Modernism

What was “Modernism” in English british literature?

1) It’s a complex concept, an “umbrella” term/ “omnibus term”= it coveres a
variety of phenomena, it describes a number of trends in the arts and
literature of the first half of the 20th century, but it also includes some
manifestations at the end of the 19th century.
It’s associated with experimentalism and the avanguarde. The starting point of
modernism, from 19th century onwards, it’s the rejection of the artistic and
literary conventions of the Victorian era and the Edwardian period (= the first
couple of decades of the 20th 1900/1910s).
At the very base of “Modernism” there is the idea of “modernity”,
“modern” What was modern in this period? Let’s see some pages taken
from a book by a scottish writer, Edwin Muir, entitled “We moderns, enigmas
and guesses” first published in 1918, end of 1WW. In Section 93 of “We
modern”, Edwin Muir confronts the questions about what means being
modern, and he says that in the present there’s a wrong way of thinking about
modernity= there are moderns now in 1918 who aren’t proper moderns, but
“conventional moderns”, that is to say they live “unthinkinglly” the present,
they belong to the present, they live in it, but uncritically, they aren’t slaves of
the past, but they are slaves of the present, they live in the moment, but they
haven’t got critical attitude about the present, no proper perspectives.
Another way of being a “modern” in the true sense according to him, it’s to be
a “fore runner”, it’s not to be enslaved by the present, imprisoned in the
present, but it means to be in the present with a “eye to the future”, with a
view to anticipating the future (=“fore runner”= to run before, to be projected
towards the future).
In the present there is an “age of preparation”, the test of real modernity is to
be in the present but being prepared for the future, to be real moderns means
to believe there are still potentialities in men, to believe that future
developments for the arts and literature that were not exhausted by victorian
era are still possible, to have faith that the elevation of men is possible, that
the time is ready to prepare for it.
There is something paradoxical in these words= being modern means to be in
the present but also being beyond it at the same time, (if you are just in the
present you are a slave) being ready for something that is always about to
come, constantly changing, tending to new artistic possibilities. This concept
helps us explain the incredible proliferation of movements, manifestos, artistic
tendencies at the beginning of the 20th century because artists and writers
 were constantly experimenting, projecting themselves beyond their current
moment.

Modernism corresponds to the atomisazion/multiplication/ proliferation of

projects, groups, movements, manifestos and statements about art. Rapid
dissemination of ideas and theories across “national borders” coming from
France, Italy, Russia, Germany, constant phenomenon of “cross-pollination”
across national borders.
Modernism can be divided into various phases:
- “Early modernism” (1890s-1910s): the major figure of this phase is Joseph
Conrad, but there are also early features of modernism in Thomas Hardy,
they were both novelists at the beginning of the 20th century. There is a
reaction against Victorian literary and artistic conventions, which little by
little begin to laid a fundation of a new way of doing literature. A
fundamental figure is Ezra Pound, an American poet who moved to Europe
in the early 20th century, he introduced many of the revolutioanry ideas of
modernism. He lived in London between 1908-1910, a great promoter of
avanguarde experimentalism in poetry, influenced by french simbolism.
1914-1915 he created a movement called “imagism” which developed a
type of poetry made of pure images. In 1913 he published a two-line poem
entitled “In a station- in the metro”, inspired by Paris. Two-line
composition
- 1st line: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd”
- 2nd line: “Petals on a wet, black, bough( the branch of a tree)”

It’s an example of an imagist poem, the title itself is a image, then 1st line is an
image and the 2nd line another one (so it’s composed of 3 images). Imagism was a
short lived poetic movement which revolved around the idea that the poetic image
is the essential vector of aestethic communication. After experimenting imagism,
Pound promoted another movement called “vorticism”= basic idea= poetic
inspiration and creation was part of a vortex of words, images, ideas, sensations,
therefore poetry was not linked with anything rational,logical, it came out of this
subconscious vortex. 1914-1918 were years of extreme experimentation, young
authors and artists tried to find new ways of doing art and literature. In 1914
another american poet arrived in London, Thomas Sterns Eliot met Pound and
english authors and began to experiment with new ways of doing poetry. He became
one of the protagonists of the “High modernism” phase 1920s-1930s = period of
greatest developments of literary experimentalism. 1922= “key year” Eliot
published his poem “the Waste land”, Joyce’s masterpiece “Uysses” was published
entirely and Virginia Woolf published her fully experimental novel, “Jacob’s Room”
3 key works of experimental avanguard of british literature of the early 20th century
appeared.

The type of poetry Eliot inaugurated in “The Waste land”= characterized by

fragmentation and yuxtaposition of images, no respect for traditional syntax, filled
with quotations, intertextual references, a kind of polyglot poetry with words or
sentences in many different language, humor and black humor, many speakers and
not just one poetic eye, many different voices. This poem describes a sense of
isolation, desolation and crisis, fragmentation and atomization of the sense of “self”
but also the idea of society. 1930s the “Auden group” emerged a new generation
of poets, made up of W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis... They knew
each other and they continued the kind of experimentalism inaugurated by Eliot and
Pound and many others in the 1920s, but the 1930s poetry much more “politicized”
than their predecessors. 1930s deeply marked by the rise of Fascism and Nazism in
Italy, Germany but with an influence in british politics as well, a period of economic
crisis after the wall street crush of 1929, unemployment, poverty, rise in the
diffusion of comunism which clush against fascism. Social unrest into the difficult
economic situation, there were many wars and conflicts in Europe, the Spanish Civil
War between 1936-39, which acted as a general reharsal for the 2nd World War
which broke out in 1939.

- 3r phase of Modernism= “Late Modernism”, it followed the 2WW, 1940s-

1950s-1960s...etc with such figures as the novelist Malcolm Lowry
“Under the Vulcano”, Samuel Beckett’s novels (1930s) and drama (1950s),
Flann O’Brien (in Ireland) who continued Joyce’s experiments. Anti-
victorianism, anti-romanticism, reaction against the excessive
sentimentalism in literature, promoted by poet and critic T.E. Hulme,who
died in action during the 2WW in 1917, he published an essay against the
excessive sentimentalism or “mawkishness” of post romantic tradition. On
the contrary he was a promoter of the “cheerful dry sophisticated poetry”,
he paved the way for imaginism. Another feature of modernism is the
rediscover of mithology, not only classical one, but also the mythology of
all other cultures around the world, thanks to the anthropologist Sir James
Frazer “The golden bough”, published in several volumes between 1819-
1915, a book of comparative religious traditions, compared all the myths of
the world he studied, introducing the “cultural relativism” European
traditions were just traditions among others, there weren’t central
anymore, they were all prestigious and interesting. So this book relatives
 the sense of superiority of European civilization, it helped demolishing
cultural Euro-centrism, which then filtered into modernism. Think about
the importance of African sculture in Cubism and Picasso’s art, the
importance of Japanese poetry, the tradition of the “Haiku” on Ezra Pound,
the influence of japanese Nou-theatre on the experimental dramas of the
modernists, the importance of mythology on many modernist authors
(Eliot) and in “waste land”, not just biblical tradition but also references to
buddism, hinduism. It was Eliot who invented the definition of “Mythical
method” to explain Joyce’s writing programm in Ulysses, were the life of
his dublin characters (Leopold Bloom, stephen and Molly Bloom) is based
on the myth of the Odyssee (the 3 characters correspond to Ulysses,
Penelope and Telemachus).
Another final General feature of modernism influence of Freudian
Theory of the Unconscious and the importance of irrationality.

The author, T.S ELLIOT

Poet’s life
He was born in St.Louis, Missouri, in 1888, his earliest writings appeared in the
magazine of the Smith academy “St Louis” in 1905, in the following year he entered
Harvard, (where he edited an contributed poems to the advocate ?). While still in
college he wrote several of his poems. “Cufra and other observations” written in
1910-11, influenced by antiromanticism. His main academic interest was philosophy
and in 1910 he went to Paris to study Bergson’s philosophy, whose theory of time
and intuition was really important to and left its traces on his poetry.
In 1914 went to Germany with the intention of studying philosophy at Marble, but in
September 1914 ,because of the outbreak of World War One, he went to Oxford
where he worked on his thesis which was a study of the philosopher F.H (Broadly?).
He then married an English writer Vivienne (…?),but the marriage was not a success.
His wife was highly neurotic and in increasingly bad health. During that period he
worked in a bank and he was the editor of “The egoist” a London literary magazine,
he also reviewed for several journals. In 1921 while he was working in a bank
distress brought him to nervous breakdown, he went to recuperate in a Swiss
sanatorium, on his way back home he stopped in Paris to give Pound the manuscript
of the waste land and he founded Criteriun ?an inlfuencial write to a literary journal
which he continued until 1939, the waste land appeared in the criteriun. His wife
died in a mental home in 1947. In 1948 he was awarded with the nobel price for
literature, then he married again and for 8 years at last he knew a sort of happiness,
until he died in London in 1965. He was naturalized as British subject when he was
49 yo, he felt himself as English, even if he was born in the States.
The Genesis of “the waste land”
The waste land is the central English poem of the 20th century, published in 1922, it’s
a timely poem: even if it deals with the post war Europe it takes on a new
significance in Brexit times. It was originally a longer sequence composed for the
most part in 1921 when Eliot had nervous breakdown. He was in continuous
correspondence with Pound, who made some changes to the manuscript of the
poem. From the poem we learn more about the personal crisis that Eliot underwent,
indeed exhausted by eccessive work and his marriage with his unstable wife. Pound
had a huge impact on the poem itself, Eliot express his gratitude to him in the
dedication of the poem “For Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro”, a quote from Dante’s
Purgatorio.
The challenge that waste land issued to readers is “density” and discontinuity,
fragmentation, a kind of poetry very difficutlt, despite commentators it will remain
an obscure poem. Allussivness and non discursive yuxtaposition of images
distinguish the poem as modernist. There is a dense network of historical,cultural,
literary and mythical in an attempt to depict modern European society and
consciousness in the fullness and complexity of its cultural tradition. The allusive
method demand readers decodification, the reader has to be active. The
discontinuity of the poem related to its organization, non discursivness opposed to
the linearity of narrative poems. The bruise created as a result of the 1 st world war
across Europe and the world of the waste land indirectly, reference to the war. The
waste land isn’t explicitly a land waste by war, instead our poem depicts a cultural
and spiritual waste land, a land populated by people who are living a kind of physical
and emotional death in the middle of their everyday life (end of first section, the
burial of the dead). The people move across a desolate landscape, of
fragmented/chaotic images not related one to another, many voices speaking not to
each other but passed each other, no uniting belief in one transcendent god, Eliot
echoes the post Darwinian concerns of an unstable world (ideas linked to Fraser’s
the golden bough). To many of his contemporaries this poem was written in the
accent of its time, it was an unmistakably 20th century poem. The main examples of
this collapse are love and sexual relationships, quite important, cultural confusion
and spiritual desolation. For Eliot people are unable to bring together the different
areas of their experience to make a complete hole. Eliot’s poetry breaks with much
of the poetry written in this period, indeed he realized that the poetic idiom
available to him was drained, exhausted and had to be changed. For Eliot and many
modernists, different experiences needed different uses of language. His poetry was
formally more experimental and innovative, intellectually complex and
pshylosophical (due to his interest in philosophy) Eliot made use of free verse,
prominent in Europe and American at the end of the 19th century. La Fork, a French
poet influenced him, as well as the American Walt Witman and Mallarme. New
forms of poetry to express the uncertainty of his times. The poem mixes very
different influences and languages, sort of monumental intertext ( hyper text with
many hypotexts) The hypotext= source text, the hyper text= the rewrite which
derives from it. The same happened in Ulysses, Eliot was fascinated by Joyce’s
mythical method.
Structure: 5 sections the burial of the dead, a game of chess, the fire sermon,
death by water and ?. In linguistic terms the text plays on the proximate and non
proximate, use of the present participle with its alternative verbal and adjectival
connotations, enables this manipulation of the time span, sort of continuous
ongoing present .

1st section
The waste land declares the centrality of present participle in the open lines. The
lyrics shape so the wasteland the glass the centrality of its present participle's in the
opening lines the lyrics shape of this opening is sharply edged by the strategies of
intense normalisation of ending each line with a present participle and the cesura
after the penultimate word emphasises the participle and urges the eyes of the
reader on the first item. So our attention is on the “lilacs” the word of the next line,
the verse sets up a tension between the old year and new, completes and ongoing
actions. In the very first lines words formed 2 clusters contained by the axes of
winter/spring, dead land/little life. The notable lexical items are the participles, is all
fell into 2 groups, one concerned with spring and the other with winter, those of the
winter cluster are surprisingly cary, concerned with shelter and nourishment. While
those associated with spring suggest both generation and disruption (mixing,
stirring). We have the dedication for pound but also important epigraph, written in
latin and Greek, which comes from a satirical by Petronius. The title of the first (the
burial of the dead) section is a reference to the Anglican prayer book. April is the
coolest month, a very famous opening because flowers and plants grow as they are
expected in spring time but they grow out of the dead land  something
surprisingly because people usually identify April as the coolest month so the waste
land surprises us. “April is the coolest month” recalls the opening of Chaucer’s
Canterbury tales intertextuality of the poem.
Hofgarden: one of the many german references, a garden in the centre of munich.
Then a line in german “No I’m not Russian, I’m lituanian,a proper german”.
We met cousin Marie, they went sleding, the winter mentioned once again. Next
follows a section that brings us back to the waste land of the title. Opening line that
begin to make more sense, ìwe can perceive,Fear and uncertainty about the future,
about what is going to grow out of this dead and blusted ( metaphor reference to
the devastation caused by the war, many millions of people died also because of the
Spanish flue, pandemic).
“A heap of broken images” (the waste land itself)
Many religious references to holy text the bible, (Norton anthology explores those
intertextual references)
Some lines in german again (lines 31-34)  “Fresh the wind blows towards home,
my irish child where are you now?” from Wagner’s opera “Tristan und his hunde”
Then there is a woman speaking to us, addressing her lover recalling how he gave
her flowers, line 42 again foreign language. When they returned from the garden he
experienced a sense of emptiness which could either be interpreted as exthetic
euphoria or deadened numbness, this strange feeling lays between euphoria and
numbness, the theme of life in death is something recurring.
Then change of setting: we found ourself in the company of Madame Sosostris
famous clairvoyante, who uses cards to predict the future that connects her to the
sibill in the epigraph, classical female figure. Link between these two women.
Line 49: Italian term, “ Belladonna”
Line 55: “fear death by water” reference to Shakespeare’s Tempest, where we can
see this link to the character of Ferdinand’ father
Death by the water is also the title of another section
Line 58: the horoscope is mentioned, so astrology eterogeneous background
Last section of the burial of the dead:
-Winter is present again
- line 76: French language
This “unreal city” is London and Eliot’s London depicts modern society as the urban
waste land of Europe in the after math of WW1. Literary and historical allusions,
both direct and implied. “Unreal city” in Baudelarie and Dante’s Inferno, but here
refers to everyday life, south London suburbs at the appointed hour, at nine, line 68
“the final stroke of nine”, a reference to religion ( see footnote in the anthology)
Eliot experience working in a bank inspired him to write this final lines, the crowd is
the new serving class, people oppressed by alienation, anonymity and routine
alienation something totally timely, also nowadays. The fact the author himself
worked for the loy? bank was one of the causes of his mental breakdown, the
account of the unreal city which flows in the first lines represents the life of the
workers “the walking dead of London bridge” many layered references:
- Allusion to Dante’s deads in the inferno
- Allusion to the dead in the national battle of Mylae?
- The deads of the first world war
Stetson (line represents 69): represents the average business man, he shouts
out to the speaker and claims the boat fought the Mylae, a battle which took
place in 2060bc during the first punic war between Romans so mix between
modern (Stetson and the first world war) and ancient (First punic war of
empires) nothing much changes, war continues being part of life. The
speaker asks him if the corpse he planted the previous year began to sprout
it recalls the initial image of life in death, of new birth in the waste land where
the living and dead are paradoxically united. Allusion to English literature to a
jacobian playwriter who wrote the tragedy “The white devil” in 1612 (lines 74-
5). As many other allusions there are some changes, the wolf present in the
original tragedy is here domesticated and transformed into a dog. It refers to a
man who refused a proper burial in the churchyard, so it refers to an unusual
kind of burial with the dead disturbed by the wolf. Eliot concludes the first
section by quoting “Le flore du mal” (I Fiori del male) by Baudelaire.

Post colonial literature and black British literature

The post-colonial literature is very complex to define: it can refer to literature after
the end of colonialism, the end of the colonial British empire. A literature which is
about the experience of colonialism.
It can also refer to literature which go beyond the colonial experience in order to
delineate a new cultural identity unrelated to the impositions of the colonial empire.
-Question of language  literary texts are not necessarily written in English: In some
countries, that were former colonies of the British empire, nowadays we have works
written not only in English, but also in local languages.
-Question of literary and cultural traditions  postcolonial literature develops under
the strong influence of English culture, English literature. The forms and the genres
of this literature are under the influence of the English language and the British
model.
So, there’s a huge conflict between these literatures that want to develop
themselves away from the colonial background and the British power.
In this new type of literature, some forms (novel) and the language is maintained,
but at the same time reinvented and transformed. English is kept, but at the same
time the standard version of English is mixed and transformed by local forms of
English: Caribbean English, Indian English…
So, the influence of the British culture is strong but always contested.
There’s a constant search of defining itself in relation to and also detaching itself
from English culture  post-colonial literature wants to find its own voice, history
and identity.
Is it ever possible to succeed in separating the post-colonial from the colonial? Is it
possible to go after the colonial completely and its heritage to establish a new
cultural reality?
Post colonial literature  1947: this date marks the beginning of process of
decolonization after the second war world. So, the British India obtained
independence and the territory was divided into two countries: Pakistan and India.
After the political partition, the exodus began: Indus and Muslim began to relocate
to their main areas, Indus going out of Pakistan and going to India. Muslims going
out of India going to Pakistan: tragic event in which there were violence and
persecutions.
1948: arrival of the first ship carrying illegal immigrates from Caribbean to Great
Britain. The ship was called ‘Empire Windrush’ and it carried 500 people invited to
Britain in order to rebuild the country after the destruction of the war. Then further
ships arrived all over the 1950s.  today we call them ‘’the Windrush generation’’,
referring to those who arrived in Britain around 1948/49 and became British citizens.
  Very little control: this little-by-little accumulated tensions in society. The
arrival of these immigrants caused episodes of intolerance, racism. (1958 in
Notting hill).
Parliament tried to resolve this situation with a law which regulated immigrations
but the problem persisted.  so, there’s a growing sense of intolerance towards the
increasing number of people from the various colonies.
M.P. Enoch Powell  in 1968, he gave a famous speech that was openly anti-
immigration, known as the ‘’river of blood speech’’, because he presented a very
gloomy vision of the future Britain in which if immigration remains uncontrolled,
there will be fights between black and white people in the streets and rivers of blood
in the cities.
Politics reacted and gradually regulated immigration: in the meantime, Britain
became a multicultural society. The first generation of immigrants and the other
ones were then followed by other generations born in Britain, of immigrant parents
or mixed parents.
Three writers:
Salmon Rushdie: Anglo-Indian novelist, born in Mumbai, in 1947 and he became
famous with a novel intitled ‘’midnight children’’, a novel that put the postcolonial
literature on the global map. It is a story about the independent India.
Hanif Qureshi: he was born in south London, in 1954 with mixed parentage. He
became famous with the novel ‘’The buddha of suburbia’’. A novel about a mixed
background young man who tried to find his identity in London.
Zadie Smith: born in Northwest London in 1975. She became the author of the first
bestseller of the new millennium: ‘’white teethes’’ It is about multiculturalism.
 All their works are about encounters, clash of different cultures and
multicultural situations. They examine the impossibility of having a pure
unmixed identity. So they explore the phenomenon of hybridization. They also
examine the dangerous attractions of integralism and essentialism. They tent
to narrate tales of origins, they explore stories of mixed genesis and
development. So the mixing of generations.
What we call back British literature, is the literature of the ‘’in-between’’ 
literature of forms of transitions. Sometimes it is also called ‘’Black and Asian British
literature’’. The identity of these authors is mixed, because they have an immigrant
background but they are born in Britain. So their identities are both British and
related to their country of origin. Black British literature is a product of those waves
of immigration  it is also associated with the richness of the British multicultural
society and also its tensions.
it is a literature which focuses on situations of mixture, transitions, transformation.
There are stories set between different times and dimensions (ethnical, the white
and non-white). These authors are between different countries (the homeland and
the place where they moved). In their novels, they imagine in-between situations. So
a third space of intercultural and intermixture.
This type of literature imagines multiple identities and not just single: the same
individual has an identity which not univocal, but it is made up of mixtures of
identities.  Edouard Glissant: in his word ‘’introduction to a poetic of diversity’’,
1996, he makes a distinction between the identity considered as a root and a
rhizome. The root is a unique structure, it goes deep into the ground. It tends to be
unique, isolated, endangered. The root of a tree gives life to a single plant.
The rhizome instead is multiple, tentacular. It gives life to multiple plants. It spreads,
it mixes with other rhizomes.
 Positive idea of rhizomatic identity: identity that isn’t pure, unique, that
doesn’t mixed.
The second is the modal that these authors adopt and work: they imagine
identity as a multiplicity.

Claude McKay, ‘’Old England’’

Between the very beginning of the 20th century and the 30s, Anglo-Caribbean
authors establish national literature as a part of the development of cultural and
political nationalism in the area.
This work demonstrates that during the same period, Caribbean writers made
significant contributions to European modernism and to the Harlem renaissance, an
intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion,
literature, theatre, politics.
Most writers had experiences abroad and engaged with European and American
culture in the world, the Caribbean literature of this period was cosmopolitan and
international. However little writers were equally nationalist, so the Jamaican poet
and playwright Una Marson tried to establish national literatures in the Caribbean
contributing to the emerging political nationalism in the region.
In contrast, McKay took a critical stance towards European, African and American
nationalism.
The author
He was born in 1889 in Sunnyvale (Jamaica) and he died in 1948 in Chicago. When
he was 17, he departed from his small village to be a constable, a police officer in the
Jamaican capital, Kingston, where he experienced racism. His native village,
Sunnyvale, was predominantly black, but here black people were considered as
inferior. He grew disgusted with Kingston’s bigotry and within one year he went back
home.
During this brief stay, he started being interested in poetry. Once back in Sunnyvale,
with the support of a neighbor, a linguists Englishman, he published ‘’the Jamaican
dialect verse collections’’, with songs of Jamaica, ballads in 1911-1912. Here, in these
two volumes, he examines opposing aspects of black life in Jamaica.
The poems are written in dialect and deal with lower class people.
-The poems in …ballads are much longer than those in ‘’song of Jamaica’’. Here a
rural boy that has come to the city as a constable as the author, frequently appears
in the ballads.
Sounds of Jamaica (1912) presents a celebratory portrait of peasant life, indeed
McKay was the son of peasant farmers and he includes also poems addressing
subjects such as the peaceful death of his mother and the black people’s Jamaican
roots. For this work, he obtained an award and a stipend from the Jamaican institute
of art and sciences. He uses that money to finance trip to the States in 1912.  he
arrived in South Carolina, then to Alabama and Kansas. In 1914 he goes to NYC and
there he worked various boring and tiring jobs.
As in Kingston, in NYC he met racism as well. This pushes him to keep writing poetry.
He involved himself in various social causes: thanks to the publication of two
volumes of poetry entitled ‘’spring in New Hampshire’’ and ‘’Harlem Shadows’’
between 1920 and 1922, he emerged as the most militant voice of the Harlem
renaissance  he firmly believed that black Americans should unite in the struggle
against colonialism and oppression.
Constab Ballads (1912) offers a sort of perspective on the conditions of black
Jamaicans and includes several poems which openly criticize things in life.
He was a cosmopolitan intellectual. After 1922 he lived in the Soviet Union, France,
Spain, Morocco.
He also wrote two novels: ‘’Home to Harlem’’, the most popular one written by an
American black, and ‘Banjo’ , where he portrayed the lightness of black migrants
from urban American Europe.
Then he published a collection of short stories entitled ‘’Gingertown’’ (1932) and
‘’Banana Bottom’’ (1933).
In all these works, he explore blackness and the black identity.

After returning to America in 1934, he was attacked by the communists for

repudiating their darkness.
In 1940 he became an American citizen and in 1942 he was converted to Roman
Catholicism and he worked with a catholic organization until his death in 1948.
He also wrote for newspapers, magazines and published an autobiography entitled
‘’A long way from home’’ (another post-colonial theme, idea of home, belonging)
and a study ‘’Harlem, negro-metropolis’’ in 1948.
His collection of poems was published posthumously in 1953.
He was proud of his African heritage. However his early literary interests were in
English poetry and he studied the British masters including John Milton, Pope and
other romantics under the tutelage of his brother (a school teacher) and Walter
Jackal, who also encourages him to write in Jamaican dialect.
So, Mickey’s interests of the English canon is very much there in ‘’Old England’’.
He also studied European philosophers such as Schopenhauer (he translates him
from German into English).
OLD ENGLAND
The title  seemingly reverent imaginative journey. Quite ironic
It was published in the first collection in ‘’sons of Jamaica’’, so in this play we find
Jamaican English.
1. Stanza: the ship is a very important element in post-colonial writing
 2. Here we have a reference to a short story entitled ‘’the little match seller’’ and
the little poem ‘’the little match girl’’. Both of them are about a pool match
who freezer to death on your years Eve.
 We have two shores, England shore and Jamaican shore
There is an initial admiration of England and this is something that many of post-
colonial subjects share -> at first they imagine the imperial Santa as a fascinating
place, but then things change.
McKay in an essay wrote, near the end of his life, and he retraces essential beliefs in
the various benefits into Jamaican people of having been educated after the English
manner. He was really happy about being educated that way and he was interested
in the English canon and some of his poems such as ‘’Old England’’ convey McKay’s
youthful responses to England.
At the same time he has a kind of controversial and strange relationship to England
In his autobiography, he says that his feeling and idea towards England change him
after he had lived there for a while. When he experienced England and London, he
realizes that England was not what he imagined when he lived in Jamaica. He came
to believe that racism was rooted in the English society and he was really depressed
discussing industrialization inflicted on the landscape, in fact, in ‘’Old England,’’ he
mentions the factory chimneys and the pouring smokes up to the sky.  A VERY
DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENT FROM THE BEAUTIFUL EXOTIC ENVIRONMENT HE WAS
USED TO.
He explains that his deep admiration for England ended at least partially because of
what he saw there on his first visit. In London he felt ‘’out of sympathy with the
environment and with these ‘’chimney factories pouring smoke’’.
Before travelling to England, the younger McKay praise ‘’Old England’’ without
qualification, so in this poem he praises familiar tourist landmarks such as Saint
Paul’s cathedral, Westminster hobby, Queen Victoria’s stone, Milton, Shakespeare,
Wordsworth. So he would like to visit those places.
There’s also an illusion to the ancient chair of England: the England’s kings. The
absolute monarchy is described as a vanity. All England had a sort of preference for
the constitutional monarchy represented by Queen Victoria who was admired in the
colonies.
This poem seems to be too impressionistic to reveal more than a vague sympathy.
In the poem another important notion is that of science  he has rationalistic
tendencies and optimism about science.
Most folks now reject traditional religion: the idea of the ‘’old’’ is recurrent
throughout the poem refers to the old fate, the old traditional religion.
This poem explores this ambiguous relationship between the post-colonial poet who
comes from the periphery of the empire and the center of the empire, London.