A critical reading of an epoch-defining poem
Here’s a quiz question for you. How many poems can you name which have spawned the name of a whole poetic movement? A famous movement, too. One poem readily springs to mind: Stephen Spender’s ‘The Pylons’, whose title inspired the name of the ‘Pylon Poets’, 1930s British poets whose work deals with technological modernity. But ‘The Pylons’ is a mysterious poem: its legacy is more famous than the poem itself. What is the meaning of Spender’s poem? Read ‘The Pylons’ here to discover (or rediscover) it; what follows is our attempt to analyse this important poem that came to define an era in British verse.
‘The Pylons’ is written in quatrains, which loosely follow an abba rhyme scheme – but sometimes only very loosely. For instance, in the first stanza we find ‘cottages’ chiming faintly with ‘villages’ and ‘made’ with ‘roads’.