Contemporary Poets [antikvár]

IntroductionThe roots of much contemporary British poetry can be found in the work of three poets born in the 19th century: the Englishman Thomas Hardy, the Irishman W B Yeats, and the American T S Eliot.Hardy's lyricism, poignancy and wry humour, his concern with 'human shows' and 'life's little ironies', make him an important bridging figure, seen as part of an 'English' tradition to be traced back to Chaucer in the 14th century and then over the centuries found in George Herbert, George Crabbe and Robert Browning and in the present century following on through Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, Philip Larkin and beyond.Yeats, who self-consciously began as an Irish poet writing on dreamy and faery-like Celtic themes, in his forties developed a more colloquial tone and a greater toughness, with a strong historical and tragic sense. He was a master of rhetoric and discovered how to transmute 'the fury and the mire of human veins'.Eliot, who settled in England before the First World War, published The Waste Land in 1922. This is one of the crucial moments of 20th-century literature: from it derives what is now seen as the Modernist movement, not only in English but in other languages all over the world.What follows draws attention to some seventy poets, most of them still actively writing, some of them emerging only recently. Together, they show the variety, the richness and the conflicts of contemporary poetry.