Theme: British literature of the xxth century

As a conclusion for this chapter it can be said that during the XX century great number of writers have done too many thing to develop English literature. With the publication of The Waste Land, modernist poetry appeared to have made a breakthrough into wider critical discourse and a broader readership. However, the economic collapse of the late 1920s and early 1930s had a serious negative impact on the new writing. For American writers, living in Europe became more difficult as their incomes lost a great deal of their relative value. While Gertrude Stein, Barney and Joyce remained in the French city, much of the scene they had presided over scattered. Pound was in Italy, Eliot in London, H.D. moved between that city and Switzerland, and many movement were now living in the States. The economic depression, combined with the impact of the Spanish Civil War, also saw the emergence, in the Britain of the of a more overtly political poetry, as represented by such writers as W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender. Although nominally admirers of Eliot, these poets tended towards a poetry of radical content but formal conservativeness


CONCLUSION
During that time he produced several volumes of poetry, of which The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems, according to some critics, was his best. In his lyrics he drew on the techniques of European poetry, as well as on his own native creativity, and acquired a mastery of rhyme and rhythm. The ideas he expressed were generally simple ones and his technique displayed them to advantage. He expressed them musically and powerfully, with the result that more people read him than any other American poet. Though his life was scarred by the tragic death of both his first and his second wife, his poetry struck a manly, affirmative note.
Most of what are considered the masterpieces of American writing in the 20th century were written in Europe, or out of a writer’s experience as an expatriate. What the lost Generation of Gertrude Stein (herself an expatriate) had lost, to a degree true only of Henry James in an earlier time, was its sense of being a part of American society. Sinolair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, e.e. Cumming, William Carlos Williams, and Scott Fitzgerald-like Eliot and Pound all spent long periods of their lives in Europe. Since none of the best writers was closer to combat than a training camp or the ambulance corps [16,155].
It was not the war itself, but long exposure to European culture, which intensified the old current of criticism of American life. Of the writers we are considering as typical of the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, only Steinbeck and Mencken did not share this experience of expatriation, a fact Mecken even felt obliged to defend.