The Modernist revolution

Despite the strong tradition, the period between 1908 and 1914 was a remarkably productive time for innovation and experiment as novelists and poets tried, in anthologies and magazines, to challenge the literary conventions not just of the recent past but of the entire post-Romantic era. For a brief moment, London, which up to that point had been culturally one of the dullest of the European capitals, boasted an avant-garde to rival those of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, even if its leading personality, Ezra Pound, and many of its most notable figures were American.

The spirit of Modernism -- a radical and utopian spirit stimulated by new ideas in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis, expressed by Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, among others, -- was in the air. English literary modernism developed out of a general sense of disillusionment with Victorian attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and belief in the objective truth. The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers. It was expressed by the English and American poets of the Imagist movement, to which Pound first drew attention in Ripostes (1912), a volume of his own poetry, and in Des Imagistes (1914), an anthology. Prominent among the Imagists were the English poets T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, and Richard Aldington.

Reacting against what they considered to be an exhausted poetic tradition, the Imagists wanted to refine the language of poetry in order to make it a vehicle not for pastoral sentiment or imperialistic rhetoric but for the exact description and evocation of mood. To this end they experimented with free or irregular verse and made the image their principal instrument. In contrast to the leisurely Georgians, they worked with brief and economical forms.

Meanwhile, painters and sculptors, grouped together by the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis under the banner of Vorticism, combined the abstract art of the Cubists with the new sensations associated with modern developments such as automobiles and airplanes. With the typographically arresting Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex (two editions, 1914 and 1915) Vorticism found its polemical mouthpiece and in Lewis, its editor, its most active propagandist. His experimental play " Enemy of the Stars ", published in Blast in 1914, and his experimental novel " Tarr " (1918) can still surprise with their violent energy.

World War I brought this first period of the Modernist revolution to an end and, while not destroying its radical and utopian impulse, made the Modernists all too aware of the gulf between their ideals and the chaos of the present. Novelists and poets parodied modernist forms and styles, which, in their view, were made insignificant by the horrors of the war, but they looked for new forms and styles to express the true meanings.

Perhaps the most outstanding novelist between 1910 and 1930 was D. H. Lawrence. He explored relationships between men and women in his autobiographical novels, in which he expressed the need for a return to the primitive, unconscious springs of human vitality. In his two most innovative novels, " The Rainbow " (1915) and " Women in Love " (1920), Lawrence traced the sickness of modern civilization, which, in his view, was only too eager to participate in the mass slaughter of the war, and the effects of industrialization upon the human soul. He rejected the conventions of the literary tradition, which he had brilliantly used in his deeply felt autobiographical novel of working-class family life, " Sons and Lovers " (1913), and used myth and symbol to express the hope that individual and collective rebirth could come through human passion.

The terrible destruction of World War I left many people with the feeling that society was falling apart. American resident in London, the poet and playwright Thomas Stern Eliot best summarized their despair in " The Waste Land " (1922), the most influential poem of the period. Its jagged style, complex symbols, and references to other literary works set a new pattern for poetry. His innovative poetry, including also " Prufrock and Other Observations " (1917), traced the sickness of modern civilization, which, as the war had shown, preferred death, spiritual emptiness and rootlessness. As he rejected the conventions of the poetic tradition, Eliot, like Lawrence, drew upon myth and symbol, but he differed sharply from Lawrence and presumed that rebirth could come through self-denial rather than passion. During the 1920s Lawrence (who had left England in 1919) and Eliot began to develop viewpoints at odds with the reputations they had established through their early work. In Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lawrence revealed the attraction to him of charismatic, masculine leadership, while, in For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (1928), Eliot (whose influence as a literary critic now rivaled his influence as a poet) announced that he was a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion” and committed himself to hierarchy and order.

Eliot was conservative in politics and religion. But W. H. Auden, Sir Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis expressed extremely liberal political ideals in their verse. All three criticized injustices they saw in an unequal society. For these poets, society suffered from a feeling of rootlessness and isolation.

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