American poetry of the first half of 20th century. The specificity of Paul Laurence Dunbar poetry. Content introduction chapter I the Poets Paul Laurence Dunbar

American poetry of the first half of 20th century. The specificity of Paul Laurence Dunbar poetry.
CONTENT
Introduction ……………………………………………………………3
Chapter I The Poets Paul Laurence Dunbar………………..………..6
1.1. Life and work of Paul Laurence Dunbar……………………..…6
1.2. Career of Paul Laurence Dunbar……………………………..…10
Chapter II American poetry of the first half of 20the century……17
2.1. Poetry in the colonies……………………………………………..17
2.2. Modernism and after……………………………………………..24
Conclusion ……………………………………………………………26
Referances……..………………………………………………………28
Introduction
Although important events often reflect themselves quickly in the literature of a country, the effect of World War I on American writing was delayed. The war promptly produced some mediocre prose and poetry, but distinguished work—mainly in the form of novels—appeared only some years later. The best came from Ernest Hemingway. He had already written some very good short stories and one first-class novel, The Sun Also Rises, but he did not publish a novel fully involved with the war till 1929. It proved worth waiting for.
A Farewell to Arms, the moving story of the love affair of a wounded American lieutenant and an English nurse, is outstanding among literary works related to World War I. Hemingway had served with an ambulance group in France and then transferred to the Italian infantry, where he stayed till the close of the war. In this novel his two characters pass an idyllic Italian summer together. She becomes pregnant, and they go to Switzerland where she has her baby. But both she and the baby die, and the American is left desolate. The war plays a principal part in the book. The American has taken part in combat and in the disastrous withdrawal of the Italian army after an overwhelming defeat. Because of his aversion to the cruelties of World War I, Hemingway made a cult of the courage necessary to survive such an ordeal.
The onset of the Great Depression, on the other hand, was rapidly mirrored in American literature, especially in novels, and during the ten years after the Depression started, much writing dealt with it. One of the best of these novels was John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. But the arrival of the Depression little affected Hemingway's attitudes. During the 1930s, he continued to publish novels and short stories. They dealt with a variety of subjects but customarily revealed his high view of courage. The brave did not always survive in his fiction but they lived their lives to the fullest. It was not till the late 1930s that reference to the Depression crept into Hemingway's writing and, even then, its influence was indirect. It did not come in the form of an attack on poverty or joblessness but in a new interest in collective political action. He believed in a great alliance of liberals to fight the battles of both peace and war. When the Spanish civil war began in 1936, he traveled to Spain to report on it and write about it. When it was over, he published a notable novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is a war novel containing the message that all liberals must help one another, must act collectively, if good is to endure, but it is also a love story of great appeal.
In spite of the significance of war for him, Hemingway never projected a mindless combativeness. He knew the suffering that war could bring, a suffering invariably compounded by the tragedies it inflicted on civilian life. Nowhere does he show this better than in the short story, "In Another Country", included in this book.
William Faulkner, too, knew the dislocations as well as the injuries that war could cause. During World War I, he trained with the British Royal Air Force in Canada but the war ended before he could go overseas. Nevertheless, on returning to Mississippi, where his family had long lived, he recognized that the wounds of war were hot only physical. He felt a sense of alienation from his Southern surroundings, which he showed in a novel called Soldier's Pay, published in 1926, and in a far better one, Sartoris, published three years later. In the latter work, the hero comes back home after the war but cannot settle down. He is tied to his Mississippi town, yet he is now cut off from it. Death is the only solution for his problem. It comes when he recklessly flies an airplane of unusual design, which crashes.
Still, Faulkner himself gradually felt a closer identification with his sorroundings. He realized he was part of them, and could not escape them. So he wrote more and more about his home, creating a Mississippi community modeled on his own county. In it he put the characters he observed, using brilliant and complicated literary techniques to tell their stories. Though his characters lived in a single Southern county, he made this county represent a world. His appeal became universal, as well as particular. Faulkner wrote of conflicts: the conflict of generations, old and young; of economic classes, rich, would-be rich, and poor; of races, white and black; of men, good and bad; and of the good and evil in man himself. His philosophy was that in the long run the brotherhood of man would triumph. His books made him world-famous and won him the Nobel Prize in 1950.