earticle

영어

Modern English Poetry mainly depicts the life of the modern society in a critical and sarcastic tone. It also emphasizes the complication of the modern life through the techniques such as irony, paradox etc. G.M. Hopkins explodes his anger over the disappearance of the landscape while T. S. Eliot tries to revolutionize the chaotic waste land with the tradition and order. Although modern poets color the modern life with darkness and dispair, they show the will to improve the waste land as well, in which modern poetry shows an aspect different from the Greek tragedy. Unlike in Post-Modern English Poetry, the concept of landscape as the shelter of human-beings still exists in Modern English Poetry . Modern English Poetry is characterized by the strong repulsion against the industrial capitalism and the bourgeois culture. Most poets in modernism have the negative aspect against the modern civilization. G. M. Hopkins can be esteemed as a pioneer of the ecologist; D.H. Lawrence’s resistance against education or modernization as well as his discovery of power of life from sex predicts today’s positive attitude toward sex. T. Hardy also his exposes negative attitude about the modern civilization by viewing it as the product of power and vanity while he insists on Nature’s persistence and modern civilization’s temporariness. Meanwhile, T. S. Eliot identifies the modern civilization with the sexual castration. W. H. Auden tries to diagnose and treat the English disease deep-rooted in the modern English society, whose cause he found in the excessive self-pity. Dylan Thomas chases the source of fear of death and sex existing in the christian society. Finally, he comes to get it over. As compared with English modernists, although American modernists, except E.E. Cummings, reveal less hatred or resistance against the modern civilization, they also share the view that the modern society has problems such as alienation, absence of God, lack of morality and commercialism. Based on these, I came to the conclusion that Modern English Poetry has, on the whole, a negative attitude toward the modern industrial civilization, while Post-Modern Poetry has somewhat of an opposite view. The fact came to light that Modern English Poetry reflected selfintrospection about the western civilization, which is thought to be one of the essences moving the western society forward. Meanwhile, Modern Korean Poetry seems to have two extreme aspects: imitation without criticism and jingoism without acceptance. From Modern English Poetry, we will have to learn such attitudes as self-criticism and selfintrospection.