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Popular poets
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ideas and different areas of experience into a more unified whole. He
seeks a single poetic voice and single religious viewpoint.
Throughout the different stages of his career, Yeats made more direct
and personal poetic statements. His poetic styles never became as
fragmented as those of Eliot. Unlike Eliot, however, Yeats did not occupy
a single viewpoint and was always ready to explore a contrary position.
Yeats continued to see things cyclically, making the fragments of his
ideas into a whole, then breaking them into fragments again. For Yeats, a
deeper understanding and a creative joy in life resulted from this process.
The following much-quoted lines from Yeats’s poem The Second
Coming illustrate these points:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
In the modern world a new Christ is unlikely to be born. It is more likely
to be an unidentifiable but violent beast. We should note, too, the use of
the colloquial word ‘slouches’. It is more precise, say, than a word such as
‘moves’; it is rougher, less conventionally ‘poetic’, more shocking. It is part
of a modern idiom of mixed styles of language which the poem creates.
Eliot consulted Ezra Pound over the writing of The Waste Land and
dedicated it to him as il miglior fabbro, or the greater poet. Pound
advised Eliot on the arrangement and editing of the fragments which
make up the text.
Pound’s own career after the publication of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
in 1920 was spent largely in Italy, and was devoted to the writing of the
Cantos, the first three of which had been published in 1917 in the magazine
Poetry. The Cantos are an immensely ambitious, allusive, multi-cultural
poetic voyage through numerous aspects of twentieth-century thought
and experience. Although daunting to the reader, they are a major
contribution to modern writing – and possibly the poetic text that was
longest in its writing, the last Cantos being published in 1970.
POPULAR POETS
While Eliot and Pound were bringing Modernism into poetry, and Yeats
was at his most productive, the two bestselling poets of the 1920s were
the Poets Laureate Robert Bridges and John Masefield. Bridges is best