Post- War British Poetry: An Analysis

The poets of the first half of the 20th century (or Eliot's generation) gave an exuberant of literature imbued with vigorous and energetic response to the war besides philosophical questions and spiritual quests following the consequences of the First World War. In comparison to Eliot's generation, the poetry of the second generation (after WW-II) is dormant, inert, and the poets seemed to recoil from the destruction, horror and disorder of the war years. While some of the poets of the 1940s adopted a neo-romantic attitude, the poets of the 50s, reacting against such attitude, made a conscious effort to focus on the real person and event. By choosing the real person and event, the poets of the 50s endeavoured to make poetry less scholarly, sophisticated and show the poet as the man next door communicating with man in the street. Consequently, most of the poets, apparently, failed to explore beyond the surface reality. But delving deep in their poetry, it is found that underneath their mundane form and content lies their deeper concern to reflect the profound and philosophical in easy and commonsensical way. The paper is an analysis of this aspect of the postwar British poetry with reference to the poetry of Phillip Larkin and Ted Hughes.