The Twentieth Century: To the 1960s

Byrne, Sandie

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_7

Sandie Byrne²

173 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter looks at the persistence of representations of social division and inequality into the twentieth century during a period of better education, greater literacy, and shorter working hours for most working-class people, and of the further alienation of the worker by the drive towards greater efficiency in production processes through fragmentation, streamlining, and automation. It begins with a discussion of the importance of Classical allusions in poetry of the Great War and of the discourse of chivalry in relation to class. The alleged exclusivity and snobbery of some Modernist poetry is contrasted with the reaction against that exclusivity in the 1930s, and Movement poetry is considered in relation to the expansion of the middle classes. The development of state-sponsored cultural institutions and the extent to which these promoted inclusivity and engendered fears of dumbing down is also examined as the context of post-war poetry.

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Notes

1.
For a discussion of the design structures of management and forms of production, see Morag Shiach, Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 6–7.
2.
Elizabeth Vandiver, Stand in the Trench, Achilles : Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
3.
Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good : Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago Il: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
4.
Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2003).
5.
Lawrence Rainey, ‘The of Cultural Economy of Modernism’ in Ronald Bush, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 33–69.
6.
Michael H. Whitworth, Reading Modernist Poetry (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012).
7.
Carey, op. cit.
8.
Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
9.
Peter Womack, ‘Literature belongs to Gentlemen’, Critical Quarterly 55:3 (October 2013), 26–43.
10.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966). Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (1989) revd edn (London: Continuum, 2004).
11.
Adriano Tilgher, Work: What it has Meant to Men through the Ages, transl. D.C. Fisher (London: Harrap, 1931), p. 63, cited by Shiach, op. cit., p. 4.
12.
The Newbolt Report: Teaching of English in England. Being the Report of the Departmental Committee Appointed by the President of the Board of Education to Enquire into the Position of English in the Educational System of England (1921).
13.
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1977); rprnt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 170–171.
14.
Anon, ‘A Dweller in Wipers’ Elegy to that Town’, Wipers Times I: 3 (16 March 1916), n.p.
15.
Gilbert Frankau, ‘Urgent or Ordinary’, Wipers Times, op. cit., n.p.
16.
Herbert Asquith, The Volunteer and Other Poems (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1915), p. 7.
17.
Vandiver, op. cit., pp. 68–69.
18.
Frantzen, op. cit., pp. 13–27.
19.
Statement by Prime Minister 11 October 1916, Hansard, HC Deb 86 cc95–161 (103).
20.
Asquith, op. cit., pp. 8–10.
21.
Asquith, op. cit., pp. 11–12.
22.
Edmund John, ‘In Memoriam’, in J.W. Cunliffe, ed., Poems of the Great War (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. 139.
23.
Frank Taylor, ‘The English Dead’, Cunliffe, op. cit., pp. 255–258.
24.
The Rev Isaac Gregory Smith, ‘Close Your Ranks’, in Cunliffe, op. cit., pp. 240–241.
25.
Margaret L. Woods, ‘The First Battle of Ypres’, in Cunliffe, op. cit., pp. 290–305 (295).
26.
Siegfried Sassoon, ‘The Poet as Hero’ in Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), p. 61.
27.
Wilfred Owen, ‘Apologia pro poemate meo’ (corrected from ‘Apologia pro poema meo’) The War Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), pp. 18–19.
28.
Vandiver, op. cit., p. 118.
29.
Vandiver, op. cit., p. 119.
30.
Vandiver notes that the poem was a verse letter to a teacher at Marlborough, John Bain, op. cit., p. 83.
31.
Charles Hamilton Sorley, ‘XXIX’ in Marlborough and Other Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916), pp. 73–78.
32.
For example, Owen Seaman, ‘Pro Patria’, War-Time Verses (London: Constable, 1915), pp. 7–8.
33.
As Vandiver notes, in ‘Strange Meeting’ and ‘Spring Offensive’, for example, op. cit., p. 394. Vandiver also cites a poem which references Owen’s use of the quotation from Horace. N.P. Graham, The Poems (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1921), quoted in Vandiver, op. cit., pp. 402–403. Wilfred Blair’s ‘A Ballad of Deathless Dons’ uses a single Greek word as part of its comic depiction of Oxford tutors drilling. Cunliffe, op. cit., p. 23.
34.
Vandiver, op. cit., p. 170.
35.
Alvarez, op. cit., pp. 25–26.
36.
Vandiver, op. cit., p. 105.
37.
Vandiver, op. cit., pp. 104–105.
38.
Vandiver, op. cit., p. 106.
39.
Vandiver, op. cit., p. 107.
40.
T.S. Eliot, ‘Modern Education and the Classics’ in Selected Essays (1932) revd edn (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 507–516 (513).
41.
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Class and the Elite’, New Review XI: 6 (June 1945), 499–509.
42.
Eliot, op. cit., p. 499.
43.
Eliot, op. cit., p. 504.
44.
Eliot, op. cit., p. 509.
45.
Auden, however, refers to novel writing as a ‘higher art’ than poetry in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, though he qualifies this, making the comparator ‘the average poet’. He praises Isherwood’s work in ‘Birthday Poem’ and ‘The Novelist’.
46.
Tony Harrison, The Gaze of the Gorgon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992).
47.
Ivor Gurney, ‘The Silent One’, Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems, ed P.J. Kavanagh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.53.
48.
See, for example, Diepeveen, op. cit., pp. 1–17; John Fordham, James Hanley, Modernism and the Working Class (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), p. 78; Jason Harding, ‘Modernist Poetry and the Canon’ in Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 225–243 (226).
49.
Graves and Riding define and discuss what constitutes Modernist poetry and include Gerard Manley Hopkins, Siegfried Sassoon, and E. E. Cummings. Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1927), pp. 155–189.
50.
Riding and Graves, op. cit., p. 9.
51.
Riding and Graves, op. cit., p. 83.
52.
Riding and Graves, ibid.
53.
Riding and Graves, op. cit., p. 84.
54.
transition (sic) 16–17 (June 1929), 1.
55.
Carey, op. cit., pp. 16–17.
56.
Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking : Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 9.
57.
Lawrence Rainey, ‘The Cultural Economy of Modernism’ in Ronald Bush, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 33–69 (33).
58.
Riding and Graves, op. cit., p. 117.
59.
Rainey, op. cit., p 43.
60.
Rainey, op. cit., p. 56.
61.
Rainey, op. cit., p. 44.
62.
Rainey, op. cit., p. 43.
63.
Carey, op. cit., pp. 4–15.
64.
D.H. Lawrence, ‘Humanity Needs Pruning’, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian Pinto (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 677.
65.
Lawrence, ‘Evil is Homeless’, op. cit., pp. 711–712.
66.
Lawrence, ‘City-Life’, op. cit., p. 632.
67.
Lawrence, ‘Cry of the Masses’, op. cit., pp. 584–585.
68.
See Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London, 1963) and Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture (London, 1948). Also discussed by Fordham.
69.
D.H. Lawrence, ‘The Education of the People’ in Works of D.H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 85–166 (97).
70.
Lawrence, ‘Embankment at Night, Before the War: Outcasts’, Poems, pp. 143–146.
71.
George Watson and J.D. Chambers, among others, argue that in addition to the social standing of Lydia Lawrence, because Lawrence’s own father did not remain a miner but became a contractor, D.H. Lawrence should not be seen as of working-class origin. The arguments are discussed in Colin Holmes, ‘Lawrence’s Social Origins’ in Christopher Heywood, ed., D.H. Lawrence, New Studies (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 1–15.
72.
Lawrence, op. cit., pp. 490–491.
73.
Lawrence, op. cit., pp. 430–431.
74.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 16–17.
75.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy , ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 74.
76.
F.R. Leavis and Denys Thomson, Culture and Environment (London: Chatto and Windus, 1933), pp. 1–3.
77.
Williams Culture and Society, p. 253.
78.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English 2 vols (New York: Harper, 1833), I, pp. 80–81.
79.
G.M. Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria (London: Longman, Green 1942), p. 576.
80.
Trevelyan, op. cit., p. 582.
81.
Michael H. Whitworth, Reading Modernist Poetry (Malden , MA and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), p. 4.
82.
Cleanth Brooks semi-humorously asserted that a knowledge of nineteenth-century poetry was a handicap for understanding twentieth-century works. Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939); rprnt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 1.
83.
D.J. Enright, Introduction, Poets of the 1950’s : An Anthology of New English Verse (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1955), p. 2.
84.
Douglas Jefferies, editorial, Storm I: 1 (February 1933), 2, quoted in James Smith, ‘The Radical Literary Magazine of the 1930s and British Government Surveillance: The Case of Storm Magazine,’ Literature and History 3rd Series IXX: 2 (September 2010), 69–86 (73).
85.
D.E.S. Maxwell, Poets of the Thirties (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 17–18.
86.
Enright, op. cit., p. 3.
87.
See, for example, Stephen Spender’s reply to the accusation that writers dare not transgress a left-wing orthodoxy. Stephen Spender, ‘The Left-Wing Orthodoxy’, New Verse (Autumn 1938); Percy Wyndham Lewis, ‘Freedom that Destroys Itself’ The Listener (8 May 1935), quoted in Cunningham, op. cit., pp. 28–29.
88.
Adrian Caesar, ‘Auden and the Class System’, in Tony Sharpe, ed., W.H. Auden in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 69–78 (70).
89.
W.H. Auden, ‘XXIV’ [Birthday Poem], Poems 1931–1936, The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), pp. 156–157 (157).
90.
Letter quoted in Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (London: Heinemann, 1995), p. 157.
91.
Quoted in Davenport-Hines, op. cit., p. 179.
92.
W.H. Auden, ‘The Cave of Making’, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1976), pp. 691–694 (692).
93.
W.H. Auden, ‘IX’ [I have a Handsome Profile’], Poems 1931–1936, English Auden, pp. 123–124.
94.
Caesar, op. cit., p. 71.
95.
Caesar, op. cit., p. 72.
96.
Auden, ‘As We Like it’, The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945), pp. 25–26.
97.
Auden, ‘At the Grave of Henry James’, Collected Poems, pp. 310–312.
98.
Caesar, op. cit., p. 76, Collected Poems, p. 693.
99.
John Lucas, ‘Auden’s Politics: Power, Authority and the Individual’ in Stan Smith, ed., The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 52–64 (153).
100.
Auden, ‘VIII’ [‘Brothers who when the sirens roar’], Poems 1931–1936, English Auden, pp. 120–123.
101.
Auden quoted in Dennis Davison, W.H. Auden (London: Evans, 1970), p. 29.
102.
W.B. Yeats, ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, Last Poems (1936–1939), Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 368–370.
103.
W.B. Yeats, ‘Introductory Rhymes’, Responsibilities (1914) op. cit., p. 113.
104.
George Moore, Hail and Farewell 3 vols, III: Vale (New York: Appleton, 1914), p. 170.
105.
Moore, op. cit., p. 171.
106.
W.B. Yeats, ‘To a Wealthy Man who Promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were Proved the People Wanted Pictures’ Responsibilities, op. cit., pp. 119–120.
107.
George Orwell and Desmond Hawkins in conversation, ‘The Writer in the Witness-Box’, BBC Radio Home Service, Broadcast 6 December 1940. A transcript is given on The George Orwell Foundation website. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-proletarian-writer/.
108.
John Barrell, Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. ix.
109.
Christopher Butler, After the Wake : An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-Garde (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 122.
110.
Quoted in Sinfield, op. cit., p. 67.
111.
George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn (London: Secker and Warburg, 1941), p. 408.
112.
Raymond Williams, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957).
113.
Raymond Williams, ‘Working-class Culture’, Universities and Left Review I:2 (Summer 1957), 29–32.
114.
Nicolson, 1939–1945, pp. 23–21, quoted in Sinfield, op. cit., p. 69. Sinfield’s note.
115.
Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (London: Verso, 1980), p. 165, quoted in Sinfield, op. cit., p. 69.
116.
Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 2007), p. 73, quoted in Sinfield, op. cit., p. 75.
117.
Hutchison, p. 61, quoted in Sinfield, op. cit., p. 71. Sinfield’s note.
118.
Hutchison, p. 63, quoted in Sinfield, op. cit., p. 74. Sinfield’s note.
119.
Hutchinson, p. 60, quoted in Sinfield, op. cit., p. 75. Sinfield’s note.
120.
Tom Nairn, English, p. 67 Sinfield, op. cit., p. 77. Sinfield’s note.
121.
Le Grand, pp. 158. Sinfield’s note, op. cit., p. 128.
122.
See, e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, transl. Walter Kauffman and R.J. Hollingdale (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), p. 77.
123.
Peter Womack, ‘Literature belongs to Gentlemen’, Critical Quarterly 55:3 (October 2013), 26–43 (26).
124.
Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1939–1945, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London: Collins, 1967), p. 186. Womack’s note.
125.
P.B. Shelley, Julian and Maddalo; A Conversation, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), ll. pp. 544–546. Womack’s note.
126.
Letter to Lady Violet Bonham Carter, quoted in Nicolson, Diaries, p. 314. Womack’s note.
127.
Nicolson, op. cit., p. 117. Womack’s note.
128.
Nicolson, op. cit., p. 432.
129.
Nicolson, op. cit., p. 153, quoted in Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (1988); rprnt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 18.
130.
Peter Childs and John Horne, The Twentieth Century in Poetry (London: Taylor and Francis, 1998), p. 125.
131.
Childs and Horne, ibid.
132.
John Holloway, ‘New Lines in English Poetry’, The Hudson Review IX:4 (Winter 1957), 592–597 (592–593). Also see Martin Green, ‘British Decency’, The Kenyon Review XXI: 4 (Autumn, 1959), 505–532 (509); and Philip Oakes, ‘A New Style in Heroes’, Observer (1 January 1956), 8.
133.
Donald Davie, letter to William Van O’Connor (31 December 1957) quoted by Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 58.
134.
Anthony Hartley, ‘Poets of the Fifties,’ Spectator (27 August 1954), 260.
135.
Poets represented in the first New Lines anthology (London: Macmillan, 1956).
136.
Anon [J.D. Scott], ‘In the Movement’, Spectator 193: 6588 (1 October 1954), 399–400 (400).
137.
Robert Conquest, Introduction, New Lines, p. xxi.
138.
Holloway, op. cit., p. 592.
139.
Conquest, op. cit., p. xv.
140.
Kingsley Amis, ‘Something Nasty in the Bookshop’, Donald Davie, ‘Rejoinder to a Critic’ in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 46–47, p. 67.
141.
Donald Davie, ‘Cherry Ripe’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 67–68.
142.
D.J. Enright, ‘The Interpreters’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 60–62.
143.
Donald Davie, ‘Too Late For Satire’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 68–69.
144.
John Holloway, ‘Epitaph for a Man’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 9–10.
145.
Kingsley Amis, ‘My Kind of Comedy’, Twentieth Century (July 1961), 50; Philip Larkin, introduction to Jill; John Wain, ‘Engagement or Withdrawal? Some Notes on the Work of Philip Larkin’, Critical Quarterly VI (Summer 1964), 177 quoted in Morrison, op. cit., pp. 68–69.
146.
Holloway, on Donald Davie’s Brides of Reason (Fantasy Press, 1959), op. cit., p. 593.
147.
Kingsley Amis, ‘Nocturne’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 48–49 (49).
148.
John Wain, ‘Who Speaks my Language III’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 86–87.
149.
John Wain, ‘Who Speaks my Language IV’, in Conquest, op. cit., pp. 87–88.
150.
D.J. Enright, ‘Class’, The Terrible Shears: Scenes from a Twenties Childhood (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), p. 64.
151.
Morrison, op. cit., pp. 61–64.
152.
Enright, op. cit., p. 9.
153.
Enright, op. cit., p. 11.
154.
Philip Larkin, statement preceding a selection of his poems in Enright, op. cit., pp. 77–78 (78).
155.
A. Alvarez, The New Poetry (1962); revd edn (London: Penguin, 1966), p. 23.
156.
Alvarez, op. cit., p. 25.
157.
Ibid.
158.
Alvarez, op. cit., p. 26.
159.
R.S. Thomas, ‘A Peasant’ and ‘The Welsh Hill Country’ Alvarez, op. cit., pp. 77–78.
160.
D.J. Enright, ‘The Poor Wake up Quickly’ and ‘The Noodle Vendor’s Flute’ in Alvarez, op. cit., pp. 85–86, pp. 886–887.

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University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire, UK
Sandie Byrne

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Byrne, S. (2020). The Twentieth Century: To the 1960s. In: Poetry and Class. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_7

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29302-4_7
Published: 31 January 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-29301-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29302-4
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