Notes based on the loveliest of books, Norton Brit Lit II 5th Edition, 1727-37.

     Now then.
     Though of course in a sense the twentieth century began in a single instant, the cultural climate that was prevalent at the beginning of the century was being gradually prepared ahead of time.  Less pressure that way.  The Jubilee (1887) and the Diamond Jubilee (1897) became increasingly insistent:  time to start a new age, honey!  ". . .there were many manifestations of a weakening of traditional stabilities.  The aesthetic movement, with its insistence on "art for art's sake," assaulted the assumptions about the nature and function of art held by ordinary middle-class readers, deliberately, provocatively."  (1727)  The same trendencies (cool word!) (I just made it up deliberately, provocatively) were in progress in France and Portland, Oregon.  Matt Arnold helped this along with his war with the "Philistines" (not from PA) versus cultured artist types in Culture and Anarchy.  
     An important culture stimulus was the Education Act of 1870, which happened in 1870.  Elementary education became legally compulsory and universal in England.  However, many of these newly-educated readers were still not very proficient.  This led to a new kind of journalism directed at unsophisticated readers--essentially, popular literature for the semiliterate, and especially the "yellow press."  Of course this went hand in hand with the rise of periodicals, printing techniques, etc. so there was a big boom of writing, more and more and more.  This boom really shook the room.  As more division grew between, high, middle, and lowbrow readers, artists kept upping the ante and tried to be elitist, making real art exaggeratedly sophisticated and directed at experts.  This is quite a difference from Wordsworth's democratization and the Romantic tendency to think of all men as brothers, etc.  
      At the end of the Victorian period, there was a major rise in attitudes like pessimism and stoicism, the idea of "keeping a stiff upper lip" and a soggy lower lip and malleable teeth, I'd imagine.  Thomas Hardy's novels and poetry display pessimism, though he denied it; Housman and Yeats both show some stoicism.
     Anti-Victorianism grew and grew in the last 20 years of the 1800s, highlit by Sam Butler's The Way of All Flesh, which I read, thank you very much.  Bernard Shaw also wanted to progress past the Victorian ways of doing things.  The final straw was later, with Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians.  
     The Victorian "woman problem" was coming to a head too.  F'rinstance, the Married Women's Property Act (1882) is self explanatory, but important.  Is that why VA Woolf got married?  Heh heh.  Women's suffrage--getting the vote, that is--was made partial in 1918 and full in 1928, but still people don't vote too much.  Why did they bother?  Whadda they have a queen for anyhow, if they want people to vote?  
     Imperialism.  The Boer War (1899-1902) was at once the height of imperialistic action, and the apex of disgust and protest against it.  All in all, very efficient.   The British Empire then melded into the British Commonwealth, which means that they got less jerky.  Kipling and Forster both wrote on the question of how to choose between being an imperialist or an anti-imperialist.  
     The Irish question was still ongoing, too.  What a time, eh?  I'll tell ya.  They wanted independence, and wanted it harder and harderly during this period.  Yeats and Joyce are symptomatic of this.  Important to mention is the Irish Literary Revival, which Lady Gregory wrote a manifesto for in 1897--see Modern Irish Drama, also by, you guessed it, Norton!  The Irish wanted independence begorrah, and if they couldn't have it politically they'd by gum get it culturally.  
     Edwardian England, which took off as a direct result of dear Vicky's death, lasted from 1901-1910, which anagrammatically suggested the prosaicality of the time.  Edward VII was extroverted and self indulgent, and the time was vulgar and conspicuous in its opulence and its love of pleasure.  It sounds like everyone had become decadent.  Artists stayed away from the taint of high society.  ". . .a period in which the social and economic stabilities of the Victorian age--country houses with numerous servants, a flourishing and confident middle class--remained unimpaired, though on the level of ideas there was a sense of change and liberation."  (1729)  Like for example TSE, our boon pal, and Rupert Brooke, who isn't a teddy bear.  
     1910-1914--a lull between Edwardian excess and WWI's incess (I don't know either) was started when George V became king.  There was a balance between Victorian earnestness and Edwardian flashiness (1729) and seemed golden and extra-stable, but all that was to change, wasn't it?  You bet it was!  Bwah-hah-ha-ha!  "No, Mr. Europe, I expect you to die!"
     What a shattering there was!  The war that failed to end all wars was a group effort.  Everyone pitched in to help their neighbors die.  Pally, what?  
     
     "The years leading up to World War I saw the start of a poetic revolution."  (1730)  They didn't do anything about it, however; they were only years, after all.  Imagists, hoo boy!  TE Hulme, Pound, Eliot, HD, yaddada yaddada.  Hard, clear, precise images, against Romantic fuzziness.  Emotionalism,  Freer Gallery and Freer metrical movement.  But alas!  There was no technique for building up a longer poem.  What to do, what to do?
     TSE helped them out, you bet.  First, Sir Herbert Grierson published his book of Donne poems in 1912, which kicked off a period of interest in the Metaphysicals of the seventeenth century.  Wit and intellectual complexity started to leach into Imagists' images then, and a darn good thing, too.  French Symbolist poetry also helped to add some dreamy suggestiveness--but isn't that kind of like Romantic Fuzziness?  Conversational or slangy diction, and irony, entered stage left.  TSE talked about Grierson's anthology in 1921 in his review, stressing the combination of thought and passion  that he felt was important for the Metaphysical poets.  So in one swell foop TSE was the leader of the critical and poetical bands.  1922 was the year of The Waste Land, by the way, in case you'd FORGOTTEN!!!  There was similar activity in other arts, such as Cubism in painting, as well as Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, and writers appreciated music and art too.  Pound, I'm thrilled to learn, wrote about George Antheil, who wrote music for machines, and TSE cheered for the Rite of Spring by our pal Stravinsky, and justifiably so.  
     More rhythmical experimentation came when Robert Bridges published the posthumous works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who re-reinvented sprung rhythm, and this publication was in 1918.  
     Norton takes Yeats as a superb figure.  Go, figure.  He was aesthetic with the aesthetes, imagistic and cold with the Imagists, and rich with the riches and the neometaphysicalisticalismers.  Well, it's just that he didn't die, you see.