Critical/contextual quotes Flashcards
Florence Dugdale
‘The Emma poems are a fiction […] but a fiction which their author has now come to believe’
(links to the haunter)
Jahan Ramazani
Hardy becomes most productive of love poems once he can write them as ‘elegies’ once love has left a ‘yawning blankness’ for his love to fill.
(links to the haunter, your last drive, the voice especially)
Seamus Perry on the Burial of the Dead
In the opening, nouns are ‘inverted’ or ‘perverted’ from their original meaning.
In the Waste Land, fertility has become a ‘curse’ or ‘imposition’ (also links to A Game of Chess and even A Darkling Thrush with the description of setting)
In the Waste Land, ‘modulating voices’ are its ‘governing aesthetic’
Alan Pound on the Darkling Thrush
The setting is described as an ‘almost lifeless wasteland’ throughout the entire poem.
Contest against with potential for a new, hopeful perspective.
Potentially more applicable to Eliot’s The Hollow Men, which’s allusion to faith is much more fragmented and unconvincing.
Andrew Swarbrick
The Hollow Men represents ‘emptiness and near-hopelessness’
Seamus Perry on The Hollow Men
The references to faith represent a ‘post-Christian worship’
Contest against and argue that it is more an incomplete, fragmented attempt at prayer.
Seamus Perry on Prufrock
Prufrock’s social anxiety build up to a kind pf ‘suppressed hysteria’
(support with opening lines and increasingly surreal nature of the poem)
Andrew Swarbrick on Prufrock
The ‘idealised womanhood’ at the end of the poem shows that Prufrock does have a ‘notion of love’
(contest against with surreal nature of ending - not really love)
Modernism context
Virginia Woolf claimed that humanity underwent a fundamental change “on or about December 1910”. Artists, writers and composers all began questioning and reinventing their art forms.
The war in 1914 accelerated these ideas, creating widespread disillusion with ideas on which civilisation had been founded.
Eliot’s poetry deeply reflects these modernist values, commenting in a 1921 essay that ‘poets in our civilisation [..] must be difficult’. His ambiguous, highly fragmented poems often containing ‘modulating voices’ reflects the general feeling of disillusionment and instability during his time.
Eliot claimed that poetry should be based upon ‘variety and complexity’ in order to reflect the human experience of his age.
Alan Pound
The awareness of human as ‘victims of time and nature’ is the main theme that links Hardy and Eliot’s poetry.
Randall Stevenson
‘Rhapsody of a Windy Night’, ‘The Love song of J.Alfred Prufrock’, and ‘the Waste Land’ all explore ‘soulless, mechanical modern life’
Peter Cash
the memory of Emma in ‘A Castle Botorel’ has a ‘secure existence outside time’
Peter Cash
the ending of ‘The Self-Unseeing’ has a ‘cheerful resolution to make the most of those moments in which happiness is isolated’
Phillip Mallet
Your Last Drive - Hardy believes he will be forgiven through his ‘late repenting love’
Hardy’s religious beliefs
‘I have been looking for God for 50 years […] I think that if he existed I should have discovered him by now’
