Paper Summary:

This paper explains that T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats, who are considered to be the quintessential examples of the modernist literary artists, were both extremely critical of their age and social milieu. The author points out that the Victorian poets Thomas Hardy and Gerald Manley Hopkins also were concerned with predicaments of their age, but their poetry does not have the same intensity and desperation to escape the past that is evident in the works of Eliot and Yeats. The paper concludes that the central similarity of all these poets is the search for a reality, which transcends the ordinary life; whereas, the different between the two eras is the modernist poets are convinced that finding new realities and values has become an inescapable and essential quest in light of the decline of modern civilization. Quotations.

From the Paper:

"Modernist literature has been characterized by the phrase "caught between two worlds." This refers to the view that the modernist poets and writers were attempting to deal with previous traditions and worldviews which they were intensely critical of. At the same time they were endeavoring to finds new ways of artistic vision and expression. Essentially the poets in the early Twentieth Century were faced with a radical shift in ideas and views about reality and society which had been engendered by discoveries in, amongst others, the fields of science and psychology; such as the Freudian discovery of the unconscious. The First World War was also to pay a large part in the questioning of the norms of values of Western society in general."

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