Modern trends of British Literature: Poetry, Theatre and Fiction

POETRY

Since 1945 British poetry has moved from what many regarded as a shift from the parochial to the international. In little more than fifty years the insular, clear verse of mainland English Britain has changed from being a centralist and predominantly male, seemingly academic practice to become a post-modern, cultural entertainment, available to everyone.

During the late forties the dominance of the pre-war modernists was overthrown. Poets such as F.S.Flint (1885-1960) and the Georgians Walter de La Mare (1873-1956), and W.H.Davies (1871-1940) used their verse to depict a vanishing rural and domestic scene. When the war ended the new poetry which emerged still bore traces of the measured and uneventful thirties verse that had gone before it. Poets of what became known as the neo-Romantic movement wrote as if the British world had not changed. Among them, Vernon Watkins (1906-1967), W.S.Graham (1918-1986), Patricia Beer (1919-1999), George Barker (1913-1991), John Heath-Stubbs (1918-2006) and others.

The reaction came in the early fifties, soon after Dylan Thomas's death in 1953, The Movement as the new tendency was called had become coherent. Movement poets opposed modernism and had little international influences. They regarded themselves as a direct continuation of mainstream English tradition. Other poets were also steadily making their mark: two of Britain's greatest twentieth-century poets, Geoffrey Hill (1932 - ) and Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998), all appeared during the formal English fifties. Hughes, the gritty Yorkshire Poet Laureate engaged the primordial struggle and won. Hill's dense, formidable poetry became, for some, the highest achievement of late twentieth-century English verse.

The safe fifties moved into the revolutionary sixties. Michael Hamburger (1924-2007), Christopher Middleton (1926-), Charles Tomlinson (1927-), Ted Walker (1934-2004), Iain Crichton Smith (1928-1998), Norman MacCaig (1910-1996) were some of the names that came up at the time. Ted Hughes, R.S.Thomas and others were joined in a spirit of urgency and the poet's ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with his full intelligence.

But explosion was around the corner. After a brief dalliance with jazz and stage performances, inspired largely by the Americans, British poetry took its vital left turn. A poetry built on wild times, popular readings and independent distribution systems exploded across the UK. Led by the Liverpool poets (Adrian Henri (1932- 2001), Roger McGough (1937-) and Brian Patten (1946-) on the back of the Beatles, and aided by Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008), Jeff Nuttall (1933-2004), Tom Pickard (1946-) and others, Underground poetry had a popular face. Poetry was removing itself from its male-dominated and often academic metropolitan centres.

In reaction, in 1982 mainstream neo-Georgian Andrew Motion (1952-) and Blake Morrison (1950-) produced the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, an anthology which makes its point more by who it left out than who went in. Pop poetry may have been doing well in the clubs while neo-modernists filled the small presses.

The steady immigration to the UK over a long period did not go unnoticed in its literature. Immigrants like Linton Kwesi Johnson (1952-) drove in new, anti-authoritarian values, made non-standard orthography acceptable and, by allying himself with black music, produced a poetry that, in Britain, was pretty much like nothing else. British culture now valued its parts more strongly than its whole. For good post-Modernists the concerns of minorities, linguistic and sexual orientation, origin and gender have all become significant. Much of the early nineties mainstream stance is evident in the output of presses like Carcanet and Bloodaxe and is gathered in the controversial anthology The New Poetry (1993) edited by Michael Hulse (1955-), David Kennedy (1959-) and David Morley (1964-). It was a controversial piece, perhaps, because of its diversity. The anthology has no central thrust other than its multiplicity.

The new poetry does not, however, contain many examples of Britain's performance poetry. During the past fifteen years verse has found an increasingly welcome home on the stage of clubs, pubs and bars. Poetry delivered as entertainment, loud, in your face and, like much of the rest of our media, instantly appreciable has turned verse from an arcane art into a truly popular one. John Hegley (1953-), and others have increased public consumption of poetry on a geometric scale. Their work is dynamic, politically apposite and often delivered with considerable humour.  Read the following poem by Hegley and observe its features and humour.

Poem de Terre

I'm not a normal person


whatever that may be


there is something very very vegetable
about me,


this human skin I'm skulking in
it's only there for show,


I'm a potato.


When I told my father
it was something of a blow,

he was hurt


and he called me a dirty so-and-so.


He kicked up a racket


and he grabbed me by the jacket;


I said, 'Daddy will you pack it in


I need you for my father not my foe


Daddy, will you try and help me grow,


won't you love me for my blemishes


and look me in the eye


before one of us is underground


and the other says goodbye?'


And he said 'No'.

When I was a schoolboy


I never knew why


I was so crap at cross-country running


but now I know


why I was so slow.


I'm a potato.

(Poem from Beyond our Kennel)

By the turn of the millennium poetry in Britain had reached a multi-faceted stand-off. Despite the work of editors like Simon Armitage and Robert Crawford (1959-) who have made brave attempts at uniting post-modern, post-Christian, post-war, post-Hiroshima, post-structuralist, post-devolution poetries under one pluralistic banner the many gleaming and disparate parts of British poetry do not like making a coherent whole. The argument between form and content remains as strong as ever. It has been raging for a hundred years and there are no winners yet. Twenty-first century British poetry is no longer precisely English. Like the world literature with which it is now firmly allied it has as many facets as the eye of a fly, saying exactly what remains as the problem of the moment.

Late Modernism 1946 – 2000

Though some critics have considered Modernism ending by around 1939, with regard to English literature, when and if Modernism disappeared and Post-Modernism began has been contested almost as hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to Modernism occurred". In fact a number of Modernists were still living and publishing during the 1950s and the 1960s, including T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson and John Cowper Powys. Furthermore the Irishman Samuel Beckett, born in 1906, continued to produce significant works until the 1980s. While Modernist Samuel Beckett was not a British writer he had a major influence on British writers in the second half of the 20th century, in works like Waiting for Godot (1955), as we have already discussed in our previous lesson. However, some view him as a Post-Modernist. Perhaps the most significant event relating to the novel in English in the second half of the twentieth-century was the publication, originally in French, of Samuel Beckett's trilogy: Molloy (1951); Malone Meurt (1951) (Malone Dies, translated by Beckett, 1958); and L'Innomable (1953) (The Unnamable, 1960).

George Orwell's satire of totalitarianism, Nineteen Eighty-Four, studied in Lesson 8, was published in 1949. As we have already seen, Orwell's works are important social and political commentaries of the 20th century. One of the most influential novels of the immediate post-war period was William Cooper's naturalistic Scenes from Provincial Life, a conscious rejection of the modernist tradition.

Graham Greene's (1904 – 1991) was a novelist whose works span from the 1930s to the 1980s. He was a convert to Catholicism and his novels explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. He combined serious literary acclaim with broad popularity in novels such as Brighton Rock (1938), A Burnt-Out Case (1961) and The Human Factor (1978), which was made into a film in 1979.

Other novelists writing in the 1950s and later were: Anthony Powell (1905-2000) whose twelve-volume cycle of novels A Dance to the Music of Time, is a comic examination of movements and manners, power and passivity in English political, cultural and military life in the mid-20th century; Nobel Prize winner, William Golding (1911 – 1993), whose allegorical novel Lord of the Flies (1954), shows how culture created by man fails, using, as an example, a group of British schoolboys marooned on a deserted island who try to govern themselves with disastrous results; philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999) who was a prolific writer of novels dealing with sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious, including Under the Net (1954). Anthony Burgess (1917 – 1993) is especially remembered for his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange 1962, set in the not-too-distant future, which was made into a film (1971) by Stanley Kubrick.

Other names include, Angela Carter (1940-1992), a novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, and picaresque works. Writing from the 1960s until the 1980s, her novels include, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman 1972, and Nights at the Circus 1984. Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary 1996, and its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 1999, chronicle the life of Bridget Jones, a thirty-something single woman in London.

Salman Rushdie is among a number of post Second World War writers from former British colonies who permanently settled in Britain. Rushdie achieved fame with Midnight's Children (1981), which was awarded both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Booker Prize later that year, and was named Booker of Bookers in 1993. His most controversial novel The Satanic Verses (1989) was inspired in part by the life of Muhammad.

Doris Lessing from Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), published her first novel The Grass is Singing in 1950, after immigrating to England. She initially wrote about her African experiences. Lessing soon became a dominant presence in the English literary scene, publishing frequently, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Below you can read the initial lines of The Golden Notebook, published in 1962.  The book tells the story of a modern woman, Anna, who tries to live with the freedom of a man. She is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one with a black cover she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with Communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which her heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer, threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

With these various thread of her story - her life - Anna weaves a vivid tapestry of contemporary concerns. Never for a moment can the reader doubt the validity of her testament. Documentary precision combines with deep narrative art to reveal the truth of being an intelligent woman. Her conclusions are likely to be debated for generations. Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.

Anna meets her friend Molly in the summer of 1957 after a separation…

The two women were alone in the London flat.

‘The point is,’ said Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, ‘the point is, that as far as I can see, everything’s cracking up.’

Molly was a woman much on the telephone. When it rang she had just enquired: ‘Well, what’s the gossip?’ Now she said, ‘That’s Richard, and he’s coming over. It seems today’s his only free moment for the next month. Or so he insists.’

‘Well I’m not leaving,’ said Anna.

‘No, you stay just where you are.’

Molly considered her own appearance — she was wearing trousers and a sweater, both the worse for wear. ‘He’ll have to take me as I come,’ she concluded, and sat down by the window. ‘He wouldn’t say what it’s about — another crisis with Marion, I suppose.’

‘Didn’t he write to you?’ asked Anna, cautious.

‘Both he and Marion wrote — ever such bonhomous letters. Odd, isn’t it?’

This odd, isn’t if? was the characteristic note of the intimate conversations they designated gossip. But having struck the note, Molly swerved off with: ‘It’s no use talking now, because he’s coming right over, he says.’

‘He’ll probably go when he sees me here,’ said Anna, cheerfully, but slightly aggressive. Molly glanced at her, keenly, and said: ‘Oh, but why?’

It had always been understood that Anna and Richard disliked each other; and before, Anna had always left when Richard was expected. Now Molly said: ‘Actually I think he rather likes you, in his heart of hearts. The point is, he’s committed to liking me, on principle — he’s such a fool he’s always got to either like or dislike someone, so all the dislike he won’t admit he has for me gets pushed off on to you.’

To read more about Doris Lessing works, go to www.dorislessing.org

Literature in the 21^st Century

Thus far, literature of the 21st century carries on many of the themes that concerned the modernist and postmodernist movements. The genesis of modernism and postmodernism can be traced to the Industrial Revolution and the vastly different thinking inspired by the world wars, and the themes that concerned those movements of the past century are still applicable to the contemporary world. It is still too soon to examine the literature produced by the 21^st century authors due to its closeness to the present moment. It is possible, however, to spot themes such as technological revolution and ecology to be present in some of the most recent works of our time.