George Eliot's Pre-War Poetry

Eliot’s poetry breaks drastically with much of the other poetry written during these years. Like the war poets, he realized that the poetic idiom available to him was tired and had to be changed. Differently experiences needed different styles and uses of language His poetry was formally more experimental and innovative and intellectually more thoughtful. Further, Ronald Carter and John McRae quote Eliot:
Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force to dislocate if necessary into meaning.( 339)
This reveals Eliot’s views on complex modern poetry of complex times. Instead of the traditional lyric rhythms and conventionally beautiful and poetic images of pre-war poets, Eliot uses images that shock and bewilder. They are images which are original and novel, striking and obscure, drawn from a discordant urban rather than a harmonious rural life. The three principal qualities which characterize Eliot’s …show more content…
It is not merely that already in 1930 the foundations were being laid for the Second World War. The rise to power in Germany of Hitler and the Nazi party were cause for increasing anxiety, but anxiety is the is not the sole characteristic of the decade .There went with it a sense of release that at last the worst could be imagined, and beyond it something better. ‘Today the struggle’, wrote Auden in his stirring poem on behalf of the Spanish republicans, putting off to tomorrow the pleasures very much in his mind at that moment,: “Tomorrow the rediscovery of romantic love; /The photographing of ravens; all the fun under Liberty’s masterful shadow” (Auden 38) .It is ‘all the fun’ potential in human life that makes the struggle worthwhile. Sometimes it seems that the struggle is fun in