Write an essay of at least 750 words that analyzes how the modernist poems address the themes of loss or isolation. support your analysis with detailed evidence and examples from the poems

The object of this collection is to provide a sample of poetry from a  

range of authors each of whom portray the theme of ‘loss’ in some way.  

‘Loss’ has been a recurring theme in literature for centuries, from  

early poets such as William Shakespeare who portrays loss in many of  

his tragedies including the loss of sanity in ‘King Lear’ and the loss  

of reputation in ‘Othello’, through to Keats’s ‘Odes’ and into the  

twentieth and twenty-first century. Loss is an important aspect of  

life and many modern poets find it to be an interesting theme to deal  

with in their work. The poems chosen for the anthology show a range of  

responses to different types of loss, from death to material  

possessions, and each deals with the theme in their own definitive  

way.  

The first poem in the anthology is ‘We are Seven’ by William  

Wordsworth. Although his work dates over 150 years earlier than the  

other poems in the anthology, he was, and still is a pivotal part of  

the development of poetry and his voice can still be clearly heard  

today in the twenty-first century. His poems from ‘Lyrical Ballads’,  

in his own words, feature ‘incidents and situations from common life’.  

This indisputably incorporates the theme of loss in many of his poems,  

such as ‘Old Man Travelling’ and ‘The Thorn’. However, the theme of  

loss is most interestingly represented in ‘We are Seven’ in which the  

narrator meets a young girl who has lost two of her siblings to  

illness. In this poem there is discord between the narrator’s  

interpretation of death and the young girl’s. Whilst the narrator sees  

d...

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...but when  

studied closely it can be established that there is much more at work  

in the poem. Williams hints at a lost sense of community brought on by  

the introduction of modern transport from a foreign country. The poem  

is an emotional recollection for the tram and everything it stood for  

to the narrator; the people and the attitude from a time that has  

passed.  

Whilst this anthology only draws upon a fraction of the poems  

throughout the time centred around the theme of ‘loss’ it nevertheless  

shows a broad view of the different interpretations of the word.  

Moreover the introduction shows how the word ‘loss’ can cause tensions  

between two poems, or solely the ideas in one poem itself. What all  

the poems do show, however, is that there is no set definition for the  

word ‘loss’, nor is there a set way to deal with the theme both in  

literature and reality.