Eliot's 'Journey of the Magi'

Here is a link to a BBC radio programme on T.S. Eliot's poem 'Journey of the Magi', a poem that I think is especially interesting to read next to Yeats's 'The Second Coming'. Well worth a listen - and it gets Bob Dylan in, too!

Poetry of World War One

Her is an excellent website dedicated to the poetry of World War One. I've given you the link to the page on Siegfried Sassoon, which is worth a look, and from there you can find others.

More on Auden

The Norton website has some good pages on Auden, and links to some worthwhile, respectable critical essays. Have a look!

Modernism and British Poetry - Final Examination

Please note that there have been some minor changes to the format of the exam. Again, I've circulated this already  by email, but perhaps some of you didn't get it.

The final examination paper will consist of two parts.

In the first part, you will be given some extracts from texts we have studied on the course, and asked simply to identify the author and the title of the text from which the extract is taken. Easy! (10 marks)

In the second part, you will be given a choice of questions. Some of these will ask for a critical reading of a longer extract or a complete poem; some will ask you to discuss a particular issue relating to the poetry we have studied. You should answer ONE of these questions with a short but well-structured essay.  (30 marks)

PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO TAKE THE COURSE TEXTBOOK OR ANY OTHER PRINTED MATERIALS INTO THE EXAM WITH YOU.

Themes for revision

As well as making sure you are familiar with the poems we have studied, you may find it particularly advantageous to revise the following topic areas for part two of the exam:

• Differing Responses in Poetry to World War One

• T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

• Modernist ideas of the self or subject

• Modernist ideas of the poet and her/his relation to the poem

• Modernism’s changing face, 1880 – 1940

• Poetry and Politics in the 1930s

W. H. Auden - The Addictions of Sin

There is an excellent documentary on W. H. Auden, made by the BBC in 2004, called The Addictions of Sin: Auden in His Own Words. You can watch the whole thing on youtube - here is a link to the first part. I'd recommend it as an good way of revising for the final exam. Watching it myself I discovered that Auden's father, like my own great grandfather, fought at Gallipoli.

Sticking with youtube, you might also find this talk about Auden helpful. I haven't listened to it all myself yet, but the first part, which discusses 'Spain', Orwell's criticisms of it, and Auden's revisions, I think you will find very useful. It might even persuade those of you who weren't convinced by the poem to take another look! The programme takes some time to get going (you can probably ignore the first five minutes!) but even if you only listen to the first parts, you'll get a lot of useful information. At 7.30 there is also a good use of the expression 'young Turks'!

'Spain' revisited again...

Here is a link to an interesting blog posting on Auden's poem 'Spain'. It gives some extra background, which may help you understand the context better. It then discusses many of the points that came up in our class discussion today. For the author, "'Spain' is indeed, as some of you suggested, "the most reluctant of political poems", yet as he also recognises, it "still compels by its potency". He makes some interesting arguments, too, regarding the source of that potency. He also makes reference to Auden's poem 'In memory of W. B. Yeats', the poem we shall look at tomorrow.  The Norton anthology website also has a section on Auden's  poem on Yeats, with some other links you might find interesting.

And here is Picasso's painting, 'Guernica', which depicts the bombing of the Spanish town by fascist forces (more information - in Turkish! - here). Click on the image to see a larger version. Like 'Spain', 'Guernica' was completed in 1937, and was intended (at least in part) to serve an expressly political end, drawing attention to fascist atrocities and encouraging support for the Republican cause.

Auden, Orwell and 'Spain'

Joan Miro, Aidez l'espagne ('Help Spain!')

George Orwell (author of 1984 and Animal Farm) was shot in the throat fighting for the Republic in Spain on the same day that W. H. Auden's poem, 'Spain', was published as a 5-page pamphlet to raise money for the Spanish Medical Aid Committee (20 May 1937). Orwell praised Auden's poem, describing it as “one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish war.” However, he criticized line 95 of the poem, "The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder", and Auden himself later changed the line (see the note in your anthology). In fact, Auden eventually suppressed the poem entirely, refusing to publish it in his collected poems. There's an interesting article here about the debate between the two men.

I'd highly recommend George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, his record of his experiences fighting in the International Brigades in Spain during the civil war there. It's a book that made a profound impression on me when I was in my late teens, and a great read. 

AN INVITATION

This afternoon some of us met to discuss the performance of George Peele's The Arraignment of Paris which we will be putting on in April, and to read through the text. Thanks to everyone who came along.

If you didn't come to the meeting but would like to perform in the play, or to help with scenery, costume design, music or any other aspect of the production, it is not too late! Simply let me know, or come along to our next meeting, which will be held on Thursday 6th January at 2pm.  Don't be shy...

Early film and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Here's a link to a famous (well, famous-ish) silent early film adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I hope it might interest both those of you studying the novel and those of you interested in film at the time of the modernsits. I admit I turned the volume off when I watched it - I can only take so much dramatic organ music.

Please note that the film is an adaptation - it makes changes to the plot, introducing new elements and eliminating others. Watching the film(s) is not a substitute for reading the book!

And if you are reading this on Tuesday (or Wednesday morning) remember that tomorrow (Wednesday) there will be a quiz on the novel, and a catch-up class from 2-4pm.

'Spain' and Psychoanalysis

Here is a link to what looks to be an interesting article on W. H. Auden's poem, 'Spain'. I haven't had a chance to read it all yet, but even if you only read the first few paragraphs it will give you some useful context.

Modernism and Film

I've just sent by email some notes on Modernism and Film to those of you on the Modernism and British Poetry course. I hope you find them interesting. Please note that this is extra material for you to look at and incorporate into your work if you wish to do so.

Here are links to a handful of modernist films you may find interesting:

Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (1926)

Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's short surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) (1928) - with its famous scene of a razor cutting into an eye: sometimes interpreted as an assault on the viewer, on we who watch the film. There are obvious parallels here with what we discussed in today's class concerning art as acid, a cleansing or surgical burning or cutting away of spiritual and aesthetic corruption. Here is an interesting essay on the film, Bunuel, Dali and Sigmund Freud.

Finally, here is a link to the famous Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin (1925), which shows the Tsarist soldiers shooting at the crowd.  This is a scene that has been the subject of many pastiches and parodies. As in your assignments you are writing your own pastiches of modernist poems, you might be interested in the following re-workings of Eisenstein's scene, the first from The Untouchables, starring Kevin Costner, and the second from Terry Gilliam's Brazil - a personal favourite! (I'm sorry both of these are in Spanish - I couldn't find English versions online. I'm sure if you have time you can find English and/or Turkish versions.)

A raid on the inarticulate

For those of you who stayed behind today...here is the excerpt that I mentioned - and quoted badly from memory - from 'East Coker', the second of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets:

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory

A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle

With words and meanings.

'East Coker' was completed in or around 1940. It is a poem I return to again and again. Here is that quote about 'a raid on the inarticulate' in context. I think it is worth quoting this passage at length. The idea of 'the general mess of imprecision of feeling, / Undisciplined squads of emotion' seems to me to go straight back to Pound and Imagist theory (if not always Imagist practice).

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres*   Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

                          [* the two (world) wars]

Here is another, related passage, which comes a little earlier in the poem:

    You say I am repeating

Something I have said before. I shall say it again,

Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

  You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

  You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

At this point I should probably just send you to read the whole poem in all its weird glory. I'd be interested to know your thoughts.

Run-on sentences

Run-on sentences were perhaps the single most common grammatical problem I came across when marking your midterms. I'm not going to fully explain what they are and how to avoid them here. If I identifed run-ons as a problem in your writing, though, I recommend that you look at this website. It gives a simple explanation of how you can join together separate, independent clauses. (You can also try the exercises; the answers are given on the same page).  In particular, note method 3. You cannot simply join two independent clauses with a comma; instead, you need a comma and a connecting word (e.g. and, but, or, for - when for means because). So, instead of writing

Mrs. Joe is cruel to Pip, she often beats him. 

you should write

Mrs Joe is cruel to Pip, and she often beats him.

or

Mrs. Joe is cruel to Pip; she often beats him.

or

Mrs. Joe is cruel to Pip. She often beats him.

I hope this helps a little.

Modernism, metonymy and fragmentation

Fragmentation and disintegration, and substitutions of parts for wholes, were occurring at many different levels in the early twentieth-century.  As Terry Eagleton observes:

Modernism reflected the crack-up of a whole civilization. All the beliefs which had served nineteenth-century middle-class society so splendidly - liberalism, democracy, individualism, scientific inquiry, historical progress, the sovereignty of reason - were now in crisis. (After Theory (London: Allen Lane, 2003) p. 63)

Which of these levels was most significant is disputed. I mentioned in class Henry Ford's perfection of the assembly line. In 1908, Ford's company began selling his famous Model T. The car became popular, and soon Ford found he was unable to meet the enormous demand:

His solution was to invent a moving industrial production line. By installing a moving belt in his factory, employees would be able to build cars one piece at a time, instead of one car at a time. This principle, called "division of labor," allowed workers to focus on doing one thing very well, rather than being responsible for a number of tasks. (source).

You can see film of  Ford's assembly lines at work here.

It is Terry Eagleton (see above) who points to a modern move from metaphor to metonymy. The critic Michael North connects this to 'Prufrock': 

The general fragmentation of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is obvious and notorious. The poem seems a perfect example of what Terry Eagleton calls the modern "transition from metaphor to metonymy: unable any longer to totalize his experience in some heroic figure, the bourgeois is forced to let it trickle away into objects related to him by sheer contiguity." Everything in "Prufrock" trickles away into parts related to one another only by contiguity. 

 As North goes on,

In this poem the horror of sex seems to come in part from its power to metonymize. Like Augustine, Eliot sees sex as the tyranny of one part of the body over the whole. Though Eliot is far too circumspect to name this part, he figures its power in his poetry by the rebelliousness of mere members: hands, arms, eyes. Sexual desire pulls the body apart, so that to give in to it is to suffer permanent dismemberment. This may account for the odd combination in Eliot's work of sexual ennui and libidinous violence. The tyranny of one part scatters all the others, reducing the whole to impotence. In this way, the violence of sex robs the individual of the integrity necessary to action.

North also discusses metonymy and time in 'Prufrock' - you can find a more complete extract from his book, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge University Press, 1991), by following the link in the post before this one, or simply clicking here and scrolling down.

We will return to this in greater detail next week.

Criticism on 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'

Here is a link to a series of short critical extracts on 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. See what some of the brightest critics have had to say about the poem. Remember, quoting or referencing critics in your work and in your exam essays is a good thing to do! Reading critics is also an excellent way of learning how to write criticism.

'Grasshopper', by e. e. cummings

I have sent this around as an email already, but I know some of you don't always get my emails, and posting it here will allow you to discuss it, should you want to. A couple of you were asking about poems (rather than manifestoes) that use typographical experimentation. This is one of my favourites, by the American poet, e. e. cummings:

If you are confused, look at the poem's last word for a clue to the subject. If you know what a grasshopper is (and how it moves) you can begin to read this poem!

I'd be very interested to know what you think. You can see a very useful selection of critical interpretations of the poem here, but make up your own minds before seeing what the critics say.

Cummings was another American poet who came to Europe and was involved in the First World War, and lived in Paris in the 1920s. He was also a painter and met Pablo Picasso, and was influenced in his poetry (like so many others) by Ezra Pound. He is a strange mix of the avant-garde and the traditionalist - some of his poetry is quite traditional, and his use of nature in his poems especially is in some ways close to that of the Romantics.

Modernist Film - Buster Keaton's Cops

I've discussed with a couple of you now the relation between film and modernism. I'll post more on this later - and if there's enough interest and I can sort out the technology, we can run an extra session on it. For now, though, have a look at Buster Keaton's Cops. Suspend your prejudices about what you think you are about to see, and you might be surprised. Keaton influenced Bunuel and Salvador Dali, and later worked with Samuel Beckett.

(If you would be interested in an extra session on film, add a comment below - this will give me an idea of the levels iof interest. Thanks!)

Dulce Et Decorum Est (2)

Yet another engagment with the 'old Lie'.... although a slightly more recent one!

First World War poetry on film

These short clips might be interesting:

1. an extract on Wilfred Owen from a BBC programme

2. an extract from Regeneration, the film I mentioned today, in which Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon discuss poetry at Craiglockhart military hospital in Scotland.

There are also lots of good clips on Youtube relating to other First World War poetry, and the First World War more generally. Have a look!

Dulce Et Decorum Est

I forgot to draw your attention today to the passage in 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley' where Ezra Pound quotes the same 'old Lie' that Wilfred Owen uses in the title and the close of his poem. There Pound writes

 These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case . .     

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later . . .

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some "pro patria, non dulce non et decor". .

By chance, I also found this translation into Turkish of poem V of 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley'. I have no idea whether it is good, or accurate, but it might be of interest. Perhaps one of you can tell me?

You might also be interested to see the manuscript of Wilfred Owen's first draft of 'Dulce Et Decorum Est', here, at the British Library's web page. Click on 'see transcript' to see a typed version of his first draft. The page also has some brief commentary on the poem. If you click on 'enlarge' - or directly here - you can see the whole first page of the manuscript properly.

Among other things, the British Library website states the following, which I didn't know (and probably should have - and so should you!):

At the time of the First World War, the poet Owen Seaman, who was editor of Punch magazine, wrote patriotic verses under the title, 'Pro Patria' that urged young men to the fight - though he himself, being 53 years old, remained as one "whose burden is to watch and wait." Those at a less comfortable distance from the fighting saw it differently. In his revelation of the reality of war Owen uses the Roman motto ironically, calling it "the old lie".

Finally, I discovered that the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, recently named 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' as his favourite poem. I'll leave you to decide how many levels of irony there are to that.....