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poetry four year

Modern Poetry ,Fourth Year

Lecturer. Haider Al-Musawi

·        Early Phase of Modern Poetry.( Under the spell of the Victorian Era)

·        Middle phase of Modern Poetry. (Orientalism in Modern Poetry)

·        Latest Phase of Modern Poetry.(Innovation, Pattern poetry under the psychoanalytic approach)

Targets:

·        Delving into the pivotal manifestos of modern poetry.

·        Delving into the literary triad; Form, Language and Contents.

·        Delving into the recent waves of Modern Criticism.

Bestowing upon the students an impetus to dissect a text themselves

Syllabi:

4-          Easter 
                
 

Lecture one

Poetry

The Twentieth Century

·        1914-18 world war I.

·        1918…Gerard Manley Hopkins` poetry published.

·        1922…T.S. Eliot s The Waste Land.

·        1922…James Joyce s Ulysses.

·        1928…W.B. Yeats`s The Tower.

·        1930…Period of depression and unemployment begins.

·        1939-45…World War II.

·        1984….Cultural criticism; Jacklight.

The End of Victorian- the Edwardian- Word War I

Cultural movement do not proceed by central and this section, which for convenience we call “the twentieth century.” Begins really with the late 19^th, when the sense of the passing of a major phrase of English history was already in the air. Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887 and , even  more diamond jubilee in 1897 were felt even by contemporaries to make the end of an era. As the 19^th c drew to a close there were many manifestations of a weakening of traditional stabilities.

The aesthetic movement, with its insistence on “art for art’s sake” assaulted the assumption about the nature and function of art held by ordinary middle class readers. Deliberately, provocatively. It helped to-widen the breach between artists and writers on the one hand and the “Philistine” public on the other a breach whose earlier symptom was Mathew Arnold’s war on the Philistines in Culture and Anarchy  and which was later to result in the “alienation of the artist” that is now a commonplace of criticism . This was more than a purely English matter. From France came the tradition of the bohemian life  that second the limits imposed by conventional ideas of respectability, together with other notions of artist as rejecting and rejecting by ordinary  society, which in different ways fostered the view of the alienated artist.

The life and work of the French symbolist poets in France, the early novel of Thomas Maun in Germany (especially Budden brooks, 1901). And Joyce’s  Portrait of the Artist as a young Man(1916) show some of the very different ways in which this attitude revealed itself in literature all over Europe. In England, the growth of education as result for the Education Act of 1870, which finally made elementary education compulsory and universal, led to the rapid emergence of a large, unsophisticated literary publish at whom new kinds of journalism, in particular the cheap” yellow press” were directed. A public that was literate but not in any real sense educated  in creased steadily throughout the 19^th century. And one result of this was the splitting up of the audience for literature into” highbrow,”  “lowbrow” and “middlebrows” although in earlier periods there had been different kinds of audience for different kinds of writing, the split now developed with unprecedented speed and to an unprecedented  degree because of the mass  production of “popular” literature for the semiliterate. The frog mention of the reading public now merged with the artist’s war on the Philistine (and indeed was one of the cause of that was in the first place) to widen the gap between popular art esteemed only by the sophisticated and the expert. This is part of the background of modern literature all over the Western word.

Another manifestation- or at least accompaniment- of the end of the Victorian age was the rise of various kinds of pessimism and stoicism. The novels and poetry of Thomas Hardy show one kind of pessimism (and it was pessimism, even if Hardy  himself repudiated the term). And the poems of A.E Houseman show another verity, while a real or affected stoicism of the last decade of the 19^th century and the first decade of the 10^th examples of this stoicism- the determination to stand for human dignity by enduring  bravely, with a “still upper lip” whatever fate may  bring-range from Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays and the theoretically assertive poems of the editor and journalist W.E Henley, to Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book  and many of his stories, the last stanza of Housman’s The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux (“Bear them we can. And if we can we must)  and Yeast’s “they know that Hamlet and least are gray.”

Although the high tide of anti-Victorianism was marked by the publication in 1918 of that classic of ironic debunking. Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), the criticism of the normal attitudes and preconceptions of the Victorian middle classes first became really violent in the last two decades of the 19^th century. No one could have been more savage in his attacks on the Victorian conceptions of the family, education and religion than Samuel Butler, whose novel The Way of All Flesh (completed in 1884m posthumously published in 1903) is still the bitterest indictment in English literature of the Victorian of life. The chorus of  questioning of Victorian assumptions grew ever louder as the century drew to an end; sounding prominently in it was the voice of the young Bernard show one of butler’s greatest admirers. The position of women too was rapidly changing during this period. The Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882, which allowed married women to own property their own right  the admission of women to the universities at different times during the Katter part of century the fight for women’s’ suffrage, which was not won  until the attitude to won until 1918 (and not fully won until 1928)– these events marked a changes in the attitude to women  in the part they played in the national life as well as in the relation between the sexes which is reflected in variety of ways in the literature of the period.

The Boer War (1899-1902) fought by the British to establish political and economic control over the Boer republics of south Africa marked both the high point of and the reaction against British imperialism. It was a war against which many British intellectuals protested and one which the British in the end slightly ashamed of having won. The development of the British Empire  into the British Commonwealth  continued in fits and starts throughout  the first half of the 20^th century with imperialist and anti-imperialist  sentiment often meeting head on; writers as far apart as Kipling and E.M. Forster occupied themselves with the problem. The Irish question also caused a great deal of excitement from the beginning of the period until well into the 1920’s. As steadily rising Irish nationalism protested with increasing violence against the political subordination of Irish to the British Crown  and government. In  World War I some Irish nationalist  sought German help in rebelling against British and this exacerbated feeling on both sides. No one can fully understand William Butler Yeats or James Joyce without some awareness of the Irish struggle for independence the feelings of Anglo-Irish men of letters on this burring topic and the way in which the Irish literary revival of the late 19^th and early 20^th century (with which Yeats was much concerned ) reflected a determination  to achieve a vigorous national life culturally even if the road seemed blocked politically.

Edwardian England (1901-10) was very conscious of being longer Victorian. Edward VII stamped his character on the decade in which he reigned. It was a vulgar age of conspicuous enjoyment by those who could afford it and writers and artists kept well away from implication in high society (though there were some conspicuous exceptions) in general there was no equivalent in this period of queen Victoria’s interest in Tennyson. The alienation of artist and intellectuals was preceding a space. From  1910(when George V came to the throne) until war broke in August 1914 Britain achieved a temporary equilibrium between Victoria earnestness and Edwardian  flashiness in retrospect that Georgian period seems peculiarly golden that last phrase of assurance and stability before the old order throughout Europe broke upper in violence with results that are still with us. Yet even the surface there was restlessness and experimentation. If this was the age of Rupert Brooke it was also the age of T.T Eliot’s first experiments in a disturbingly new kind of poetry.

Edwardian as a term, applied to English history suggests a period in which the social and economic stabilities of the Victorian age-country houses with numerous servants a  flourishing and middle –class a strict hierarchy of social classes- remained unimpaired through on the level of ideas there was a sense of change and liberation. “Georgian” refers largely to the lull before the storm of World War I. that war as out selection of the war poet makes clear, produced some major shifts in attitude.

Poetry

Lecture two

THE POETIC REVOLUTION

A technical revolution in poetry was going on side by side with shifts in attitude. The imagist movement influenced by T. E Hulme’s insistence on hard clear, precise images and encouraged by Ezra Pound when he lived in London just before World War I, fought against romantic fuzziness and facile emotionalism in poetry. The movement developed simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic and its early members included Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolittle, John Could Fletcher and F.S. Flint. As Flint explained in an article in March, 1913 imagist insisted on Direct treatment of the thing’ whether subjective or objective on the avoidance of all words “that did not contribute to the presentation,” and on a freer metrical movement than a strict adherence to “the sequ3nce of a metronome” could allow. All this encouraged precision in imagery and freedom of rhythmical movement, but more was required fir the production of poetry of any real scope and interest. Imagism went in for the short, sharply etched, and distractive lyric, but it had no technique for the production of longer and more complex poems. Other new ideas about poetry helped to provide this technique. Sir Herbert Crierson’s great edition of the poems of John Donne in 1912 both reflected and helped to encourage a new enthusiasm for 17^th c metaphysical poetry. The revival of interest in metaphysical wit brought with it a desire on the part of some pioneering poets to introduce into their poetry a much higher degree intellectual complexity than had been found among the Victorian or Georgian. The full subtlety of French Symbolist poetry also now came to be appreciated. It had been admired in the 90’s but for its dreamy suggestiveness rather than for its imagistic precision and complexity. At the same time a need was felt to bring poetic language and rhythms closer to those of conversation, or at least to spice the formalities of poetic utterances with echoes of the colloquial and even the slangy irony. Which made possible several levels of discourse simultaneously and wit, with the use of puns (banished from serious poetry for over 200 years). Helped to achieve that union of thought and passion which T.S Eliot in his review of Grieson’s anthology of metaphysical poetry (19210 saw as characteristic pf the metaphysical and wished to bring back into modern poetry. A new critical and a new creative movement in poetry went hand in hand, with Eliot the high priest of both. It was Eliot who extended the scope of Imagism by bringing the English metaphysical and the French symbolists (as well as the English Jacobean dramatist) to the rescue; thus adding new criteria of complexity and allusiveness to the criteria of concreteness and precision stressed by the imagists. It was Eliot, , too who introduced into modern English and American poetry the kind of irony achieved by shifting suddenly from the formal to the colloquial or by oblique allusions to objects or ideas that contrasted sharply with those carried by the surface meaning of the poem. Thus between, say 1911 (the fist year of the Georgian poets) and 1922  (the year of the publication of The Waste Land) a major revolution occurred in English-and for that matter American-poetic theory and practice-a revolution which determined the way in which most serious poet and critics now think about their art. If one compares the poems in Palgrave s Golden Treasury, a Victorian anthology which was still used as a basic school text in Britain in the 1930s with those in a number of academic anthologies of the mid 20^th century, the change in poetic taste will become startlingly apparent. In the critical discussion, if not always in the allotment of space, Donne rather than Spenser becomes the great poet of the 16^th and 17 the century period: Gerard Manley Hopkins replaces Tennyson as the great 19^th century poet: and in general what one might call the metaphysical-Symbolist tradition and the platonic strain of both the Elizabethan and (in his own way) Wordsworth.

The posthumous publication by Robert-Bridges in 1918 of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins encouraged further experimentation in the language and the rhythms. Hopkins combined absolute precision of the individual image with a complex ordering of image and a new kind of material patterns.

The young poets of the early 1930’s-W.H, Auden, Stephen Spender Day Lewis-were much influenced by Hopkins as well as by Eliot (now the presiding genius of modern English and American poetry) and by variety of other poets from the 16^th c John Skelton  to Wilfred Owen. And even when the almost flamboyant new tones of Dylan Thomas were first sounded in the; late 1930’s, the influence of Hopkins could still be heard. It is only since Word War II, that a new generation of young English poets (including Donald Davie, Elizabeth Jennings and Philips Larkin) searching for what has been called “purity of diction” have turned away from both the 17^th c and the poetry of Hopkins and Eliot to seek a poetry which avoids all kinds of verbal excess in its desire for quiet luminosity and unpretentious truth.

Meanwhile the remarkable reflecting beginning among career of W.B Yeats stretching across the whole modern period showed how a truly great poet can at the same time  the varying developments of his age and maintain as unmistakably individual accent beginning among the aesthetic of 90’s turning later to a more tough and spare ironic language without losing his characteristic verbal magic, working out his own notions of symbolism and bringing them in different ways into his poetry developing in his full maturity rich symbolic and metaphysical poetry with its own curiously haunting cadences and its imagery both shockingly realistic and movingly suggestive, Yeast’s work is a history of English poetry between 1890 and 1989. Yet he is always Yeats unique and inimitable-without doubt the greatest English- speaking poet of his age.

Two important 20^th C poets stand somewhat apart from the main map of English poetry in the first half of the century. They are Robert Graves and Edwin Muir. Each has a highly individual voice and, the latter especially, limited range. But they both show that there were strengths in the English poetic tradition untapped by Eliot and his followers. Graves, with a strong sense of tradition combined with a highly idiosyncratic poetic personality, has played a part in English poetry comparable to that played by Robert Frost in American. Muir’s more quietist and mystical temperament was nourished by the unusual circumstances of his life, and his childhood in Orkney. In him, awareness of his native Scotland and a response to the heroic stories of ancient Greece were linked. Both poets were much concerned with time and the human response to time, and both had a deep sense of history.

Poetry

Lecture three

BETWEEN THE WARS

The postwar disillusion of the 1920s was, it might be said a spiritual matter just as Eliot’s Waste Land was spiritual and not a literal wasteland. Depression and unemployment in the early 1930’s, followed by the rise of Hitler and cruel shadow of fascism and Nazism over Europe with its threat of another war represented another sort wasteland which produced another sort of effect on poets and novelists. The impotence of capitalist governments in the face of Hitlerism combined with economic dislocation to turn majority of young intellectuals (and not only intellectuals) in the 1930’s to the political Left. The 1930’s were the Red decade, because only the Left seemed to offer any solution. The early poetry of W.H Auden and his contemporaries carried out for “the death of the old gang” (in Auden’s phrase) and a clean sweep politically and economically, while the Franco rebellion against the republican government in Spain, which started in the summer of 1936 and soon led to full scale war, was regarded as a rehearsal for an inevitable second world war and thus further emphasized the inadequacy of politicians. Yet though all this is reflected passionately in the literature of the period, particularly in the poetry, it was not accompanied by any interesting developments in technique; many younger writers were more anxious to express their attitudes than to construct new kinds of works of art. The outbreak of World War II in September, 1939 following very shortly in Hitler’s pact with Russia, which shocked and disillusioned so many of the young Left wing writers, marked the sudden end of the Red decade; the concern of writers in Britain now was to maintain their integrity and indeed their existence in what was from the beginning expected to be a long and destructive war. This they did surprisingly well, but nevertheless this second was brought inevitable exhaustion; English literature has never quite recovered the vitality and interest in technical experimentation that marked the twenty wears after about 1912.

These years-roughly 1912 to 1930- were the Heroic Age of the modern English novel. Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and D.H Lawrence are the giants with Virginia Woolf and E.M Foster brilliant minor figures- to name only the most outstanding writers. An important novelist of this period who stands rather apart from any of the movements discussed here is Ford Maddox Ford (1873-1939), whose four novels about Christopher Tietjens published in the 1920’s (and republished in a single volume as Parade’s End in 1950) show meticulous craftsmanship and a deep sense of the change wrought by the war on English life and character. The poet Robert Graves is similarly independent of movements and fashions in 20^th C literature, he developed the Georgian tradition by adopting that of Eliot.

FICTION

Once can trace three major influences on the changes in attitude and technique in the modern novel. The first is the novelist’s realization that the general background of belief which united him with his public in a common sense of what was significant in experience had disappeared. The public values of the Victorian novel, in which major crises of plot could be shown through changes in the social or financial or martial statue of the chief characters, gave way ti more personally conceived notions of  value dependent on the novelist’s intuition’s and sensibilities rather than on public agreement. “To believe that your impressions hold for others” Virginia Woolf once wrote (discussing Jane Austen) ‘is to be released from the cramp and confinement of personality’. The modern novelist could no longer believe this: he had to fall back   on personality, drawing his criterion of significance in human affairs (and thus his principle of selection) from his own intuitions, so that he needed to find ways of convincing the reader that his own private sense of what was significant in experience was truly valid. A new technical burden was thus imposed on the novelist’s prose, for it had now to build to a world of values in stead of drawing on an existing world of. Virginia Woolf tries to solve the problem by using some of the devices of poetry in order to suggest the novelist’s own sense of value and vision of the world, Joyce on the other hand, made no attempt to convey a single personal attitude but reacted to the breakdown of public values by employing a kind of writing so multiple in its implications that it conveyed numerous point of view simultaneously, the author being totally objective and committed to none of them- a mode which required remarkable technical virtuosity.

The second influence on the change in attitude and technique in the modern novel was a new view of time, time was not a series of chronological moments to be presented by the novelist in sequence with an occasional deliberate retrospect (‘this reminded him of’ he recalled that) but as a continuous flow in the consciousness of the individual, with the already continuously merging unto the “not yet” and retrospect merging into anticipation. This influence is closely bound up with a third: the new notions of the nature of consciousnesses which derived in a general way from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung but were also part of the spirit of the age and discernible even in those novelists who had not read either psychologist. Consciousness is multiple, the past is always presenting it at some level and is continually coloring one’s present reaction, Marcel Proust in France, in his great novel sequence Remembrance of Things past (1912-28) had explored the ways in which  the past impinges on the present and consciousness is determined by memory. The view that a main is his memories that his present is the sum of his past, that if we dig into a man’s consciousness we can tell the whole truth about him without waiting for a chronological sequences of time to tale him through a series of testing circumstances, inevitable led to a technical revolution in the novel. For now, by exploring in depth into consciousness and memory rather than presiding lengthwise along the dimension of time a novelist could write a novel concerned ostensibly with only one day of the hero’s life (Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway). This view of multiple levels of consciousness existing simultaneously. Couple with the view of time as a constant flow rather than a series of separate moments, meant that a novelist preferred to plunge into the consciousness of his characters in order to tell his story rather than to provide an external framework of chronological narrative. The “stream of consciousness” techniques, where the author tried to render directly the very fabric of his character’s consciousness without reporting it in formal quoted remarks was developed in the 1920’s as an important new technique of t he English novel. It made for more difficult reading, at least for those accustomed only to the methods of the order English novel. No “porch” was constructed at the front novel to put the reader in possession of necessary preliminary information: such information emerged as the novel progressed the consciousness of each character as it responded to the present with echoes of its past. No conventional signposts were put to tell the reader where he was, for that was felt to interfere with the immediacy of the impression. But once the reader learns how to find way in this unsignposted territory, he is rewarded by new delicacies of perception and new subtleties of presentation.

Consecration on the “stream of consciousness” and on the association of ideas within the individual consciousness led inevitably to stress on the essential loneliness of the individual. For all consciousnesses are unique and isolated, and if this unique, private world is the real in which men live, if the public values to which they must pay lip service in the social world in which they move are not the real values which give meaning to their personality, then each man is condemned to live in the prison of his own incommunicable consciousness. How is true communication possible in such a world? The public gestures imposed upon us by society never correspond to out real inward needs. They are conventional in the bad sense, mechanical, imposing a crude standardization on the infinite subtlety of experience. If we do try to give out a sign from our real selves that sign is bound to be misunderstood when read by some other self in the light of that self’s quite other personality. The theme of such modern fiction is thus the possibility of love, the establishment of emotional communication, in a community of private consciousness. This, is in different ways, the theme of Joyce, Lawrence, of Virginia Woolf, and of Forster, and (on a rather different scale and not always so directly) of Conrad. The search for communion and-the inevitable isolation of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses is symbolic of the human condition as seen by the modern novelist, similar investigations of this basic condition are Forster’s explorations of conventions which seem to be helps to living but which in fact prevent true human contracts, and Virginia Woolf’s delicate projections of the relation between the self’ need for genuine communication. The theme of all Lawrence’s novels is human relationships the ideal of which he restlessly explored with shifting emphases throughout his career; such relationship can be all too easily distorted by the mechanical conventions of society notions of respectability or propriety, by all the shames and frauds of middle class life by the demands of power or money or success. One might almost say that the greatest modern novels are the difficult, and at the same time the inevitability of being human. The dilemma of the condition is never really solved in these novelists; but knowledge that the dilemma is shared-knowledge so brilliantly conveyed in Ulysses and so wryly proffered by Forster- can both illuminate and comfort.

Not all the novelists of the period, of course, were concerned with these themes or employed the new techniques appropriate to them. The "documentary" novelists, such as Arnold Bennet and John Galsworthy (and, in  some at least of his novels, H. G. wells) presented, often with great skill, the changing social scene, showing considerable insight the sympathy in recording aspects of it through the behavior of their imagined characters. Virginia Woolf called these writers "materialists" marinating that they were content to deal with externals and not go on to explore those aspects of consciousness of the true inward life of men, in which human reality resides. She was perhaps judging unfairly, by standards that were not applicable to their sort of fiction; but modern criticism has on the whole agreed with her.

Poetic drama in England with his Murder in the Cathedral (1935). His  later attempts to combine religious symbolism with the box office  appeal of amusing society comedy (as in The Cocktail Party, 1950) though impressive technical achievements were not wholly successful: the combination of contemporary social chatter with profound religious symbolism produces an unevenness of tone and disturbing shifts in levels of real of realism. Elsewhere in modern drama the conflict between realism and symbolism (first clearly seen in Ibsen) is acted out in a variety of ways.

In spite of the achievements of Shaw; Yeats, and Eliot it cannot be said of the drama as it can of poetry and fiction in this period that a technical revolution occurred which changed the course of literary history with respect to that particular literary form. The reformers of the 1890 s invoked the name of the great Norwegian playwright. Henrik Ibsen; like Shaw they saw him as essentially a critic of middle-class society than (as critics tend to see him today) as an essentially poetic dramatist experimenting with symbolic moderns of expression. This may be the reason why the influence of Ibsen soon petered out in run-of-the-mill plays of humanitarian social concern. Harley Granville- Barker actors director and Shakespeare scholar and critic as well as playwright, wrote four interesting and thoughtful plays in 1909 and 1910, but for all their intelligence they never really come alive theatrically. The staple of London west End theater remained social comedy stiffened by occasional irony and sweetened by sentimentality (Noel Coward sis one of the best purveyors of this sort of fare).  The cleverly contrived sentimentalities of J.M Barrie (1860- 1837) were highly popular in their day: Barrie s showed a high theatrical skill and a determined cunning in the exploitation of the audience s reaction. That audience consisted for the most part of tired Philistines. And it was they who determined what to be a box-office success. An original Scottish dramatist, who at one time speared to be  achieving single-handed a new  awakening in the Scottish theater but who   in the end failed to do so, was Janise Bride (pseudonym of Dr. O.H Mavor, 1885-1951) whose witty and inventive plays show an intellectual  liveliness sometimes reminiscent of Shaw.

The energy which the Irish movement gave to England drama has not lasted, Sean O Casey later plays, where he is influenced by expressionist techniques suggested by German dramatist as well as by Eugene O Neil, have nether the vitality nor the vivid humor of those earlier plays in which he was able to give tragic meaning to the realities of contemporary Dublin life without denying its comic elements. Arnold Irish playwright, William Denis Johnston, has also experimented with expressionist techniques and has achieved some of his plays a remarkable combination of the grotesque and the ironic but vitality has not been coming into the English theater in the 1950 s and early 1960 s from this direction.

In the late 1940 s and early 1950 s it seemed that the verse plays of  Christopher fry were about to bring a new kind of poetic life into English drama. But fry s exuberantly witty use of metaphor soon lost its appeal and by the late 1950 s a very different kind of drama brought vitality to the British theater. John Osborne s Look Back in Anger was produced at the royal count theater in 1956, angrily and in an unadorned and sometimes brutally colloquial dialogue it thrust upon the audience. he

The short story I n this period benefit from the new techniques of exploration n depth. A greater consciousness of the symbolic uses to which  object and incidents can be out and a greater subtlety in the ways in  which patterns of suggestiveness are built up below the quietly realistic  surface  can be found in the short stories of writers  so different from each  other as Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Lawrence and Foster, Katherine Mansfield learned from the Russian short-story writer Anton Chekhov how to use the casual seeming incidents of ordinary life in such a way as  to set up haunting overtones of meaning. The apparently inconsequential  surface masking the carefully organized substructure is found much  modern fiction (perhaps most of all in Ulysses) it is one of the result of  the coming together in the novel and the short story of realism and symbolism of contemporary probability and timeless significance. These things of course come together in great fiction of all ages; but the modern writer contrives their coexistence with greater self-consciousness than his predecessors.

Poetry

Lecture four

THE DRAMA

Modern drama begins in a sense with the witty drawing-room comedies of Oscar Wild; yet Wilde founded no dramatic school. His wit was personal and irresponsible, unlike the wit of Restoration comedy, which reflected an attitude to the relation between the sexes which was part of a view society held by a whole (if a small) social class. Bernard Shaw brought still another kind of wit into drama-not wild s exhibitionist sparkle nor yet the assured sophistication of the restoration dramatist. But the provocative paradox that was meant to tease and disturb, to challenge the complacency of the audience, Shaw s discussion plays were given dramatic life through the mastery of theatrical techniques which he learned the snit-Victorianism of the lat Victorians: his long life should not obscure the fact that his first- and some of his best plays belong to the 90 s. other attempts by 20^th-century dramatist to debate social questions on the stage- by  Galsworthy, for example- deserve respect for their  humanity and intelligence an sometimes for their theatrical craftsmanship  but they lack Shaw’s   verbal and intellectual brilliance and his superb capacity to entertain. We must turn to Ireland to find another really impressive variety of dramatic activity. The Irish Literary Theater was founded  in 1899. with early play The Counters Cathleen as its first production. The founders- Yeats, Lady George Moore, and Edward  Martin to mark a contribution to an Irish library revival, but  they were influenced also by the independent Theatre in London, founded  in 1891 by J. T Grain in order to encourage new developments in the drama. In 1902 the Irish Literary Theater was able to maintain a permanent all Irish company and changed its name to the Irish National Theatre, which moved in 1904 to the Abbey Theatre, by which name it has since been known . Many of plays produced at the Abbey Theatre were only of local and ephemeral interest, but J. M. Singer’s use of the speech and  imagination of Irish country people. Yeast’s powerful symbolic use of  them from old legend and Sean O Casey use of the Irish civil  war as a background for plays combining tragic melodrama. Humor of character, and irony of circumstance, brought new kinds of vitality to the theatre. T. S. Eliot  attempted with considerable success to revive a ritual revelation of psychological and social problems left unresolved or even exacerbated by the welfare state. The Entertainer (1957) was similar in its brash virtuosity: Osborne’s third play, Luther (1960) shows him moving  out of a preoccupation with a restricted part of the contemporary social scene to wider concerns and a freer use of imagination. Arnold Wesker was another Royal Count discovery. N a trilogy that began with Chicken Soup  with Barley (1958), he explored, though less stridently than Osborn, related social and psychological problem. Joan Little wood s Theatre Workshop introduced another kind of vigorous new theatricalism, with an impromptu-seeming kind of play made up made numerous small scenes; distinctive examples are Brendan Behan’s The Queer Fellow (1956)  and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958). A third significant influence  on recent English Drama has been the direction peter Hall, who commissioned a number of important play for  his Aldwych production, including  Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons( 1960)    the man however who is emerging as the most important and individual dramatist is Harold Pinter, whose plays including The Birthday Party (1958), The Caretaker (1960) and the Homecoming (1966)  project disturbing symbolic meaning in a quietly colloquial language . these playwrights have the advantage of working with lively and  innovative talent in the practical theater. In addition there s a constant  and fruitful interaction between drama on the stage and drama in the film, the playwright himself usually working in both media.

Literary Criticism

Criticism occupies a much larger place on the map of modern literary culture than it has ever occupied before. New psychological and anthropological ideas have stimulated new kinds of critical activity; tools of critical analysis have been sharpened by the impact of linguistic philosophy; the  increased difficulty of much modern writing. Itself the result of the fragmentation  of the audience for literature and the consequent withdrawal of  serious writers into coteries using a more or less private symbolism, has  increased the demand for critical interpretation. This is the great critical  age, and criticism and creation have marched together (in Eliot’s work, for example) to an usual degree, although modern amerce has placed more  emphasis on criticism than has modern  Britain.  From one point of view, it  could be maintained that Matthew Arnold is  the father of modern literary criticism. Arnold thought literature was bound  to place religion as a source of inspiration and spiritual refreshment, and  as a result insisted that we must have “the best” literature. If literature, rather than religion, is central to a civilization and not a mere relaxation or optional pleasure, discrimination between good and bad literature is of  the first important and critics become in a sense the equivalent of  priests. F. r. Leavis, who edited the influential review Scrutiny from its foundation in 1932 until its denies n 1953, inherited from  Arnold this view of the need to discover and proclaim the best“. His and his contributors essays in Scrutiny were devoted to what they called “discrimination”  to a determined winnowing of the little wheat from the abundant chaff by a careful technique of practical criticism which at first owed a great deal to I. A . Richards’ methods in his Cambridge lectures. Leavis also inherited from Arnold his war against the Pristine  and the view  that the quality of literature which is produced and esteemed  by s generation is bound up with the whole quality of the culture of the way in which people live and work as well as think. Culture and Environment , by Leavis and Denys Thomason (1933) , is similar in more than title to Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy  it is an examination of the way in  which the conditions of living imposed by some elements in modern civilization inhibit proper discrimination in literature as in order spheres. But Leavis repudiates any such simple ethical criterion as Arnold’s “high seriousness” and sees the true moral vision of writer embodied much more subtly and often indirectly in his work than Arnold did. In this view he has been influenced by Eliot’s reduplication (in Tradition and the Individual Talent) of “ay semi-ethical criterion of sublimity.

In general there has in the last forty years or so- but again not to the same degree as in America-a repudiation of the older view of criticism as gentlemanly chat about books, the “hours in a library” sort of thing in favor of criticism much more rigorous and analytic. The revolution in taste proclaimed in the ant romantic essays of T.E Hulme and developed in the influential essays of Eliot inevitably demanded a more strenuous kind of criticism,. If poetic imagery was to be hard, dry, and precise and at the same time impregnated with metaphysical wit and irony, and if a new degree of intellectual complexity was to be demanded of poetry, then the critic had to provide himself with tools for the careful analysis of meaning and structure in order to demonstrate these qualities  or the lack of them. Similarly, critics who agreed with Eliot that the poet has, not a ‘personality’“ to express, but a particular medium, became suspicious alike of autobiographical and exclamatory responses to literature and of the biographical approach which tended to assess literary quality in term of the degree to which the writer genuinely expressed himself.

Thus the Arnoldian insistence on discrimination combined with the Hulme-Eliot tradition of precision and complexity to demand a more searchingly analytic kind of critical description and evaluation. Al the same time I. A .Richards, interested in problems of communication and the different ways in which work to communicate different sorts of meaning developed his own technique of poetic imagery and structure, which had considerable influence on practical (i.e. applied)  criticism. Richards turned to psychology for aid his investigation of meaning and also for the construction of theory of literary value. Psychology came into modern criticism in may other ways. Although the old fashioned kind of biographical approach was now out of favor, the examination of the psychology of poetic creation became a respectable branch  of criticism, sometimes used to reinforce an analytic account of  how imagery works in a poem. On the whole, however, what might be called “genetic” criticism-explanation of the origins and development of work, rather than of its present nature and value-went on apart  from analytic and evaluative criticism. “genetic” criticism could use psychology with all the new resources brought in by Freud and Jung, or it could use sociology, studying the social factors that helped to condition particular writers and their works.

Psychology came into criticism in other ways also. Together with anthropology it helped to investigate the ways in which myth and symbol work in literature. Eliot had confessedly drawn on anthropological works in The Waste Land.  Thus virtually asking the critics to use such aids in examining the poem. They were not slow to take him up. Here Jung rather tan Freud was the major influence. For Jung’s view of racial memory (akin to Yeats view of the “Great Memory” , which preserved the meaning of symbols) was obviously relevant to any investigation of the way in which the mythical element in literature operates. Maud Bod kin’s Archetypal Patterns in poetry   (1034) was pioneer work in this field; it stimulated a host of further studies of myth and symbol on both sides of the Atlantic.

At the same time technique of the analysis of meaning developed by Richard in his practical criticism were being developed to greater and sometimes provocative lengths by his onetime pupil, William Epsom. Semantics was now an established tool of the analytic critic, used in many different ways. So the pattern is this first the necessity for discrimination (because we must have “the best”) through rigorous critical analysis further emphasis on critical rigor by the Hulme-Eliot tradition of Precious. impersonality and perplexity new tools for critical analysis through  the study of semantics and linguistic philosophy: an interest in archetypal images through the psychological and anthropological  incitements to the study of myth and symbol; side by side with this, and sometimes interacting with it psychological and sociological investigation of the way the creative process operates in given instances. All these elements are present in what has for many now years now been called in America the “new criticism” for American critic, more than British critics, have taken up and developed, sometimes with great originality and persuasiveness, all of these critical strains.

In recent years the pattern of critical thought and practice has become less easily definable. New kinds of interests, social or linguistic and some times both have emerged and interacted in varying ways with the procedures developed by Richards Leavis and other. The application of linguistic to the study of different styles-a branch of criticism in stylistics-though not widely popular in British is nevertheless being followed by some younger critics and points toward a new kind of sophistication in the analyses of literary language which may well give a new direction to the Empsonian tradition of analysis of ambiguity. Similarly, the anthropological study of myth which has influenced the myth critics and the seekers of archetypes since the middle 1930s has been given a new depth and complexity by the influences of the French social anthropologist Claude Levi- Strauss. Strauss’s theory of structuralism is concerned with the way the human mind interest and orders the phenomena perceived by the senses and this helps to explain the symbols men use, the social structure they build myths they construct, and the language they employ. Thus new links between anthropology, sociology, linguistics and literature are being forged which may well change radically the shape of literary criticism.

Modern poetry never impugns the trends of literary analysis but it yields itself to the lens of the literary triad; Language, Form, Contents, so poetry can accommodate itself to new ways of living because it is also an expression of the unchanging and universal essence of human experience. One result of poetry s constant stretching and shifting to cover the elastic shape of life is the  appearance of new forms of expression without loss of the old ones. Gerard Manley Hopkins, H.H.Cummings. Dylan Thomas and many more have startlingly reshaped the language of poetry without preventing anyone else from writing in traditional verse pattern. Still the nature of poetry is unchanged by its growing diversity of forms. We. may still define it as the interpretive dramatization of experience in metrical language. Consequently, the literary triad can explicate a verse as followed:

1-Language of poetry.

a. diction; denotation and connotation

b. Imagery.

c. figurative language

1.     metaphor.

2.     metonymy synecdoche.

3.     personification

d. rhetorical devices.

1.     hyperbole and understatement.

2.     ambiguity

3.     ellipsis.

2-Form of poetry.

a. sound values.

1.     rhyme.

2.     alliteration and assonance.

3.     onomatopoeia.

b. versification.

1.     rhythm and meter.

2.     lines of verse.

3.     stanza form.

4.     sonnet.

5.     free verse.

c. form and meaning.

4-content of poetry.

a. narrative.

b. emotion.

c. ideas.

1.     historical context.

2.     explicit statement versus metaphor.

3.     allegory.

4.     symbol.

5.     allusion

6.     myths and archetypes.

Poetry

Lecture five

Pattern Poetry  as a manifestation to the philosophy of the time.

     The most important thing could be noticed in the modern age is the shape of the poem it could be changed into anything interesting in the real life. The shape could refer to the nature like the rain, cloud, flower or umbrella shape poetry¹⁴  for examples; Patterns exist in almost every facet of our lives. There are repeating patterns in art forms such as music, dance, architecture and painting. And every language has its unique rhythms and patterns that get expressed in both prose and poetry. All language patterns subtly influence the way we perceive what is being said or written. Because using words is so automatic for most of us, we usually don t take the time to notice the patterns that we use everyday. To bring a focused attention to the rhythms and patterns of language is really where poetry begins. A poet needs to study, replicate, alter and sometimes flout the patterns that both control and enrich our lives.¹¹   there are many kinds of patterns in poetry according to way of presenting to the readers.

   Examples of experimental and visual poetry forms are as widespread and boundless as the category suggests. This selection of examples highlights the visual form that poetry can take on the printed page:-

    Alter poetry appeared in the 16th century, when English, French, and German Renaissance poets started writing and printing their poems to specific shapes and patterns. For example of an altar form the latter Renaissance’s premier practitioner of the form, George Herbert. The shape replicates a wing – classic altar poetry.

The Easter Story

Jesus came to compensate
For all the wrongs we do.
He came to earth to die for us,
So we’d be born anew.

"This bitter cup, let it pass from me,"
He cried, in a plaintive voice;
"Yet not My will, but Thine be done;"
He said, in His faithful choice.

The Judas kiss would seal his fate;
He faced a hostile crowd;
The governor, Pilate, saw through it all;
Jesus’ guilt he disavowed.

"I wash my hands of all of this,"
Said Pilate, "Let Him be."
But the crowd yelled "Crucify him now,
And set Barabbas free!"

Pilate yielded to their wish;
And Jesus was led away.
The soldiers beat him, and mocked Him, too,
Yet He continued to obey.

A crown of thorns lay on His head,
As His sentence was carried out;
His hands and feet were pierced with nails,
But He did not scream or shout.

"Father, forgive them for this crime;
They know not what they do."
He said this despite His torment, because,
He was thinking of me and you.

"It is finished," he sighed in His anguish and pain,
As His body gave up to death.
The curtain tore, and darkness fell,
After He took His last breath.

The best of the story is the very last part;
It’s why on Easter we’re filled with pleasure:
Death could not our Savior hold;
His power is beyond all measure.

He rose from the grave, and was seen all around;
Ever since, He’s inspired devotion,
And we’ll be with Him for eternity,
When we get our heavenly promotion.

That’s why Easter is a major event:
He suffered and died in our place.
He rose and forgave us and loves us still,
Our Savior of matchless grace.

By Joanna Fuchs

Open form poems are patterns can be selected to teach specific concepts such as conditional tense, present participles, summarizing, and contrast, and they lend themselves to working in large groups, in small groups, and as individuals. They are more challenging and satisfying to students than worksheets, and they offer a chance for students to share their work in a non-competitive manner. Many patterns can be used with all levels and ages of learners. Even those who cannot yet write can dictate poems as a language experience.

     The catalogue poem focuses on action words--present participles-- associated with a particular noun that is not revealed until the last line. For the poem s reader, it becomes a discovery process of what the noun will be and can even be made into a game by covering up the last line of each student s poem. For the poem s author, it requires reverse and visual thinking in that the student must begin with the last line--the main idea--and, through visualization, imagine actions that, together, describe that idea alone.

    Rain shape poem              Flower shape poem

Also  we have the wing shape poetry for example:

from The Temple (1633), by George Herbert:  

  Easter wings.

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,

Though foolishly he lost the same,

Decaying more and more,

Till he became

Most poore:

With  thee

Oh let me rise

As larks, harmoniously,

And sing this day  thy victories:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My  tender  age  in  sorrow   did   beginne:

And still with sicknesses and shame

Thou  didst  so  punish  sinne,

That  I  became

Most thinne.

With  thee

Let me combine

And feel this day thy victorie:

For,  if  I  imp  my  wing  on  thine

Affliction shall  advance the  flight in  me

 But the most important shape or we can say funny shape in the  shape poetry for example;¹⁶

      Human shape poem

In the last resort, man ,nowadays, depends upon the shape to convey his main issues, we are a race against time.

Lecture Six

War Poetry

We d gained our first objective hours before
While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.
Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,
With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,
And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.
The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began,— the jolly old rain!

A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,
Staring across the morning blear with fog;
He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;
And then, of course, they started with five-nines
Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.
Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst
Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,
While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.
He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,
Sick for escape,— loathing the strangled horror
And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.

An officer came blundering down the trench:
Stand-to and man the fire-step! On he went...
Gasping and bawling, Fire- step...counter-attack!
Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right
Down the old sap: machine- guns on the left;
And stumbling figures looming out in front.
O Christ, they re coming at us! Bullets spat,
And he remembered his rifle...rapid fire...
And started blazing wildly...then a bang
Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out
To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked
And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,
Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans...
Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,
Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

1929. Sassoon, the English novelist and poet who, after serving as an officer in World War I, expressed his conviction of the brutality and waste of war in his grim, forceful, realistic verse. He is also known for his three-volume fictional autobiography, at first published anonymously under the title The Memoirs of George Sherston. Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man is the first volume in the trilogy and gives a particularly vivid evocation of the life of the English country gentry before World War I. Contents: Early Days; The Flower Show Match; A Fresh Start; A Day with the Potford; At the Rectory; The Colonel s Cup; Denis Milden as Master; Migration to the Midlands; In the Army; and At the Front. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

About the Author

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC (8 September 1886 - 1 September 1967) was an English poet and author. He became known as a writer of satirical anti-war verse during World War I. He later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston Trilogy". --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The book Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried Sassoon (author) is published or distributed by Obscure Press [1846641136, 9781846641138]. This particular edition was published on or around 2006-01-31 date. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man has Paperback binding and this format has 396 number of pages of content for use. This book by Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried Sassoon is written in English language.

·       Dear Students, You will be examined next week,25-04-2011,take a note of that all the poems included, ,be brief and never tackle something irrelevant to the meant questions" Least written, Soonest mended.   

التوقيع:                                                                                                          رئيس القسم

مدرس المادة:  م .حيدر غازي  الموسوي                                                           أ. م. د. فريد حميد الهنداوي

التأريخ:  22    / 5 /2011                                                                             التأريخ:      / 5 /2011