Thematic Overview and Comparison: Connecting the Post-1900 Love Poetry Anthology

This final lesson draws together the threads of the Post-1900 Love Poetry Anthology, identifying the major themes, formal strategies, and critical debates that connect the individual poems into a coherent body of work. It also offers strategies for the comparative element of the AQA A-Level English Literature examination, where you are required to compare poems from the anthology with each other and with pre-1900 poetry and prose texts.

---

Major Themes Across the Anthology

1. Shifting Attitudes to Love

The anthology traces a century of changing attitudes to love. The poems are not arranged chronologically, but reading them in historical order reveals a clear trajectory:

Period	Key Poets	Dominant Attitude
Early 20th century (1900–1930)	Mew, Millay, Frost	Love as repression, subversion, moral dilemma
Mid-century (1930–1960)	MacNeice, Jennings, Larkin	Love as transcendence, erosion, sceptical failure
1960s–1970s	Sexton, Heaney, Douglas, Harrison	Love as confession, violence, elegy, class
Late 20th / early 21st century	Duffy, Muldoon, Symmons Roberts, Cope	Love as intertextuality, play, sacred/secular tension