The modern movement

Abstract

Most of the revolutionary works of Modernism belong to the second and third decades of the century. Within twelve years of 1913 a sequence of remarkable publications had opened up paths of literary experimentation in an explosion of innovation: D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) and Women in Love (1921), James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock (1917) and The Waste Land (1922), W. B. Yeats’s The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) and Some Do Not (1924), Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr (1918) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Edward Thomas’s Collected Poems (1918) and Edith Sitwell’s Facade (1922). This innovatory output, accompanied as it was by the continuing simultaneous productivity of older writers such as Hardy, Conrad, Shaw, Bennett, and George Moore, as well as by the work of new and distinctive if less revolutionary writers such as Sassoon, Masefield, Strachey, Firbank, T. F. Powys, and Aldous Huxley, inaugurated an epoch of creativity unmatched in richness since Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Scott, and Jane Austen were at work a century earlier.