S6: War Poetry And Post 1945 Poetry Flashcards
Wirtschaftliche Einschränkungen
Austerity
Britain after 1945
• Austerity despite victory in WW II
• Welfare state under Labour
• National insurance + NHS
• Implementation of Education Act
• Decolonialization
• UK turns from global power to insular European nation state
- joins EU in 1973
• Social and political changes and social unrest under Margaret Thatcher
Decolonialisation
• Colonies gain independence (India 1947, Rhodesia 1980)
• New definition of Commonwealth
How was Poetry since 1945?
- reaction to classical modernism
- new topics
- new voices (women, working class, postcolonial writers, celtic fringe)
Whats the Movement?
• Starting in the 1950s; anxieties of the post-war era
• Rejection of Modernism and the romantic elements of some of 1940s poetry
• Argued for a limited, rationalist, polished poetics
• Clarity (both in language and content) rather than obscurity and mystification
• Verbal restraint over stylistic excess, avoidance of rhetoric, austerity in tone
• Colloquial idiom and themes
Who are Movement Poets?
• Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
• Kingsley Amis (1922-1995)
• Donald Davie (1922-1995)
• D. J. Enright (1920-2002)
• John Wain (1925-1994)
• Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001)
• Thom Gunn (1929-2004)
• Robert Conquest (1917-2015)
Who was Philipp Larkin? + 3 main works
• Worked as a librarian at the University of Hull
• Many accolades (Auszeichnungen); refused to become Poet Laureate
Main works:
• The Less Deceived
• The Whitsun Weddings
• High Windows
What are characteristics of Philipp Larkin‘s „High Windows“?
• Very direct language
• Modern times –> change in (sexual) attitudes; new sense of freedom
• Melancholy
• Sense of having missed out (not young enough for sexual revolution)
What were reactions against The Movement?
= British Poetry Revival
• Loose group of poets in the tradition of (American) modernists (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams)
• Avant-garde movement influenced by ‘New American Poetry’
• J. H. Prynne, Sean Bonney, Denise Riley, Peter Manson
• Interest in theoretical discourses and performance
By whom is the poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”?
Dylan Thomas
„Do not go Gentle into that good night“ characteristics
• Form: villanelle
• Spanish / Italian origin; Renaissance dance-songs
• 19 lines, two repeating rhymes, two refrains
• 5 tercets, one quatrain
• A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2
(capital letters = the refrains; lowercase letters = rhymes)
Poetry since WWII
• Since the 1980s, spectrum of Britain’s poets more diverse in class, ethnicity, gender, and region
• Shift also to new literatures in English (Commonwealth, former colonies)
• Shift also towards poetry and the academy, in particular in the US (Strong correlation between poets and creative writing classes, Also in the US, splintering into distinct factions)
• Confessional free verse (‘postconfessional’; ‘neoconfessional’)
• New Formalism
• ‘Formal’ poets in the UK and Ireland: Carol Ann Duffy, Derek Walcott
• The Lyrical Mainstream (Charles Bernstein); against the ‘oppression’ of form
• Latino, Native American, Asian American poetries
• Transnational and cross-ethnic poetry
Who was the first poet laureate?
John Dryden
Poet Laureats in the UK
• Annual salary; barrel of sherry
• Requirements: no longer obligation to write for certain occasion; when and where can be chosen freely
• Public duties; educational and cultural influence
Who‘s the current Poet Laureat in the UK?
Simon Armitage (since 2019)
What are the „Next Generation Poets“?
List of poets named in 2014 by a panel for the Poetry Book Society, which once every 10 years selects 20 poets „expected to dominate the poetry landscape of the coming decade“
Who‘s the current Poet Laureat in the US?
Ada Limón since 2022
Next Generation Poets
- Carol Ann Duffy
- Patience Agbabi
- Kae Tempest
