For my final project I decided to research apocalyptic themes in modern poetry and why poets use this as a trope. For the research section I talked about what I believed was used as an inspiration for this theme and found sources to back me up. After writing the research I chose four different poets and did a close read on each of them and gave a short biography of each. The four poets I chose were William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Thomas Hardy.
A lot of times when people hear the word apocalypse they think of the end of the world, but the idea of this could also be about the received vision. For example, William Carlos Williams’s poem, “Spring and All.” I wrote that this poem has an apocalyptic view because he is talking about the dead weeds and trees but later in the poem he talks about how spring is emerging and the land will wake up. It reminded me of the circle of life which I think he used as a metaphor of the poem because he talks about creation after he describes the societal destruction.
Another factor of inspiration on the apocalypse theme is, what I believe, religion. The apocalyptic writing is all over the religious scriptures from the Bible. It is in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament about the impending apocalypse or also Noah’s Arc from Genesis. William Butler Yeats wrote profoundly of religion. The Second Coming by Yeats’s was written just a year after the first world war and this was about the second war coming. But it was also about the second coming of Christ.
Yeats’s begins the poem with a feeling of loss of control. Since this was written just a year after the war ended, he uses this poem to express the feelings of the aftermath. Everything was just a disaster. Even though the war was over, technically, no one really won. Because there was a lost of so many innocent women, children, men, and soldiers. The first lines indicate everything spinning out of control. The falcon representing man and the falconer representing God is symbolizing a man turning away from God and of the chaos that was there at the end of the war.
For T.S. Eliot I chose to talk about The Wasteland. The Waste Land is understood to be a metaphor of cultural pessimism and sterility. It depicts a culture that is dying and longs for vitality or rebirth. The subject of this poem is the decline of western culture and the beauty that this culture once possessed.
Lastly, I wrote about Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush. Dr. Andrzej Diniejko says Hardy’s life can be divided into three phases. The first phase (1840-1870) embraces childhood, adolescence, apprenticeship, first marriage, early poems and his first unpublished novel. The second phase (1871-1897) is marked by intensive writing, which resulted in the publication of 14 novels and a number of short stories. In the third phase (1898-1928), the period of the writer’s rising fame, he abandoned writing novels and returned to poetry. The Darkling Thrush has the theme of renewal, life in darkness, and finding optimism when things are going wrong. He eludes that the world is a living creature. It is slowly being killed by the darkening days and encroaching frost. The clouds above him are the canopy adorning a crypt, while the wind sings a funeral dirge in the world’s honor.