British Literature: The Early Modern Era

It seems to me that the transition from the Victorian to the Modern era was essentially a change in point of view.  Whereas the Victorian point of view prevailed at least up until the last decade or so of the 1800s, now you had the prevalence of modern opinion.  This sort of A/B comparison I think is well represented in Siegfried Sassoon’s They. (Greenblatt, 1960)  In the poem’s first stanza you have the voice of the bishop, whom I take to represent the personification of the old, Victorian order.  In the second or last stanza, you have the voice of “the boys,” that is, the soldiers returned from the Great War.  Taken together, the two stanzas provide, in microcosm, the two eras, Victorian and modern, in conversation with each other.

Incidentally, They is a war poem and Sassoon is considered a war poet. (Greenblatt, 1830)  In other words, there is a substrata of modern era writers whose works was either directly or indirectly (but either way, rather heavily) by the war.  Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, May Wedderman Cannan, Robert Graves and David Jones belong to this category.

According to the lecture notes, one of the characteristics of the modern era is the tendency to see the world as neatly divided between "civilized" and "savage" peoples. (Froisy)  Sassoon’s lines in the first stanza about sending the boys out to destroy “Anti-Christ” and, in his place “breed an honourable race,” seem to reflect this line of thinking.

Soldiers of the Great War

Another essential element of modernism is the questioning of received truths of Christian tradition. (Froisy)  Christian tradition, in Sassoon’s poem, is represented by the words of the bishop in the first stanza.  But “the boys” (representing modern, i.e., “realistic” thought) contradict the words of the bishop.  While the bishop speaks in platitudes and in the abstract, the boys answer back in terms of stark reality.  Yes, the boys aren’t same, like the bishop said, but not in the same way.  This may be taken as the elevation of rationality over other sources of truth, another essential element of modernism. (Froisy)

Modernists challenged the idea that God played an active role in the world, which led them to challenge the Victorian assumption that there was meaning and purpose behind world events. (Froisy)  A hint of this is seen in the bishops weak acknowledgement, in the end, that “the ways of God are strange!” (Greenblatt, 1961)

Another Modernist tendency is that modern writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses  a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favored techniques of juxtaposition and multiple point of view challenge the reader to re-establish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms." (Froisy)  I found no correlation between this essential tenet of modernism and Sassoon’s poem, but it did suggest to me that, had the modern era’s rapid technological advances delivered computers and Microsoft to the early modernist writers, they might perhaps have produced their poems on PowerPoint, a present day example of a fragmentary form from which readers struggle to piece together a coherent meaning.

Works Cited.

Froisy, Carol.  Lecture Notes, Week 8.  Literature 211.  American Public University. 

Greenblatt, Stephen and M.H. Abrams.  Eds.   The Norton Anthology to English Literature.  8^th Ed., Vol. 2.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.