“And time future contained in time past”: British Modernist Poetry from T.S. Eliot to Ted Hughes

Journal Title: Studia Litterarum - Year 2017, Vol 2, Issue 3

Abstract

It seems that T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) and Ted Hughes (1930–1998) are poets of different individual talents and epochs. Hughes, a poet of the second half of the 20th century, concentrated on the conflict between Nature and the human being destroying Nature and thus preparing the end of the humanity. T.S. Eliot was a poet of urban civilization, a reformer of the Anglophone modernist poetry. In his days, the “poetry of Nature” rooted in the pastoral poetry of the 17th–18th centuries and in Romanticism, existed but only at the margins of mainstream poetic trends. Nevertheless, one can find it even in Eliot’s poetry, particularly in his Landscapes — poems written at the beginning of the 1930s. Also, both Eliot and Hughes were modernists. Eliot standing at the beginning of modernism, Hughes at its end; though the latter lived in the time of postmodernism, he was not a postmodernist himself since he was not engaged in the deconstruction and fragmentation of the “world model.” Like Eliot, he was a poet with integral Weltanschauung and a bright individual talent. Like Eliot, he was a traditionalist, though Eliot being an American was a “conscious traditionalist,” while Hughes, an Englishman, was most likely a “born” traditionalist: instead of deconstructing tradition, he was bearing on it. His “great tradition” included Shakespeare, Blake, Coleridge, Kipling, Graves, and Dylan Thomas. Both Eliot and Hughes are poets of eschatological trend and mythologists. However, one will not find Eliot among the authorities enlisted by Hughes in his “great tradition.” In the time of Hughes, Eliot was rejected due to the regular change of mainstreams trends. British poetry in the second half of the 20th century is “tired” of urban poetry, of “Nature denial,” so it comes back to its track, and the motives that existed in Eliot’s poetry only in the background are now brought to the forefront.

Authors and Affiliations

T. N. Krasavchenko

Keywords

Related Articles

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH’S PASSIONS: BETWEEN DRAMA AND LYRICS

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passions are considered to be a synthesis of dramatic and lyric principles. Traditional comparison of Passions with musical drama or ancient tragedy does not exhaustively express the nature of t...

Why Was a Baby Devil Born: The Legend about a Blasphemous Communist, Monstrous Births, and the Limits of Religious Didactics

In 1923, the Russian ethnologist and archaeologist Vasily Smirnov published an article entitled “A Devil is Born. (Contemporary Legend)”. The article dealt with an unusual demonological legend that had appeared short t...

BLOK’S ROSE AND CROSS IN THE LIGHT OF ROSICRUCIAN TRADITIONS

The author explores the mystical nature of symbols and the leitmotif structure of Alexander Blok’s drama Rose and Cross. The choice of the 13th Century Languedoc as the basis for the drama’s chronotope shows that the p...

THE PROBLEM OF HUMANISM IN M. GORKY’S ESSAY “A. A. BLOK”

The article examines one of the most important problems of Gorky’s work — a problem of humanism. It relates the history of creation of Gorky’s essay “A. A. Blok” (1923) to the author’s reflections about deformation of t...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP26164
  • DOI 10.22455/2500-4247-2017-2-3-74-81
  • Views 332
  • Downloads 17

How To Cite

T. N. Krasavchenko (2017). “And time future contained in time past”: British Modernist Poetry from T.S. Eliot to Ted Hughes. Studia Litterarum, 2(3), -. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-26164