The term “modern” is, of course, highly variable in its temporal reference, but it is frequently applied to the literature written since the beginning of World War I in 1914. This half-century has been one of the outstanding periods in English and American literature. It has been marked by persistent and multi-dimensioned experiments in subject matter and form, and has produced major achievements in all the literary genres. The poets include Yeats, Frost, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Auden, Robert Graves, Robert Lowell, and Dylan Thomas; the novelist, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner; the dramatists, G. B. Shaw, Sean O’ Casey, Eugene O’ Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Samuel Beckett; and the critics, T.S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, and the American New Critics.