MACMILLAN ANTHOLOGIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

General Editors: A. Norman Jeffares, formerly Professor of English,

University of Stirling Michael Alexander, Berry Professor of English Literature,

University of St Andrews

MACMILLAN ANTHOLOGIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Volume 1 THE MIDDLE AGES (700-1550) Michael Alexander and Felicity Riddy

Volume 2 THE RENAISSANCE (1550-1660) Gordon Campbell

Volume 3 THE RESTORATION AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY (1660-1798) Ian McGowan

Volume 4 THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (1798-1900) Brian Martin

Volume 5 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (1900-present) Neil McEwan

MACMILLAN ANTHOLOGIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

_______ THE ______ _

TWENTIETH CENTURY (1900-present)

Edited by Neil McEwan

MACMILLAN

© Selection and editorial matter Neil McEwan 1989

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

First published 1989 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.

1098765432 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97

ISBN 978-0-333-46477-9 ISBN 978-1-349-20151-8 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20151-8

v

Contents

Acknowledgements xv General Introduction xx Introduction xxu Note on Annotation and Glossing xxvu Note on Dates xxvii THOMAS HARDY 1

I Said to Love 1 The Darkling Thrush 2 The Dark-Eyed Gentleman 3 Shut Out That Moon 4 'When I set out for Lyonnesse' 5 The Year's Awakening 6 My Spirit Will Not Haunt the Mound 6 The Haunter 7 The Going 8 After a Journey 9 At Castle Boterel 10 The Oxen 11 During Wind and Rain 12 The Glimpse 13 The Shadow on the Stone 14 Afterwards 15 If It's Ever Spring Again 15 The Sundial on a Wet Day 16 When Oats Were Reaped 17 He Never Expected Much 17 Family Portraits 18

HENRY JAMES 20 Fordham Castle 20

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW 38 From Major Barbara

[Proper Names] 38 JOSEPH CONRAD 49

From Typhoon [Bad Weather] 49

VI CONTENTS

From The Secret Agent 56 [England is Absurd]

A. E. HOUSMAN 74 Others, I am Not the First 74 On Wenlock Edge 75 The Chestnut Casts His Flambeaux 75 The Oracles 76 Could Man Be Drunk For Ever 77 The First of May 78 When I Would Muse in Boyhood 79 In Valleys Green and Still 79 Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall 80 Parta Quies 80

W. B. YEATS 82 Down by the Salley Gardens 82 The Lake Isle of Innisfree 83 The Fiddler of Dooney 83 Never Give all the Heart 84 Words 85 No Second Troy 85 A Coat 86 The Scholars 86 The Fisherman 86 An Irish Airman Foresees his Death 88 The Second Coming 88 Leda and the Swan 89 Sailing to Byzantium 90 Among School Children 91 Swift's Epitaph 93 Byzantium 93 Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931 95 Lapis Lazuli 96 Beautiful Lofty Things 98 Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad? 98 The Circus Animals' Desertion 99 Under Ben Bulben 101

RUDYARD KIPLING 104 From Kim

[Friend of All the World] 104 The Song of the Little Hunter 124

CONTENTS Vll

Recessional 125 Sussex 126 Harp Song of the Dane Women 129 Cities and Thrones and Powers 129 If ... 130 The Land 131 Gethsemane 1914-18 134

H. G. WELLS 135 The New Accelerator 135

ARNOLD BENNElT 147 From The Old Wives' Tale

Elephant 147 JOHN GALSWORTHY 162

From Strife [Breaking the Men 1 162

H. H. MUNRO ('SAKI') 173 Sredni Vashtar 173

IDLAIRE BELLOC 178 Lord Lundy 178 From 'Epigrams' 180

WALTER DE LA MARE 182 Autumn 182 All That's Past 182 The Ghost 183

FORD MADOX FORD 185 From The Good Soldier

[The Ashburnhams 1 185 G. K. CHESTERTON 194

The Praise of Dust 194 The Secret People 195 The House of Christmas 197 Variations of an Air 198

WINSTON CHURCHILL 201 A Speech to the House of Commons,

13 May 1940 201 The Dunkirk Evacuation, 4 June 1940 203 The Finest Hour, 18 June 1940 204 A Broadcast Speech, 11 September 1940 205

JOHN MASEFIELD 208 Sea-Fever 208 Cargoes 209

Vlll CONTENTS

EDWARD THOMAS 210 Adlestrop 210 Swedes 211 The Owl 211 As the Team's Head Brass 212 Lights Out 213 Home 214 Good-night 215

HAROLD MONRO 216 Great City 216 Street Fight 217 Living 218

E. M. FORSTER 220 From A Room With a View

[Not Truly Refined] 220 L YTION STRACHEY 229

From Eminent Victorians Dr Arnold 229

P. G. WODEHOUSE 241 From The Inimitable Jeeves

The Great Sermon Handicap 241 VIRGINIA WOOLF 257

From To the Lighthouse [Loneliness] 257

Letters To Gerald Brenan, Christmas Day

1922 262 To V. Sackville-West, 16 March 1926 264

JAMES JOYCE 269 From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man [Mortal Beauty] 270

From Ulysses [Hades] 277

JAMES ELROY FLECKER 291 The Parrot 291 To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence 292 The Old Ships 293

CONTENTS IX

D. H. LAWRENCE 294 From Women in Love

Classroom 294 The Bride 304 Snake 304 The Mosquito 307 Kangaroo 309 Innocent England 311 The Ship of Death 312 Bavarian Gentians 316

SIEGFRIED SASSOON 317 The General 317 To Any Dead Officer 317 Everyone Sang 319

RUPERT BROOKE 320 Heaven 320 Clouds 321 Peace 322 The Dead 322 The Soldier 323

EDWIN MUIR 324 The Covenant 324 The Labyrinth 324 The Horses 326

EDITH SITWELL 329 Still Falls the Rain 329

T. E. LAWRENCE 331 From Seven Pillars of Wisdom

[Death was Cheap] 331 T. S. ELIOT 337

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 337 Sweeney Among the Nightingales 342 From Four Quartets

Little Gidding 343 ISAAC ROSENBERG 350

God Made Blind 350 Break of Day in the Trenches 351 Louse Hunting 352 Returning, We Hear the Larks 352 Dead Man's Dump 353

x CONTENTS

IVY COMPTON-BURNETI 356 From A House and Its Head

[Father] 356 WILFRED OWEN 363

Anthem for Doomed Youth 363 Dulce et Decorum Est 364 Strange Meeting 365

ALDOUS HUXLEY 367 From Brave New World

[Suggestions from the State] 367 ROBERT GRAVES 374

The Cool Web 374 Sick Love 375 Welsh Incident 375

CHARLES SORLEY 377 To Germany 377 When You See Millions of the Mouthless

Dead 377 EDMUND BLUNDEN 379

The Pike 379 Forefathers 380 The Midnight Skaters 381 October Comes 382

BASIL BUNTING 383 On the Fly-leaf of Pound's Cantos 383 A thrush in the syringa sings 384 Three Michaelmas daisies 384 Gone to hunt 384 You idiot! 385

STEVIE SMITH 386 The Singing Cat 386 Not Waving But Drowning 387

EVELYN WAUGH 388 From The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold

Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age 388 GEORGE ORWELL 398

From Nineteen Eighty-Four [The Principles of Newspeak] 398

CONTENTS Xl

GRAHAM GREENE 408 From The Honorary Consul

[The Hostage] 408 ANTHONY POWELL 420

From At Lady Molly's [General Conyers] 420

SAMUEL BECKETT 430 From Waiting for Godot

[Magicians] 430 JOHN BETJEMAN 436

In Westminster Abbey 436 Senex 438 May-Day Song for North Oxford 439 Sunday Morning, King's Cambridge 439

W. H. AUDEN 441 This Lunar Beauty 441 On this Island 442 Lullaby 443 Gare du Midi 444 Musee des Beaux Arts 444 In Memory of W. B. Yeats 445 Law Like Love 447 The Shield of Achilles 449 Et in Arcadia Ego 451

WILLIAM EMPSON 453 To an Old Lady 453 Homage to the British Museum 454 Missing Dates 455

KATHLEEN RAINE 456 Shells 456 Rock 457

STEPHEN SPENDER 458 The Truly Great 458 An Elementary School Classroom in a

Slum 459 NORMAN MacCAIG 461

Feeding Ducks 461 Nude in a Fountain 461 Celtic Cross 463

Xli CONTENTS

WILLIAM GOLDING 464 From The Inheritors

[Pictures] 464 ROY FULLER 473

The Barber 473 The Family Cat 474 At a Warwickshire Mansion 475

F. T. PRINCE 477 Soldiers Bathing 477

R. S. THOMAS 480 Evans 480 A Welsh Testament 481

HENRY REED 483 Naming of Parts 483 Chard Whitlow 484

DYLAN THOMAS 486 The Force that through the Green Fuse

Drives the Flower 486 And Death Shall Have No Dominion 487 Fern Hill 488

CHARLES CAUSLEY 490 Timothy Winters 490

JOHN HEATH-STUBBS 492 Not Being Oedipus 492 To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence 493 Hornbills in Northern Nigeria 494

IRIS MURDOCH 496 From The Fire and the Sun

[Praising Art to Plato] 496 D. J. ENRIGHT 504

University Examinations in Egypt 504 History of World Languages 505

KEITH DOUGLAS 506 On a Return from Egypt 506 Simplify Me When I'm Dead 507 Vergissmeinnicht 508

KINGSLEY AMIS 509 From Lucky Jim

[Ordeal by Music] 509

CONTENTS Xlll

DONALD DAVIE 518 The Garden Party 518

PHILIP LARKIN 520 Church Going 520 Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph

Album 522 Toads 523 At Grass 525 Toads Revisited 526 The Whitsun Weddings 527 Vers de Societe 529 The Explosion 530

JAMES KIRKUP 532 Rugby League Game 532

JOHN MORTIMER 534 From A Voyage Round My Father

[Words into the Darkness] 534 PATRICIA BEER 545

Spanish Balcony 545 ELIZABETH JENNINGS 547

San Paolo Fuori Le Mura, Rome 547 The Novice 548

WILLIAM TREVOR 549 From Lunch in Winter

The Bayeux Lounge 549 JOHN OSBORNE 553

From Look Back in Anger [Damn them All] 553

TED HUGHES 564 The Jaguar 564 Pike 565

HAROLD PINTER 567 From The Caretaker

[Worries] 567 GEOFFREY HILL 575

Genesis 575 Canticle for Good Friday 577 'Domaine Public' 578

TONY HARRISON 579 A Kumquat for John Keats 579

xiv CONTENTS

Bringing Up 582 GILLIAN CLARKE 584

The Sundial 584 Plums 585

TOM STOPPARD 587 From Jumpers

[What to Believe?] 587 IAN HAMILTON 600

Pretending Not to Sleep 600 Now and Then 601

SEAMUS HEANEY 602 The Otter 602 The Skunk 603 Holly 604

DOUGLAS DUNN 605 The Clear Day 605 A Summer Night 606

JAMES FENTON 608 The Killer Snails 608

Bibliography 609 Index of First Lines 611 Index of Authors 616 Source List 618

xv

Acknowledgements

The editor and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material: Kingsley Amis, for an extract from Lucky Jim (1965), pp.36-46, by permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd; W. H. Auden, for 'Law Like Love', 'The Shield of Achilles', 'On this Island', 'Musee des Beaux Arts', 'Gare du Midi', 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats', 'This Lunar Beauty' and 'Et in Arcadia Ego' from Collected Poems (1976), by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Samuel Beckett, for an extract from Waiting for Godot (1965), pp. 65-71, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Patricia Beer, for 'Spanish Balcony' from Collected Poems, by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd; Hilaire Belloc, for 'Lord Lundy', 'On Lady Poltagrue', 'The Statue', 'On Mundane Acquaintances', 'On a General Election' and 'On a Sleeping Friend' from Sonnets and Verse, Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd (1954), by permission of A. D. Peters & Co. Ltd on behalf of the Estate of the author; John Betjeman, for 'In Westminster Abbey', 'Senex', 'May­Day Song for North Oxford' and 'Sunday Morning, Kings Cambridge' from John Betjeman's Collected Poems (1958), by permission from John Murray (Publishers) Ltd; Edmund Blunden, for 'October Comes' from Shells by a Stream, (1944), Macmillan, by permission from A. D. Peters & Co. Ltd, on behalf of the Estate of the author; and 'The Pike', 'Forefathers' and 'The Midnight Skaters' from Poems of Many Years (1957), by permission of Collins Publishers; Basil Bunting, for 'A Thrush', 'Three Michaelmas Daisies', 'Gone to Hunt', 'You Idiot!' and 'On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos' from Collected Poems (1978), by permission of Oxford University Press; Charles Causley, for 'Timothy Winters' from Collected Poems (Macmillan), by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd on behalf of the author; Winston Churchill, for extracts from Into Battle Speeches of Sir Winston Churchill, May 1938-Nov. 1940, ed. Randolph Churchill (1941), by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd on behalf of the Estate of the author. Copyright © The Estate of Sir Winston Churchill; Gillian Clarke, for 'Plums' from Selected Poems (1985), by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd, and 'The Sundial' from The Sundial (1978), by permission of the author and J. D. Lewis & Sons Ltd; Ivy Compton-Burnett, for an extract from A House and its Head (1951, Eyre and Spottiswoode), pp.88-97, by

xvi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

permission of Curtis Brown Ltd on behalf of the Estate of the author. Copyright © 1935 by Ivy Compton-Burnett; Donald Davie, for 'The Garden Party' from Collected Poems (1972, Routledge'and Kegan Paul), by permission of the author; Keith Douglas, for 'Vergissmein­nicht', 'On a Return from Egypt' and 'Simplify Me When I'm Dead' from The Complete Poems of Keith Douglas, ed. Desmond Graham (1978), by permission of Oxford University Press. Copyright © 1978 Marie J. Douglas; Douglas Dunn, for 'The Clear Day' and 'A Summer Night' from Elegies (1985), by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; T. S. Eliot, for 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and 'Sweeney Among the Nightingales' from Collected Poems 1909-1962 (1963); and 'Little Gidding' from Four Quartets, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; William Empson, for 'To an Old Lady', 'Missing Dates' and 'Homage to the British Museum' from Collected Poems (1955), by permission of Chatto & Windus Ltd; D.J. Enright, for 'University Examinations in Egypt' and 'History of World Languages' from Collected Poems (1981), by permission of Watson, Little Ltd on behalf of the author; James Fenton, for 'The Killer Snails' from The Memory of War (1982), The Salamander Press and Penguin Books, by permis­sion of A. D. Peters & Co. Ltd on behalf of the author; Ford Madox Ford, for an extract from The Good Soldier, Chap. 3, by permission of The Bodley Head; E. M. Forster, for an extract from A Room With a View (1908), pp.124-33, by permission of Edward Arnold (Pub­lishers) Ltd; Roy Fuller, for 'The Barber', 'The Family Cat' and 'At a Warwickshire Mansion' from New and Collected Poems 1934-84, by permission of the author and Seeker and Warburg Ltd; William Golding, for an extract from The Inheritors (1955), pp.31-43, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Robert Graves, for 'The Cool Web', 'Sick Love' and 'Welsh Incident' from Collected Poems (1975), by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of the Executors of the Estate of the author; Graham Greene, for an extract from The Honorary Consul (1974), Chap. 3, by permission of Laurence Pollinger Ltd on behalf of the author; Ian Hamilton, for 'Pretending Not to Sleep' and 'Now and Then' from The Visit (1970), by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Tom Harrison, for 'A Kumquat for John Keats', and 'Bringing Up' from Selected Poems (1984, Viking Penguin), by permission of Fraser & Dunlop Scripts Ltd on behalf of the author; Seamus Heaney, for 'The Otter' and 'The Skunk' from Field Work (1979), and 'Holly' from Station Island (1984), by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; John Heath-Stubbs, for 'Not Being Oedipus'

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XVll

from Selected Poems (1965, Oxford University Press), and 'Hornbills in Northern Nigeria' and 'To a Poet A Thousand Years Hence' from The Watchman's Flute (Carcanet Press), by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd, on behalf of the author; Geoffrey Hill, for 'Genesis', 'Canticle for Good Friday' from For the Unfallen 1952-8 (1968), and 'Domaine Public' from King Log (1970), by permission of Andre Deutsch Ltd; Ted Hughes, for 'The Jaguar' from The Hawk in the Rain, and 'Pike' from Lupercal, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Aldous Huxley, for an extract from Brave New World (Penguin), pp.27-34, by permission of Mrs Laura Huxley and Chatto and Windus Ltd; Elizabeth Jennings, for 'Sao Paulo Fiora Le Mura, Rome' and 'The Novice' from Collected Poems (1967, Macmillan), by permission from David Higham Associates Ltd on behalf of the author; James Joyce, for extracts from Ulysses (1937), pp. 93-107, by permission of The Bodley Head on behalf of the Executors of the Estate of the author; and A Portrait of the Artist (1968), Chap. 4, by permission of Jonathan Cape Ltd on behalf of the Executors of the Estate of the author; James Kirkup, for 'Rugby League Game' from Refusal to Confirm (1963, Oxford University Press), by permission of the author; Philip Larkin, for 'Church Going', 'Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album', 'Toads' and 'At Grass' from The Less Deceived (1955), by permission of The Marvell Press; and 'Toads Revisited' and 'The Whitsun Weddings' from The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and 'Vers de Societe' and 'The Explosion' from High Win­dows (1974), by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Norman Mac­Caig, for 'Feeding Ducks', 'Nude in a Fountain' and 'Celtic Cross' from Selected Poems (1971), by permission of the author and The Hogarth Press; Walter de la Mare, for 'Autumn', 'All That's Past' and 'The Ghost' from The Collected Poems of Walter de la Mare (1979, Faber and Faber), by permission of The Society of Authors on behalf of the Literary Trustees of the author; John Masefield, for 'Sea-Fever' and 'Cargoes' from Poems, by permission of The Society of Authors on behalf of the Estate of the author; John Mortimer, for an extract from A Voyage Round My Father (1971, Methuen & Co.), pp.36-48, by permission of A. D. Peters & Co. Ltd on behalf of the author; Edwin Muir, for 'The Covenant', 'The Labyrinth' and 'The Horses' from The Collected Poems of Edwin Muir (1960), by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Iris Murdoch, for an extract from The Fire and the Sun (1978, Oxford University Press), pp. 79-89, by permission of the author; George Orwell, for an extract from Nineteen Eighty-Four

xviii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

(1984, Penguin and Seeker and Warburg), pp. 257-63, by permission of A. M. Heath on behalf of the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Seeker and Warburg Ltd; John Osborne, for an extract from Look Back in Anger (1957), pp. 10-22, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Wilfred Owen, for 'Anthem for Doomed Youth', 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and 'Strange Meeting' from The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed. C. D. Lewis, by permission of the Estate of the author, editor and Chatto and Windus Ltd; Harold Pinter, for an extract from The Caretaker (1967), pp.48-57, by permission of Methuen, London; Anthony Powell, for an extract from At Lady Molly's (1957), pp.224-36, by permission of William Heinemann Ltd; F. T. Prince, for 'Soldiers Bathing' from Collected Poems (1979, The Menard Press), by permission of Anvil Press Poetry Ltd; Kathleen Raine, for 'Shells' and 'Rock' from Collected Poems 1935-1980, (1981, Allen & Unwin), by permission of the author; Henry Reed, for 'Chard Whitlow' and 'Naming of Parts' from A Map of Verona (1946), by permission of Jonathan Cape Ltd on behalf of the Estate of the author; Siegfried Sassoon, for 'The General', 'Dead Officer', and 'Everyone Sang' from The Collected Poems of Siegfried Sassoon 1908-1956 (1956, Faber and Faber), by permission of George Sassoon; George Bernard Shaw, for an extract from Major Barbara (1958, Longman), pp. 78-90, by permission of The Society of Authors on behalf of the Estate of the author; Edith Sitwell, for 'Still Falls the Rain' from Collected Poems (1965, Macmillan), by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd on behalf of the Estate of the author; Stevie Smith, for 'The Singing Cat' and 'Not Waving, But Drowning' from The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith (Penguin Modern Classics), by permission of James MacGibbon; Stephen Spender, for 'I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great' and 'An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum' from Collected Poems 1928-1953, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Tom Stoppard, for an extract from Jumpers (1972), pp.57-71, by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd; Dylan Thomas, for 'The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower', 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion' and 'Fern Hill' from Collected Poems 1934-52 (1952, Dent), by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd on behalf of the Estate of the author; R. S. Thomas, for 'A Welsh Testament' and 'Evans' from Selected Poems 1946-68 (1973), Hart-Davis, by permission of Collins Pub­lishers; William Trevor, for an extract from 'Lunch in Winter' in The News From Ireland (1986), pp. 80-84b by permission of A. D. Peters

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XiX

& CO. Ltd on behalf of the author; Evelyn Waugh, for an extract from The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1973, Chapman and Hall), pp. 121-33, by permission of A. D. Peters & Co. Ltd on behalf of the author; H. G. Wells, for an extract from 'The New Accelerator' in In the Days of the Comet and Seventeen Stories (1925, T. Fisher Unwin), pp. 435-55, by permission of the Estate of the author and The Hogarth Press; P. G. Wodehouse, for an extract from 'The Great Sermon Handicap' in Inimitable Jeeves (1953, Penguin), pp. 122-40, by permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd on behalf of the Trustees of the Wodehouse Trust; Virginia Woolf, for extracts from To the Lighthouse (1964, Penguin), pp.230-7; and The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vols. II & III, ed. Norman Nicholson (1976), by permission of the author's Literary Estate, the editor and The Hogarth Press; W. B. Yeats, for 'Down by the Salley Gardens', 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', 'The Fiddler of Dooney', 'Never Give all the Heart', 'Words', 'No Second Troy', 'A Coat', 'The Scholars', 'The Fisherman', 'An Irish Airman Foresees his Death', 'The Second Coming', 'Leda and the Swan', 'Sailing to Byzantium', 'Among School Children', 'Swift's Epitaph', 'Byzantium', 'Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931', 'Lapis Lazuli', 'Beautiful Lofty Things', 'Why Should Not Old Men be Mad?', 'The Circus Animals' Desertion' and 'Under Ben Bulben' from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1965, Macmillan), by permission of A. P. Watt Ltd on behalf of Michael Yeats and Macmillan London Ltd.

Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.

xx

General Introduction

There can often be a gulf between the restricted reading required by a school, college or university syllabus and the great expanse of English literature which is there to be explored and enjoyed. There are two effective ways of bridging that gulf. One is to be aware of how authors relate or have related to their contemporary situations and their contemporaries, how they accept, develop or react against what has been written by their predecessors or older contemporaries, how, in short, they fit into the long history of English literature. Good histories of literature - and there is a welcome increase of interest in them -serve to place authors in their context, as well as giving a panoptic view of their careers.

The second way is to sample their work, to discover the kind or kinds of writing they have produced. Here is where the anthology contributes to an enjoyment of reading. It conveys the flavour of an author as nothing but reading that author can. And when an author is compared to his or her fellow writers - a thing a good anthology facilitates - the reader gains several extra dimensions, not least an insight into what thoughts, what fears, what delights have occupied writers at different times. To gain such insights is to see, among other things, the relevance of past authors to the present, to the reader. Reading an anthology shows something of the vast range of our literature, its variety of form and outlook, of mood and expression, from black despair to ecstatic happiness; it is an expansive experience widening our horizons, enhancing specialised study, but also conveying its own particular pleasures, the joy of finding familiar pieces among unfamiliar, of reacting to fresh stimuli, of reaching new conclusions about authors, in short, of making literature a part of oneself.

Anthologies also playa part in the life of a literature. If we are the beneficiaries of our literary inheritance, we are also trustees for it, and the maintenance of the inheritance for future generations requires new selections of properly edited texts. The Macmillan Literary Anthologies, which have followed on from the Macmillan Histories of Literature, are designed to present these texts with the essential pertinent information. The selection made of poetry, prose and plays has been wide and inclusive, authors appear in the order of their dates of birth,

GENERAL INTRODUCTION XXI

texts - with the exception of the Middle English section - are modernised and footnotes are kept to a minimum. A broadly representative policy has been the aim of the general editors, who have maintained a similar format and proportion in each volume, though the medieval volume has required more annotation.

AN] M]A

XXll

Introduction

Many of those who knew what was happening felt the 1914-18 war to be the end of an era. News of the death toll on the Western Front caused profound dismay. Henry James feared that 'the treacherous years' had betrayed all nineteenth-century hopes of 'betterment' - a disillusionment 'too tragic for any words'. National sentiment among intelligent members of the ruling classes was altered by the carnage at the battles of Mons, the Somme and Passchendale: the soldier-poet Wilfred Owen condemned 'the old lie' that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. Fastidious readers found Rudyard Kipling's tone wrong, in the Imperialist hymn 'Recessional', when it was published in 1897; after the war it became fashionable to mock such an unquestioning patriotism, especially for those who welcomed the Russian Revolution of 1917. Poems such as Kipling's 'The Land', which celebrated a serene unchanging rural England, came to seem naIvely 'pre-war', another old lie in a country where millions lived in urban poverty. The idea spread that the Victorian age and its Edwardian aftermath had been founded on lies.

The apocalyptic mood of the war years added impetus to the effect of discoveries in science and philosophy, as they gradually filtered into the awareness of educated people. Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1901) undermined nineteenth-century common sense about the workings of the mind, and Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (1905) upset assumptions about external reality. Various schools of philosophy tended to weaken confidence in reliable knowledge. The human mind, it was argued, imposes structures which we take for reality, so that the world is man-made and might be remade. Such ideas were dizzying. The Russian and Italian Futurists called for the 'abolition' of almost everything in previous culture. Spokesmen of the Swiss Dada movement declared that we can only be sure that everything is meaningless. Just at the time when technology, by producing motor-cars and aeroplanes, showed the power of reason when applied to things, 'advanced' thought denied its value when applied to human life. The Modernist movement in the visual arts thrived in this revolutionary atmosphere. The Post-Impressionist exhibition in London in 1910 presented a demanding challenge to

INTRODUCTION XXlll

English popular taste, but Modernists knew that Cubism, then three years old, was even more radical and believed the new painting conveyed something profoundly new in twentieth-century sensibilities. Virginia Woolf announced that 'human nature changed' in 1910. She and others of the avant-garde looked to literature to catch up.

Several gifted writers thought in terms of such a challenge. D. H. Lawrence saw the war as the end of 'everything', and was full of dreams of a better world to be reborn like the phoenix. He argued for a new creed to emancipate 'the whole man - and woman - alive' from ugly industrialisation and Victorian respectability, and for fiction, free from 'the old stable ego of character', able to show the passionate, aggressive undercurrents of human nature. His finest works, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (New York, 1920), are, none the less, recognisable as novels. James Joyce's Ulysses (Paris, 1922) makes far more drastic departures from traditionally realistic story­telling. T. S. Eliot's Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1920) and The Waste Land (1922), difficult poems in which there is no evident interrelationship among the parts, looked equally revolutionary. Eliot knew Joyce's work and followed his example in drawing on the widest resources of language and varying style, from lyrical verse to scraps of public-house conversation; like Joyce, he mixed, as unpredictably as possible, fragmentary allusions to history, past literature and myth with vignettes of contemporary life, to convey a sense of deracinated and unreal modernity.

The,se writers were not only original but very good indeed. Eliot's control of rhythm and concentration of effect - in which he was aided by the American proponent of 'Imagist' terseness, Ezra Pound - are startlingly beautiful, even for readers who find modern life less hopelessly disintegrated than The Waste Land says it is. The richness and inventive energy of Joyce's prose and the fluent verve of D. H. Lawrence are compelling. It is natural for British literature to claim Eliot, who was an American citizen until 1928, the Irish Joyce, and the Anglo-Irishman W. B. Yeats, who figures with them in accounts of the Modernist movement. It is not necessary to sympathise with Yeats's eccentric mystical and political system of thought in order to admire the wide range of his mature poetry, intensely evocative in symbolist lyrics, sometimes frankly angry about old age. One of his finest short poems, 'The Second Coming' (1921), expresses the worst modern fears, as the slouching beast replaces Christ, in words which sound natural and tremendous. Another symbolist, Virginia Woolf,

XXIV INTRODUCTION

abandoned conventional story-telling and realism (which she called 'infantile') in her later novels; she wrote with delicate vivacity, in them and in essays and letters too. All these innovators in the literature of the second and third decades of the century had difficulty in establishing the validity of their work; Joyce and Lawrence were banned for indecency. They succeeded because they wrote so well.

The academic community which, since the 1920s, has become an influential arbiter of literary judgement, soon welcomed them as the principal authors of a new phase in literature. They were especially attractive because they offer such rich opportunities for rival interpretations, and for annotation: Eliot, Joyce and Yeats are more densely associative than any mainstream English writers since the seventeenth century. Newly created departments of English literature formed a canon in which Lawrence and Eliot, Joyce and Yeats are central; and 'new' critics valued ambiguity rather than clarity, symbolism rather than realism, and radical experiment rather than discreet modification of narrative and verse techniques. Major Victorians still productive after 1900 were, if possible, claimed for the 'Movement': Henry James and Joseph Conrad benefited, gaining wider attention than they had in their lifetimes. There was a tendency to dismiss from serious consideration such writers as Arnold Bennett who could not be assimilated, and to purvey the belief that superior new writing must be 'difficult'. This has been unfortunate, because much of the best modern literature cannot be judged by Modernist criteria.

English writers born between 1900 and 1914 - the first generation for whom twentieth-century conditions were normal- include Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, William Golding and Roy Fuller. Most were at school during the First World War. Growing up, they were likely to meet ideas too new to be met in the classroom. When Graham Greene, for example, ran away from his public school, his parents sent him to a Freudian psycho-analyst. When these men began writing in the later 1920s and the 1930s, Modernism was a fact of contemporary literature; their elders had been the iconoclasts. Theirs was a natural response; they admired, and wrote differently.

There were other examples of new work by older writers. Thomas Hardy had completed his career as a Victorian novelist before 1900. His honesty and pessimism sounded up-to-date to young people in the 1920s determined to be unVictorian. His elegies for his wife Emma-

INTRODUCTION xxv

of which 'The Going' is the finest - are timeless in their appeal. A. E. Housman, too, expressed private unhappiness with grandeur: 'The troubles of our proud and angry dust/ Are from eternity, and shall not fail'. W. H. Auden, who was to be the poet for most of his contemporaries, found encouragement in them to abandon the style of his early imitations of Eliot. He was able to revitalise traditional verse forms in crisp, idiomatic language, informal but authoritative. For the enigmatic, alienated voices of Eliot's Prufrock and Sweeney, he substituted the voice of a man speaking to men and women - of contemporary events (with a sympathy for Left-Wing convictions in the 1930s) and of the classic themes of lyric poetry. After 1939, when he moved to America, Auden grew in fluency and versatility, leaving a body of poems which are distinctly of our time, and good by old criteria. There have been various developments in English verse since 1945. William Empson (among older writers) and Geoffrey Hill are tough, erudite and oblique; Roy Fuller, Philip Larkin, D. J. Enright and others vaguely grouped as 'the Movement' are lucid, colloquial, and unafraid of old-fashioned disciplines.

There has been no radical, Joycean break with the past in English prose, despite the Modernist assertion that realism and story-telling were discredited. Ramshackle English society remained, after 1918, too worrying, amusing and interesting for new writers to ignore, and they portrayed it with a zestful sense of emancipation from Victorian restrictions. Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918), elegant and ironic, implied that the culture of the last century had been bogus and stuffy, verbose and vulgar. This limited view became, for a while, very influential. But eras retreat rather than end; Victorian beliefs and doubts persisted into the age of motor-cars and votes for women, and relations between modern and older values are complicated. One of the liveliest advocates of social and political change was George Bernard Shaw, whose plays urging that poverty is the only crime were founded on Fabian Society assumptions of the late nineteenth century. The idea of a complete end to old ways was alarming as well as exciting. Despite Virginia Woolf's confidence about change, human nature was much the same after 1910 and, freed from civilised restraints in Germany and Russia between the wars, returned to ancient follies and brutality. Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) imagine future Englands where scientific progress has resulted in barbarism. The satires of Evelyn Waugh imply that this has happened already.

xxvi INTRODUCTION

Another idiosyncratic novelist, Graham Greene, who made an art from the conventions of the thriller, assumes the modern world to be totally estranged from safe and solid Victorianism, but Anthony Powell's great novel in twelve volumes, A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975, discovers comedy in the interaction of surviving nineteenth-century institutions and manners with modern ways. Waugh, Greene and Powell saw late James, Conrad and Ford Madox Ford as the modern masters of artistic rendering in fiction; they can be seen as followers of James in their concern with form and their respect for the claims of a good story. Among new writers of the 1950s, the novelist Kingsley Amis and the playwright John Osborne, known then as 'angry young men', made fresh attempts to dispel anachronistic stuffiness in British life. For those who think Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, performed in London in 1955, authentically modern in its vision of a purposeless wasteland, such writers as Amis and Osborne can seem unsatisfactory. But Beckett progressed towards silence; most recent English prose literature has been talkative and interesting about what remains of our civilisation.

The most obvious strength of modern British literature is its diversity. Stubborn individuality, in authors who refuse to conform to any movement, is still characteristic. A remarkable number of them have been Christian. It was disconcerting to ideas about the Modern when T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (1943) made him one of the most distinguished of Anglican poets. Throughout the century, writers have been healthily unpredictable. Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels of dialogue will not fit into any rigid literary historical scheme, and neither will the lyrics of Dylan Thomas, the wartime oratory of Winston Churchill, the light but not lightweight verses of John Betjeman or the brilliant prose fantasies of P. G. Wodehouse. This anthology aims to illustrate the diversity rather than to impose a theory, and to entice new readers into the work of authors - H. H. Munro, Arnold Bennett, T. E. Lawrence - who are not often 'set' for study. It has tried to show too that English writing has retained the power to entertain, without which literature will never achieve anything else.

Note on Anglo-Irish writers W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett have been included in this anthology of British literature on the grounds that they were born before Irish independence. William Trevor (see p. 549) has also been considered to have a place in British as well as in Anglo-Irish literature.

Note on Annotation and Glossing

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An asterisk .. at the end of a word indicates that such words are glossed in the margin.

A dagger t at the end of a word or phrase indicates that the word or phrase is annotated, or given a longer gloss, at the foot of the page.

Note on Dates

Where dates appear at the end of extracts, that on the left denotes the date of composition, that on the right, the date of publication.