Modern
Two world wars break the old forms. Poets abandon regular metre, novelists move inside consciousness, and writers assume you can handle fragmentation and allusion without a guide. The short poem becomes sharper, stranger and more compressed.
✦Free verse
✦Stream of consciousness
✦Fragmentation and collage
✦Heavy allusion — the poem as an argument with the past
W. B. Yeats
Nobody else in English changed style so completely and so late.
T. S. Eliot
He changed the sound of English poetry and made allusion a modern technique.
Virginia Woolf
She made the interior life the proper subject of the novel, and wrote its finest essay on women and fiction.
Wilfred Owen
He wrote the war's most exact poems, and made pity and protest the same act.
Robert Frost
He made the conversational poem carry philosophical weight.
William Carlos Williams
He founded a poetry of plain objects and local speech that shaped American verse for decades.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
He wrote the definitive novel of American aspiration, and of the sentence that closes it.
Franz Kafka
He turned bureaucracy into metaphysics and made anxiety a literary form.
Aldous Huxley
He invented the dystopia where nobody needs to be forced.
John Steinbeck
He wrote American working life as tragedy without sentimentality.
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost · 1916
The poem everyone quotes as wisdom, and misreads as advice.
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats · 1919
Twenty-two lines that every crisis since 1919 has been quoted into.
The Waste Land — Opening
T. S. Eliot · 1922
The poem that broke English verse open, starting with a contradiction.
Mrs Dalloway — Opening
Virginia Woolf · 1925
One June day in London, told from inside a mind.
Dulce et Decorum Est
Wilfred Owen · 1917
The Latin tag that patriotic poetry loved, taken apart in a gas attack.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T. S. Eliot · 1915
A middle-aged man rehearsing a question he will never ask.
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams · 1923
Sixteen words that ask what a poem is allowed to be about.
The Great Gatsby — Closing
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925
The last page of the American dream, written in the tense it describes.
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka · 1915
A salesman wakes as an insect and his family adapts — quite well.
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf · 1927
A summer house, a postponed trip, and ten years passing in a bracket.
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley · 1932
A world that has abolished pain and, with it, most of what makes a life.
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck · 1937
Two migrant workers and a farm they will never own.
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck · 1939
A family drives west into a promise that has been sold already.
The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux · 1910
An opera house with a fifth cellar and a tenant nobody has seen.
The Call of Cthulhu
H. P. Lovecraft · 1928
A case file assembled from notes, clippings and a sailor's account.
The Shadow over Innsmouth
H. P. Lovecraft · 1936
A traveller reaches a decaying town with a church that is not a church.