London and Modernist Poetry: Yeats, Eliot, Flint, Aldington

Abstract

The city of London assumes many a pose in poems by W.B. Yeats, T.S.Eliot; Richard Aldington, F.S. Flint. To grasp what role the city plays in each poem, I read Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” Flint’s “Lilac,” and Aldington’s “London: May 1915,” Eliot’s The Waste Land. In terms of the general tone Eliot’s Waste Land is purgatorial, Flint’s “Lilac” otherwordly, Yeats’s and Aldington’s poems dreamy and realistic, but when we look into it deeper, it assumes so different a pose. That makes the difference: Yeats a Symboliste, Eliot an Imagiste like Flint and Aldington, at least in their London-based poetry.