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(1) Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936):

Kipling is an imperialist who celebrates the British Empire and the white man’s burden in his poetry, as well as in his novels. He was essentially the poet of soldiers and sailors; and many of his poems are written on the exploits of British soldiers in foreign lands.

The language he uses is the language actually used by the British soldiers. “By making the uneducated British fighting man articulate, Kipling brought a new element into English poetry.” Departmental Ditties (1886), Barrack Room Ballads (1892), The Seven Seas (1896), The Five Nations (1903) and Inclusive Verse and Poems (1830) contain the best of his poetry.

He is the poet of England and the laureate of her empire. Imperialism finds a clear and unabashed voice in him. He exulted in the achievements of his countrymen in founding the Empire and did not care to emphasis the harsh and cruel means they adopted to colonies foreign lands. He is proud of the achievement of England and constantly harps on the white man’s burden. He is narrowly nationalistic in his outlook.

Kipling shows great skill as a craftsman and a motorist, but he lacks that intensity of vision which results in great poetry.

(2) Thomas Hardy (1840-1928):

Thomas Hardy was one of the two great pessimistic poets of The Edwardian era poetry is the final expression of the disillusionment resulting from the advance of science and the disintegration of faith and traditional values.

The pessimism, which is a characteristic feature of Hardy’s fiction, also marks his poetry. His poems reveal his consciousness of the miseries and sufferings of human life. As in his novels, so in his poetry his theme is the human predicament and the suffering which is caused to him by the imperfections of the power that rules on high.

Destiny strews joy and pain with a nerveless and purposeless hand and this aimlessness makes human life,” a strange orchestra of victim shrieks and pain.” However, his pessimism is not an unrelieved one for he believes that human lot can be made endurable through tact, mutual sympathy, and wise social reform.

(3) A.E. Houseman (1859-1936):

Housemen Joins Hardy in the run of pessimistic poets of Edwardian era. His poetry bears of close affinity to that of Hardy. His poetic output was small. He produced A Shropshire Lad (1896), Last Poems (1922), and More Poems, (1936). The predominant mood in his poetry is one of “cultured ironical disillusionment with life”,

Though underlying this tragic view there is a warm appreciation of the beauties of nature, particularly in A Shropshire Lad which depicts the country life of the Welsh border. The poems of Housemen have the polished ease and restraint which might be expected of so fine a classical scholar.

They are concise, sometimes epigrammatic in expression yet always perfectly easy to understand. Music came to him under the stress of emotion, but it was controlled by his scholarly sense for meter.”

It is Housemen’s love of Nature that relieves much of the gloom and tedium of his pessimism. His nature-poetry is refreshing.

(4) Robert Bridges (1844-1930):

Bridges was essentially an artist and artistic subjects like Beauty, Love and Nature are the themes of his poetry.

He learnt the art of poetry very painstakingly. He is a great artist with words; the stamp of the artist’s pen is on every line of his verse.

As a lyric poet, he lacked the force and intensity of Shelley’s lyrics. He had too much of artistic reserve and self-control to soar aloft on the wings of lyric fancy. His lyrics are marked with artistic beauty, but the fire of passion and the heat of emotion do not kindle them. His best love poetry is contained in “The Growth of Love”, a sonnet-sequence. Awake My Heart, to be Loved, Awake are his famous love lyrics. Among these Awake is one of the finest love-lyrics in the English language.

Bridges is the poet of joy and optimism. According to him, earthly beauty is only a reflection of heavenly beauty. Beauty is not merely an earthly vision of womanly grace, but the manifestation of divine beauty and perfection in human life.

Bridges is also a great lover of the beauty of nature. His enjoyment of Nature is personal and first hand and his expression of her beauty is simple and direct, unaffected by any artificial glow of imagination.

He was a great metrical artist. “His effort was to naturalize classical meters in England. He threw fresh light on the laws and secrets of English versification and provoked considerable interest in the study of English prosody.

(5) Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-89):

Hopkins is a great religious poet of the 20th century, an age essentially irreligious. He embraced the Roman Catholic in 1866. His early poetry reveals his love of religion, nature and God. He glorifies God and his own soul. The Wreck of the Deutschland, 1875, his longest and most difficult poem, recounts the death of five nuns who went down in the ship of that name.

It is a poem marked with tragic pathos. His last poems that nature is a Heraclitear Fire and Of the Comfort of the Resurrection show that he regained his lost faith in God. He sees all Nature consumed into ashes while his soul alone remains imperishable like an “immortal diamond”. It has been said, “That the poet in Hopkins was strangled by the priest.” But the poetry of Hopkins, while glorifying God, is not without an acute sensibility for the beauties of Nature. His appreciation of

Hopkins was a great artist with words as well as a great rhythmic innovator. He believed that poetry needed a language distinct from that of prose, a language rich in suggestion both to the senses and the intellect. He freely used archaic and colloquial words. He used compound epithets such as, “drop-of blood”, “foam-dapple cherry”, and his imagery is short and precise.

(6) John Masefield:

John Masefield was a Georgian poet. He succeeded Robert Bridges as poet Laureate in 1930. His early poetry was written in the style and manner of Kipling and is marked with a note of action and adventure. It was his Salt Water Ballads (1902) which brought out fully his genius as a poet. Ballads and Poems (1910) show an advance in technical skill.

The Everlasting Mercy (1911) is his first really great narrative poem. It was followed by The Widow in the Bye Street (1912). The Daffodil Fields (1913) and Lolling down (1917). (1913) is an autobiographical poem describing the life of a youth who runs away to sea, and it contains many reminiscences of the poets’ early life. Reynard the Fox (1919), a vigorous narrative poem, is “a little Odyssey of fox-hunting.” It contains many true Chaucerian sketches of human figure.

His poetry is charged with his democratic sympathy for the downtrodden, the poor and the suffering. He is essentially a poet of the people. Another important feature of his poetry is his shark realism, and sometimes it becomes coarse and brutal, ugly and sordid. He is also a romanticist and a lover of beauty, and best of his poems are those in which we get glimpses both of romance and beauty as in poems like ‘The Seekers’ and ‘Cargoes’.

Masefield is a great sea-poet and few poets have been able to capture the atmosphere and life of sea, the ships, and sailors, as vividly and realistically as he has done in poems like Dauber and Sea-Fever. He loves the English landscape and his poetry gives a many-sided picture of rural England.

Masefield’s poetry suffers from many faults – a coarse brutal realism expressed in slangy and violent phraseology is his besetting sin. But, on the whole, he is a great poet and he deserves all praise for his narrative poems, his democratic feelings of sympathy; his love for nature, and his appreciation of the beauties of the countryside.

(7) Walter De La Mare:

He is among the poets of the Georgian period. He is essentially the poet of the fairyland creating in his poetry a world of dreams, fantasies and imagination, a world which appeals to children as well as to grown up people. In The Listeners and Other Poems (1912), Peacock P/e(1913), The Fleeting and Other Poems (1933), Collected Poems (1902-18)’ Poems for Children (1930), Bells and Grass (1941), The Traveler, (1946) we have some of the finest poetry of the era.

He is formally arid by profession a children’s poet. He has very successfully captured the joy and pleasures of childhood in his Songs of Childhood.

His Poetry is the note of fantasy. He gives his fancy free reign, and throws to the winds the laws of logic and probability. He is the laureate of the fairyland. Fairies, ghosts and phantoms haunt his poems. He provides an escape from the problems of life into the world of the fairies. In The Listeners and The Mocking Fairy, the haunting atmosphere is expectancy grips the readers who read spell-bound up to the very end.

He is also a master artist and a superb craftsman. His verses have a cadence and subtlety

He is also a master artist and a superb craftsman. His verses have a cadence and subtlety of rhythm which linger, rise and fall like the tremulous fall of a snow-flake. All this wizardry of music and technical perfection is achieved without the least sign of artifice or labor. It has the ease and effortlessness of the highest art.

(8) James Elroy Flicker (1884-1995):

Flecker is essentially the poet of the East, dwelling lovingly in a world of oriental grandeur and magnificence. He was fascinated by the exotic novelty and illusive romanticism of the east, which he has depicted in one poem after another.

He is the master of jeweled phrase and gem-like verse. He is a great and inspired artist with words. “He has full command over his language and versification.” “He delights in the very names of exotic things and distant places, and master as he is of dazzling phrase and supple rhythm, he seldom and fails to evoke an answering delight in the reader.”

(9) W.H. Davies (1879-1940):

Davies is a great poet of Nature and rural life. He presents the sights and scenes of nature as well as the life of the innocent country people living in the lap of nature. He has immortalized himself through his The Autobiography of a Super Tamp (1908). It was after the loss of a leg while attempting to board a train that he turned to poetry for a living and produced a few volumes of verses, which at once caught the public eye, and brought fame and recognition to the poet.

Davies is essentially a lyric poet. His lyrics are short and spontaneous. Most of Davies poems are shorter than those of any other modern poet. Out of 400 poems in his Collected Poems, two hundred and seventy are only of three stanzas or even less. His lyrics are characterized by, spontaneity and simplicity.

The world of his poetry is a world of vivid description of natural beauty. Of intense joy, a world of sunrises, cows and sheep, owls and cuckoos, butterflies and squirrels. Davies may not be very accurate and precise in his nature-descriptions.

He does not seek to portray Nature with the eye of a scientific observer. But he communicates successfully his own joy in nature, and inspires his readers with his own zest for Nature. There is something’s infectious about the freshness of nature in his poetry.

There is a note tender sympathy in Davies’ poems for animals and children. He has a sense of the tramp’s comradeship with the horse, the cow, the sheep, the cuckoo and the butterfly.

(10) John Drinkwater (1882-1937):

John Drinkwater’s Collected Poems show that he is an intellectual interested not in lyrics and songs but in elegiac and meditative verse. His poems exhibit his gravity and earnestness, his sanity and rigorous discipline.

He is a self- conscious artist, who writes in the “cold ink of thought”, rather than in the “red blood of a fired brain.” “His work is always controlled in emotion and expression. There is little of the furorpoeticus and his language and imagery shows him to be a deliberate, careful craftsman of rather limited gifts.”

His imagery shines not as a star or a flower but like a jewel, a priceless gem of art. “He speculates, meditates, ruminates, but only rarely illuminates, other than as the glow-worm illuminates himself and his own surroundings.”

However John Drinkwater will be remembered not for his longer, reflective poetry, but for his nature poetry. He represented and celebrated “the English countryside, its streams arid pools and woods, its birds and cattle and flowers, its shepherds and gypsies, with a cultured pastoral fancy untroubled by any urgency.” Few modern poets equal Drinkwater in the appreciation of nature.

(11) W.B. Yeats (1865-1939):

Yeats was an Irish man, but he takes his place among the great English poets of the age.

He is great by virtue of the bulk and variety of his poetry, and critics and agreed that very few of his poems can be regarded as definitely inferior. His work is uniformly good even though he writes on such varied subjects as ancient legend, mythology, folklore, politics, history, love, and constantly makes new myths of his own. His creative range is immense, he writes with perfect ease and mastery on themes taken from every possible sphere of life, and a high standard of performance is maintained throughout.

The period of poetic activity in his case extended over fifty years. His early poetry is romantic while the later one is realistic both in theme and treatment. He began writing verse in the thinned out romantic, Pre-Raphaelite tradition.

His early poems are frankly escapist and are heavily over-hung with Pre-Raphaelite tapestry. His use of Irish mythology and folklore took all Europe by storm and it had a rare fascination for those who were fed up with the hackneyed classical myths and legends.

He has been called by Graham Hough and others, “the last of the great romantics” but he became dissatisfied with this romanticism and discarded it more and more as he aged. His later poetry is characterized by stark, naked realism, even brutality and coarseness, and with a masculine vigor and force.

In keeping with modern realistic trends, there is greater and greater approximation to speech rhythms and colloquial diction. The poetry of the rich and complex The Tower and The Winding Stair volumes is a majestic utterance which stimulates and lifts up the readers by its very urgency, intensity and immediacy. His poetry is a battle-ground for the clash of opposites.

The antimonies of the human and the non-human, of the spiritual and the physical, the sensuous and the artistic, physical decay and intellectual maturity, the past and the present, the personal and the impersonal, power and helplessness, are forever appearing and reappearing in his poetry. In the early poetry, such opposites are merely rendered, but in his later poetry, according to David Deices, there is also an attempt at reconciling them.

He Yeats was a symbolist from the beginning to the end of his carrier so that Rather Symons regarded him as the chief exponent of the symbolist Movement in England. With age and experience, Yeats acquired full command over his material and widened the scope of the lyric. Thus in the brief, Leda and the Swan the poet succeeded in compressing whole ages of history from the remote antiquity down to the present age.

The admirable and effective poem The Second Coming owes its intensity to Yeats’ prophetic vision. Cleanthes Brooks regards him as a great myth-maker and his Vision as “the most ambitious attempt made by any poet of our time to set up a myth”.

The charge of obscurity has sometimes been brought against Yeats. There is no doubt a mysticism by its very nature is incapable of rational exposition. Yeats was a conscious artist.

He selects his words with reference both to their sense and sound. As an artist, he had the creative gift and the inward conviction and his so-called arrogance arises from his assurance. He may sometimes seem coarse and brutal, but his very brutality is an expression of his integrity of purpose.

He kept away from the Verse libber and other technical innovations of his day, but he used the traditional meters and stanza-forms with consummate skill. He freed the English lyric from the tyranny of the limbic and manipulated the stress, pause and cadence of the long line with great mastery and self-confidence.

The octosyllabic couplet he made particularly his own and brought out its full colloquial possibilities. He had a Donne-like command over stanza-structures and made his stanza patterns correspond with the movement of thought and emotion. The sudden shifts in tone and mood, often within the same line, further indicate Yeats’ affinity with Donne and his school.

He may not be a Shakespeare, a Dante, or a Milton, but he must certainly rank with the greatest poets of all times.

(12) Imagist Poets:

The reaction against Georgian trend is represented by a group of poets who called themselves ‘Imagists’ for their aim was to represent real life in images that were clear, precise and exact.

The founder of this school T.E. Hulme (1833-1917) and his most illustrious disciple Ezra Pound insisted that, “poetry should restrict itself to the world perceived by the senses and to the presentation of its themes in a succession of concise, clearly visualized, concrete images, accurate in detail and precise in significance.

They defined poetry, “as the presentation of visual situation in the fewest possible concrete words, lightened of the lightened of the burdens of conventional adjectival padding and unhampered by general ideas or philosophical or moral speculations.

The new rhythms of the Imagists bore a close affinity to those of everyday speech and were quite different from conventional verse-patterns. Ezra Pound and Edith Sitwell are the two most original and prominent poets of this school. Their poetry is still read and enjoyed.

(13) Rupert Brooke (1987-1915):

Brooke was soldier-poet. He gave expression to patriotic fervor in his sonnets, particularly in the Soldier. When the war came in 1914, Brooke hailed it with enthusiasm. He wrote a number of war sonnets expressing his patriotic enthusiasm and noble resolve to serve his country. He himself enlisted as a soldier, and went to war for the sake of his dear motherland.

He was killed in action in 1915, and in popular imagination he was canonized. “It is natural, though unprofitable; to speculate is to what might have been Rupert Brook’s place in English poetry if he had lived on. The marks of greatness in his poems are few, but such marks there are.

He saw the world with a clear eye and recorded what he was with directness and clarity. Yet, however poetic in him, Rupert Brooke was more important as the occasion for poetry in other “the war-time revival of English poetry, had its origin in Brooke alone” (A.C. Ward).

(14) Miss Edith Sitwell (born 1887):

The early poetry of Edith Sitwell partakes fully of the gloom and frustration generated by the war. Her long poem The Sleeping Beauty is a Highly-wrought work of art, glowing with color and imagery.

She was considerably influenced by the Second World War and her memorable war poems Songs of the Cloud (1945) and The Canticle of the Sun (1949) bring out the impact of the second war on the poetess. “Later Edith Sitwell developed into one of the major religious and metaphysical poets of the period under the stressful and sobering influences of the troubled nineteen thirties and the ensuing Second World War.

The Song of the Cloud (1945) though containing mainly poems written from 1919 onward, also includes a number of pieces from her early and middle period, and shows her progress from the fantastical to the spiritual – a progress which, in the light of her poetry as a whole, can be seen as orderly and inevitable” (A.C. Ward).

(15) T.S. Eliot (1888-1965):

Dominated the English literary scene and tried his hand at poetry, at drama, at criticism, both literary and social, and at journalism, and achieved eminent success in each of this field. He has become a part and parcel of the English literary tradition which he has modified and enriched for the benefit of the coming generations.

One of his greatest achievements consists in his having given expression to the dominant anxieties and feelings of his age. Through the medium of his poems he has rendered the torturing impact of a great metropolis on the human soul, the anguish, the ennui, the boredom, the neurosis which such a life generates. But he is not merely a representative poet; he is also a critic of his age.

He universalizes contemporary predicament, and shows it to be a part of the human predicament in every age and country. His poetry is a curious mixture of tradition and individual talent.

The English Metaphysical tradition, the French Symbolist movement, the poetry of Dante, Existential philosophy, the philosophies of the orient, Hindu, Buddhist and others, Christian tradition and theology, and ancient myths and legends, are only a few of the many influences which have gone into the making of hi poetry. He called himself a “Classicist in literature.” He was a conscious artist who, like the classics, achieved formal perfection through carefully studied means.

His poetry is poetry of revolt against the decadent and exhausted, almost dead, poetry of his day; it marks a complete break from the thinned out romantic tradition. He was that architect of the English language, who tried to restore to it life and vitality bringing it into contact not only with current speech but also with European literary tradition.

The use of conversational rhythms and imagery drawn from urban life, the use of symbols, the juxtaposing of the past and the present in his poetry, etc., are some of the ways in which he communicates his sense of the modern predicament. He ‘forged new measures to express the complexity and intricacy of modern life.

The traditional Iambic meter was loosened and made more and more flexible till it could express the changing tempo of the modern mind, the clash of opposite thoughts and feelings within the soul, as well as tearing sounds and incoherent noises of urban life. Eliot’s view of life was essentially religious. He has given impetus to a number of poets to experiment with new forms and evolve new techniques.

(16) W.H. Auden (1907-1977):

Auden studied the life of the common man and the social problems confronting him in the post-war world. He was disgusted with the outdated social order and advocated violent social reforms for bringing about a more just social order.

He advocated revolutionary reforms along communistic lines for the regeneration of the downtrodden and the miserable sections of society. His early poetry, written during the inter-war period, expresses his sense of the, “hollowness of the disintegrating post-war civilization”.

Later, Auden came under the influence of Freud and his psychological approach to the problems of human life. He now advocated sympathetic understanding of the problems of the weaker sections of society, rather than a sentimental sympathy for them.

As an artist and experimentation, Auden showed considerable intellectual curiosity and receptiveness to new ideas and suggestions. He was influenced in many ways by Eliot, Owen, Hopkins and the French symbolists.

(17) Stephen Spender (born 1902):

He is interested in the uplift of the masses, and has constantly advocated social reform on Communistic lines. Poems (1933) clearly indicate the same Marxist attitude as that of Auden. I n the poems of this volume we have the vision of a future world from which death, despair and decay have been completely wiped out.

The old world, “where shapes of death haunt human life”, must go and the young comrade must, “advance got rebuild…advance to rebel”, giving up, “dreams…of heaven after our world.”They must be governed and dominated by, “the palpable and obvious love of man for man.”They must work for a world in which none would die of hunger and, “Man shall be man.”

Spender is “an artist of fine sensibilities and considerable technical accomplishment”, and his work is widely admired today for his lyricism, sensuous imagery, psychological penetration, introspective insight, and his advocacy of the inherent dignity and nobility of the individual.

(18) Cecil Day Lewis (born 1904):

“Cecil Day Lewis gives perhaps the clearest expression to the revolutionary doctrines shared by a number of his poetic friends, like Auden and Spender.” In the Magnetic Mountain, he makes a frontal attack on the existing social order and makes a fervent appeal for a revolution which would usher in a more just social system. In the early poetry of Day Lewis, the influence of T.S. Eliot and Auden is clearly perceptible.

But Day Lewis, in spite of the influence of Auden, “is a more human poet”. His poetry is not intellectual in tone. He does not exhibit,” the same restless intellect and acquisitiveness of knowledge as does Auden”. He is a great lover of the beauty of nature, and his love of nature is clearly brought out by his later lyrics. “Day Lewis was an open air poet, above all poetry of the wind and of bird-song, of everything that shared and inspired his own nervous vitality (A.S. Collins).

(19) Dylan Thomas (1914-1953):

Dylan Thomas is closely associated with the revival of religious poetry in the forties. He is also recognized as the father of the new romantic poetry of the poetry. His poetry is strongly emotional in tone, full of fervor and vigor. It is vital, and vividly colorful and musical. “The depth and intensity of his passion, his verbal gift, the technical skill which underlies his metrical experiments, all suggest that Dylan Thomas has the making of a great poet”.

Dylan Thomas is a difficult poet, for his poetry is packed with metaphor symbolic imagery, often difficult to grasp. A number of his earlier poems are obscure because of their metaphor and imagery, and above all their use of personal symbols. His attempt to push into the service of his muses every Biblical, Freudian or folk-image, makes him obscure and difficult. He is a poet for the learned few, and not for the average reader. In this respect he is true disciple of T.S. Eliot.