Modernism - Literary Movements, English Fiction & Prose Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, English Poetry - 20th Century - Literary Criticism, English Fiction & Prose Literature - 20th Century - Literary Criticism, Psychology & Lit

Problem of Consciousness in Modern Poetry

Name: Problem of Consciousness in Modern Poetry
Author: Hugh Underhill
ISBN: 9780521066518

by Hugh Underhill

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Overview

Modernist aesthetics have been identified with a sense of cultural crisis, defined by its distance from an ideal of unified, 'undissociated' consciousness attributed to primitive man. This original study of the problem of consciousness in modern poetry examines the struggle towards that ideal of 'unitary' subjective experience, through close readings of British and Irish poets from Hardy and the Georgian poets, through D. H. Lawrence, Edward Thomas, Yeats, Eliot, MacNeice and Auden, to Ted Hughes. Hugh Underhill argues that the poetry's emphasis on inner states and 'the experience itself' underrepresents the extent to which the crisis is socio-historically determined. Acknowledging the Romantic inheritance of a myth of 'poetry', Underhill embraces both modern poetry's resistance to positivist reductions of the mystery of consciousness, and the clarification of poetry's socio-cultural role (co-ordinating 'inner' and 'outer' worlds) provided by contemporary theories of subjectivity and the text. The problematic status of any notion of the unitary in the twentieth century is shown to give space at least for experiencing indeterminacy as a field of creative choice and freedom.

Synopsis

Modernist aesthetics have been identified with a sense of cultural crisis, defined by its distance from an ideal of unified consciousness. This original study examines the struggle toward that ideal of unitary subjective experience in modern British and Irish poetry from Hardy to Ted Hughes. Hugh Underhill argues that the poetry's emphasis on inner states underrepresents the extent to which the crisis is in fact socio-historically determined.