Dr Oliver Tearle’s summary of a classic modernist poem
‘Autumn’ by T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) is arguably the first modern poem in the English language. Written in 1908, it shows something different from the poetry being written by the Georgian poets such as Rupert Brooke and John Drinkwater, or the surviving ‘Victorian’ poets such as Thomas Hardy. Here is this short gem of a poem, with a few comments on it, that are designed to serve as preliminary analysis of its form, meaning, and imagery.
Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Modernist poetry is often associated with long poems such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, but modernism was also when poetry went small, thanks in no small part to Imagism, spearheaded by Pound himself. Here are 10 works of modernist poetry which couldn’t be accused of outstaying their welcome – none is longer than twelve lines.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
To the Lighthouse was Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel. By this stage of her career, she’d written a couple of more conventional novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919); she’d written the novel which is often cited as the turning point in her career as a modernist writer, Jacob’s Room (1922); and she’d written what is probably her most famous novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925), which features a couple of characters who’d featured in The Voyage Out (the action of Mrs Dalloway takes place over one day in June 1923, although there are numerous flashbacks to earlier in the characters’ lives, particularly to the youthful years of the title character).
The life and work of short-story writer Katherine Mansfield, in five pieces of trivia
1. Katherine Mansfield was the only writer who made Virginia Woolf jealous. When Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis, aged just 35, in 1923, fellow modernist writer Virginia Woolf confided in her diary: ‘I was jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ Mansfield’s short stories – notably ‘Bliss’ (1918) and ‘The Garden Party’ (1920) – are among the most important works of Anglophone modernist fiction. Like many modernist writers (though unlike Woolf), Mansfield was born and raised outside of Victorian England, in New Zealand (where she was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888, the same year as fellow modernist T. S. Eliot). She grew up to be unconventional in both her lifestyle and her writing.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Virginia Woolf’s third novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), is not her most famous book, but it is one of her defining novels and marked a watershed in her development as a writer, so a little analysis of its significance, and a summary of the story behind its composition, may be of interest. Woolf’s first two novels appeared in 1915 and 1919: The Voyage Out and Night and Day.