The Modernist revolution

As early as 1917, Eliot impressed a small audience with a sample of his extraordinary talent in " The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." . The poet's remarkable talent for attaining effects with words and images of totally different pitch appears at times in "Prufrock," but its poetic force is more fully realized in the well-unified "Portrait of a Lady," and in the shorter poems such as "Sweeney among the Nightingales"--a title in itself rich in suggestion of the sharp contrasts which may be expected. The Waste Land ( 1922), if not "a center for the poetic achievement of the first quarter of the present century," has created more discussion and exercized a wider influence than any recent literary work. The five parts are related rather than connected by the prevailing mood suggested in the title. The spiritual and moral emptiness of the present generation and of the trend of civilization is the background out of which the theme emerges. Eliot's negative approach in The Waste Land began to give way to a somewhat more positive attitude in the so called "Ariel Poems," but it was not until "Ash Wednesday" ( 1930) appeared that he indicated a path away from desolation in what in his Essay on Dante he called "a coherent traditional system of dogma and morals." The four long poems which make up Quartets ( 1943) are in a sense a continuation of the assertion, although these poems have much in them which is not directly concerned with the necessity for an abiding religion. "The Dry Salvages" and "Little Gidding" are not so full of arresting and ingeniously contrived images as the early poems, nor are the contrasts in association and tonal quality so pronounced. Eliot's major poem, The Waste Land, published in 1922, is not a land literally laid waste by war, a real wasteland which poets such as Owen and Rosenberg had graphically described. It does not mention the economic dislocation which would eventually lead to the unemployment and economic crises of the late 1920s. The people move across a desolate landscape of fragmented images; they do not relate to one another. The many different voices we hear in the poem speak not to each other but past each other. There is no uniting belief in one transcendent God. In this sense, Eliot echoes the post-Darwinian concerns of an unstable world, and many of the ideas owe a lot to Frazer's The Golden Bough . To many of T.S. Eliot's contemporaries, the whole poem was written in the accent of its times - an unmistakably twentieth-century, indeed post-war poem which records the collapse in the values of Western civilisation. The main examples of this collapse are sterile, unloving sexual relationships, cultural confusion, and spiritual desolation.His later poetry is characterised by a quiet searching for spiritual peace. Poems like Marina explore aspects of religious revelation; and his major poetic sequence Four Quartets, with its many allusions to the Bible, to mystical religious literature, and to Dante, presents a sustained exploration of the relations between moments in human time and moments of spiritual eternity. Virginia Woolf’s criticism distils and reapplies Bell’s and Fry’s aesthetic ideas as a means of arguing for the potential freedom of the novel from commonly received understandings of plot, time, and identity. In discussing the revision of traditional modes of representation in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf (1882-1941) insists that each day ‘the mind receives a myriad impressions-trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel’. As Virginia Woolf’s fictional style developed beyond the relatively conventional parameters of The Voyage Out (1915) to the experimental representations of consciousness in Mrs Dallomay (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931), specific characterization recedes and the detailed exploration of the individual identity tends to melt into a larger and freer expression.

Virginia Woolf’s most complete, but ambiguous, representation of the life of a woman character’s mind in Mrs Dalloway is also her most thorough experiment with the new technique of interior monologue. The novel plays subtly with the problem of an identity which is both multiple and singular, both public and private, and it gradually insists on the mutual dependence and opposition of the perceptions of Clarissa Dalloway and the shell-shocked ramblings of a victim of the war, Septimus Warren Smith. Mrs Dalloway reveals both the particular originality of Woolf’s fictional mode and the more general limitations of her social vision. When she returns to the problem of a dissipated identity in her extraordinary tribute to the English aristocracy, Orlando (1928), she seems to seek both to dissolve and define character in a fanciful concoction of English history and shifting gender. The book is in part a sentimental tribute to the personal flair and ancestral fixation of her aristocratic friend and fellow-writer, Victoria (‘Vita’) Sackville-West (1892-1962), in part an exploration of a ‘masculine’ freedom traditionally denied to women. In To the Lighthouse (1927), one of her most experimental works, the passage of time, for example, is modulated by the consciousness of the characters rather than by the clock. The events of a single afternoon constitute over half the book, while the events of the following ten years are compressed into a few dozen pages. Many readers of To the Lighthouse, especially those who are not versed in the traditions of modernist fiction, find the novel strange and difficult. Its language is dense and the structure amorphous. Compared with the plot-driven Victorian novels that came before it, To the Lighthouse seems to have little in the way of action. Indeed, almost all of the events take place in the characters’ minds.