Arms and the man (armas y el hombre)

Pertenece al género de la comedia. El título proviene de las primeras palabras de la obra de Virgil, "Aeneid". Fue producida por primera vez el 21 de abril de 1894 en la avenida Theatre y publicada en 1898 como parte de volumen "Plays Pleasant" de Shaw. Fue uno de los primeros exitos comerciales de Shaw. Él fue llamado a salir al escenario después de cerrarse el telón, donde recibió aplausos entuciastas. Una de las personas del público le abucheó a lo que Shaw respondió de su forma característica: "Mi querido amigo, estoy de acuerdo contigo, ¿Por qué nosotros dos nos peleamos tanto?. Esta satírica obra es una falsa noción sobre el nacimiento de la guerra y el amor.

Argumento

La obra transcurre durante la guerra serbo-bulgara de 1885. Raina, la protagonista de la obra, es una jóven búlgara comprometida con uno de los héroes de esta guerra, Sergius Saranoff, al que idealiza

Una noche, un soldado voluntario sueco, de la armada serbia (Bluntschli) irrumpió en su habitación y le pidió que le escondiera.Gracias a eso, él no murió.

Saint Joan

Es una obra de 1923 del irlandés George Bernard Shaw. Escrita en parte, antes de "Roman catholic church canonized Joan of Arc", esta es una dramatización basada en lo que se sabe de su vida y sobre los expedientes sustanciales de su ensayo. Fue el primero presentado en Broadway en 1923 por el Theatre Guild con Winifred Lenihan como Joan. Su premier en Londrés lanzó al estrellato a la amiga de Shaw, Sybil Thorndike, la actriz para quien el había escrito el papel, y rapidamente se convirtió en un clásico.

Nöel Coward

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. (Me gustan los largos paseos, especialmente cuando ellos cogen a la gente que me molesta)

Television is for appearing on - not for looking at. (La television es para aparecer en ella, no para mirarla)

The higher the buildings, the lower the morals. (La superioridad de las construcciones, la inferioridad de la moral)

People are wrong when they say that the opera isn't what it used to be. It is what it used to be. That's what's wrong with it. (La gente se equivoca cuando dicen que la opera no es lo que solia ser. Es lo que solia ser. Eso es lo que tiene de malo.)

The Vic The 20th century

The first three decades:

The Victorian era continued into the early years of the 20th century and two figures emerged: These were Yeats and Hardy.Yeats was to learn a lot from the new poetic. Hardy was a more traditional figure. 

The Georgian poets and World War I 

The Georgian poets were the first major grouping of the post-Victorian era. Their poetry represented something of a reaction to the decadence of the 1890s and tended towards the sentimental. Although many of these poets wrote socially-aware criticism of the war.

The poets featured included Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and Siegfried Sassoon.

Modernism

The early decades of the 20th century saw the United States begin to overtake the United Kingdom as the major economic power. T. S. Eliot, H.D. and Ezra Pound, each of whom spent an important part of their writing lives in England.

Pound's involvement with the Imagists marked the beginning of a revolution in the way poetry was written.

In addition to these poets, other English modernists began to emerge.

The Thirties

The poets who began to emerge in the 1930s had two things in common; they had all been born too late to have any real experience of the pre-World War I world and they grew up in a period of social, economic and political turmoil.

The poetic landscape of the decade was dominated by four poets; W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice.

The 1930s also saw the emergence of a home-grown English surrealist poetry whose main exponents were David Gascoyne, Hugh Sykes Davies, George Barker, and Philip O'Connor.

John Betjeman and Stevie Smith  were two of the most significant poets of this period.

Betjeman was a quietly ironic poet and Smith was an entirely unclassifiable one-off voice.

The Forties

The 1940s opened with the United Kingdom at war and a new generation of war poets emerged in response. As with the poets of the First World War, the work of these writers can be seen as something of an interlude in the history of 20th century poetry.

The main movement in post-war 1940s poetry was the New Romantic group that included Dylan Thomas, George Barker, W. S. Graham, Kathleen Raine, Henry Treece and J. F. Hendry. These writers saw themselves as in revolt against the classicism of the New Country poets..

He was born in Wales in 1914.

His first book, Eighteen Poems, was published to great acclaim when he was twenty.

Thomas did not sympathize with T. S. Eliot´s thematic concerns with social and intellectual issues.

Thomas first visited America in January 1950, at the age of thirty-five. His reading tours of the United States, which did much

to popularize the poetry. Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination.

Tragically, he died from alcoholism at the age of 39.

His selected bibliography of Poetry:

The Fifties

The 1950s were dominated by three groups of poets, The Movement, The Group and a number of poets that gathered around the label Extremist Art.

They were identified with a hostility to modernism and internationalism, and looked to Hardy as a model. However, both Davie and Gunn later moved away from this position.

As befits their name, the Group were much more formally a group of poets, meeting for weekly discussions under the chairmanship of Philip Hobsbaum and Edward Lucie-Smith.

The term Extremist Art was first used by the poet A. Alvarez to describe the work of the American poet Sylvia Plath 

He was born on August 9, 1922, in Coventry.  The first of his poems to be published in a national weekly was 'Ultimatum'.

Then in June 1943, three of his poems were published in Oxford Poetry. These were 'A Stone Church Damaged By A Bomb',

'Mythological Introduction', and 'I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land'.In 1951, had a small collection, XX Poems, privately

printed in an edition of 100 copies.In the following years, he continues publishing poems (The Whitsun Weddings, All What

Jazz, Aubade...)

Larkin received many awards in recognition of his writing, especially in his later years.

Philip Larkin died of cancer on Monday, December 1985. He was 63 years old.

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Funeral Blues
W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling in the sky the message he is dead,

Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Funeral Blues (español)

Que se paren los relojes, que se corte el teléfono,

Que el perro  a un hueso jugoso ya no le ladre,

Que se callen los pianos y con redobles en sordina

Venga el ataúd y entren los dolientes.

Que los aeroplanos que gimiendo dan vueltas en lo alto

Escriban en el cielo el mensaje:”Él ha muerto”,

Que pongan pajaritas de papel en los cuellos blancos de las palomas,

Que los policías se pongan guantes negros.

Era mi norte, mi sur, mi este y mi oeste,

Toda mi semana y mi día de descanso,

Mi mediodía, mi medianoche, mi plática, mi canción.

Pensé, y estaba equivocado, que nuestro amor duraría siempre.

Ya no quiero las estrellas. Que las apaguen,

Que empaquen la luna y desmantelen el sol.

Que sequen el océano y barran los bosques

Porque ya nada de lo que venga habrá de ser bueno.