalem (1960), which brings to fore his sympathy for the working-class, his socialism,
his inclination for the Jewish cause, etc
...


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...
St

A more popular dramatist who emerged during the period was Harold Pinter (b
...
Unlike Wesker, he does not directly address the political issues of the time
in his plays
...
‖
Pinter started as dramatist with a bang, producing three plays in the same year - The Room, The
Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party - in 1957
...
Then came out in 1959 his The Caretaker, which was performed the following year
...
They also show, in their dialogue, the
influence of Eliot
...

One notices a definite change in Pinter‘s art with the performance of his The Homecoming
(1964) at the Royal Shakespeare company
...

Rather indefinite and unspecific in situations and characters, it dramatizes several sides of social
tensions woven in the lives of a large family (presumably Jewish)
...
It was followed by Old Times (1971), No Man‟s Land
(1975), and Betrayal (1978), all marking an extension in themes handled in The Homecoming
...
His plays are half character studies and half
fantasy or imitation of parts of an early Hitchcock film
...
A character in his play Loot (1966), named Inspector Truscott,
underlines the dramatist‘s attitude to the subject of state repression of common citizens: ―If I
ever hear you accuse the police of using violence on a prisoner in custody again, I‘ll take you
down to the station and beat the eyes out of your head
...
Orton wrote four major comedies, besides Loot,
namely, Entertaining Mr
...
His comedies attempted to
expose the folly of the fool, the hypocrisy of the hypocrite, the incoherence of the incoherents
...
As for the form of comedy, he does
not just exploit the traditional forms, but also transforms them into something dangerously
different
...
1937),
a Czechoslovakian by birth, is implosive and tidy
...
The play that has made him famous (partly
because of the title derived from Shakespeare‘s Hamlet) is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
Dead (1967)
...
‖ The play, as a
matter of fact, is a re-reading of Hamlet from the viewpoints of Einsteinian laws, Eliotic
negatives, and Beckettian principles
...
Perspective changes,
time is fragmented, the Prince is marginalized, or decentred
...
Although on surface it is a farcical comedy, it carries beneath the
surface a lurking sense of doom or death, which the audiences are never allowed to forget
...
condemned
...
If we
start being arbitrary it‘ll just be a shambles
...

Stoppard‘s other plays include The Real Inspector Hound (1968), which is a parody of an
English detective story; Jumpers (1972), which ridicules intellectual gymnastics, in which
intellectuals do jumping exercises, raising unstable philosophic structures; Travesties (1974),
which is considered his most witty and inventive play, and includes the cast of historical figures
such as Joyce, Lenin, Tristan, Tzara, etc
...
This is
considered Stoppard‘s most allusive and subtle play
...

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1934), who has faithfully
followed the didactic German tradition, although he later disclaimed that he was working as a
sort of disciple of Brecht
...
His early plays include The Pope‟s Wedding (1962) and Saved (1965), both of which
deal with the inherited lexical and emotional deficiencies of the working class life
...
His analysis is that violence is a logical
consequence of the brutalization of the working class
...
In his
subsequent plays, Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968), Lear (1971), Bingo (1974), and The
Fool (1976), he presents anger and violence not merely as means of self-expression but also as
instruments of social change
...

Caryl Churchill
Very much like Bond, Caryl Churchill (b
...
She, however, relates exploitation and repression to the subjection of
women
...
She always presents her women characters as victims of
a culture which regards them as mere commodities, or which has imposed conditions of
inequality on them, brought up to subject to the masculine social conventions
...
Her later work
includes Serious Money (1987), which is topical and apocalyptic presenting the effects of stockmarket deregulation in the city of London; Mad Forest: A Play from Romania (1990), which
makes a searching study of competing truths and half truths; and the two inter-related short
plays, Blue Heart (1997), the first of which carries the title of Heart‟s Desire, the second of Blue
Kettle, which focus on lexical problems and failure of communication
...
1924) whose A Man For All Seasons (1960), based
on Thomas More‘s life, deals with power politics and the clash of ambitions
...


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...
St

POST-MODERN CRITICISM
Until the time of the modernist period of English literature, literary criticism was a ―literary‖
activity, with leading (call them policy) documents written by the leaders of the literary
movements
...

But in the post-modern period there is no such thing as literary theory, nor any of the dominant
theoretic documents of today‘s activity of criticism has come from any man-of-letters
...
, who have
propounded all kinds of dismantling orders, which are being applied, by their followers, in the
field of literature
...
No wonder the literary criticism today has become cultural studies, feminism,
postcolonialism, etc
...
As Jonathan Culler has attempted to explain the nature of THEORY:
Theory in literary studies is not an account of the nature of literature or methods for its study
...
a new kind of

161

writing has developed which is neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary
productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor social prophesy, but all of these
mingled together in a new genre
...
This is the
simplest explanation of what makes something count as theory
...

Thus, the main effect of theory is disputing all that we have been considering ―common sense
...
It questions as well the non-literary concepts of philosophy, sociology, linguistics,
etc
...
‖ It also challenges that literature is a representation of ―life‖,
whose truth is outside of itself, in history, or biography, etc
...
In this all-round critique of common sense,
theory insists that all that passes in the name of natural or essential or universal is nothing but a
construction of social practices, a production of a certain discourse
...
It is interdisciplinary, always deriving ideas or leaving effects outside an original discipline
...
It is analytical and speculative, always working out what is involved or implied in a text, or
language, or meaning, or subject, etc
...
It is a critique of common sense, always questioning whatever is considered a given or natural
or essential or universal
...
It is thinking about thought, always enquiring into categories and concepts we use in making
sense of things, such as what is woman or man or meaning or text, etc
...
15)
Critics like Terry Eagleton (a well known British Marxist critic) may find in theory an
expression of democratic impulse, and a liberation ―from the stranglehold of a civilized
sensibility,‖ the fact of the matter is that it has seriously subverted the value of literature in
various ways, such as the following:
1
...
As such, it is
anti-democratic
...
It has reduced literature to the status of a speech, any speech, political, pornographic, stray
writing, etc
...

3
...
As such, it is divisive, not unifying
...
It has also made criticism a negative activity, which is meant to trace faultlines, lapses,
absences, what the text does not say or has failed to say
...
It tends to marginalize artists and their art-works
...

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The alien idioms
one encounters, the gigantic critical apparatuses one confronts, the mind-boggling systems one
has to comprehend, all quickly combine to create a climate utterly discomforting, making one
unstable even for a ‗temporary stay against confusion
...
Of course, after his abortive journey through the verbal forest he does not
return the same man; he comes back sadder‘ but not wiser
...
Mortally afraid of encountering more of such declarations, he decides
never to seek any critical company for his future journeys into the ‗cities of words
...
Until the end of the
nineteenth century literary criticism had remained committed to elucidating for the common
reader the social and moral significance of literary works, and was always written in a literary
style as readable as literature itself
...
T
...
And it is well worth remarking that Shakespeare‘s characters, like those
in real life, are very commonly misunderstood, and almost always understood by different
persons in different ways
...
If you take only what the
friends of the character say, you may be deceived, and still more so, if that which his enemies
say; nay, even the character himself sees himself through the medium of his character, and not
exactly as he is
...

The very first thing one notices here is the use of an idiom readily available to the common
reader
...
One notices,
too, how in a very simple manner the issue of the author‘s intention has been explained, which
makes clear that it is available within the text itself, and that one does not need to look for it
anywhere else, including the author as a historical personage
...
Those who brought about this change include I
...
Richards, Ezra Pound, T
...

Eliot, and the New Critics
...
Perhaps it
had to change with the increasing influence of science in the modern age
...
T
...
In the golden age of the future which the triumph of science is to
usher in, nothing will be considered knowledge unless it is science
...
‖ Thus was adopted by
Pound, as well as by those ‗new‘ poets and critics who faithfully followed the dictates of this
poet‘s poet and the critic‘s critic, the method of science in poetry and criticism
...
A
...
Note, for example, the following:
To understand what an interest is we should picture the mind as a system of very delicately
poised balances, a system which so long as we are in health is constantly growing
...
The ways in which they
swing back to a new equipoise are the impulses with which we respond to the situation
...
Suppose that we carry a magnetic compass

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about in the neighbourhood of power magnets
...

The mind is not unlike such a system if we imagine it to be incredibly complex
...

Thus, from Pound‘s scientific ‗method‘ we move to Richard‘s scientific ‗system
...
They considered literature as an instrument of
education
...
The most influential of these high priests of scientism, T
...
Eliot, carried
this task with greater force than even Pound and Richards
...

It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science
...

Here the poet‘s mind becomes the gas chamber in which various experiences combine like
different chemicals to form a new compound
...
No doubt, this conversion of literary
criticism into a study of systems and structures, principles and processes, involved in the making
of literature, is effected under the express influence of science
...
K
...
, in the working of the structure called poem
...

In its attempt to introduce scientism in literature and literary criticism, the modernist criticism in
the early twentieth century also made the author invisible, for like the filament of platinum he
does not go into the compound called poem; he just stays behind
...
It became inaccessible to the common reader who would not have the
benefit of knowing various sciences and their principles and processes, systems and structures
...
The macro commentaries of earlier criticism were replaced
by the micro explications of verbal devices used in the making of a poem
...
W
...
Yeats, who called himself one ‗the last romantics‘, soon realized
this arduousness of modern poetry and of modern criticism
...
We
alone can think like a wise man, yet express ourselves like the common people
...
‗To right and left‘ by which I mean what we
need like Milton, Shakespeare, Shelley, vast sentiments, generalizations supported by tradition
...
We know how the writings of Eliot and Pound, Joyce and Woolf, became special
readings, based as they were on philosophies and theories drawn from extra-literary sources
...
Thus, literary

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criticism became one of the specialities in the corporation of knowledge disciplines
...
Wimsatt and Beardsley came out with their famous (or notorious?)
articles on ‗intentional fallacy‘ and ‗affective fallacy‘, with explicit implication of disinfecting
literary criticism of moral as well as social significance
...
Naturally, then, the nature of literary criticism also became amoral, like any
discipline of science, having nothing to do beyond the functions of various parts, or the workings
of various structures or systems
...
Both reiterated the
scientific study of literature, restricting its activity to the explication of verbal devices, their
interrelational functions, and their functions in relation to the working of the structure of which
they are internal components
...
While
‗invisibility‘ of the author was pushed further to declare the ‗death of the author‘, the ‗intentional
fallacy‘ gave way to the ‗reader-oriented theories‘
...
Even those in the
business of teaching literature were forced to choose their micro areas of specialization, for it
was impossible for any individual scholar to keep pace with the fast developing specialities in all
the areas
...
There came in the literary market numerous brand products of the
Post-Modern multinationals
...
The word has gradually appeared in his work; at
first it was masked by the instance of Truth (that of history), then by that of validity (that of
systems and structures); now it blossoms, it flourishes, this word-as-mana is the work ‗body
...
We frequently come across today in the writings of the PostModernist critics words such as dialogic, discourse, enthymeme, exotopy, heteroglossia;
agonaporia, difference, deconstruction, grammatology, logo-centrism, phallogocentrism;
genotext, phenotext, multivalent, slippage, dispositif, episteme; androcentric, androgyny,
biocriticism, biologism, gynocritic, pornoglossia, sexism; actualization, cratylism, idiolect, lang,
parole, paradigm, diaspora; fetishism, flaneur, homology, ideologeme, etc
...
Specialism
forces the scholars to evolve their special languages known only to those who have acquired the
required efficiency in the super speciality
...
They must perforce remain alien to each other, each becoming a code communication,
leaving no scope for general conversation
...
One could trace the course of scientific spirit from its
early demystification of the universe to later despiritualization of society to further
mechanization of human life to, finally, dehumanization of mankind
...
They have always stood for the
preservation and promotion of humanism across national boundaries, racial reservations, or
cultural constraints
...

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The manner in which some of
the brand products of Post-Modernism have chosen to champion the cultural, ethnic, or genderic
causes, has in fact made the remedy worse than the disease
...
, discourses have been developed based
solely on the differentiating features of ‗cultural‘, ‗ethnic‘ or ‗genderic‘ life, promoting a new
form of tribalism
...
One is reminded of Plato‘s caves inhabited by tribes with
horizons of the mind measuring the narrow holes of their respective caves, utterly unable to
comprehend the open universe
...
Today,
what have become more important for criticism are, not the human concerns, but the purely nonhuman enquiries into the nature of things—a study of principles and processes, systems and
structures
...
‘ If we look at the titles of leading books
and articles in the field of criticism today, the nature it has acquired, adopted, and imbibed
becomes quite clear
...
Here is a sample list of some of the titles from the vast
verbal forest that has grown over the years
...
P
...
, etc
...
In sum, the nature of criticism has acquired the character of science in all respects,
turning away from the humanities, and has become a philosophico-scientific discipline called
theory, which mixes literature with non-literary writings and the pseudo-literary films or
journalism, and confines itself to the study of sociological behaviour of literary texts, their
political overtones, their psychological suggestions, their anthropological patterns, their
historical narrations, their linguistic structures, etc
...

Criticism today has been taken over by the disciplines of philosophy and psychology, sociology
and anthropology, entirely changing the parameters of reading literary works
...
We look for the sub-texts and
sub-structures, for faultlines and fictographs, using the apparatus borrowed from one of the
disciplines just mentioned
...
the notion
that if we plant our feet solidly enough in Christian or democratic or Marxist values we shall be
able to lift the whole of criticism at once with a dialectic crowbar
...

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Since Frye made this observation in 1957 much water has flown through the Thames
...
All aspects of a literary work are talked about in
the name of criticism except the aspect of its humanity
...

No doubt, the discussion of art, particularly literature, cannot confine itself to the formal aspect
of art considered in utter isolation
...

This idea of complete civilization is also the implicit moral standard to which ethical criticism
always refers, something very different from any system of morals
...
Its ‗grand flourish of negativised rhetoric‘, comprising such
impressive keywords as ‗discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentring, indeterminacy, and
antitotalization‘, does hypnotise some intellectuals, but it leaves highly dissatisfied the steady
explorer of ultimate meanings in literature as well as life
...
The goal of criticism must remain,
as Frye insists: ‗
...
One who possesses such a standard of transvaluation is in a state of intellectual
freedom
...
It is high time that resistance was put up to the confusing critical cries of
our time, paving the way for the restoration of the every-abiding goal of literature and literary
criticism
...

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