Critical Editions is a series intended to bring literary texts closer to students of both postgraduate and undergraduate levels. This anthology of modern British poetry includes representative poems by the important poets of the canon and helps introduce the reader to the sheer exuberance and variety of this period in British poetry. The detailed introduction offers a survey of the main themes, styles and poets. The commentaries accompanying each poem will enable students to unravel the more obscure references and contextual implications of the poem in question. The edition includes a select bibliography in the area to enable further reading and research.
Mohan Ramanan is Professor of English at the University of Hyderabad. A senior academician, he is the author of several books including books on modern poetry from Britain, America and India. His doctoral study on the Movement poets was later published as The Movement . He went on to publish Difficult Balance, a study of contemporary American formal verse and edited a book on contemporary Indian English verse.
Preface vii Acknowledgements viii Note to Teachers and Learners ix Introduction The Precursors Ezra Pound The ‘English’ Strain: The Hardy Line The Modernists: The Fascination of a Past with ‘Unified Sensibility’ Organic Society and Organic Poetry Thomas Stearns Eliot William Butler Yeats The Thirties Poets of the Forties The Movement Poets The Sixties and Seventies The Eighties Contemporary Verse Select Bibliography 1. Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) The Darkling Thrush The Convergence of the Twain The Voice 2. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) God’s Grandeur The Windhover Thou art Indeed Just, Lord, if I Contend 3. William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) The Lake Isle of Innisfree The Wild Swans at Coole Easter 1916 The Second Coming A Prayer for My Daughter Sailing to Byzantium The Circus Animals’ Desertion 4. Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) The Listeners Thomas Hardy 5. Edward Thomas (1878–1917) 60 The Owl October The Gypsy 6. Ezra Pound (1885–1972) 64 A Pact In a Station of the Metro 7. David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930) Last Lesson of the Afternoon Snake Bavarian Gentians 8. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The Waste Land 9. Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) Anthem for Doomed Youth Strange Meeting Futility 10. Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–73) The Letter Our Hunting Fathers In Memory of W. B. Yeats 11. Dylan Thomas (1914–53) A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London 12. Philip Larkin (1922–85) Church Going 13. Ted Hughes (1930–98) The Horses 14. Seamus Heaney (1939– ) Death of a Naturalist 15. Craig Raine (1944– ) A Martian Sends a Postcard Home