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MODERNISM
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The dramatic changes that took place in literature
between 1900 and 1930 can justly be called a revolution. In rejecting
the traditional forms and values of 19th-century literature, Modernism
included the adoption of new subject matter as well as new style and new
technique. The visual arts were affected no less, more obviously in
fact, than literature, and some movements, such as Dada and Surrealism,
Italian Futurism, and English Vorticism, spanned both art and
literature. Like most such convenient labels, however, 'Modernism' is
elastic. The first great modernists in the English novel —
James,
Conrad -
were in action well before 1900, and they were strongly influenced by
still earlier writers such as
Balzac,
Hawthorne
and George
Eliot.
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JAMES

The sales of
Henry James
(1843-1916) were far less than
Hardy's and,
except for his famous ghost story The Turn of the Screw (1898), he was
not very widely read (recent Hollywood adaptations have revived public
interest), but his critical reputation was far greater (a famous
biography of James by Leon Eciel runs to five volumes). The novelist's
novelist, he was virtually the first English speaking writer to give
serious consideration to the novel as an art form, and his sheer
craftsmanship has created such enthusiasm among critics that it is easy
to forget that James was a born story-teller.
He came from a New England family of intellectual heavyweights, but
disliked the current commercialism of American society and found the
older culture of Europe more rewarding. He settled in England in 1876
and eventually became a British subject. Nevertheless, he remained
closely engaged with America, and his novels, especially those of his
first period — including Roderick Hudson (1875), The American (1877),
The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879) and the finest of them,
Portrait of a Lady (1881) — are largely concerned with the conflict
between the old and new civilizations.
In the 1890s he turned his attention to English society and he also made
serious efforts in drama, but his plays were painfully unsuccessful.
James was a man of deep human
sympathy - 'be kind' was his advice to his young nephews — but in his
second period his style became more indirect and sometimes obscure. Nor
are his last three great novels, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The
Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904), in which he returned to
the ever-fascinating question of Euro-American contrasts, easy reading.
Among other notable examples of his fiction are Washington Square
(1881), The Bostonians (1886), The Aspern Papers (1888) and What Maisie
Knew (1897). His travel writing, critical essays (Balzac
was his favourite) and fragments of autobiography are full of interest.
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CONRAD

Joseph Conrad
"Lord Jim"
A more shadowed, psychologically more subtle view of Empire is presented
in the works of
Joseph Conrad
(1857-1924). He was born in the Ukraine of Polish parents, who both died
before his 12th birthday. He spent 20 years in the French and British
merchant navies before becoming a writer - in English, his third
language. In his early novels, including An Outcast of the Islands
(1896), which were set in Malaya and the South Pacific, there is an
occasional suggestion of strain, but by the time of The Nigger of the
Narcissus (18977) he was m full command of the language, of an
elaborate, rhythmical style and of a distinctive sense of form.
Conrad
had once captained a river steamer in the Congo, providing background
for the novella Heart of Darkness (1899}, an allegory of the takeover of
the Belgian Congo, in which
Conrad's
concern with the corruptibility of the individual is taken to a shocking
conclusion. This theme, of man's susceptibility to evil influences, is
evident in Lord Jim (1900) and in the powerful Nostromo (1904), set in
South America and regarded by some critics as his greatest work.
Conrad's
novels were slow to engage the approval of either critics or readers,
although his brilliance was swiftly recognized by contemporaries such as
Henry James and Edward Garnett,
Jonathan Cape's near-legendary publisher's reader. By the time of his
death he was established as a leading Modernist
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Knut Hamsun
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KNUT HAMSUN
Knut Hamsun (August 4, 1859
– February 19, 1952) was a Norwegian author. He was praised by
King Haakon VII of Norway as Norway's soul. In 1920, he was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for the epic, Growth of
the Soil. He insisted that the main object of modern literature
should be the intricacies of the human mind, that writers should
describe the "whisper of blood, and the pleading of bone
marrow".
Hamsun's
literary debut was the 1890 psychological novel, Hunger, which
some critics consider to have been an inspiration for Franz
Kafka's classic short story, A Hunger Artist.
Hamsun's
reputation was severely tarnished by his vehement advocacy of
Nazi Germany both before World War II and after Germany occupied
Norway in April, 1940. He lionized leading Nazis and in 1943, in
the middle of the war, he mailed his Nobel medal to Joseph
Goebbels. Later, he visited Hitler and in a eulogy for the
German leader published on May 7, 1945 — one day before
surrender of the German occupation forces in Norway —
Hamsun
proclaimed, “He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a
prophet of the gospel of justice for all nations.” After the
war, due to a finding that Hamsun was in mental decline, efforts
to prosecute him for treason were dropped.
Nearly 60
years after his death, a recent biographer told a reporter, “We
can’t help loving him, though we have hated him all these years.
That’s our Hamsun trauma. He’s a ghost that won’t stay in the
grave.” In 2009, the Queen of Norway presided over the gala
launching of a year long program of commemorations of the 150th
anniversary of the author's birth. On August 4, 2009 a
Knut
Hamsun Center
(Hamsunsenteret) was opened in Presteid, Hamaroy island.
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NEW DIRECTIONS
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The period between the
1890s and the First World War was a period of transition. Writers were
acutely aware of changes in society, particularly those relating to science
and technology, and to human consciousness. The certainties of the Victorian
era were lost, and the modern age loomed as a frightening, unknowable
future. However, such insecurity was not exactly new. It had activated the
often-noted malaise that affected so many 19th-century writers, including
such pillars of the Victorian age as
Tennyson or
Matthew Arnold. Literary
historians see the 'modern' revolution as two movements, the first,
relatively optimistic phase, which ended in 1914, and a second, pessimistic
phase in the wake of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.
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EXPERIMENT
Like every new movement in the arts. Modernism was antagonistic to the
tradition it displaced. It was hostile not only to 19th-century moral
values, but also to 19th-century techniques, the general structure of
rational narrative, description and resolution. Instead of the omniscient
narrator, for example, novelists preferred to convey personality through
unspoken thoughts and feelings in the 'stream of consciousness' technique
(the phrase originated by the American philosopher
William James, brother of
Henry
James). Modernism was self-consciously and determinedly experimental, which
is one reason why it is hard to categorize as a 'movement'. Incidentally, it
represented a further widening of the division between the upper reaches of
literature and the lower slopes occupied by the reading public. Poetry, in
particular, was to become an increasingly a minority interest.
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MODERNISTS AND 'EDWARDIANS'

Arnold
Bennett
"The Old Wives' Tale"
BOOK I-II,
BOOK
III-IV
Of course not all writers of the early 20th century were modernists. In
English literature, critics draw a distinction between modernists and
Edwardians - broadly, those who followed the realist tradition, such as
Arnold Bennett (1867-1931),
John Galsworthy (1867-1933) or
H. G. Wells
(1886-1946).
It is today increasingly evident that this distinction is far
from straightforward, and that the most revered names among the modernists
(James,
Conrad, the early
D. H. Lawrence, even
Joyce) often wrote in an
'Edwardian' way. The influential novelist and critic
Ford Madox Ford
(1873-1939), a major figure in contemporary thinking about literary form,
who scoffed at amateurish 'nuvvles', nevertheless published, as editor of
the English Review,
Bennett and
Galsworthy, as well as
James,
Conrad, the
Voracist Wyndham Lewis and
Ezra Pound. His four-volume masterpiece. Parade's
End (1924— 28), though employing many characteristic modernist experimental
devices, can be seen as a direct successor of the old, three-decked,
'condition-of-Fngland' type novel. Altogether, Modernism was more pragmatic
than is often assumed.
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PSYCHOLOGY
Probably no one had more influence on modern literature than the Viennese
psychologist and founder of psychoanalysis,
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). In an
elegy written on Freud's death, W. H. Auden called him, without
exaggeration, "no more a person now but a climate of opinion'.
Freud's ideas arose from his study of neuroses. Freudian criticism, though
perhaps not Freud
himself, sees creativity as a form of sublimation,
typically deriving from traumatic experiences in childhood, and art as a
pathological phenomenon. In the words of the critic Lionel Trilling, 'the
poet is a poet by reason of his sickness as well as by reason of his power'.
The greatest impact of
Freud himself resulted from his theories of the
unconscious mind and the nature of repression, his study of the development
of sexual instincts in young children, and his 'interpretation of dreams'
(the title of his first great book). Many of his ideas have given rise to
popularised conceptions with which everyone is now familiar: for example,
the Oedipus Complex, the sexual rivalry between a son and father for the
mother (whence the Electra Complex, rivalry between daughter and mother for
the father); the death wish; phallic symbols, the significance, conscious or
unconscious, of any penis-shaped object as a symbol of male sexuality; penis
envy, the desire of a girl for such an organ. The latter doctrine in
particular has aroused outrage amongst feminists, and in fact very little of
Freud's teaching is now accepted without considerable qualification.
However, that does not lessen its impact on the modernists.
Freud would have been less influential had he not also been a fine writer.
Some of his case studies are true works of art, and he was also a
penetrating literary critic, his writings on Hamlet, Oedipus and other
characters marking the beginning of a long, continuous, tradition of
Freudian biography.
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ANTHROPOLOGISTS
After the writings of
Freud, the most influential work was The Golden Bough
of the British anthropologist. Sir James G. Frazer (1854— 1941), the first
volume of which was published m 1907. It is a monumental comparative study
of myth and religion, the fundamental thesis of which is that humanity
progresses from magic, through religion, to science. Frazer's eloquent style
added to its appeal. His work inevitably relied on secondary sources and his
ideas have long been overtaken, but his description of primitive society and
his discussion of such matters as fertility rites, sacrifice, the dying god,
etc. had a profound effect on writers - which was in fact a greater effect
than they had on anthropologists.
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CRAFT OF THE NOVEL
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The novel thrived in the
early years of this century, and so did the idea of the novel which, among
the modernists, was turning into a very different creature. According to the
literary theories of Flaubert and
Henry James, style and form were
everything, or almost everything, and subject matter was unimportant. The
novel was an autonomous aesthetic creation, not an imitation of life, on
which the creator - the novelist -should not intrude. Aesthetic
considerations of this kind were the chief concern of the greatest novelists
of the period, including
Proust,
Joyce,
Woolf and
Faulkner.
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PROUST

Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was physically frail, an asthmatic, who as a young
man moved freely m Parisian high society. There he acquired the material for
his single great masterpiece, A la recherche dii temps perdu (published in
seven sections between 1913 and 1927), translated as Remembrance of Things
Past. The work became practically his only interest during his latter years
when he lived as a recluse, seldom venturing outside in daytime, an
existence only partly prescribed by deteriorating health. The subject of
this seminal novel, which ran to about 3,000 pages, is Time and Memory. The
authentic past can only be recaptured through involuntary memory, triggered
by an apparently insignificant incident or object. Through such 'privileged
moments', the past is recaptured. All traditional ideas of narrative are
abandoned, and events and feelings are fed through a narrator figure, Marcel
(not, in spite of similarities, an alter ego).
Proust's precision in
describing human consciousness echoes
Henry James and
Joyce; his idea of
insignificant past incidents assuming later importance is found in
Virginia
Woolf, and his notion of human relationships forming a pattern like a piece
of music was adopted by
Anthony Powell in A Dance to the Music of Time
(1951-75).
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JOYCE

Born and raised in Catholic Ireland,
James Joyce (1882—1941) set all his
fiction in his native city of Dublin, although from 1904 he abandoned
country and religion and lived abroad. His first, autobiographical novel, A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published, largely clue to the
enthusiasm of Ezra Pound, in 1916, throws light on his early life and his
discovery of his vocation. It adopts a stream-of-consciousness narrative
reflecting the hero's development and foreshadows the astonishingly original
use of language that characterises his greatest work, Ulysses (1922; not
published in Britain until 1936 due to alleged obscenities). Ostensibly it
covers a single day in the life of three characters in Dublin (Leopold and
Molly Bloom and Stephen Daedalus, the hero of Portrait of the Artist). Its
18 episodes roughly reflect equivalents in the Odyssey, and this mythic
structure contributes to the creation of an epic from superficially mundane
material. Past and present interact, trivial events acquire sometimes
profound significance, and extreme erudition mingles with coarse humour.
Joyce's highly allusive style, including parodies of various literary forms,
does not make for easy reading, and his last book Finnegans Wake (1939) is
inaccessible to the ordinary reader without a comprehensive gloss. Newcomers
to Joyce, possibly the most influential novelist of the century, wisely
start with his early short stories, Dubliners (1914), which are relatively
conventional in technique.
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Marilyn on Long Island (New York) Reading
James Joyce's Ulysses by Eve Arnold (1955)
'Can't hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? ... Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night!. My ho head halls. 1 feel as heavy as
yonder stone ...
Beside the rivering waters
of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!'
Joyce, Finnegans Wake.
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FAULKNER

Place is no less important in
William Faulkner (1897-1962), whose
mythical Yoknapatawpha County reflects Lafayette County in Mississippi where
his family had long been established and where he lived nearly all his life.
The history and legends of the South, including his own family, furnish the
material for most of his books and all of the better ones. Encouraged by
Sherwood Anderson (1876—1941), a leading naturalistic writer famous for his
stories of Winesburg, Ohio, he began writing fiction while working as a
journalist in New Orleans. His first two novels were based respectively on
his experiences as a trainee pilot in the Royal (British) Air Force and
bohemian life in contemporary New Orleans.
Moving back to his home town of Oxford (Jefferson in the novels),
Faulkner
began to write the remarkable novels that presented a fictional illustration
of the doom-laden history of the South, containing plenty of tragedy and
horror but also much humour. Though his literary career was long and
productive,
Faulkner's fame rests chiefly on the novels written in the late
1920s and early 1930s, persistently experimental in style and earning him
recognition as a leader of Modernism (a slightly later development in North
America). The Sound and the Fury (1929) has several narrators, one of them
mentally disabled. As I Lay Dying (1930) brilliantly employs the
stream-of-consciousness technique. Light in August (1932), the immense and
complex Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Intruder in the Dust (1940)
consolidated his reputation.
Faulkner also wrote short stories, including
the classic 'The Bear' which is an episode in Go Down, Moses (1942), and two
volumes of poetry. By the time he won the Nobel Prize in 1949, his best work
was some years behind him, though his last novel, The Reivers (1962) is
genial and entertaining.
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BLOOMSBURY
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Bloomsbury is an area of west London containing the
University, the British Museum (and Library), many publishers, bookshops,
and residential Georgian streets and squares which, in the early years of
the century, were home to many mutually acquainted literary and artistic
people. 'Bloomsbury', in the sense of an intellectual social circle,
extended much further. It represented the essence of the post-Victorian,
modernist culture, extending from literature and art to sex, family life and
international relations. Bloomsbury in this sense had a profound effect on
Britain, although its truly international figures were few, the most notable
being the economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) and the novelist
Virginia Woolf. Today, Bloomsbury has become a cult, and an apparently
inexhaustible subject of books. Tourists have worn a path along the bank of
the River Ouse in Sussex to the spot where
Virginia Woolf committed suicide
in 1941.
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WOOLF

Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
"Jacob's Room"
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) came from a prominent literary family. Her
father, Leslie Stephen, was the originator of the (British) Dictionary of
National Biography, and her mother was a Duckworth, the publishing
family Her sister Vanessa Bell was, like her husband Clive, an artist, who
designed jackets for the Hogarth Press, set up by Virginia and her husband
Leonard in 1917. Virginia, a woman of ethereal beauty and, like so many of
the Bloomsbury group, bisexual, married Leonard, social reformer and author,
in 1912.
Woolf, whose life was punctuated by nervous breakdowns, was an experimental
novelist often compared with [ovce. Besides her own work, she was a
stimulating commentator in her luminously intelligent essays and in her
feminist criticism, for example, A Room of One's Own, 1929. Her early
novels, The Voyage Out (1915, but written earlier) and Night and
Day (1919) were relatively realistic. The interval between them was
largely occupied with the Hogarth Press, which published
Katharine Mansfield
and T. S. Eliot, among others.
Her reputation as England's leading modernist author was established in the
1920s by Jacob's Room (1922), based on the life and death of a
beloved brother; Mrs Dalloway (1925), a classic using the stream-of-conscious-ness
technique; To the Lighthouse (1927), employing the same technique to
explore male-female conflict and based on her parents; and The Waves
(1931), her most boldly experimental (and difficult) novel, and considered
by some critics to be her masterpiece. The eponymous Orlando (1928),
is alternatively male and female through four centuries. Something of a
departure, it was her most successful novel and dedicated to Vita Sackville
West, a woman of shared affinities. Her last novel Between the Acts
(1941) returns to the stream-of-consciousness technique and celebrates
traditional English values in the shadow of war.
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FORSTER

Technically,
E. M.
Forster (1879-1970) was a more traditional novelist.
The novel, he famously said, 'tells a story'. He established his reputation
with Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey
(1907), A Room With a View (1907) and, conclusively, with Howard's
End (1910), a brilliant encapsulation of contemporary middle-class
mores, which ends with
Forster's famous motto, 'Only Connect ... ',
signifying his commitment to sympathetic relationships as the foundation of
a civilized existence.
During the rest of his life he wrote only two more
novels: Maurice (1971), celebrating a homosexual relationship, which he
declined to publish during his lifetime, and his most famous, A Passage
to India (1924), the fruit of two visits to the subcontinent that
cemented his hatred of imperialism. Sexual deviance, then highly improper,
no doubt contributed to Forster's humane liberalism (he was the first
president of the National Council for Civil Liberties). Besides his few but
intensely evocative novels, he wrote short stories and fine and accessible
commentaries on English literature, notably in Aspects of the Novel
(1927).
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LAWRENCE

D.H. Lawrence
"Sons and Lovers"
PART I,
PART II,
"Lady Chatterley's Lover" PART I,
PART II
As the son of a Nottingham miner, the connections of
D. H. Lawrence
(1883-1930) with Bloomsbury were remote, though when living in London he
became friendly with several of the group, including the critic David
Garnett, the new Zealand short-story writer
Katharine Mansfield and the
philosopher Bertrand Russell. He was a born — and prolific - writer, of
poetry, criticism, travel, plays, essays and short stories, as well as
novels. His first novel, The White Peacock (1911), was published
thanks to Ford Madox Ford, who had been impressed by his early poetry. Sons and Lovers (1914), based on his childhood, exemplified the
intensity of
Lawrence's passions, but The Rainbow (1915), one of his
best, ran into trouble through alleged obscenity and for some time he was
unable to find a publisher for Women in Love (privately printed
1920).
In 1912,
Lawrence ran off with Frieda, the German wife of a Nottingham
professor, and from 1919 they lived a peripatetic life. Australia provided
the setting for Kangaroo (1923) and Mexico for The Plumed Serpent
(1926). Although the real subject of his last novel is the destructive
effects of industrialism on human consciousness, Lawrence's frank treatment
of sex prevented publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover until 30
years after his death from tuberculosis at the age of 44.
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WASTELANDS
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Poetry of the modern period, as one literary historian put it, 'has not
escaped the atmosphere of controversy.' Few groups of poets have endured
such censure as the English 'Georgians' (1920s), seen as artificial and
shallow. French symbolism remained an important influence, especially in
Germany, where it stimulated one of the finest lyric poets of the century,
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) and the
Austrian Hugo von Hofmannsthal
(1874-1929), while in France Surrealism, a term coined by the 'evangelist of
Modernism', Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), aimed, under the vigorous
leadership of Andre Breton (1896-1966), to overturn all accepted doctrine in
poetry and the arts. Other influential movements included German
Expressionism and Italian Futurism.
The last note of English Romanticism was
sounded by A. E. Housman (1859-1936), and a powerful influence was
exercised, not for the best, by the highly original work of
Gerard Manley
Hopkins (1844-89), almost unknown before 1918. The exotic appeal of the East
surfaced in James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915); Walter de la Mare (1973-1956),
champion anthologist, wrote technically distinguished lyrics untouched by
modern fashion. In short, variety, like controversy, was not lacking.
Nevertheless, poetry in English in the first half of the 20th century was
largely dominated by an Irishman,
Yeats, and an American,
Eliot.
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The First World War had a dramatic effect on literature. All the great works
of Modernism, if not actually concerned with the War, are affected by it.
The term 'war poets' signifies a disparate group in whose work the War plays
the major part, often because, sadly, the poet himself did not survive it.
Rupert Brooke, a young Georgian, was probably the most popular with -
civilian - readers, though not with critics. He died early (April 1915),
before the hideous experience of the trenches had obliterated the curiously
exalted spirit in which, at the outset, war was regarded as a liberating,
cleansing experience. Julian Grenfell (fatally wounded May 1915) also died
before disillusion led Edmund Blunden (a survivor) to the realisation that
only 'the War had won, and would go on winning'. Other survivors included
Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, a major though idiosyncratic writer, and
Ivor Gurney. Among non-survivors were Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg and
Wilfred Owen.
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Émile
Verhaeren
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EMILE
VERHAEREN
Émile
Verhaeren, (b. May 21,
1855, Saint Amand lez-Puers, Belg.—d. Nov. 27, 1916, Rouen,
France), foremost among the Belgian poets who wrote in
French. The vigour of his work and the breadth of his vision
have been compared to those of Victor Hugo and Walt Whitman.
Verhaeren was educated at Brussels and Ghent and during 1875–81
studied law at Leuven (Louvain), where he became acquainted with
Max Waller, the founder of the influential periodical La Jeune
Belgique (1881). Verhaeren became one of the group in Brussels
who brought about the literary and artistic renaissance of the
1890s.
His first book, a collection of
violently naturalistic poems (Les Flamandes, 1883; “The Flemish
Women”), created a sensation. Verhaeren was an art critic as
well as a poet, and many of the poems in his first collection
concerned paintings. He followed this volume with a collection
of short stories, but his reputation as a lyric poet was
confirmed by a succession of works. After he produced Les Moines
(1886; “The Monks”), a mystical celebration of Belgium, a
personal crisis dominated his next three collections: Les Soirs
(1887; The Evening Hours), Les Débâcles (1888), and Les
Flambeaux noirs (1891; “The Black Torches”). They were followed
by Au bord de la route (1891; “Along the Way”; later retitled
Les Bords de la route), Les Apparus dans mes chemins (1891; “The
Appearances on My Road”), and Les Campagnes hallucinées (1893;
“The Moonstruck Countrysides”), after which he wrote solely in
free verse.
Verhaeren’s growing concern for
social problems inspired two collections in 1895: Les Villages
illusoires (“The Illusory Villages”) and Les Villes
tentaculaires (“The Tentacular Cities”). His more intimate Les
Heures claires (1896; The Sunlit Hours) is an avowal of his love
for his wife; it led to the series of his major works, among
which the most outstanding are Les Visages de la vie (1899; “The
Faces of Life”), the five-part Toute la Flandre (1904–11; “All
of Flanders”), and a serene, joyful trilogy composed of Les
Forces tumultueuses (1902; “The Tumultuous Forces”), La Multiple
splendeur (1906; “The Manifold Splendour”), and Les Rythmes
souverains (1910; “The Supreme Rhythms”). During that period he
also published books on art, two further collections of personal
lyrics addressed to his wife, and plays—including Les Aubes
(1898; The Dawn), Le Cloître (1900; The Cloister), Philippe II
(1901; Eng. trans., 1916), and Hélène de Sparte (1912; Helen of
Sparta).
The qualities most noted in
Verhaeren’s prolific poetry—more than 30 collections—are his
great range and vitality. His lyricism and originality are
expressed in a fresh, unpolished language of great power and
flexibility. No writer since Charles de Coster had addressed his
fellow Belgians so directly. Verhaeren’s three main themes are
Flanders, human energy (expressed in the desire for progress,
the brotherhood of man, and the emancipation of the working
classes), and his tender, mature love for his wife. It is
perhaps in the poems celebrating domestic joys that he is most
moving. More generally popular are those glorifying Flanders—the
greatness of its painters and the pleasures of its common
people—and those that exalt the triumph of human intelligence
over matter and praise the epic beauty of the industrial age.
Verhaeren’s plays in verse,
although often showing dramatic power and poetic inspiration,
are sometimes criticized for their excessively rhetorical style
and are rarely produced. His critical writings on art are
sympathetic to those painters—Rembrandt, Rubens, and others—who
depict life at its boldest, most dramatic, and most colourful.
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Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke
"Duino
Elegies"
Rainer Maria Rilke (also Rainer Maria von Rilke) (4 December 1875 – 29
December 1926) is considered one of the German language's greatest 20th
century poets. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with
the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety —
themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the
traditional and the modernist poets. He wrote in both verse and a highly
lyrical prose. His two most famous verse sequences are the Sonnets to
Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the
Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte
Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to
his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.
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Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Hugo von
Hofmannsthal
"Poems"
Hofmannsthal was born in Vienna, the son of an upper-class Austrian mother
and an Austrian-Italian bank manager. His great-grandfather, Isaak Löw
Hofmann, Edler von Hofmannsthal, from whom his family inherited the noble
title "Edler von Hofmannsthal," was a Jewish merchant ennobled by the
Austrian emperor. He began to write poems and plays from an early age. He
met the German poet Stefan George at the age of seventeen and had several
poems published in George's journal, Blätter für die Kunst. He studied law
and later philology in Vienna but decided to devote himself to writing upon
graduating in 1901. Along with Peter Altenberg and Arthur Schnitzler, he was
a member of the avant garde group Young Vienna (Junges Wien).
In 1900,
Hofmannsthal met the composer Richard Strauss for the first time. He later
wrote libretti for several of his operas, including Elektra (1909), Der
Rosenkavalier (1911), Ariadne auf Naxos (1912, rev. 1916), Die Frau ohne
Schatten (1919), Die ägyptische Helena (1927), and Arabella (1933). In 1901,
he married Gertrud (Gerty) Schlesinger, the daughter of a Viennese banker.
Gerty, who was Jewish, converted to Christianity before their marriage. They
settled in Rodaun, not far from Vienna, and had three children. In 1912 he
adapted the 15th century English morality play Everyman as Jedermann, and
Jean Sibelius (amongst others) wrote incidental music for it. The play later
became a staple at the Salzburg Festival.
During the First World War
Hofmannsthal held a government post. He wrote speeches and articles
supporting the war effort, and emphasizing the cultural tradition of
Austria-Hungary. The end of the war spelled the end of the old monarchy in
Austria; this was a blow from which the patriotic and conservative-minded
Hofmannsthal never fully recovered. Nevertheless the years after the war
were very productive ones for
Hofmannsthal; he continued with his earlier
literary projects, almost without a break. In 1920,
Hofmannsthal, along with
Max Reinhardt, founded the Salzburg Festival. His later plays revealed a
growing interest in religious, particularly Roman Catholic, themes. Among
his writings was a screenplay for a film version of Der Rosenkavalier (1925)
directed by Robert Wiene.
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Guillaume Apollinaire

From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Guillaume Apollinaire (August 26, 1880 – November 9, 1918) was a French
poet, writer, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother. Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century, he is credited with
coining the word surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described
as surrealist, the play Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1917, later used as the
basis for an opera in 1947). Two years after being wounded in World War I,
he died at 38 of the Spanish flu during the pandemic.
Born Wilhelm Albert Vladimir Apollinaris Kostrowitzky and raised speaking
French, among other languages, he emigrated to France and adopted the name
Guillaume Apollinaire. His mother, born Angelica Kostrowicka, was a Polish
noblewoman born near Navahrudak (now in Belarus). His father is unknown but
may have been Francesco Flugi d'Aspermont, a Swiss Italian aristocrat who
disappeared early from
Apollinaire's life. He was partly educated in Monaco.
Apollinaire was one of the most popular members of the artistic community of
Montparnasse in Paris. His friends and collaborators during that period
included Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, André Salmon, Marie
Laurencin,
Andre Breton, André Derain, Faik Konica, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre
Reverdy, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Ossip Zadkine, Marc Chagall and Marcel
Duchamp. In 1911, he joined the Puteaux Group, a branch of the cubist
movement. On September 7, 1911, police arrested and jailed him on suspicion
of stealing the Mona Lisa, but released him a week later.
Apollonaire then
implicated his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning
in the art theft, but he was also exonerated. He fought in World War I and,
in 1916, received a serious shrapnel wound to the temple. He wrote Les
Mamelles de Tirésias while recovering from this wound. During this period he
coined the word surrealism in the program notes for Jean Cocteau and Erik
Satie's ballet Parade, first performed on 18 May 1917. He also published an
artistic manifesto, L'Esprit nouveau et les poètes. Apollinaire's status as
a literary critic is most famous and influential in his recognition of the
Marquis de Sade, whose works were for a long time obscure, yet arising in
popularity as an influence upon the Dada and Surrealist art movements going
on in Montparnasse at the beginning of the twentieth century as, "The freest
spirit that ever existed."
The war-weakened
Apollinaire died of
influenza during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. He was interred in the Le Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.
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ELIOT

T.S. Eliot
"The Waste Land"
Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Harvard, where
he wrote some of the satirical poems in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
(1917),
T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (1888-1965) left the U.S.A. in 1914 and
settled in London, eventually becoming an influential publisher at Faber and
Faber. Like many others, he was encouraged by Ezra Pound, to whom The Waste
Land (1922) is dedicated. Among other important influences were
Dante,
the Elizabethans Jacobeans, especially
Donne, and Christian mystics (Eliot
joined the Anglican Church in 1927). The Waste Land, the most influential
(though not the most read) poem of the century, is a pessimistic view of the
desolation of European civilization after the war. In five books, mainly in
free verse, it is uncompromisingly intellectual, full of complex and learned
references which are not much clarified by Eliot's notes (for further
elucidation of a transcription from the Sanskrit Upanishads, the reader is
advised to consult a scholarly work in German).
Eliot's poetic drama.
'Sweeney Agonistes' (published in the 1936 Collected Poems, but written ten
years earlier) turned him towards the theatre. His most successful verse
play, often revived, was Murder in the Cathedral (1935), about the murder of
Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral and first staged there. The Cocktail
Party (1950) was also a popular and critical success. The work that some
critics think challenges The Waste Land as Eliot's masterpiece is the
sequence Four Quartets (1943), 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', "The Dry
Salvages' and 'Little Gidding'. It is suffused with Anglo-Catholic
mysticism, dwells on time, memory and consciousness and offers some hope of
reconciliation that is hardly discernible in The Waste Land.
Eliot also
wrote several volumes of profound and original social and literary
criticism, not forgetting humorous verses for children about cats.
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POUND

Another American exile,
Ezra Pound (1885— 1972) lived in London, Paris
and, mostly, Italy. He was leader of the experimental movement known as
Imagism, characterised by new verse forms, complex imagery and everyday
speech. Adherents included the poets H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell
and Richard Aldington. Pound also promoted the work of
Robert Frost,
advised
Eliot, and was associated with the brief Vorticist movement.
Hugely well-read, witty, complicated, his own creative effort went into
his Cantos, a modern epic that occupied most of his life. This, plus his
influence on others and his main1 volumes of criticism, make him one of
the masters of Modernism.
Pound's support for Fascism led to his
incarceration for 13 years in a US mental hospital after World War Two
where he completed The Visan Cantos (1948), controversially awarded the
Bolhngen prize for poetry.
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THE IRISH REVIVAI
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The upsurge of Irish nationalism
that began in the late 19th century and lasted until after the
establishment of the Free State in 1921 was largely a cultural
phenomenon. Irish legend and folklore, history and poetry, even games,
all played a part, but drama was at the core. The Irish Literary
Theatre, which later became the Irish National Theatre and eventually
the Abbey Theatre Company, was founded in 1899. The moving spirits were
two dissimilar individuals who shared a passionate devotion to Catholic
Irish culture (though themselves members of the Protestant
English-speaking ascendancy),
W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.
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YEATS

William Butler Yeats
"A Man Young
And Old"
Son and brother of successful painters,
W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
(1865-1939) gave up art in favour of literature in his twenties, his
early publications including studies of Blake and Spenser. A convinced
Irish nationalist, he was fascinated by Irish folklore and from an early
age was powerfully attracted by mysticism and the supernatural, a
significant influence and potent source of symbol in his work. He
founded an Irish Literary Society in London (1891) and later Dublin, and
his dream of a national theatre began to take concrete shape when,
through a Catholic landowner, Edward Martyn, he met Augusta, Lady
Gregory, widow of an ex-governor of Ceylon. His play, Ibe Countess
Cathleetu based on a story in his first collection of Irish folk tales,
was staged in Dublin in 1892, an event taken as marking the beginning of
the Irish Revival.
Yeats's most successful play was Catbleen ni Houlihan (1902) with Maud
Gonne, the beautiful revolutionary nationalist and subject of his love
poetry, in the title role as a personification of Ireland. In spite of
all his work for the Irish theatre,
Yeats was essentially a poet, not a
playwright, though Ireland is the theme of all his creative writing.
Often described as the greatest poet in English of the century,
Yeats
went through many reincarnations, from the Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite
poems of his early years, to a tougher, more refined style under the
influence of Synge, Pound and others, to the dense symbolism of The
Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933). What lends him great stature
is the blend between his life and his work, his noble, if sometimes
faulty (he flirted with Fascism in the 1930s), effort to make the world
fit his imaginative pattern.
'Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams,"
Yeats, 'He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven'.
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NATURALISM AND ITS OPPONENTS
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Realism in drama encouraged Realism in the theatre - in sets and
stagecraft, as well as acting. Among the leaders in this development were
Sir Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in London, where he induced nightly
fainting fits with his highly detailed production of the famous melodrama,
The Bells (1871); Duke George II of Saxe-Meiningen, who with his
actress-wife formed a touring company in which the actors spoke rather than
enunciated; and the American impresario David Belasco, a truly 'theatrical'
personality, famous for special effects of which his own popular plays were
often the vehicle (Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden
West, attained greater fame as Puccini operas).
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ANTI-REALISM
The most obvious casualties were the 'popular' theatres and music halls
which catered to the working class, but they were not the only ones. The
middle classes were also deserting the theatre. For this, however, the
cinema was only partly to blame. From
Henrik Ibsen and on, people simply did not
like the new drama: it broke cherished taboos and demanded that they think
for themselves, something they had no desire to do. With the arrival of
Modernism, in its various anti-Realist guises, all the old conventions
appeared to have been abandoned, and anarchy, it seemed, strode the stage.
Experimental drama did not provide 'a good night out', and theatres
contracted to adjust to their reduced audience.
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SYMBOLISM

Maurice
Maeterlinck
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The reaction against experimental drama was noticeable in France as
early as the 1850s; a dramatisation of
Zola's Tberese Raquin was booed off
the stage. Zola was a Symbolist only in the rather general sense in which
symbolism is a characteristic of nearly all literature. More specifically,
Symbolism refers to certain French writers and artists around the turn of
the century, perhaps to a group of Russians somewhat later and sometimes to
Modernism in Latin America.
The most influential figure was
Mallarme whose advice to depict not the
thing but the effect is a kind of Symbolist motto. He advocated a new drama
portraying the mental life, not the world of the senses. For the Symbolists,
art is a means of understanding rather than feeling, and since they despised
mundane reality, the Symbolists were antagonistic towards Realist drama.
Symbolist drama tends to be learned and decidedly static.
The Art Theatre founded in the 1890s by the poet Paul Fort, was at the
centre of the movement, set up largely in reaction against the predominantly
Realist Theatre Libre of the actor-director Andre Antoine, a friend of
Zola.
Playwrights patronized by the Art Theatre included
Maurice
Maeterlinck
(1862-1949), best known for Pelleas et Melisande (1892, later the basis of
Debussy's opera) and The Blue Bird (1908),
Hugo von
Hofmannsthal
"Poems" (1874-1929),
Paul
Claudel (1869—1955) and the young
Yeats, whose interest in the occult the
Symbolists shared. The influence of Symbolism was widespread, not only m
Russia and Latin America, but also on Pound,
Joyce,
Eliot,
Rilke and
Virginia Woolf.
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EXPRESSIONISM
As
J. B. Priestley remarked 'it is a waste of time trying to find an
exact definition of Expressionism in drama'. In its most forceful,
revolutionary phase, it belonged to the Berlin theatre of the early 1920s,
more broadly to Central Europe in the first quarter of the century, and more
broadly still to much non-Realist drama. The term was first used of painting
in which the painter 'sought to express emotional experience rather than
impressions of the physical world'. The young Expressionist playwrights had
large ambitions, seeking a spiritual transformation of society, and, in
terms of the drama, abandoning objectivity and attempting to capture the
subjective depths of modern poetry and the greater scope of, significantly,
the cinema (where Expressionism had powerful effects . Rebelling against
most current values. Expressionist playwrights turned to once-taboo subjects
such as sex and class. The typical Expressionist 'hero' (always male) is not
involved in a plot but in some kind of inward odyssey, and the mood is often
violent, always extreme. Stage designers were influenced by Expressionist
art, with atmospheric lighting, fierce colours, and jagged lines. Beyond
Central Europe, the Expressionist influence was not great, though an
exception might be made for
Eugene O'Neill.
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Silver Age of Russian Poetry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Silver Age is a term
traditionally applied by Russian philologists to the first two decades of
the 20th century. It was an exceptionally creative period in the history of
Russian poetry, on par with the Golden Age a century earlier. In the Western
world other terms, including Fin de siècle and Belle Époque, are somewhat
more popular.
Although the Silver Age may be said to have
truly begun with the appearance of
Aleksandr
Blok's "Verses to the Beautiful
Lady", some scholars have extended its chronological framework to include
the works of the 1890s, starting with Nikolai Minsky's manifesto "With the
light of conscience" (1890),
Dmitry
Merezhkovsky's treatise "About the
reasons for the decline of contemporary Russian literature" (1893) and
Valery Bryusov's almanac "Russian
symbolists" (1894).

Aleksandr
Blok
"Dvenadtzat"
("The Twelve")
llustrations by Yuri Annenkov
Although the Silver Age was dominated by
the artistic movements of Russian Symbolism, Acmeism, and Russian Futurism,
there flourished innumerable other poetic schools, such as Mystical
Anarchism. There were also such poets as
Ivan Bunin and
Marina Tsvetayeva
who refused to align themselves with any of these movements.
Aleksandr
Blok
emerged as the leading poet, respected by virtually everyone. The poetic
careers of
Anna Akhmatova,
Boris Pasternak, and
Osip Mandelshtam, all of them spanning many decades, were also launched
during that period.

Boris Pasternak
"Poems"
The Silver Age ended after the Russian
Civil War.
Blok's death and
Nikolay
Gumilyov's execution in 1921, as well as
the appearance of the highly influential
Boris Pasternak collection, My Sister is
Life (1922), marked the end of the era. The Silver Age was a golden era
nostalgically looked back to by emigre poets, led by
Georgy Ivanov in Paris
and
Vladislav Khodasevich in Berlin.
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Osip Mandelshtam "Tristia",
"Poems"
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Anna Akhmatova
"Poems",
"Requiem",
Iconography
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Marina Tsvetayeva
"Poems"
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AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHTS
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North America in the 19th century was not short of theatrical
entertainments, from vaudeville and burlesque through melodrama to serious
plays, but native American drama made little impression on the world stage
until the early 20th century. Its flowering then is associated largely with
O'Neill and the development of an American equivalent of the European
independent art theatre.
O'Neill was unique, but there were other dramatists
worthy of serious consideration, such as
Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959),
Thornton Wilder (1897-1976), remembered especially for his evocation of
provincial life in Our Town (1938) and his best-selling novel The
Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927),
Lilian Hellman (1907-84), who
caused a sensation with her first play, dealing with lesbianism, The
Children's Hour (1934), and, later and greater,
Tennessee Williams and
Arthur Miller.
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O'NEILL

Son of an actor,
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), as with so many American
writers, knocked about in various colourful jobs (gold prospector, seaman,
etc.) before beginning to write plays, mainly naturalistic dramas based on
his maritime experience, while confined in a tuberculosis sanatorium. He
became involved with the Provincetown Players, a group of actors and
writers who founded an art theatre in a converted New England fishing shack
in 1915, and the company produced his early plays. With Beyond the Horizon,
a full-length realistic drama, and the Expressionist The Emperor Jones (both
1920), about the rise and fall of a black adventurer, he achieved national
recognition. Although
O'Neill is generally known for only a handful of
plays, he was at this time extremely prolific: between 1920-22 he produced
nine plays. He was widely recognized as America's first great playwright,
and became a major influence on later American drama.
Influenced by
Ibsen,
Strindberg and Greek tragedy,
O'Neill was an
experimental dramatist who did not find his true voice until comparatively
late. The New England tragedy Desire under the Elms (1924) is
naturalistic in form. Strange Interlude (1928) is an
experiment in the dramatic use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, and
Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) is
O'Neill's rewriting of Aeschylus set in
the American Cavil War. After Ah, Wilderness! (1933), uncharacteristically a
nostalgic comedy, and the unsuccessful Days Without End (1934), no new play
appeared for twelve years, due largely to ill health, although he did not
stop writing. His final period began with The Iceman Cometh (1946), a long,
naturalistic tragedy of the pipe-dreaming no-hopers in a saloon on New
York's Bowery. His masterpiece, Long Day's Journey into Night (1956) was
written in the early 1940s and first performed posthumously. It recounts a
day in the lives of the troubled, mutually destructive Tyrone family, based
on his own. A Moon for the Misbegotten (1957) concerns the self-destruction
of the elder brother of the family after the mother's death.
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TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Like
O'Neill,
Tennessee (Thomas Lanier)
Williams (1911-83) had many
one-act plays performed by obscure groups before establishing a reputation
for his deeply felt, partly autobiographical drama The Glass Menagerie
(1944).
Williams was born in Mississippi and Southern culture and families
form the major component of his plays. His sympathy for the lost, tormented
individual (a description that, judging from his Memoirs, 1975, might be
applied to him) was evident also in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), set in
New Orleans and concerned with the destructive - or destroyed — illusions of
a faded Southern belle. None of his later plays had quite the resounding
success of these two. They included; The Rose Tattoo (1950), a comedy; the
symbolic, experimental Camino Real (1953); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1955), a psychological family drama; Sweet Bird of Youth (1956), and
The Night of the Iguana (1959)
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ARTHUR MILLER

Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe
The finest plays of
Arthur Miller (born 1915) were written by the time he
was 40, although his reputation has continued to climb, especial in
Britain. His first Broadway play in 1944 closed within a week, but All My
Sons (1947), a drama of disillusion in the tradition of Ibsen an important
influence), was a big success, and his masterpiece, Death of a Salesman
(1949)
. an even greater one. An American classic, it concerns an ordinary, well-meaning
man destroyed by the false values of society.
Miller's famous essay on
'Tragedy and The Common Man' was written the same year. The Crucible (1953)
is a powerful, if flawed, drama about the witch trials of 17th-century
Salem, bur clearly reflected McCarthy's persecution of alleged Communists in
contemporary America. A View from the Bridge (1955), set among Sicilian
longshoremen (dockers) in Brooklyn, is again concerned with tragedy brought
upon a simple family by contemporary values. Perfectly constructed, it
features in many 'Eng. Lit.' syllabuses. After a long silence.
Miller's next
play was the controversial After the Fall (1964), apparently based on his
marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Incident at Vichy (1964) concerned the
persecution of the Jews; The Price (1968), more widely admired, returned to
his old theme of the destruction of family relationships; Broken Glass
(1994) won the Olivier Best Play Award.
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AVANT-GARDE DRAMA
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The rise of the independent 'art' theatre, the rejection of Naturalism
and the resulting experimentalism in drama spawned a variety of novelties.
Some caused a brief flutter and disappeared as suddenly as they arose.
Others carried more intellectual weight and, although contemporaries may
have seen them as passing curiosities, they proved to have unexpected
staying power and influenced the later development of drama.
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IONESCU

Romanian-born
Eugene Ionescu (1912—94) was an admirer of Jarry and also
found comedy in the absurd, notably in The Bald Prima Donna (1948),
constructed largely from the banal phrases of a French phrase book. His
later 'anti-plays', often featuring a bewildered author-figure, fuse humour
with grim and tragic elements, even despair. In his most successful play. Rhinoceros (1959), human beings are turned into rampaging pachyderms by an
increasingly totalitarian society.
The rough early life, much of it spent in prison, of the 'saintly monster"
Jean Genet (1910-86) furnished material for his plays, notably The Maids
(1947), The Balcony (1957) and The Blacks (1958). Illusion battles with
reality, and bizarre, often violent fantasies are played out in a dream-like
atmosphere that, in spite of Genet's declared amoral and hedonistic
principles, approaches religious ritual. This was something like the form of
drama, misleadmgly called the 'Theatre of Cruelty", advocated by the
actor-director Antonin Artaud (1896-1948).
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BECKETT

Samuel Beckett
"Waiting for
Godot"
The idea that the world is absurd, mysterious beyond comprehension,
naturally gives rise to pessimistic sentiments, bewilderment and a sense of
purposelessness. Representing these themes in drama can have enervating
effects. Plots become more illogical or non-existent, dialogue minimal and
obscure. Theatregoers for whom the naturalistic drama is the norm naturally
complain of these difficulties. Compensations include humour, an important
element in Beckett's renowned play Waiting for Godot (1952, first performed
in English in 1955), which had a massive impact on modern drama and is
chiefly responsible for Beckett's reputation as the most innovative,
influential writer of his time.
Samuel Beckett (1906-89) was born near Dublin, went to Paris, where he later
settled permanently, and met
Joyce, a lifelong friend and subject of his
first book. Most of his work was written in French, sometimes translated
into English by himself. His later stage plays include Endgame (1957),
Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Happy Days (1961). With Come and Go (1966),
containing 121 words, and Breath (1969), lasting 30 seconds, he took
minimalism as far as possible. He also wrote novels, stories and poems.
Although Beckett's work is despairing, it is illuminated by black humour:
some of the two tramps' exchanges in Godot amount to an intellectual comic
patter, and the play overall has a strangely exhilarating effect.
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PINTER

Born into a Gockney Jewish family,
Harold Pinter (born 1930) was writing
poetry in his teens. He became a professional actor, later a notable
theatrical director, and aroused interest with his second play. The
Birthday Party (1958). It contained many of the characteristics of
Pinter's distinctive style: set in a single room, whose occupant is
vaguely and inexplicably threatened by mysterious intruders, the
dialogue inconsequentially conversational, with pauses more meaningful
than words. In The Caretaker (I960), which established Pinter as a major
playwright internationally, a derelict who may or may not be named
Davies, seeks to gain possession or occupancy of a room which may or may
not belong to one or both of two brothers. The prevailing air of menace
is hard to account for. Of his other plays, perhaps the best is The Ilomecoming (1965), a black and sinister 'comed\'' superficially about
the effects of introducing a woman into a male household. Later plays
lacked the impact of the early ones, and Pinter became involved with
various other projects, e.g. directing plays and writing film scripts.
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DURRENMATT

Swiss playwright
Friedrich Durrenmatt (born 1921), a prolific writer who
first gamed attention abroad in the 1950s through his existentialist
detective novels, considered, in the wake of the horrors of 1939—45,
that it was no longer possible to make moral judgements since the world
was devoid of moral values. ' Tragedy' is therefore no longer
appropriate, but his disillusioned, absurdist plays are very black
comedies. The Marriage of Mr Mississippi (1952) concerns two people
whose zealous pursuit of justice ends in their justification of
murder, and the infinite corruptibility of human beings underlies The
Visit (1956) and The Physicists (1962).
Durrenmatt's later plays show
signs of mellowing and are more conventional in technique.
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POETS
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According to legend, the denunciations of the poet Archilochus against
his enemies were so effective that they committed suicide. By the mid-20th
century, poets and their work had lost that kind of impact. Perhaps the last
poet who really believed in poetry's influence on public events was Yeats,
who agonized that his play Cathleen ni Houlihan was
responsible for the deaths of the leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin
('Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?'). Modern
poets are more of the mind of
Auden (in his elegy to Yeats): 'poetry makes
nothing happen'.
Opinion polls show that a large number of people have
written a poem at some time, and published poets are more numerous than
ever, though very few make a living from their poetry. Modern poetry since
Eliot has often been too 'difficult' for the average reader. However, a
handful of poets in the late 20th century have achieved a huge popular
following as well as the respect of the critics.
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FROST

Robert
Frost
"Poems"
The popular image of
Robert Frost
(1874— 1963) is of the poet of New
England, its birch trees and farmland, the heir of Wordsworth and the
Transcendentalists. His early poetry was published in old England, where he
lived with his family in 1912—15 after a period of profound depression
caused partly by the deaths of two children. He formed a close friendship
with the English poet,
Edward Thomas, killed in the First World War, who
shared his love of the traditional and the colloquial. He subsequently
settled on a New Hampshire farm, though neither farm nor poetry absolved him
from the need to teach. By the time of Collected Poems (1930),
Frost's
'woodland philosophy' — and the accessibility of his work — had made him an
American icon, but there was something deeper and darker in him. This
bitter, destructive element is more evident in the dramatic, blank-verse
poems of the 1940s, which explore the relationship of the individual to God
m the modern world.
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DYLAN THOMAS

Dylan Thomas
"Poems"
Hugely popular during his lifetime,
Dylan Thomas (1914—53) has come to
be regarded with suspicion by some critics, who suggest that his
extraordinary verbal exuberance and elaborate style mask superficiality
and insincerity. Even in Wales, some regard him as a showman, exploiting Welshness. However, a few of his poems are among that select number
familiar to nearly everyone. In general, his poems need to be read
aloud, and no one read them better than himself. Best of all is his
radio play. Under Milk Wood (1952), a picture of a Welsh fishing village
in language that bridges the division between prose and poetry. His
exhausting American tours, combined with frail health and an addiction
to wild living, combined to cause his early death.
LARKIN

For thirty years librarian at the University of Hull,
Philip Larkin
(1922-85) knew from youth that he was a writer, but he did not find his
true voice until about 1950, and first attracted widespread attention
with The Less Deceived (1955). His other major collections are The
Whitsun Weddings (1964) of which the title poem is his best known, and
High Windows (1974). Conservative, anti-modernist, working with
traditional forms and conventional subject matter but in subtly new
ways, Larkin, if not a major artist - his total output was small - seems
to exemplify the first-rate poet who yet remains in touch with and
appeals to ordinary people.
HUGHES

Ted Hughes (born 1930), who succeeded the much-loved John Betjeman as
Britain's Poet Laureate in 1984, is a very masculine poet, vital, even
violent, whose best-known work is probably Crow (1970), a sequence of
poems linked by the image of the dark, crafty, predatory crow.
Hughes's
view of the animal world, his chief subject, emphasizes the alienation
of modern society from its natural origins. He has also written
extensively for children and for the theatre. Hughes was married to the
distinguished American poet Sylvia Plath (1932—63). whose subsequently
much-discussed suicide (before most of her work was published; has
obstructed objective judgment of her work and may (or may not) be
connected with
Hughes's ambiguous attitude to women.
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