essay on modern poetry pdf

A Short Analysis of T. E. Hulme’s ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’

A summary of a key modernist essay

There are numerous documents which might be described as ‘manifestos’ for modernist poetry in English – Ezra Pound’s ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’ springs to mind – but T. E. Hulme’s ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ was almost certainly the earliest. It’s an important announcement of a new poetic style and, in a small way, a revolutionary document in modern poetry. You can read ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ in full here , but in this post we’re going to try to analyse Hulme’s essay and pinpoint why it was so important.

In 1908, there was a widespread feeling – well, it was widespread among a small but significant group of new poets, anyway – that a new way forward needed to be found for English verse. Algernon Charles Swinburne, who would die the year later but who had been a powerful force in English poetry since the 1860s, proved a particular sticking-point. T. S. Eliot , looking back on the year 1908 (when he was still an undergraduate at Harvard), said the key question was: ‘Where do we go from Swinburne?’ The answer was, apparently, nowhere: he couldn’t find a way out from under the long shadow cast by Swinburne’s poetic virtuosity.

Across the Atlantic, at the meetings of the Poets’ Club in London, another young poet, T. E. Hulme , was offering an answer to the question Eliot had posed, in his ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ which he delivered to his fellow members of the Poets’ Club some time in 1908. In ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, Hulme states a number of important and, as it would turn out, influential points about a new direction for modern poetry in English. These can be summarised as follows:

Free verse frees English poetry from the ‘hypnotic’ effects of rhyme and regular metre. T. E. Hulme namechecks Gustave Kahn, a French poet, as the person who first outlined the virtues of vers libre or free verse. As Hulme himself puts it:

The length of the line is long and short, oscillating with the images used by the poet; it follows the contours of his thoughts and is free rather than regular; to use a rough analogy, it is clothes made to order, rather than ready-made clothes.

By using free verse in modern poetry, the poet can free himself from the regularity of conventional poetic metre (what Ezra Pound would later liken dismissively to the metronome). As Hulme argues, regular rhythms in poetry stem from the days when poetry was ‘a religious incantation’, and ‘rhyme and metre were used as aids to the memory’. But the modern poet has no need for such out-of-date techniques, which are more likely to ‘produce a kind of hypnotic state’ in the reader or listener. Free verse will keep the reader on their toes, since the rhythm will continually vary and the reader will never know whether to expect a long or a short line next, a rhymed or an unrhymed one.

Poetic language needs to be direct and use fresh metaphors. This is the last and perhaps the most important tenet, in view of Hulme’s wider philosophy of poetry, in all of ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’. For Hulme, poetry is the place where new metaphors are created; once they become familiar phrases they are used in prose as readily understandable terms, and then they ‘die a long lingering death in journalists’ English’ (nothing much changes). Hulme uses the example of describing the hill being ‘clad with trees’: when this was first used it was probably uttered by a poet, who was using a metaphor (suggesting that the hill is clothed with the trees), but now when we hear it we pass over it as a familiar and even clichéd expression. (You can probably think of your own examples here: think of Shakespeare’s phrases, such as ‘heart of gold’ or to vanish ‘into thin air’, which when first heard would have sounded fresh and inspired a vivid image in the listener’s mind; now, though, we merely pass over them as conventions, comprehending their meaning without really stopping to visualise them as images.) Modern poetry, as Hulme writes towards the end of ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, should endeavour to forge fresh metaphors and vivid images.

Those are the main points of T. E. Hulme’s argument in ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’, which can be read as a blueprint for the modernist poetic revolution that followed, including the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. This short summary and analysis of Hulme’s position has sought to summarise some of the key aspects of his essay, but there are numerous questions to ask of this position. How does one go about creating new images which aren’t too outré, too absurd? Even the description of hills being ‘clad’ with trees may once have sounded silly and far-fetched. And how should free verse be used responsibly by the poet, so that a poem doesn’t essentially become a piece of prose chopped up? (For more about this, see T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘ Reflections on Vers Libre ’, which addresses this point.)

Discover more about Hulme’s poetry with this poem he wrote in the WWI trenches and  this selection of some of his finest poems . For a more detailed discussion of Hulme, we recommend this book by the founder-editor of Interesting Literature , Dr Oliver Tearle,  T.E. Hulme and Modernism .

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20th Century (Modern) Poetry in English Literature: Characteristics & Themes

Back to: History of English Literature All Ages – Summary & Notes

Table of Contents

Introduction

Modernism, a movement that was a radical break from 19 th century Victorianism , led to post-modernism, which emphasized self-consciousness and pop art. While 20th-century literature is a diverse field covering a variety of genres, there are common characteristics that changed literature forever.

20th Century English Poetry Development

The first phase of the movement, the school of imagism, the style of French symbolist poetry influence of Dome and the dominance of war poetry, these were all different manifestations of modernism in English poetry (1909-16)A.D.

During the flowering of Modernist poetry between 1917 and 1929, the 2 nd phase of the movement, all these initial manifestations of modernism combined to find a full nature expression in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell and later Yeats most notable of which is,Eliot’s The Waste Land , Sitwell’s Gold Coast Customs and Yeats’s Michael Robartes and the Dances

The 3 rd and the final phase of Modernist is largely the decade of the 30s which is marked by the Marxed (Non-Marxist) poets such as Auden, Louis McNiece, C. Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender.

Characteristics

Diverse variety of themes.

Poetry today can be written on almost any subject. The modern poets find inspirations from railway trains, tramcars, telephones and things of commonplace interest. Modern poets have not accepted the theory of great subjects for poetic composition.

The whole universe is the modern poet’s composition. He writes on themes of real-life e.g.  The Songs Train by John Davidson,  Goods Train of Night by Ashley,  Machine Guns by Richard Aldington,  Listeners by Walter

The poetry of the 20 th century is marked with a note of realism. Realism in modern poetry was the product of a reaction against the pseudo- romanticism of the last century over and above the influence of science.

Love forms the subject of many modern lyrics Robert Bridges has produced fine sonnets of love in The Growth of Love. E.g. I Will Not Let Thee Go. W.B. Yeats’ When You are Old etc.

There is a note of pessimism and disillusionment in modern poetry. The modern poet has realized the pettiness of human life and the tragedy and suffering of the poor have made him gloomy and sad.

Romantic Elements

In spite of the dominance of realism, in modern poetry, the spirit of romance continues to rule the minds of certain poets like Yeats, E. Thomas, Masefield etc. The works of these poets have the fact that the spirit of romance is as old as the life itself.

Walter De La Mare’s poetry is full of true romantic spirit bordering on supernaturalism. With him, the ghosts and fairies of the old world have come into their own in the 20 th century.

He gives a clear picture of birds, clouds landscapes, sea and countryside in his poetry. Masefield, Robert Bridges, Edmund Blunden etc are the great poets of nature in modern poetry.

Humanitarian and Democratic Note

Modern poetry is marked with a note of humanitarianism and democratic feeling. The modern poet, more than Wordsworth ( read A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal ) , is interested in the life of labourers, workers etc.

Religion and Mysticism

The modern age is the age of science, but even in this scientific age, we have poems written on the subject of religion and mysticism. W.B. Yeats, Francis Thompson, Robert Graves etc are the great poets who have kept alive the flame of religion and mysticism in their poetry.

Diction and Style

Modern poets have a preference for simple and direct expression. Modern poets have chosen to be free in the use of the meter. They have followed freedom from the trammels of verse. Verse rhythm is replaced by sense rhythm. There is free movement in 20th-century English poetry.

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Understanding Poetry Otherwise: New Criticism and Historical Poetics

2020, Literature Compass

This essay juxtaposes recent work in historical poetics with New Critical reading practices, particularly those theorized by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their influential textbook Understanding Poetry (1938). It focuses on the relationships among method, period, and aesthetic value: the ways that New Critical reading and its variety of critical judgment helped make 19th-century poetry minor. Examining Understanding Poetry's association of 19th-century poetry with aesthetic badness -- as well as the generic histories of the textbook's "bad" poems -- the essay demonstrates the importance of the problem of evaluation for historical poetics.

Related Papers

Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory

If poetics customarily deals with generalities, history seems to insist on particulars. In the 21st century, various literary critics have sought to manage these competing imperatives by developing an “historical poetics.” These critics pursue sometimes very different projects, working with diverse methodologies and theoretical frameworks, but they share a desire to think again about the relation between poetics and history. Some critics have pursued an historical poetics by conducting quantitative studies of changes in metrical form, while others have investigated the social uses to which poetry was put in the cultures of the past. Both approaches tend to reject received notions of the aesthetic or literary, with their emphasis on the individual poet and on the poem’s organic unity. Much work in historical poetics has focused instead on problems of genre and reception, seeking the historical significance of poetry in what is common and repeated. Sometimes this work has involved extensive archival research, examining memoirs, grammar books, philological tracts, and other materials in order to discover how poetry was conceived and interpreted at a particular time. These methods allow critics to tell histories of poetry and to reveal a history in poetry. The cultural history of poetic forms thus becomes a history of social thought and practice conducted through poetry. For other critics, however, the historical significance of a poem lies instead in the way it challenges the poetics of its time. This is to emphasize the singular over the common and repeated. In this mode, historical poetics aims both to restore poems to their proper historical moment and to show how poems work across history. The history to be valued in such cases is not a ground or world beyond the poem, but the event of the poem itself.

Bill Benzon

Underwood and Sellers have discovered that over the course of roughly a century (1820-1919) Anglo-American poetry has undergone a consistent change in style in a direction favored by editors and reviewers of elite journals. This directional shift aligns with the one Matthew Jockers found in Anglophone novels during roughly the same period (from the beginning of the 19th century to its end). I argue that this change is characteristic of a cultural evolutionary process and sketch a way to simulate such a process as an interaction between a population of texts and a population of writers. I suggest that such directionality is a sign of autonomy in the aesthetic system, that it is not completely coupled to and subsumed by surrounding historical events.

A History of American Poetry: Contexts-Developments-Readings. Eds. Oliver Scheiding, René Dietrich, Clemens Spahr. Trier: WVT, 2015.

René Dietrich

This handbook answers the need for fresh and informative readings of canonical and non-canonical poems. The thirty-one chapters engage revisionary trends in poetry scholarship. They unfold a critical history of American poetry that challenges conventional interpretations and provide insightful new readings of well-known poems and writers as well as introductions to poets and texts that may be more unfamiliar. Each chapter focuses on two poets set into dialogue with each other, presenting paired readings of one representative text from each author. In addition to a number of familiar texts and names that are necessary for students to understand basic developments in American poetry, the handbook offers chapters on multilingual colonial poetry, nineteenth-century Native American poetry, and contemporary experimental poetry. The paired readings of poems in each chapter also invite interconnected lessons that make readers compare, for example, the communal conventions of colonial poetry to the collective poetics of contemporary performance poetry. The handbook encourages readings across and against literary periods, while annotated paired readings and additional reading suggestions should inspire students to analyze poems as particular sites of historical and political meaning. Being both a manual in terms of current theoretical directions in literary studies and a guide to practical criticism, A History of American Poetry helps students to further explore the diversity and multiple poetic traditions that make up American poetry in its intersections with historical contexts and other literatures.

The Emily Dickinson Journal

Elizabeth Petrino

Andrew Ford

The fact that the term " aesthetics " was only introduced into philosophic discourse by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735 is regarded by some historians of the subject as a sign that the ancient Greeks were not much interested in questions about the nature of beauty and the arts. (For them, ta aisthêtika would have suggested sense perception in general.) Other historians treat this fact as a factoid, a historical curiosity that need not stand in the way of assuming that the ancients responded to works of art in ways much like ourselves and confronted the same problems as we do when we try to think about beauty and art. The problem with this reasonable assumption is that it is hard to amass many actual texts that deal directly with the subject: most ancient discussions of issues we would define as aesthetic are embedded in works devoted to quite other topics, especially politics, ethics, or metaphysics. Thus Kristeller's much‐quoted denial that the ancients had anything comparable to modern aesthetics remains a challenge: " ancient writers and thinkers, though confronted with excellent works of art and quite susceptible to their charm, were neither able nor eager to detach the aesthetic quality of these works of art. " 1 The present chapter hopes to throw light on this question by turning from the Greeks' philosophies of art to their literary criticism. The daily, practical business of commenting on poems, interpreting them, and evaluating them implied the existence of standards for evaluating literature. This was especially so in the " agonistic " musical culture of the Greeks, which regularly set one poem against another in a competition to see which was the " finest " (kallistos: Ford 2002, 272–293). Already in the Archaic period, the most prestigious performances of Homeric epic took the form of competitions among professional reciters (rhapsôidoi), and the Athenian contests in tragic, comic, and dithyrambic poetry are well known; amateurs exchanging songs at drinking parties often turned to singing games. All such events raised the question, whether explicitly or implicitly, of what criteria to use when declaring one poem " finest " of all. I propose to study closely two texts from Classical Athens in which the question of standards is discussed. The pair is notable for suggesting that works of verbal art ought to be judged on their own terms. Taken together and set in context, the texts suggest that, in practice if not always in theory, the ancients recognized an aesthetic dimension to literature to a far greater extent than is sometimes allowed. In criticism, the possibility of a literary aesthetics emerges most clearly in the question of whether poets have any autonomy in the sense of immunity to certain kinds of objections

Matthew Landis

Re-animating Benjamin's Theses for 21st century poetics—A wreading through of that seminal text. Excerpts presented at the most recent ALA Symposium on Modern American Poetry in Savannah, GA.

Zarnab Malik

Aris Hidayatulloh

Yale Review

Stephen Yenser

Joel Calahan , V. Joshua Adams , Michael Hansen

This essay introduces the March 2016 special issue of Modern Language Quarterly, "Reading Historical Poetics," edited by V. Joshua Adams, Joel Calahan, and Michael Hansen. In the introduction, we situate the work of the six scholars who contributed essays on historical poetics to the volume by describing and evaluating the conflicting methodological approaches pursued by scholars of historical poetics in current Slavic and American comparative traditions.

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