Edwardian poets

2.  Edwardian era
 The Edwardian era is a period of time in British
history that commonly dates from the end of the
Victorian era in 1901 until the beginning of the
First World War in 1914.
 The period is named after the reign of King
Edward VII. Although Edward's reign ended with
his death in 1910, the four years that succeeded
are also referred to as 'Edwardian'.
 The Edwardian era is the last in British history
to be named after a reigning monarch.

3.  Although it was a relatively short time, it was a
period of tremendous change.
 The Victorian era brought about the Industrial
Revolution, which rapidly increased the size
and population of cities.
 This increase led to the poor and working
classes living among the more wealthy and
this, in turn, led to a demand for social
change.
 It was also the time when women's suffrage
came to prominence. High-profile campaigns
brought women's suffrage to the forefront of
political discussion.

4.  Edwardian Poetry- In a review of modern
English poetry, Edwardians claim attention
first. Henry Newbolt, John Masefield,
Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman , Edward
Thomas, John Davidson, Rupert
Brooke, Kipling, Bennett, de La Mare,
Masefield and Yeats stand in the forefront of
Edwardian poetry. Of course they did not
solve difficulties, whether social, political or
introspective, but they helped to view them
impersonally and yet practically, under the
influence of contemporary ideas.

5.  These poets continued in the old tradition; none
of them founded a school.
 They kept to 19th century methods. They were
well-advised to do so, because behind and
around them there was a body of traditionalists,
less inspired and less creative, but never the less
sufficiently influential to sustain public opinion.
 The Edwardian age is in the main an age of
criticism, of questioning and of refusal to accept
established institutions.
 From another point of view Edwardian age
appears as a time of great prosperity and glitter,
of social stability and spacious case, the halcyon
period before storm.

6.  Henry Newbolt
 1862–1924
 Henry Newbolt is best known for writing
poetry that heralded his native England
during the reign of Queen Victoria and
the early 20th century.
 In addition to poetry, Newbolt wrote
novels and criticism while enjoying the
company of other leading literary figures
of the time, such as Henry
James, Thomas Hardy, William
Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.


7.  Earning his law degree in 1887, Newbolt divided
his time between writing and practicing law.
 He produced a few works, including a
novel, Taken from the Enemy (1892), and a
play, Mordred (1895). During this time, Newbolt
also contributed articles to the Law
Digest. After 12 years as a lawyer, he finally
succumbed to his first love—literature—and
devoted himself full-time to pursuing his art.
He married Margaret Edina Duckworth and
settled into a writer’s life.

8.  Newbolt’s early work garnered him some minor
attention, but his career took off when “Drake’s
Drum” appeared in Longman’s Magazine in 1896.
 Critics everywhere hailed the work as a
masterpiece. The poem is a patriotic piece using
direct, yet lyrical language that celebrates the
spirit of England.
 ” It was published again one year later in a
collection called Admirals All and Other
Verses. Together with 11 additional Newbolt
poems, the collection was a bestseller, enjoying
30 printings by 1910 and turning Newbolt into an
national celebrity

9.  John Masefield, (born June 1, 1878,
Ledbury, Herefordshire, Eng.—died May
12, 1967, near Abingdon, Berkshire),
 poet, best known for his poems of the
sea, Salt-Water Ballads (1902,
including “Sea Fever” and “Cargoes”),
and for his long narrative poems, such
as The Everlasting Mercy (1911).
 Educated at King’s School, Warwick,
Masefield was employed aboard a
windjammer that sailed around Cape
Horn.

10.  He left the sea after that voyage and spent
several years living precariously in the United
States. His work there in a carpet factory is
described in his autobiography, In the
Mill (1941).
 He returned to England, worked for a time as a
journalist for the Manchester Guardian, and
settled in London. After he succeeded Robert
Bridges as poet laureate in 1930,
his poetry became more austere.

11.  Other of Masefield’s long narrative poems
are Dauber (1913), which concerns the eternal
struggle of the visionary against ignorance and
materialism, and Reynard the Fox (1919), which
deals with many aspects of rural life in England.
 He also wrote novels of adventure—Sard
Harker (1924), Odtaa (1926),
and Basilissa (1940)—sketches, and works for
children.
 His other works include the poetic dramas: The
Tragedy of Nan (1909) and The Tragedy of
Pompey the Great (1910), as well as a further
autobiographical volume, So Long to
Learn (1952). Masefield was awarded the Order
of Merit in 1935.

12.  Order of Merit, British honorary institution
founded by Edward VII in 1902 to reward those
who provided especially eminent service in the
armed forces or particularly distinguished
themselves in science, art, literature, or the
promotion of culture.

13.  Thomas Hardy, (born June 2, 1840,
Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, Eng.—
died Jan. 11, 1928, Dorchester, Dorset),
British novelist and poet.
 Son of a country stonemason and
builder, he practiced architecture
before beginning to write poetry, then
prose. Many of his novels, beginning
with his second, Under the Greenwood
Tree (1872), are set in the imaginary
county of Wessex.
 Far from the Madding Crowd (1874),
his first success, was followed by The
Return of the Native (1878), The
Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of
the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the
Obscure (1895), all expressing his
stoical pessimism and his sense of the
inevitable tragedy of life.

14.  Their continuing popularity (many have been
filmed) owes much to their richly varied yet
accessible style and their combination of
romantic plots with convincingly presented
characters.
 He returned to poetry with Wessex
Poems (1898), Poems of the Past and the
Present (1901), and The Dynasts (1910), a
huge poetic drama of the Napoleonic Wars.

15.  In 1903, 1905, and 1908 Hardy successively published the
three volumes of The Dynasts, a huge poetic drama that
is written mostly in blank verse and subtitled “an epic-
drama of the War with Napoleon”—though it was not
intended for actual performance.
 Poetry collections
 Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
 Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
 Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909)
 Satires of Circumstance (1914)
 Moments of Vision (1917)
 Collected Poems (1919)
 Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses (1922)
 Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles (1925)
 Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928)

16. A.E. Housman
 A.E. Housman, in full Alfred
Edward Housman, (born March 26,
1859, Fockbury, Worcestershire,
Eng.—died April 30, 1936,
Cambridge), English scholar and
celebrated poet whose lyrics
express a Romantic pessimism in a
spare, simple style.
 Housman, whose father was a
solicitor, was one of seven children.
He much preferred his mother; and
her death on his 12th birthday was
a cruel blow, which is surely one
source of the pessimism
his poetry expresses.

17.  From 1882 to 1892 he worked as a clerk in the
Patent Office in London.
 In the evenings he studied Latin texts in
the British Museum reading room and developed
a consummate gift for correcting errors in them,
owing to his mastery of the language and his
feeling for the way poets choose their words.
 Articles he wrote for journals caught the
attention of scholars and led to his appointment
in 1892 as professor of Latin at University
College, London.

18.  Housman regarded himself principally as a
Latinist and avoided the literary world. In 1911
he became professor of Latin
at Cambridge, teaching there almost up to his
death.
 His major scholarly effort, to which he devoted
more than 30 years, was an annotated edition
of Manilius (1903–30), whose poetry he did not
like but who gave him ample scope for
emendation.
 Some of the asperity and directness that
appears in Housman’s lyrics also is found in his
scholarship, in which he defended common
sense with a sarcastic wit that helped to make
him widely feared.

19.  MAJOR WORKS:
A Shropshire Lad (1896)
Last Poems (1922)
More Poems (1936)
The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman (1939)

20.  Edward Thomas, in full Philip Edward
Thomas, (born March 3,
1878, Lambeth, London, England—died
April 9, 1917, Arras, France), English
writer who turned to poetry only after
a long career spent producing nature
studies and critical works on such
19th-century writers as Richard
Jefferies, George Borrow, Algernon
Charles Swinburne, and Walter Pater.
 Thomas was educated at St. Paul’s
School and the University of
Oxford and spent most of his life
unhappily employed as an essayist and
journalist. In 1913 he met the
American poet Robert Frost, who
encouraged him to write poetry.

21.  Two years later Thomas enlisted in the British
army; freed from routine literary work, he was
able to produce increasingly fluent poetry.
 The rhythms of his verse are quiet and unstressed;
he was above all a poet of the country.
 He was killed during World War I, and most of his
poems were published posthumously, though a few
were published under the name Edward Eastaway
during his lifetime. Thomas’ Collected
Poems appeared in 1920.
 Thomas's poems are written in a colloquial style
and frequently feature the English countryside.
The short poem In Memoriam exemplifies how his
poetry blends the themes of war and the
countryside.

22.  In Memorium (Easter 1915): 'In Memorium' shows
this to be a poem of remembrance. Easter,
when the death and resurrection of Christ is
celebrated, is the most important date in the
Christian calendar; a time for reflection on
sacrifices made.

23. •John Davidson (11 April 1857 – 23 March 1909)
was a Scottish poet, playwright and novelist, best
known for his ballads.
•In 1890 he went to London, practiced journalism,
and wrote novels and short stories to earn a
living.
• His second and third volumes of verse, Fleet
Street Eclogues (1893), proved popular,
established his reputation, and earned the respect
of T. S. Eliot, who wrote a preface to a selection
of Davidson's poems in 1961 edited by Maurice
Lindsay.
•Davidson's true medium was verse. Davidson
possessed a genuine and distinctive poetic gift.

24. WORKS
The North Wall (1885)
Diabolus Amans (1885), verse drama
Bruce (1886 ) a drama in five acts
Smith (1888) a tragedy
Plays (1889)

25.  Rupert Brooke, (born Aug. 3, 1887, Rugby,
Warwickshire, Eng.—died April 23,
1915, Skyros, Greece), English poet, a
wellborn, gifted, handsome youth whose
early death in World War I contributed to his
idealized image in the interwar period.
 His best-known work is the sonnet
sequence 1914.
 He studied in Germany.
 He spent a year (1913–14) wandering in
the United States, Canada, and the South
Seas. With the outbreak of World War I, he
received a commission in the Royal Navy.

26.  Brooke’s wartime sonnets, 1914 (1915), brought him
immediate fame.
 known for his idealistic war sonnets written during
the First World War, especially "The Soldier".
 He was also known for his boyish good looks, which
were said to have prompted the Irish poet W. B.
Yeats to describe him as "the handsomest young man
in England“.
 Poems
The sodier(1915)
The Old Vicarage, Grantchester(1912)
The dead(1915)
The great lover(1915)
Heaven(1913)

27.  Rudyard Kipling, in full Joseph
Rudyard Kipling, (born December 30,
1865, Bombay [now Mumbai], India—
died January 18, 1936, London,
England), English short-story writer,
poet, and novelist chiefly
remembered for his celebration of
British imperialism, his tales and
poems of British soldiers in India, and
his tales for children. He received
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.
 Kipling’s poems and stories were
extraordinarily popular in the late
19th and early 20th century.

28.  Poems
 IF(1910)
 RECESSIONAL(1897)
 GUNGA DIN(1890)
 THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN(1899)
 THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES(1911)

29.  William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28
January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist,
writer and one of the foremost figures
of 20th-century literature.
 He was a driving force behind the Irish
Literary Revival and became a pillar of the
Irish literary establishment who helped to
found the Abbey Theatre.
 From 1900 his poetry grew more
physical, realistic and politicised.
 Yeats had a lifelong interest in
mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrol
ogy.
 In December 1923, Yeats was awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature.

30. STYLE
 He was a Symbolist poet, using allusive imagery
and symbolic structures throughout his career.
 Unlike the modernists who experimented with free
verse, Yeats was a master of the traditional forms.
 His later poetry and plays are written in a more
personal vein, and the works written in the last
twenty years of his life include mention of his son
and daughter.
 The preface for the English translation
of Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali (Song Offering)
(for which Tagore won the Nobel prize in
Literature) was written by Yeats in 1913.

31. Poems
The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems
 The Second Coming
 Sailing to Byzantium
 Easter, 1916
 The Stolen Child
 A Prayer for My Daughter
 Adam's Curse
 Leda and the Swan
 'Death'. ·
 The Second Coming
 He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
 Long-Legged Fly

32.  BIBLIOGRAPHY
Edward Albert history of english literature
Paplawski Paul english literature in context