ABSTRACT

Until now, most teaching has focused on the novel as the most useful way of raising issues of gender, ethnicity, theory, nationality, politics and social class. In The Twentieth Century in Poetry Peter Childs places literature in a wider social context and demonstrates that all poetry is historically produced and consumed and is part of our understanding of society and identity. This student-friendly critical survey includes chapters on:
* the Georgians
* First World War poetry
* Eliot
* Yeats
* the thirties
* post-war poetry
* contemporary anthologies
* women's poetry
* Northern Irish and black British poets
It builds a narrative not of poetry in the twentieth century, but of the twentieth century in poetry.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

chapter |27 pages

‘Union Jacks in Every Part'

Prewar and Georgian Poetry

chapter |22 pages

‘Not Concerned with Poetry'

World War I

chapter |21 pages

‘Birth, and Copulation, and Death'

The 1920s and T.S. Eliot

chapter |19 pages

‘Demon and Beast'

The 1920s and W.B. Yeats

chapter |21 pages

In/Between the Wars

Poetry in the 1930s

chapter |21 pages

‘Philosophical Sundials of History'

Poetry after the war

chapter |16 pages

‘Ted Hughes is Elvis Presley'

Recent anthologies by men

chapter |20 pages

‘My History is Not Yours'

Recent anthologies by women

chapter |25 pages

Anti-and Post-Colonial Writing

Northern Irish and black British poets