“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
- EP ID EP26164
- DOI 10.22455/2500-4247-2017-2-3-74-81
- Views 349
- Downloads 17
Musical Outlook in Alexey Losev’s Novel The Woman-Thinker
This article discusses the role of music in the context of A.F. Losev’s philosophical prose of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Describing the key ideas of Losev’s philosophy of music, the essay presents Losev as both the writer...
“YOUR P.C.W.” THE UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF PAUL SCHEERBART TO ERICH MÜHSAM
The archive of a German writer and anarchist Erich Mühsam (1878– 1934) is a signifcant but “unexplored” part of the manuscript collection of the A. M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Scien...
The Face of the Other in Emmanuel Levinas and Alexey Uhktomsky
The author compares ethical concepts of a Russian physiologist and philosopher Alexey A. Ukhtomsky and a French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Both use the word “face” as a philosophical term. The paper examines the “fa...
Rabelais’ “culture of folk humor” as a Technique of Archaicized Narration
The French reception of Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais excludes the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel. However, by analyzing Rabelais’s text as a reflection of national culture and ignoring the author’s role in the develo...
RUSSIAN FOLKLORE AS A REFLECTION OF NATIONAL CHARACTER IN THE WORK OF BORIS VYSHESLAVTZEV
The essay is focused on the spiritual crisis of Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th Century and on the search of philosophical alternatives to overcome the crisis within the framework of Russian philosophical...