The Pressures of History on Poetic Forms Anonymous College

The idea that poetic forms are sensitive to and affected by the pressures of history is undisputed; yet whether a poet embraces this or challenges it varies. The adoption of a specific form inevitably implies historical concern. This is evident the 18th century lament Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Thomas Gray employs a traditional stanzaic elegiac form, creating a poem rooted in the past. The modernist masterpiece The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot is similarly sensitive to mythology and the poetic genre, yet the fragmentation of these in form presents a poem that addresses the existential crises of the modernist period. Although these crises are also indirectly by W.B. Yeats in his pastoral poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree, the poet rejects the context of Victorian poetic form through creating a unique Irish lyricism that paves the way for his own poetic landscape that is not bound by time or the confines of the modern metropolis. This suggests that poetic forms are often affected by, but not always accommodating of the pressures of history.

The elegiac form, rooted in the exploration of grief and loss, is employed by Thomas Gray in Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard to show how human mortality is a...