INTRODUCTION

VICTORIAN POETRY (by Inma C. Sanchis Garcia- Astilleros)

AESTHETIC PRERAPHAELISM (By Annalisa Garofalo)

GEORGIAN POETS (By Tania Sendra Ferragud)

MODERNISM (By Ani Tadevosyan)

NEW ROMANTICS IN THE FORTIES (By M. Elena Mármol Rodríguez)

THE GROUP (By Mari Carmen Mora Vives)

THE MOVEMENT (By Mari Carmen Mora Vives)

THE MODERNIST TRADITION (BY SARA)

The Modernist Tradition was formed by some young poets that worked in the fifties and who were very important for the main developments throughout the next two decades. As an example of these poets, we can include Charles Tomlinson, Roy Fisher, Bob Cobbing and Gael Turnbull who we are going to analyse just after this introduction.

(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Englishpoetry)

Gael Turnbull was a Scottish poet who was an important precursor of the British Poetry Revival which was a reaction to the Movement’s more conservative approach to British poetry.

(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GaelTurnbull)

He was very little related with the Romantic Movement and particularly, with the topic of Love and Worship of Nature but we have found out a link between him and William Blake.

In one of his works, Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969) which is an anthology of poetry, he made an invocation of this author, William Blake and of the performance poets. The front cover of this work also characterizes a detail from Glad Day, an engraving by him.

A main feature that characterizes Turnbull is that he recognized all the time the talent of the poets who wrote and were writing since then and encouraged and gave advice to the new writers.

(cf. http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/online/snpc/list.cfm?letter=G)

In this period, Charles Tomlinson was another author and in my opinion had more in common with our topic because he explains the things that he wants through some metaphors related with nature. He uses a lot of nature words, as for example, “garden” (line 2), “raindrops” (line 6) and we can find a word related with nature in the title “rain”. We had chosen in order to analyse it, a poem called During Rain included in his Selected Poems (1955-1997).

During Rain

Between

Slats of the garden

Bench, and strung

To their undersides

Ride clinging

Raindrops, white

With transmitted

Light as the bench

With paint: ranged

Irregularly

Seven staves of them

Shine out

Against the space

Behind: untroubled

By the least breeze they

Seem not to move

But one

By one as if

Suddenly ripening

Tug themselves free

And splash

Down to be

Replaced by an identical

And instant twin:

The longer you

Look at it

The stillness proves

One flow unbroken

Of new, false pearls,

Dropped seeds of now

Becoming then.

(cf.http://www.poetryarchive.com/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=471 )

The first part of the poem is explaining what a raindrop is. With the metaphor of the raindrop, the author of this poem is trying to transmit us his opinion about what a governor is and about what his paper in the society is.

For him, all these people seem to be different but then, they have a lot of common characteristics. When the citizens think that the period of one of them has finished, appears another governor who is identical to the other. He says “and splash/ down to be/ replaced by an identical/ and instant twin”.

Finally, we can read in the last lines “of new, false pearls,/ dropped seeds of now becoming then”, with these words, we can interpret that he is criticizing the government and the people who work in it because they are false people that are cheating all the time if they are interested in something.

In order to sum up, we have to remark that Charles Tomlinson is all the time criticizing the government because he doesn’t like its way of acting.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English _poetry

Home: < www.wikipedia.org> 17/12/06

2. http://www.nls.uk/catalogues/online/snpc/list.cfm?letter=G

Home: <www.nls.uk> 17/12/06

3. http://www.poetryarchive.com/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=471

Home: <www.poetryarchive.com> 17/12/06

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gael_Turnbull

Home: <www.wikipedia.org> 17/12/06

THE EXTREMIST ART POETS (BY SARA)

The first poet that used this label in order to describe the work of another author was A. Alvárez and we also can associated this term with some English poets of the fifties like Ted Hughes, Francis Berry and Jon Silkin.

(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_poetry)

Within this poetic movement, we are going to focus our attention on Edward James Hughes, an English poet and children’s writer, relating him with the Romantic characteristic of Love and worship of Nature after exploring his poetry because his work is famous for its symbolism, passion, and shadowy natural images.

His earliest poetic work, Hawk in the Rain (1957), was based in the innocent savagery of animals although his work was mostly about the cynical within nature. He created a sense of violence and passion in natural events.

(cf. http://www.answers.com/topic/ted-hughes)

Hawk Roosting is an example of the poems that are included in this work.

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
 
The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.
 
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
 
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -
 
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
 
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.
 
 -- Ted Hughes

(cf. http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/42.html)

In the first stanza, I think that the author wants to say us that humanity is tied and it can’t do anything against the politics of the period. He writes it, for instance, in the third line “Between my hooked head and hooked feet”. With “my eyes closed” in the first line, he is emphasizing that people don’t want to see what is happening.

Apart from this, we can observe in the second stanza that the people look for “high trees” in order to escape of this kind of problems and not fight against them.

In the two following stanzas, he is talking about the politics, the people who have the power who think that the entire world is their property. He says it through the second line of the fourth stanza “I kill where I please because it is all mine” for example.

Finally, we can read in the sixth stanza that he is telling us that the people think all we have said before but they don’t do anything and prefer not to rebel and remain in the obscurity.

It is said that in Hughes’ works he gave us a perspective of a very simple and bad built world frequently.

(cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Hughes)

Another feature that we can mention is his relation that Craige Raine can notice with the Romantic poet, Keats. He says that both Hughes and Keats think that “poetry should be natural and should come as easily as leaves to the tree”.

(cf. http://timesonline.co.uk)

In conclusion, I would like to add that this author was also famous for their intense images about the British background and the savage animal world. Apart from his political issues, his poems also deal with nature.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Hughes

Home: < www.wikipedia.org> 17/12/06

2. http://www.answers.com/topic/ted-hughes

Home: <www.answers.com> 17/12/06

3. http://www.cs.rice.edu/ssiyer/minstrels/poems/42.html

Home: <www.cs.rice.edu> 17/12/06

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_poetry

Home: <www.wikipedia.org> 17/12/06

THE BRITISH POETRY REVIVAL (by Arantxa Sarrió Chaqués)

THE MERSEY BEAT (by Arantxa Sarrió Chaqués)

CONCLUSION