Final Blog Post

As times change, so has society and those that take part in its various parts, particularly with the spread of education from just the higher white male class to the lower class, females, and non-whites. Because of this, writers have changed from mainly white nobles to almost anyone. Skill and prominence with the pen is not connected with one's birth anymore. The difference in viewpoints and personal writing aesthetics becomes clear between these two groups, particularly in terms of class. This is blatantly seen when comparing the neoclassical and some of the Romantic Era writers to the Late 20th Century writer, Johnson, and his work, "Inglan is a Bitch" written heavily in African-American English dialect and finding disgust in "Inglan" throughout the entire work. While others have spoken up against certain parts of England before him, none have done it, in what many back then would consider, an uneducated way and with such contempt for England as a whole. Percy Shelley, in his “Song to the Men of England”, indeed spoke up against English corruption and the misfortunes his fellow Englishmen suffer, but he wrote in such a way that the problems with England were certain men and that his fellow Englishmen should band together against the plots of such men. Johnson did not speak of camaraderie with his fellow Englishmen and was a solitary negative viewpoint towards all of England. 

That being said, it was not a straight procession from the high class to the lower class and everyone. Some of the middle class and lower echelons of the higher class were accepted, sometimes with dispute, into the society of writers before the lower class ever did. John Keats was not originally welcomed as a writer by all, receiving harsh criticisms of his work and of those who were willing to accept him. Even Wordsworth and Coleridge were at first hesitant and asked of their readers to be patient and give their viewpoint towards writing a chance. They even tried to appeal to the common rural Englishman, with a focus on nature and the common man in such works as "Lucy Gray", "Nutting", and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". This would become much more common later as the common man became the writer, which would lead to the production of works such as "Digging" by Heaney or "This will be the Verse" by Larkin.

Ironically, with the increase of freedom and equality, women's works for women have lost some prominence as women in first world country societies tend to be all but true equals with men and did not suffer such horrible indignities and lack of rights as did women before them. Works such as Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the rights of Woman" will not be commonly found today in first world countries. Still, Women's rights has been a slow process and in Virginia Woolf's time, they were still in the process of making accomplishments. Accomplishments had been made though, and one can see the difference in Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway"which details a rich and high class woman acting on her own. The problem is because of her high class, she has never done anything properly for herself and is a fool at times, as shown through her thought processes. This story is not empowering for women despite showing the main character as doing something something, or at least attempting to, by herself and of being high class. It just follows a foolish woman and her idiocies with no attempt to sugarcoat or make her look better than she is.  

War in British Literature

      British writers treated and reacted to war in different ways. After WWI writers started to speak out more against the harsh realities of war. We see a very different tone in Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade compared to the later 20th century authors. In the Victorian Era Britain was flourishing and expanding its empire. They felt that it was their duty to carry the "white man's burden" and install British sensibilities and religion in other colonies. War was celebrated as expanding the power, heritage, and assets of the Empire. Soldier's killed in action were glorified for giving their life for the empire. In Tennyson's last stanza;

"When can their glory fade?/ O the wild charge they made!/ All the world wondered./ Honour the charge they made!/ Honour the Light Brigade,/ Noble six hundred!" (702 1st ed) The words glory, honour, and noble stand out evoking emotions of patriotism and duty. We aren't left questioning the reasons of the war but in awe of the brave 600. I also noticed "All the world wondered" repeated twice. This decision adds to the gravity of the scene, and glorifies the act on a world stage. It's easy to see why when looking at the context of the wars; during the Crimean War (1853-54) Britain lost around 25,000 soldiers, whereas WWI was fought on the home front and led to over 900,000 soldiers killed in action.

      Due to the huge differences in magnitude of wars as well as the state of Britain Post-WWI the later works give a more realistic depiction of war and loss. Owen's Dulce et Decoru, Est leaves a very different taste in your mouth; "My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory?/ The old Lie: Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country" (1118). Owen brings the horrors and nightmares of war to light while also working directly against the tradition that its an honor to die for ones country. No patriotic nod to the greatness of Britain but only looming unheroic death. Gurney takes on the same tone in "To his Love" describing a fallen soldiers as a "red wet thing I must somehow forget" (1129). A common thread between the poets who served in the war is their style representing their fragmented sense of self. Owen uses weird half rhymes in Strange Meeting as well as unconventional stanza/meter styles in other works. The Aftermath of WWI changed British Literature drastically; no longer the ideal or the realistic but a new era without identity. Writers and readers alike are left trying to make sense or direction from the remaining fragments.

Jackie Kay "In My Country"

"Walking by the waters down where an honest river shakes hands with the sea, a woman passed round me in a slow watchful circle, as if I were a superstition." I found the beginning of this poem promoting friendliness and virtue. Where the river is personified as honest and shaking hands with the sea, it was pleasant, and with the introduction of a word choice like superstition, there seemed to be emphasis on the play the woman has on the narrator, who is potentially a "superstition." My first impressions of this entire poem in relation to how we might want to interpret the setting is that, there is a comfort and friendliness in the turf. See, the place of people at the beach is being set for us as though there is a lot more meaning and value to the land than anything, however, it was a superstition and judgement, that caught my eye...

She later says other than a superstition, it was a look as though the narrator were "the worst dregs of her imagination." I believe this is supposed to pose the woman as a threat to the narrator: for if anyone would have any harsh negative judgement on a woman at the friendly beach. When she spoke, her words spliced into "bars of an old wheel," as if a ship were turning around and changing direction. "A segment of air." The pause for effect here seems to be entertaining the notion that there are people who might find us to be a curious subject as though there are reasons for us to be subject for any suspicions...

I believe that the writer was making a statement about people and their nature in owning the land to be theirs and familiar vs. worrisome or unfamiliar in any way... in which case a place where anyone could look at them as though there could be any reason to believe that there could be anything dreg about it... Because there was some mischief in this poem, I assessed that there was a regard for the cause of that woman to be curious of the nature of the narrator... because perhaps, it was that she was not from around those parts. See, if she had been from around there, she may have been able to determine that there were more reason to be friendly by an honest river who shakes hands with the sea, and not a place to be reckoning that there be any reason to believe there narrator to be anything other than friendly.

I believe that this poem speaks for the writer and her value of England in the late 20th century, because she speaks for the her country: it's her land: it's her country, and when she is asked in the very ending where it is that she is from, she replies: "Here... Here. These parts." Jackie Kay likely believes that her poem is still very representative of the sea and her passions for her true nature as an English woman to be determined as both friendly and virtuous... and anyone who should challenge that nature of her being... she should speak her mind to believe in her own powerful nature as a woman of England: a woman with power who was actually not a bad woman at all. It speaks for her country, and it speaks for her time.

The Inability to Escape One's Social Class: a Social Issue

An overarching social issue in the different genres of British literature that we read that I noticed was the inability to escape the social class that you were born into. This seemed to be an apparent theme in all of the genres that we read. This is something that I was unfamiliar with, having only read mostly American literature where you can rise from poverty all the way to West Egg. In many of the poems and novels, this issue was not directly addressed. It is something that I have simply observed that seems to lie within many texts that we have read. This issue of inability to escape one’s social or economic class is problematic for me as an American reader because I have grown up reading and being submerged in a culture that promotes, and often encourages, people to work hard to move on up the ladder.

            Starting in the Romantic Era, a prime example of inability to escape one’s social class is The Chimney Sweeper. In this poem William Blake describes a young boy who is sold by his parents to a chimney sweeping company. This poem describes the miserable life as a chimney sweeper and the awful conditions that they work in that inevitably leads the working children to their death. The fact that a boy’s parents are forced to sell their son to a chimney sweeping company leads me to believe that he comes from a poor family who could use every last dime they could get. It is clear that little Tom Dacre will not have a fair chance of making a steady living sweeping people’s chimneys and eventually work his way up to the top of the company and retire a rich man after sweeping for several years. On the contrary, we learn the little Tom Dacre will, soon, die a chimney sweeper, never having the chance to advance from a low social standing to a higher social class.

            In the Victorian Era, a clear example of the inability to escape social class is shown in Dickens’ A Walk in the Workhouse. In this short story, Dickens attempts to draw sympathy from the reader on the lower class people in this workhouse. He successfully does this by given detailed descriptions of the different kinds of people that are in the workhouse. He describes this congregation as having few “young women, and beetle-browned young men; but not many” but “aged people were there in every variety” (751, Broadview Anthology). The description of all the different types of old people and their disabilities leads the reader to the fact that these are people who have been in the workhouse for their entire lives, and the abundance of elderly people show that there is no escape from their poverty.

            Finally, in the 20^th Century we get another, perhaps the clearest, example of the inability for people to escape their social class. In E.M. Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, we see an obvious social divide between the colonized Indians and the Anglo Indians. A direct example of this conflict is when two friends, one Indian (Aziz) and the other British (Fielding), are discussing their friendship at the end of the book. In their last dialogue, Aziz claims that he and Fielding cannot be friends and it is clear that the reason for this is because Fielding is of a different social class that Aziz. They cannot be friends because one is a colonizer and the other is the colonized, which creates an inequality between the two that neither can escape due to their nationality. In conclusion, the texts that we have read this semester all seem to carry the theme of the inability to escapes one’s social class, regardless of the time period or genre it was written in.

War and Poverty

Writers, no matter their time period, like to write about the beauty and the life they see around them. Nature and the everyday human life was the most common topic of the romantic’s era that hasn't yet disappeared. More than anything writers seem to write about social issues. Issues such as war, and poverty and oppression because these issues never seem to completely disappear. For example, an evaluation of the everyday working life of man can be seen in "Song to the Men of England" in 1819 and in "Inglan Is a Bitch" written in 1991. There is one hundred and seventy two years between these two poems and yet both address the unfair difference in the life of the working poor.  "Men of England, wherefore plough/ For the lords who lay ye low?/ Wherefore weave with toil and care/ The rich robes your tyrants wear?" (pg 412) and "mi know dem have work, work in abundant/ yet still, dem mek mi redundant/ now, at fifty-five mi gettin' quite ol'/ yet still, dem sen' mi fi goh draw dole." (pg 1599)  Both of these poems address the unfair conditions of the working poor. In “Song to the Men of England” the poet is addressing those poor men who were working in a time of economic depression and social turmoil following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. This poem is a call to arms to force change I the social and economic order. In “Inglan Is a Bitch” the speaker is bemoaning the unfairness of the working conditions for immigrants. In the passage quoted above the man was laid off after fifteen years of hard work and had to receive welfare at fifty-five. He ends the poem with the line “is why wi a goh dhu ‘bout it?” which seems as though it could also be a call to arms.

War is another social issue poets commonly write about, mostly because it’s an all encompassing topic that happens over and over simply due to human nature. Lord Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Bridgade” is probably one of the most famous of the Crimean War’s resulting poetry. World War One and World War Two and the Crimean War are a few that have poetry written for them. Even the modern wars in Iraq and Afghanastan, soldiers write about their experiences. Some topics are universal. Sadly enough, war and poverty seem to be some of them.

Significance Between High and Low Brow Modernism

The idea of aesthetics and literary form, in a modernist frame of criticism, usually refers to the commonly employed methods of fragmentation, prose poetry, and the intentional blurring of the lines between what is read as a short story and what is read as poetic verse. One obvious example would be T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland; a poem traditionally viewed as a holistically modernist innovation to the prototypical poetic paradigms of the time. However, there is an important, distinct divide between Eliot's kind of modernism - which sought to showcase and give praise to the author's educational background - and what other modernist writers of his era sought to interpret modernism as; such as Steinbeck, who wrote what we now call "middle" or "low brow" modernism. 

This difference in high and low modernism constitutes not only a change in the voice of the text, but an inevitable metamorphosis on the page in terms of line length, line breaks, purposefully placed vernacular, and overall structure of any given modernist text. A great example of this would be to contrast The Wasteland against Linton Kwesi Johnson's "Inglan is a Bitch", a modernistic innovation we have come to call 'dub poetry'. Parallels can be drawn by simply examining each text against their author's social and economic environments, and the respective innovations therein; Eliot drew inspirations from the learned classical literature he was trained of, while Johnson instead drew guidance from the rich musical culture he in which was immersed.

Such a shift in literary form over the centuries of what scholars call the modernist movement is critical to what many writers today have implemented into their own writing voices. Authors like Joyce, Eliot, Auden, and others, paved the way for countless experimental moves taken not only by contemporary professionals, but by amateurs like myself and my classmates. Modernity shows its influence in many of the student's works who claim Hemingway or Fitzgerald as inspirations. I know that these are American writers, and not British, but if I've learned anything by taking the two survey classes in the same semester it's that modernism was shared between the British and Americans in a lot of ways. Overall, it's this change in literary form that obscures lines and brings new questions for the reader when interpreting a text - and it's all thanks to time, culture, and the non-stop human nature of evolving. 

Literature and Culture

The literature of a certain time period seems to reflect the culture the more I learn and understand the various societal influences and contexts of different works. Within the Romantic era and up to modern movements of the early twentieth century, there seem to be many various changes within the British culture that effect the writings prevalent at that time.  From the dreamy poetic language and imagery in much of the literature of the Romantic period, a sense of longing is present. The Victorian Era addresses stereotypical gender roles, especially in Northanger Abbey showing a female protagonist can act on her own volition. The works of the twentieth century stray away from Gothic tales to focus on the serious issues at hand, like war or colonialism.

Since a function of literature is a way to reflect the society of the time, it would seem that the natural progression of changes within writing was closely intertwined with the happenings of the culture. The Romantic and Gothic movements served a space for escape from the surrounding world. However, poems like "The Chimney Sweeper" by William Blake acted as a way to address child labor in a personal narrative of orphans slaving away in grimy, unhealthy conditions. In comparison, Wordsworth's ability to captivate the reader through dreamy imagery while addressing issues was more of an indirect commentary to the issues at bay.

As time progressed to the twentieth century, the ever looming threat of war and the reality of loss brought out harsh realities in literature. In particular, T.S. Elliot's "The Wasteland" unfolded as an intense snapshot of the feelings of the people of England in WWI. Through it's depressing sense of loss and longing for a new start, the poem, riddled with allusions and metaphors, describes a culture desperate to escape the harsh realities of war. Throughout the couple hundred years of literature we read, issues being addressed reflect the voices of the oppressed, those in despair and those that wish to entertain. One of the biggest things I noticed through the progression of time was the way issues were addressed. The earlier works wrote around issues, while the future addressed them head on. Urgency and the severity of issues seems to effect the approach as much as the content that is being addressed.