The Problem of Consciousness in Modern Poetry

Modernist aesthetics have been identified with a sense of cultural crisis, defined by its distance from an ideal of unified consciousness.

Hugh Underhill (Author)

9780521066518, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 June 2008

356 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.45 kg

Modernist aesthetics have been identified with a sense of cultural crisis, defined by its distance from an ideal of unified consciousness. This original study of the problem of consciousness in modern poetry examines the struggle towards that ideal of 'unitary' experience, through close readings of British and Irish poets from Hardy and the Georgian poets, through Lawrence, Edward Thomas, Yeats, Eliot, MacNiece and Auden, to Ted Hughes. Underhill argues that while their poetry is both a critique and an expression of crisis, its tendency to emphasize inner states and subjective experience has drawn attention away from the socio-historical dimensions of the problem. Poetry, as contemporary theories of consciousness remind us, is itself a socio-cultural institution and is answerable to outer as well as inner forces. Underhill examines these problems and paradoxes, showing how the impossibility of any stable notion of the unitary in our century can in fact be seen as an opportunity for creative choice and freedom.

Preface
Introduction: the inward revolution
1. From Georgian origins to 'Romantic Primitivism': D. H. Lawrence and Robert Graves
2. Strangers to nature: modern nature poetry and the rural myth
3. The 'poetical character' of Edward Thomas
4. 'Myself Must I Remake': W. B. Yeats
5. 'Here and Now Cease to Matter' T. S. Eliot
6. The Work of Man: Louis MacNeice and W. H. Auden
7. 'Nothing of our Light': Ted Hughes
Conclusion
Notes
Select bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]