Introduction Twentieth-Century English Poetry contains the poetry of over 280 poets from 1900 to the present day, including W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, A.E. Housman, John Betjeman, Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Isaac Rosenberg, D.H. Lawrence and Carol Ann Duffy and many others. It also incorporates works by poets such as Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Louis MacNeice and Siegfried Sassoon. This synopsis will focus on the two such poets of the...
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Read Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney, lines 1345-1382. Write a commentary on this passage. Explore how the passage reflects themes important to the poem as a whole. Themes you might want to consider include, but are not limited to, monstrosity, lineage, travel, landscape, gender. Lineage, a theme closely interlinked with the idea of bravery is an explicit notion that meanders through the poem: these are themes that are distinctly highlighted in this passage. Beowulf depicts the overpowering nature of the...
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Two world wars, an intervening economic depression of great severity, and the austerity of life in Britain following the Second World War help to explain the quality and direction of English literature in the 20th century. The traditional values of Western civilization, which the Victorians had only begun to question, came to be questioned seriously by a number of new writers, who saw society breaking down around them. Traditional literary forms were often discarded, and new ones succeeded one another...
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The undertaking of a transition from one phase of life to another can prove difficult and there may be obstacles to overcome along the way. To transcend adversity, an individual will often need to maintain diligence and perseverance to seek new beneficial opportunities and the development of self-belief. This attitude towards self-development can also allow and individual to gain support crucial to successfully make the intended changes. This difficult transitioning process can be explored through Stephen Daldry’s film, Billy Elliot...
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There are other mentions of nature, for instance: “The sky” (v3), “sea and hill” (v6), “that rock” (v10), “The leggy birds” (v11), and “Water and ground” (v16). Nature is important in this poem, “breakers shredded into rags” (v10), breakers are heavy waves which become white foam. (Wikipedia) This is really inspiring for the narrator. A lot of his poems are including natural elements, for instance, in “Personal Helicon”, the reference to the Helicon Mountain shows that Heaney is very close...
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This essay will show how the tradition of animal poetry is present in both ‘The Otter’ by Seamus Heaney and ‘The Mower to the Glow-worms’ by Andrew Marvell. This essay will portray this by comparing and contrasting the poetic techniques used in these poems. Firstly, Heaney’s poem is what one would call free verse as it has no rhyme or metrical rhythm, whereas Marvell’s Poem is in a sense more traditional as rhyme, a metrical rhythm called an iambic tetrameter,...
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In this assignment, I will compare ‘The Otter’ by Seamus Heaney (page 191-2 in The Faber Book of Beasts) to ‘The Mower to the Glow-Worms’ by Andrew Marvell (page 159 in The Faber Book of Beasts) and explore the ways in which these poets write about animals. ‘The Otter’ is a twentieth century poem and comprises seven quatrains, with no regular rhyme scheme or meter, and the lines differ in length. Throughout the poem, Heaney uses the otter as a...
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The “Faber Book of Beasts,” (Muldoon, 1997) is an anthology of poems based around the theme of animals. Muldoon has created this anthology around the opinion that these poems are “a selection of the best animal poems,” (Muldoon, 1997). The two poems that will be discussed, “The Otter,” (Heaney, 1997) and “The Mower to the Glowworms,” (Marvell, 1997) both use animals as the protagonists in their poems. They do this in both comparable and contrasting ways. Traditionally, when a poet...
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Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘The Thimble’ discusses the plethora of uses that a thimble has provided to many different societies and cultures over its time of existence. The thimble is a small closed-end cap worn over people fingertips to protect them from needles while sewing. But ‘The Thimble’ argues that every object is an absent center around which every culture develops a different meaning. The wording by Heaney in the beginning of the poem is sexually suggestive. When he talks about...
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This paper deals with Seamus Heaney's attitude to politics in his poetry, focusing on 'North' collection (1975). It aims at showing how Heaney developed from a nature poet to a political poet and how the surrounding events affected his poetry and his attitude. Besides, he is not really considered as a political poet but he had to respond to the events around him in his homeland, Ireland. North is considered a reflection to the conflict inside the poet who is...
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In the poem ‘Mid-Term Break’ belonging to the collection ‘Death of a Naturalist’ (1966), the poet Seamus Heaney thoroughly explores the theme of children sometimes being forced to grow up. The memory poem presents the tragedy which forced Seamus Heaney to come of age, laying out in snapshot-like form the instances that marked the influential day. Called away from school, he faces the reality of his younger brother’s death, and the new expectations which fall upon him. Through the poet’s...
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Poetry is one of the most powerful forms of writing because it takes the English language, a language we believe we know, and transforms it. Suddenly the words do not sound the same or mean the same. The pattern of the sentences sounds new and melodious. It is truly another language exclusively for the writer and the reader. No poem can be read in the same way, because the words mean something different to each of us. For this reason,...
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