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, the voice, and I found her out there possibly)
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. (opening with the the inversion of Spring’s typical meaning)
Fertility has become a ‘curse’ or ‘imposition’ (also links to A Game of Chess and even A Darkling Thrush with the description of setting)
On the hyacinth girl bit, Perry describes it as an ‘episode of failed connection’
The Waste Land is characterised by ‘modulating voices’
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
Represents a ‘post-Christian worship’ - could contest against and say its not a firm belief in a new kind of spirituality, but a failed, fragmented attempt at reconnecting with the old one (Christianity)
Suggests that the ‘eyes’ in The Hollow Men, and ‘water’ in The Waste Land represent the same thing - connection, intimacy, hope, faith, God perhaps - something that is absent in a post-war England and is required to fully experience life
Suggests that the hollow men can’t reach/find the ‘eyes’ because of their ‘timidity and fearfulness’ - quite Prufrockian (they’re inhibited by their own character deficiencies)
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 ‘At Castle Botorel’ has a ‘secure existence outside time’
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’
Victorian pessimism - Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin’s ‘Origin of species’ in 1859 asserted that we (humans) aren’t the centre of existence and we are products of a wider, changing world.
Hardy reflects the general feeling amongst Victorians that humans were victims of an uncaring world. Links to Alan Pound’s assertion that Hardy’s recognition of humans as ‘victims of time and nature’ is what links him the most strongly to Eliot.
Eliot religious context
He converts to Anglicanism in 1927. The Hollow Men can be read as a transitionary poem between faithlessness and believing in God/hope.
What movement is Hardy considered to be a part of?
Alan Pound - Hardy could be regarded as a ‘transitional figure’ between Victorianism and modernism
