Even if the English language is widely used, barely any Englishmen from England have used it effectively.
Look at their Nobel Prize for Literature Laureates:
>William Golding
>Rudyard Kipling
>Harold Pinter
>Bertrand Russell
>John Galsworthy
>Doris Lessing (although African-born)
None of these are good. Some of them don't even write proper literature, but genre fiction or philosophy. It is so over for England.
Americans completely BTFO them, even before WWII. The best "British poet" from the 20th century was T.S. Eliot, an American. The next best is Wyndham Lewis, whose father was American, and who was born off the Canadian coast.
>muh Shakespeare
Englishmen will hold onto one good writer for 600 years and not innovate at all. It's pathetic.
Ahem, Frederick Rolfe
What a funny man.
>Even if the English language is widely used, barely any Englishmen from England have used it effectively.
Wrong.
>Look at their Nobel Prize for Literature Laureates:
All of the authors you listed are overrated and the Nobel Prize is a better indicator of popularity than it is of quality.
>Americans completely BTFO them, even before WWII.
I'm sorry, but it's going to take more than just Melville, Whitman, Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, Thoreau, Faulkner, and Hawthorne to qualify that claim. Even after WWII most American literature has been boring and gaudy, and even more so than in the pre-war years.
>The best "British poet" from the 20th century was T.S. Eliot, an American.
Only impressionable barely literate morons think Eliot is a worthwhile poet.
>Englishmen will hold onto one good writer for 600 years and not innovate at all. It's pathetic.
You don't know anything about the development of poetry since then, do you? Almost all worthwhile poets who wrote in English were Englishmen.
>since then, do you?
I'm sure your queer hybrid slam poem about Muslim rights is great Britbong. But no one cares about any poetry in England after the Romantics, who also lauded Shakespeare.
>Almost all worthwhile poets who wrote in English were Englishmen.
Then why didn't they write any epic poetry in Modern English beyond John Milton (whose first poem was about Shakespeare, by the way)?
I’m American and even I know American literature besides a select few authors sucks.
>Then why didn't they write any epic poetry in Modern English beyond John Milton
I don’t know if you’re just willfully ignorant or dumb. There’s been shitloads of English epics before and after Milton
> whose first poem was about Shakespeare, by the way
Irrelevant and doesn’t even make up a fraction of his ouvre
You have maybe read no more than 6 American writers in your entire life
You can’t even name another English epic poem.
Samson Agonistes reminds me more of Venus and Adonis than the Bible. Every Englishman worships Shakespeare to the point they can’t innovate.
The Faerie Queene (one of my favorite books btw), The Prelude? Blake’s Big Three Prophecies (Vala being one of my favorites btw)? The Ring and the Book? Sigurd the Volsung? Evangeline? The Song of Hiawatha? Clarke? (Yes, I know the last three are American), Tristram of Lioness? Troilus and Criseyde? The Earthly Paradise? Pearl? Hyperion? The Wanderings of Oisin? Idylls of the King? Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses? Dryden’s Aeneid? Confession Amantis?
If you count drama, there’s also plenty of examples too.
None of those which are English were written after Milton.
>Hyperion
It's a fragment, you moron.
>Wanderings of Oisin
That's Irish.
>Translations
Jesus, you're reaching.
>Idylls of the King
>The Ring and the Book
Not epics at all. They belong to the genre called narrative poem. Do you know what epic poetry is?
Also
>Blake
No literary critic thinks he wrote an epic poem. Even his longest poems are not very long and don't really include the elements of epic poetry at all.
You actually proved my point in only listing Longfellow, since he is the first thing you think of when you think modern epic poetry: an American.
Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams have done more for poetry in the 20th century than all 20th century English poets combined.
>only Longfellow
Clearly you can’t read. I also listed Wordsworth, Swinburne, and Morris as examples after Shakespeare
> Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams have done more for poetry in the 20th century than all 20th century English poets combined.
In the sense that they killed poetry yes.
You also listed Americans, an Irishman, translations, narrative poems, and a fragment. You are a fraud and should never speak publicly of poetry.
A person who upholds Pound, WCW, or Eliot as examples of great poetry has no right to speak of poetry in any capacity
Even someone from a random West Indies island has done more for poetry in the 20th century than any Englishman.
If you're going to base your opinions off skimming Wikipedia and Google search results, you already have access to the facts that prove yourself wrong.
Stop projecting.
Don’t think you ever read them, m8.
>Even his longest poems are not very long
Blake's Jerusalem is 4500 lines long. Evangeline is 1400 lines long.
>don't really include the elements of epic poetry at all.
Neither does Evangeline. It's a narrative poem about le love and le place.
>Ezra Pound
Mogged by Eliot
>William Carlos Williams
Mogged by Auden
>Eliot
He was American, born and bred.
>Auden
He was rightly dismissed in his early years. How anyone finds him interesting is beyond me.
Eliot was ethnically and spiritually an Englishman. That's why he threw his american citizenship to the rubbish bin and became a Brit.
As uninteresting as Auden might be, he's still better than William Carlos Williams (what a meme!).
These homies ain't even know about Bill Morris smdh senpai
Name one good English writer in the last century. An American probably did what they did, but better.
fp already been bp
>filters yet another pleb
He can't keep getting away with it
This is such an arbitrary, useless, meme-brained way of looking at literature -- even beyond the useless, meme-brained desire to talk about rankings of Great Authors over the specifics of actual texts. It's literature reimagined as polandball comics made by 14 year olds.
If you seriously think that there's something uniquely shoddy about English writers, then describe what that thing is, or what underlies it, rather than just listing writers and calling them self-evidently bad. Tell us your theory about how they're mired in the 19th century novel, or lack the rough energy of American capitalism, or are too wary of pretension to get as far-out as the French -- anything to make it seem like you've actually read one of the books you're talking about.
If you can't draw any interesting connections or broader insights on the basis of your individual sense of dislike, then accept that it's just an individual, arbitrary response without any real significance.
Not to mention that there is zero chance anyone on this board is widely read enough to make a statement like this with any confidence. I don't know how OP would articulate why he likes Lewis but not Lawrence or Woolf or Waugh, but I'd be keen to know, because surely he must have read them all closely before composing this post.
Basically, don't post Blast as your pic related if you're not going to make even the tiniest effort to emulate the vividness and precision of Lewis's criticism.
>Rankings
Most literary criticism isn’t about just ranking and collating a list of important writers, but it seems that you can talk about general movements in literature. I think the decline of English writing, especially with poetry, coincided with the economic background of British Imperial decline. Their poets also gravitated towards more overtly political tones and began to become so political that there was nothing left. This can be seen in their poets who went towards Confessional styles. Look at Ted Hughes. Even if he began as someone only interested in animals, nature, and vitalism, it shifts towards a more overt theme of sexuality and sexual politics.
If Woolf spoke about everyday psychology and the flow of experience, someone like Zadie Smith just talks about the politics of media and university life. I think this can be seen in their actual language use. Woolf flowed like a sea. Lawrence moves like light. Yet Hughes is simplistic and direct, as not to confuse his message of sexual politics.
>This can be seen in their poets who went towards Confessional styles.
This happened in France as well with so-called "autofiction". Horrible genre/approach.
I have to admit as an Englishman I agree with your contention that English literature in the 20th century declined canonically and didn't live up to the increasing prestige of the its Americans. The "great" names, especially after WWII, are mostly American. There are of course great English writers in the earlier half of the 20th century (Woolf, Waugh and Lawrence have already been mentioned) but "The Great Tradition" of the English novel appears perhaps to have stopped there, a surprising development considering England's canonical dominance in that form since the 18th century. (Perhaps something to do with the fall of Empire and a general sense of decline in Britain post-WWII? In contrast, with the fall of colonialism the prestige and output of Irish literature increased with some remarkable figures in the 20th century.) One of the most canonical English names in recent years, Zadie Smith, is really following on from the American maximalists. The canon for poetry seems more evenly or proportionately distributed in the second half of the century (the English have Larkin and Geoffrey Hill, among others) for whatever reason.
I don't think Nobel Prize winners are a good way of judging a country's literary output at all, however. Very few of the best authors and poets of the US were recognised with that award -- the ones who were (Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl Buck, Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Bellow, Isaac Singer, Joseph Brodsky) do not at all give us a representative view of 20th century American lit and perhaps should make one realise how silly it is to view 20th century English literature in the same terms.
Eliot won the Nobel while already being British, not american.