Some Conlemporary Poets

Philip Larkin and Thorn Gunn, among others, arc thought of as original witnesses to modern melancholy and innovators of the con­versational manner in poetry, but their work actually seems the prod­uct of a creative understanding of such varied predecessors as Hardy, Yeats, Owen, Eliot, and others. In considering English poetry since World War II it is more useful to focus on the range of modem po­etry, rather than its coherence or consistency, as the contrast between the work of Elizabeth Jennings and Ted Hughes suggests. Jennings developed as a poet of the personal, internalized affections; her po­etry is often concerned with the modest, overlooked, and set-aside. Hughes, on the other hand, is a poet of violent fact, of the wild, cruel, and even grotesque; his subjects are often creatures of the animal world. Between Jennings's poetry of perceived nuances and Hughes's poetry of fierce symbol lies the basic scope of poetry in our time.

English literature in the twentieth century reflects a world far different from that which Queen Victoria knew, far different from that which earlier centuries produced. It is a world not of the British Empire but of the Commonwealth, a world in which Canada, Aus­tralia, South Africa, and India, among others, are today independent nations. A world of international community has altered the idea of what being «English» is. Writers as different in origin and art as Gra- ham Greene and Doris Lessing, lor example, are among those now working in the long tradition wliich holds that the quality of life is enhanced by an ability to express ideas about it.

The modern world, in all its complexity, is described with com­passion and bitterness, humor and irony, cynicism and hope in En­glish literature of the twentieth century.