Modernism

The modernist period was characterized by the great production in both cultural and
literary fields as a result of the passing of an Education Act in 1870 that made elementary
education compulsory for everyone until the age of 13 and the arising new audience
demanding the production of a kind of popular literature that was aimed to a broader
readership. Some song writers of the time kept producing works in a more sophisticated
narrative which only could be appreciated by the highly educated members of the upper
classes, but a new kind of writers appeared concentrating on a more popular form of writing
that would be more understandable by a broader audience. What was interesting was that
despite being a works of complex writing and containing topics such as psychology,
anthropology, history and aesthetics, this literary pieces could thrive at the same time as the
work of writers who focused on more popular and traditional contents. According to Carter
and McRae, Modernism is essentially a search to explain mankinds place in the modern
world, where religion, social stability and ethics are all called into question, and the many
forms of experimentation developed a wider range of narrative and descriptive techniques
as well as the appearance of the use of imagery in poetry, mythological and stream of
consciousness approach.(Ronald Carter, John McRae, The Routledge History of Literature
in English: Britain and Ireland. Routledge, London, (2001), p.320-322) .
As regards modern poetry, by the time of the Victorian period became to an end
with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, the concepts that we associate with the modern
period had already begun, as the Romantic ideas were left behind. The publication of The
Symbolist Movement in Poetry by Arthur Symons in 1899 was of great influence on poets
such as W. B. Yeats and T.S Eliot, and so poetry went suffered many changes as to the kind
of language in its use. The new style of writing was considered a more appropriate
approach to express feelings and ideas and the poetic diction transform into a new poetic
language that was closer to a the language to everyday speech that combined dialect words,
colloquial expressions, specific terminology and foreign words and was concerned with a
wider range of subject matters. (Ronald Carter, John McRae, The Routledge History of
Literature in English: Britain and Ireland, Routledge, London, (2001), p. 331). One of the

purposes that Modernist poets tried to express thought their works was to represent the
world in a way that showed the spiritual and psychological conditions in the poetic
resources that were at hand; thus enlarging the limits of rhythm, imagery, symbolism,
allusion and many other literary devices and the further exploration of syntax was
developed. (. (Ronald Carter, John McRae, The Routledge History of Literature in
English: Britain and Ireland, Routledge, London, (2001), p. 342).

First war poetry

Poetry was written, during the first stages of the First World War, to express the
honour and patriotism that fighting for ones country represented and also as a way of
celebrating its glories, but as the war went on until its end in 1918, over 9 million lives
from Europe, the United States and the British Commonwealth were lost, putting in
evidence the dreadful outcomes of war and reflecting directly in the poetry that was being
produced during that time.
The principal figure among the war poets was Wilfred Owen, whose writing style
and the language he used were affected by his personal experiences, at war, reflecting little
theory and intellectualism (Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern, University of
California Press, Berkley, CA, (1963), p. 169); he saw as his duty to reveal, through his
poems, the horrors of war and he also questioned to what extent such savageness was
necessary; as he reflected in one of the poems he is well-known for: Dulce Et Decorum
Est. Regarding writing techniques, Owen favoured a wider range of forms, the vowel
sound effects at the end of lines and his ability to produce poetry in half-rhymes stood out
greatly which, as opposed to full rhymes conveying integrity in a patterned structure, it
gave a sense of incompleteness and disorganization but however, thought to be a fitting
form to express the subject matters that Owen was concerned with. (Ronald Carter, John
McRae, The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland, Routledge,
London, (2001), p. 332-333).

W.B.Yeats

Yeats, another poet who stood out during the Modernist period, produced writings
from his first publication in 1885 until his death in 1939, which can be said to have
undergone changes in both technical and topical approaches as his career as a poet divides
into three main stages. The first part of his development as a writer was characterized by
the romantic ideas of previous movements and by his connection to Celtic and Aesthetic
communities, using descriptive language in order to make imagery clear and consequently
producing mystical poetry influenced by myths and folklores of the Irish lands.
Yeats second main phase during his career focused on Irish nationalism, for which
he developed a more accessible style, using simple and popular narrative. His commitment
to nationalistic issues was such that his poetry became a display of political and social
concerns, as in Easter in which he tells about the unsuccessful revolt of the Irish against
the British government for their independence, resulting in the execution of some of them
who were Yeats acquaintances. It is assumed that the loss of faith led him to the
development of esoteric thinking resulting in the use of symbolism in his poems delivering
a kind of poetry that was precise and evocative.
In the final stage of his career he combined elements from his previous stages and
produces a more mature style of writing, focusing on more personal experiences than social
matters. In his later poems he expresses his ideas about the physical, sensual and disturbing
aspects of life contrasting them with its opposites, creating a modern form of poetry mixing
formal and colloquial style but maintaining the traditional structure.
Some of his most important works include Easter (1916), The Wild Swans at
Coole (1917), The Second Coming (1921), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921),
The Towers (1928) and The Winding Stair (1929). (Ronald Carter, John McRae, The
Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland. Routledge, London,
(2001), p.335-337).

D.H Lawrence
He is considered another important figure of the modernist period, he is sought to
represent the inner thoughts and feelings of his characters by doing this, the plot was not as

important as the change in feeling and the characters stream of consciousness; and having
into account their relationships with the rest of the world, particularly with nature.
Lawrences poetry follows no structures as regards rhyme and favors the freestyle which was the reason why some critics thought of Lawrences production as careless
but Lawrence himself thought this technique to be the best way to convey the complexity of
emotions. He once said: 'Free verse has its own nature.... It has no finish. It has no
satisfying stability, satisfying for those who like the immutable.
Lawrence considered his poems as a biography of his personal emotions, which he
created in order to understand and control his own feelings and consequently being able to
grow as a human being. (Chris Woodhead, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Verse, An
Anthology of Sixteen Poets, (1984), p. 99-100).
As a novelist, he explores individual impulses in the relationships of man and
women and the fundamental ideas behind an harmonious relationships, describing them
using poetic symbolism and psychological description in a more innovative and
experimental technique with which the author aims to express the process of formation of
the individual character, as in The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921).
Lawrences writings focused on moral spiritual and physical and concerns of society, as
well as the theme of freedom from inhibition and honesty in a relationship, which can be
seen in the collection of poems Look! We Have Come Through! (1917).Another of
Lawrences themes that characterized his fiction was the creativity or destruction that
sexuality as an impulsive reaction in a relationship could cause; this topic can be found in
Lady Chatterleys Lover (1928) which is Lawrences more notorious novel banned over
thirty years in England for its graphic content.
The first half of the twentieth century is, for many critic figures, the highest period
in which the English novel was developed, considered to be the time when the greatest
novels of this century were written, while new technical approaches, innovation and
experimentation were at their highest use; the novels produced during these years reflect a
contrast between the confidence that nineteenth literature revealed about the structure of
society and the place every individual had in it with the realization of a community divided
by different values that twentieth century novels reflected. (Ronald Carter, John McRae,

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland, Routledge, London,
(2001), p. 361-362).
Virginia Woolf
Woolf saw the traditional novel as restrictive in the sense that this form of writing
focused on a plot development and logical order did not allow portraying experience in a
real way. She began writing after her father past away, as she once said, her father put
pressure on her and that is why she could never have written while he was present. At the
beginning Woolfs novels were a little traditional concerning form, an aspect that changed
throughout her career.
One method that she exploits is the stream of consciousness along with poetic
rhythms and imagery so as to portray her characters feelings in great detail; she is likely to
be more concerned with her characters internal thoughts than their actions. With the stream
of consciousness technique one can see how thoughts and ideas arise in the head because of
the lack of punctuation. She was a pioneer in the successful experimentation of the
concepts of time and memory; she explores with fluid narrative the senses of real time and
the time in ones mind. Her main novels are Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse
(1927) and The Waves (1931). (Ronald Carter, John McRae, The Routledge History of
Literature in English: Britain and Ireland. Routledge, London, (2001), p.385-389).

James Joyce
His writings were mainly about Dublin. Before novels, he wrote poetry, plays and
short-stories. His first short-stories Dubliners (1914) portrays with realism the lives of
ordinary people. In this collection Joyce depicts the life of citizens that feel oppressed by
relationships, social, cultural and religious traditions or by their own.
A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his first major novel, is said to be
autobiographical. Ulysses is said to stand at the top of the modernist period, it was
censored so that Joyce had problems to find a publisher. This novel uses the stream of
consciousness technique and a great variety of forms, styles and ideas.
(Ronald Carter, John McRae, The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and
Ireland. Routledge, London, (2001), p.390-393).

Katherine Mansfield
Mansfields writings are not typical if you compare them with the criterion of the
nineteenth-century realism according to the development of the story, its climax and
conclusion, which is why she can be characterized as opposing traditional writers. Some
people said that the techniques that Mansfield uses were inspired in some way by Freuds
ideas and discoveries in the sense that her works deal with inner thoughts. Mansfield was
conscious about the gender problems that women went through at the time of her writings,
according to this conception, Bliss can be seen as a work that tries to portray the
situation of women in that period. (Cornut-Gentille DArcy, Chantal, Katherine
Mansfields Bliss: The Rare Fiddle as Emblem of the Political and Sexual Alienation of
Woman. Papers on Language and Literature 35.3 (1999): p 244).
One of Mansfields recurring themes in her short stories is time, as a sequence of
private irregular moments that happen during different occasions and which share the same
level of importance; these experiences are always lived by female characters and this was a
style Mansfield developed, through the use of a narrative that explored the female
consciousness, known as feminine symbolism, a technique linked to ironic symbolism,
through which the character experiences an kind of epiphany, a discovery that provides her
with insight that leads to the awareness of disappointment. (Mark Williams, The Artificial
and the Natural. The Development of Katherine Mansfields Prose Style, in: Telling
Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, ed. Jacqueline Bardolph (2001), p. 367-368).

Bibliography

Ronald Carter, John McRae, The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and
Ireland. Routledge, London, (2001).
Cornut-Gentille DArcy, Chantal, Katherine Mansfields Bliss: The Rare Fiddle as
Emblem of the Political and Sexual Alienation of Woman. Papers on Language and
Literature 35.3 (1999).

Mark Williams, The Artificial and the Natural. The Development of Katherine
Mansfields Prose Style, in: Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English,
ed. Jacqueline Bardolph (2001).
Chris Woodhead, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Verse, An Anthology of Sixteen
Poets, (1984).
Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern, University of California Press, Berkley,
CA, (1963).