Modernism moves to New York

Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism

Faulkner “discovered” (1946, Nobel Prize, 1948)

American film (trade agreement with post-war France)

Nabokov in town (since 1940) Jazz and Popular Culture W.H. Auden reverses earlier expatriate

pattern of Pound, Eliot, and Company – becomes an American citizen

Other Postwar Poets Reflect Trend

Silvia Plath is the British poet from Jamaica Plain

Ted Hughes is most famous for his American wife

Philip Larkin is a dedicated aficionado and published critic of American jazz. The most modern element in his nostalgic poetry (besides the four-letter words) is jazz influenced

Rhyme and Meter Remain in Force

Whitman’s influence (overwhelming on American poets like William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Allen Ginsberg) is considerably muted in Britain.

These innovative Americans for the most part ignore British post-war poets.

What’s Missing?

We will not be studying the most influential British lyric poets of the period, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but the popular culture they represent became more and more inescapable – and their work mostly rhymed, too!

W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

Son of a physician – medical themes in poems

Attends private schools, then Christ Church, Oxford

Close friend of Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood

Freudian socialist as a young man, interested in Christian theology later

Influenced by Hardy, Hopkins, Eliot, and Yeats

Becomes an American citizen in 1946

Pulitzer Prize, 1948 Moves back to Oxford the year

before his death

“In Memory of W.B. Yeats”

Laden with allusions to Yeats’s life and poetry

Plays upon the elegiac tradition Reflects Auden’s preference for sense over

sound (this often means political sense) Asserts Auden’s own bid for Yeats’s crown

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Born Coventry, England – his father an admirer of Hitler

Professional librarian all his life Founder of “The Movement” with

Kingsley Amis, Thomas Gunn Influenced by Hardy, Yeats, and

Dylan Thomas Jazz critic Obsessively concerned in his

poems with the anguish of mortality The Whitson Weddings (1964) Controversial Oxford Book of

Twentieth Century English Verse (1973)

High Windows (1974)

“High Windows”

Its opening frank obscenity makes this poem inescapably modern

Its reference to pills and diaphragms reinforce this impression – an ugly one

The rest is wistful, nostalgic for oneself This emphasis on the speaker’s own pocket

edition lost paradise is the essence of “confessional” verse.

Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

Born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire Radio mechanic in Royal Air Force B.A. at Cambridge – majoring in

archaeology and anthropology –where he meets Sylvia Plath

On Plath's encouragement, Hughes submits his first manuscript, The Hawk in the Rain, to The Poetry Center's First Publication book contest, which announces him as the winner.

After her suicide, he writes no poetry for years, editing hers

Crow (1970) Appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 The Birthday Letters (1998)

“Wind”

Sophisticated slant-rhymes apt for its disorienting imagery

Shifting verb tenses from stanza to stanza Lurking “confessional” content Domestic setting denies universals Abrupt images subvert the timelessness of

the Imagist ideal – until the end

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Born in Jamaica Plain, Mass Graduates from Smith summa cum

laude, 1955; wins Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, England

Marries Ted Hughes On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath kills

herself with cooking gas at the age of 30 Autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar,

published in 1963 Two years later Ariel, a collection of

some of her last poems, published Crossing the Water and Winter Trees in

1971 The Collected Poems, 1981, edited by

Ted Hughes

“Lady Lazarus”

Autobiographical prophecy – she makes it come true Myths, archetypes, even the Holocaust applied to

oneself Reinvents the woman poet – as Lamia? The three-line stanza is the only constant – this is

the closest thing to freedom from meter and rhyme we will read from these poets

But meter and rhyme are still important here – look how closely this poem resembles Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”