WWI, Yeats, and Auden Bundle

Modernism - form and content coming together

Yeats

• The Second Coming - Mystic
• Human history was constructed of alternating 2000 year cycles called gyres and was characterized by values antithetical to its predecessor
• 2000 octo 1 AD - Pagan gyre beginning with Zeus' rape of Leda
• 1 AD to 2000 AD - Christian gyre beginning with the birth of Christ
• Yeats envisioned these gyres as interlocking
• 3 dimensional cones, they are spinning
• Man is represented by the falcon
• Spirits mundi - jung, collective unconscience opposite of Holy Ghost
• Awakening of man's animal nature. Not an apocalypse, just a new phase
• Difficult to read
• Questioning of religion (traditional religion anyway) 
• asking ultimate questions
• alienation
• fragmentation
• ambiguous ending (Byzantuim)
• Imagism
• He writes about Irish things in Irish ways and deplores the dead feeling of poems like "The Waste Land"
• Themes
• Irishness
• Beauty of Nature
• Mysticism
• Life is fleeting, keeps moving on

Easter 1916

• Most used for blind patriotic purpose which the poem cautions against
• About the change in Ireland but also about the cost of those changes

Owen - Anthem for doomed youth is also a sonnet

• Look for comparisons - soldiers to other things
• Loss of manhood with physical and mental disability
• How are they modernist? asking life's ultimate questions
• alienation, questioning of traditional institutions
• Psychological
• Probing, nervous quality of expbring ultimate questions

Auden

• Lyrical and personal

Brooke - The Soldier

• Pro-war propaganda 
• Sonnet
• Not Shakespearean more like Petrarachan sonnet
• mixes the two just like he is talking about
• Mixing himself
• Volta is between 8 and 6

Sassoon

• Fought in France
• Helped wounded soldiers
• wounded himself
• refused to return
• hospitalized
• returned to front
• wounded again
• poetry seen as unpatriotic and/or grotesque
• Glory of women
• anti-propaganda
• misogynistic?
• Questioning
• Suggest that they put medals above the lives of their men
• those at home have an unrealistic idea of the war front

"Glory of Women"

• Ironic
• Uses puns: "you and us"
• Retire = run
• talks to German mothers at end
• They knit socks
• even German women think of men as soldiers
• women have chivalric image in their minds
• makes war seem less glorious
• even playing field of all soldiers
• all women the same

"They"

• Bishops response completely inadequate
• imagism
• lack of the definite ending
• questioning religion
• in media res

Bishop thinks they will be changed in good ways. The ways the soldiers list are bad ways

Once again those at home misunderstood the war.

"The Second Coming." WB Yeats

1. How do the first 2 lines of the poems illustrate the third?
1. In the 1st 2 lines, the falcon keeps spiraling higher and further but away from its master, away from safety, where things fall apart and the center cannot hold.
2. What might the falconer symbolize, and what else in the poem supports your notion?
1. The falconer might symbolize safety and control, which is supported by the fact that "anarchy is loosed" once the falcon gets further from the falconer
3. Line 4: what is the effect of calling it "mere" anarchy?
• Anarchy is an extreme end of the spectrum at control (and lock throat and the world "mere" down plays it a little, of moronically?
4. How do lines 7 and 8 illustrate disorder?
• The best lock all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate seems to be the opposite of how logic would dictate. They expect is turned upside down.
5. What might the "rough beast" portend (a "portent" is synonymous with an "omen")?
• Rough beast, to me, points toward the devil, but the mention of Bethlehem later obviously points to Jesus
6. What characterization of the beast is suggested by its description?
• The words "rough" and "slouches" combined with the word "beast" suggest evil to me
7. Explain (interpret) lines 19 and 20:
• The last 20 centuries, the centuries following Christ's birth, have been doomed by him from the beginning, when he was in a "rocking cradle"
8. List words in the poem that indicate circularity/cycles?
• turring and turring, tyre, round, reel, rocking
9. How do these images of cycles support the poem's thesis?
• The cyclical words come back to the idea of Christianity, of the 2nd coming, that Jesus was born and will be born again, so to speak
10. The last line contains a paradox. What is it, and why would a paradox fit this poem quite well? 
• The paradox is that before something is born, it shouldn't be able to slouch towards Bethlehem "to be born; this is an impossibility. The paradox is fitting because we have already seen several paradoxes so far, and with the word being turred upside down in the context, why not make language and logic turn upside down as well.