Preface vii
Acknowledgements viii
Note to Teachers and Learners ix
Introduction
The Precursors
Ezra Pound
The ‘English’ Strain: The Hardy Line
The Modernists: The Fascination of a Past with ‘Unified Sensibility’
Organic Society and Organic Poetry
Thomas Stearns Eliot
William Butler Yeats
The Thirties
Poets of the Forties
The Movement Poets
The Sixties and Seventies
The Eighties
Contemporary Verse
Select Bibliography
1. Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
The Darkling Thrush
The Convergence of the Twain
The Voice
2. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)
God’s Grandeur
The Windhover
Thou art Indeed Just, Lord, if I Contend
3. William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
The Wild Swans at Coole
Easter 1916
The Second Coming
A Prayer for My Daughter
Sailing to Byzantium
The Circus Animals’ Desertion
4. Walter de la Mare (1873–1956)
The Listeners
Thomas Hardy
5. Edward Thomas (1878–1917) 60
The Owl
October
The Gypsy
6. Ezra Pound (1885–1972) 64
A Pact
In a Station of the Metro
7. David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930)
Last Lesson of the Afternoon
Snake
Bavarian Gentians
8. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Waste Land
9. Wilfred Owen (1893–1918)
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Strange Meeting
Futility
10. Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–73)
The Letter
Our Hunting Fathers
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
11. Dylan Thomas (1914–53)
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
12. Philip Larkin (1922–85)
Church Going
13. Ted Hughes (1930–98)
The Horses
14. Seamus Heaney (1939– )
Death of a Naturalist
15. Craig Raine (1944– )
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home