The twentieth century really begins before the end of the nineteenth century. ... Before 1914, English literature and ideas were in many ways still harking back to the nineteenth century: after 1918, Modern begins to define the twentieth century. ... Poetry to 1945 Queen Victoria died in 1901, but most of the certainties of the Victorian age had disappeared long before. ... Yeats himself quickly drew the lesson that 'We must purify poetry', which was to continue, through movements like Imagism and Vorticism, up to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the period when the Modern mov...

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• Approx Pages: 42