Drummer Hodge : the poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902)
- Authors: Van Wyk Smith, Malvern
- Date: 1976
- Subjects: War poetry -- History and criticism South African War, 1899-1902 -- Literature and the war South African War, 1899-1902 -- Art and the war
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2252 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1003919
- Description: From Preface: This is not a history of the Boer War; nor is it an exclusively literary study of the poetry of that war. If the work that follows has to be defined generically at all, it may be called an exercise in cultural history. It attempts to assess the impact of a particular war on the literary culture, especially the poetry, of both the participants and the observers, whether in South Africa, in Britain and the rest of the English-speaking world, or in Europe. An assumption made throughout this study is that war poetry is not only verse written by men who are or have been under fire. Just as 'War poetry is not to be confused with political, polemical, or patriotic verse, although it can contain elements of all of these, so it is also the work of observers at home as much as that of soldiers at the front. It follows that I have not allowed myself the academic luxury of selecting, on the basis of literary merit only, a handful of outstanding war poems for rigorous analysis and discussion. "Doggerel can express the heart" wrote one of these late-Victorian soldierly versifiers, and I have roamed widely in the attempt to assemble the material which, I believe, records the full range of the impact that the Boer War made not only on Briton and Boer, but on the worId at large. A major thesis of this study is that the Boer War marked the clear emergence of the kind of war poetry which we have come to associate almost exclusively with the First World War. Poems in the style and spirit of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" were written in profusion, but the work which serves as this study's masthead, Hardy's "Drummer Hodge," clearly has --like many of its contemporaries-- more in common with Owen's verse than with Tennyson's. The reasons for the appearance of such poetry are discussed in Chapter 1; the rest of the book provides the evidence of it.
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- Date Issued: 1976
The voice of protest in English poetry : with special reference to poets of the first three decades of the twentieth century
- Authors: Verschoor, Edith N E
- Date: 1973
- Subjects: Protest poetry, English -- History and criticism , English poetry -- History and criticism , English poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2277 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007270
- Description: Poetry, like every other form of art, reflects the values of the artist himself as well as the values of the age in which he lives. "I would say that the poet may write about anything provided that the thing matters to him to start with, for then it will bring with it into the poem the intellectual or moral significance which it has for him in life". (Louis MacNeice). This thesis sets out to uncover some of the things which, in the long pageant of English poetry, have "mattered" to poets to such an extent that they have felt compelled to voice their protest against any violation of such things perceived by them in life around them. The basic study has been a search for the different kinds of values and codes of conduct, in social, political and moral spheres, which have been unacceptable to some of the major poets in English, and to examine particularly the manner and the tone of voice in which each one has expressed his disapproval. "Poetry was the mental rattle that awakened the attention of intellect in the infancy of civil society." (T.L.Peacock). English poets who have protested against whatever they regarded as worthy of protest have continued up to the maturity of civil society to be rattles (some soft and mellow, others loud and harsh), to awaken both the intellect and the conscience of their readers.
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- Date Issued: 1973
The dramatic theory of William Hazlitt : "Imagination in criticism"
- Authors: De Villiers, André
- Date: 1964
- Subjects: Hazlitt, William, 1778-1830 , Drama -- History and criticism -- 19th century , English drama -- History and criticism -- 19th century
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2320 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1013383
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- Date Issued: 1964