Virginia Woolf defined Modernism as a "shift" in consciousness and thought: "All

human relations shifted...and when human relations change there is at the same
time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.
The years leading up to World War I saw the start of a poetic revolution. The imagist movement
arose in reaction against Romantic fuzziness and emotionalism in poetry. A new critical
movement went hand in hand with the new poetry, and T. S. Eliot was high priest of both. Poets
looked back to the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century and produced work of much
greater intellectual complexity than the Victorians. In the 1950s, poets such as Philip Larkin and
Thom Gunn were members of the Movement, which emphasized purity of diction and a
neutral tone.
The twentieth-century novel experienced three major movements. High modernism, lasting
through the 1920s, celebrated personal and textual inwardness, complexity, and difficulties.
High modernists like Woolf and Joyce wrote in the wake of the shattering of confidence in old
certainties.

Summary The Lake Isle of Innisfree

The poet declares that he will arise and go to Innisfree, where he will build a small cabin of clay
and wattles made. There, he will have nine bean-rows and a beehive, and live alone in the
glade loud with the sound of bees (the bee-loud glade). He says that he will have peace there,
for peace drops from the veils of morning to where the cricket sings. Midnight there is a
glimmer, and noon is a purple glow, and evening is full of linnets wings. He declares again that
he will arise and go, for always, night and day, he hears the lake water lapping with low sounds
by the shore. While he stands in the city, on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, he
hears the sound within himself, in the deep hearts core.

Summary The Second Coming

The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening gyre (spiral),
cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; anarchy is loosed upon the
world; The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is
drowned. The best people, the speaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst are full of
passionate intensity. Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; Surely the
Second Coming is at hand. No sooner does he think of the Second Coming, then he is
troubled by a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere
in the desert, a giant sphinx (A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank
and pitiless as the sun) is moving, while the shadows of desert birds reel about it. The darkness
drops again over the speakers sight, but he knows that the sphinxs twenty centuries of stony
sleep have been made a nightmare by the motions of a rocking cradle. And what rough
beast, he wonders, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Summary "The Song of Wandering Aengus
"The Song of Wandering Aengus", by W.B.Yeats is a fanciful and lyrical poem inspired by a Celtic
deity of the same name. It is a retelling of a legend. "In Celtic mythology, Aengus g was a god
of youth and beauty and (in some versions) a god of love. It is likely that this early poem by
Yeats, that very Irish poet, was based in Celtic mythology." The woman in the poem appears to
be a fairy, while hazel wood was believed to have magical, mystical qualities. These features
help give the poem a mystical, other worldly feeling. Consisting of three stanzas of eight lines
each, the even numbered lines rhyme with each other. Internally, the poem employs iambic
tetrameter, "...meaning each line has four (tetra-) poetic feet to it, which are iambs (two-
syllable feet composed of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable)."
In the first verse, the speaker goes out to a hazel wood at night and ends up catching a silver
trout on a fishing line. Why does he go out there in the first place? "I went out to the hazel
wood,/Because a fire was in my head," The hazel was associated with water-witching and by
extension the magic, fairy world. What is the fire in his head? Is it a burning drive, or madness?
Perhaps it is there to draw him to seek out the magic water. Quite possibly without having
planned his actions in advance beyond cooling the flame, he breaks off a piece to go fishing.
"And cut and peeled a hazel wand/And hooked a berry to a thread;" Since he already knows
where the water is, the hazel is to attract something or someone else instead. His "berry" is a
different kind of bait, the kind that might attract fairies. In the dark, it dangles on a thread.
Interestingly, Yeats goes on to describe moths and moth-like stars. "And when white moths
were on the wing,/And moth-like stars were flickering out," The moth is a winged creature, the
night equivalent of a butterfly. Both are associated with faeries. It is also a creature attracted to
flames, paralleling the fire in the head of the speaker at the beginning of the poem. Are they
there as a warning that those who get too caught up in passions may be burnt by them, as a
moth is burnt by the flame it is drawn to? The white stars are flames also, further supporting
the concept of a dangerous but exciting mystery. The moment of truth comes quietly, gently
and without struggle. "I dropped the berry in a stream/And caught a little silver trout."
In the second verse, he finds that he has not caught a fish, but a magical girl. "When I had laid it
on the floor/I went to blow the fire a-flame,/But something rustled on the floor,/And someone
called me by my name: It had become a glimmering girl"/With apple blossom in her hair". The
silvery trout transformed into a glimmering girl must be a fairy, confirmed by the way she runs
and disappears with the coming dawn. "Who called me by my name and ran/And faded through
the brightening air." "It's all about the quest, isn't it? About seeking after a particular
idea/ideal/idol....He is so entranced by the girl, who represents for him his heart's dearest wish,
that he spends years and years looking for that girl, hoping to meet her again, ending the poem
as an old man."
In the final verse, the speaker determines he will continue looking until he finds the vanished
girl. "Though I am old with wandering/Through hollow lands and hilly lands,/I will find out
where she has gone,/And kiss her lips and take her hands;/ I will find out where she has
gone,/And kiss her lips and take her hands;/And walk among long dappled grass,/And pluck till
time and times are done/ The silver apples of the moon,/The golden apples of the sun" The
ecstasy of her kiss and the warmth of her loving hands will be his reward forever. Through the
rest of their lives and into eternity, he will pluck her fruit, the moon's silver apples and the sun's
golden ones. The silver moon is feminine, fickle, and changing. It is what is only accessible at
night, and by extension in the land of dreams and mystery. The golden sun is masculine and
shines in the land of wakefulness, giving the warmth that makes all things grow. Both represent
eternity as they outlast humankind. The sun is the eternal flame of love, and the moon is
another realm in which love can be immortal if the lovers are born or become immortals
themselves. Sun and moon together represent perfect harmony and fulfillment. This is the
speaker's hope on the quest that both drives and burns in every fibre of his being.