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Chapter 13 - Poetry and Transition

from Part III - Aesthetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2021

James Purdon
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
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Summary

One traditional solution to the problem of how modernist poetry began is to tell the story of a transition between Yeats’s early masterpieces and Eliot’s The Waste Land. This is a story which usually centres upon the rise of free verse and a growing urgency to represent the modern world. More recently, critics have looked to tell stories about neglected poets, in which less obviously experimental works are found nevertheless to represent that same modern world. Both approaches involve tracing continuities and ruptures, often with reference to the unprecedented ruptures and rapid developments which characterised life in Britain in the first two decades of the century. This chapter shifts the emphasis from deciding how poetry somehow made a miraculous leap from the fin de siècle to high modernism, to exploring how the poetic forms of diverse poets working at this time refract the very conception and experience of transition, and especially the experience of transition when no certain beginning or end is in sight. The aim here is thus to resist the logic of literary history’s usual narratives, and to show that the poems of this period do so too at the level of poetic technique.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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  • Poetry and Transition
  • Edited by James Purdon, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book: British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age?
  • Online publication: 07 December 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108648714.015
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  • Poetry and Transition
  • Edited by James Purdon, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book: British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age?
  • Online publication: 07 December 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108648714.015
Available formats
×

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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Poetry and Transition
  • Edited by James Purdon, University of St Andrews, Scotland
  • Book: British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age?
  • Online publication: 07 December 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108648714.015
Available formats
×