“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one who asks, I know not,” wrote Augustine of Hippo. Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice. Buddhist philosophy made impermanence the first mark of existence.
Literature has fought time with art. William Shakespeare‘s sonnets promise the beloved immortality “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see”; Andrew Marvell hears “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near”; Macbeth hears only “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”, creeping in its petty pace. John Keats‘s Grecian Urn freezes lovers forever on the point of a kiss. In Great Expectations Miss Havisham stops all her clocks at the moment she was jilted, and her wedding cake rots for decades.
The moderns, inspired by Henri Bergson’s distinction between clock time and lived duration, broke narrative time apart: Proust recovered the past through a madeleine; Joyce and Woolf compressed whole lives into a single day; T. S. Eliot meditated in Four Quartets that “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future”. Martin Heidegger argued that human existence is itself temporal — we are beings toward death.
Thinkers & Authors
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Mir Taqi Mir
The first great master of Urdu poetry (1723–1810) — “Khudā-e-Sukhan”, the God of poetry — whose six dīvāns of ghazals, written amid the sack and ruin of eighteenth-century Delhi, made grief, love and loss sing in a language of heartbreaking simplicity.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Poet Laureate for forty-two years and the voice of Victorian England — author of In Memoriam, “Ulysses”, “The Lady of Shalott”, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and Idylls of the King — whose music, melancholy and struggle between faith and doubt made him the most popular poet of his age.
W. B. Yeats
The Irish poet, dramatist, mystic and senator who moved from the dreamy Celtic Twilight to the hard, magnificent modern poems of “Easter, 1916”, “The Second Coming”, “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Among School Children” — the greatest poet writing in English in the twentieth century, and a Nobel laureate.
Virginia Woolf
Novelist, essayist, publisher and the presiding genius of the Bloomsbury Group, whose Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves remade the novel around consciousness and time, and whose A Room of One’s Own became a founding text of feminist criticism.
T. S. Eliot
The American-born banker, publisher and poet who became the most influential English-language poet of the twentieth century — author of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, The Waste Land, “The Hollow Men” and Four Quartets — and the critic who redefined tradition, impersonality and the “dissociation of sensibility”.
Harivansh Rai Bachchan
The Hindi poet whose Madhushālā (“The House of Wine”, 1935) — a tavern, a wine-bearer and a cup as an allegory of life — became the most popular poem in modern Hindi; also a translator of Shakespeare and the Rubaiyat, a Cambridge scholar of Yeats, and a great autobiographer.
Agyeya
Revolutionary, prisoner, soldier, editor and the pioneer of modernism in Hindi — founder of the Tār Saptak anthologies that launched Prayogvād and Nayī Kavitā, author of the psychological novel Śekhar: Ek Jīvanī and of Nadī ke Dvīp, and a poet of the solitary, self-aware individual.
Mohan Rakesh
The playwright who created modern Hindi theatre — Āṣāṛh kā Ek Din, Laharõ ke Rājhaṁs, Ādhe Adhūre — and a leader of the Nayī Kahānī, writing of artists, lovers and families broken between ambition and longing.
Qurratulain Hyder
“Ainee Apa”, the grande dame of Urdu fiction — novelist of time, history and the Indo-Muslim civilisation, whose Āg kā Daryā (River of Fire, 1959) follows four souls across 2,500 years of Indian history, from the age of the Buddha to Partition.
Works
4
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot’s 434-line poem (1922) — a collage of voices, quotations, languages and scenes from a spiritually dead post-war London, built on the legend of the Grail and the Fisher King, moving from “April is the cruellest month” to the Sanskrit thunder of the Upanishads, “Shantih shantih shantih”.
Ulysses
Joyce’s modernist epic (1922): a single day in Dublin, 16 June 1904, following the young artist Stephen Dedalus, the Jewish advertising canvasser Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, mapped onto Homer’s Odyssey and told in eighteen different styles — ending in Molly’s unpunctuated “yes”.
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf’s novel (1925): on a June day in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway, a London society hostess, prepares for her party, while Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran, is driven to suicide — two lives that never meet, told through the flowing consciousness of a whole city as Big Ben strikes the hours.
Āg kā Daryā
Qurratulain Hyder’s epic Urdu novel (1959): four characters — Gautam, Champa, Kamal and Cyril — reappear in different forms across 2,500 years of Indian history, from the age of the Buddha through the Mughals and the British to Partition, in a meditation on time, civilisation and loss.
Schools & Movements
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Modernism in English Literature
The radical experiment in English-language writing from about 1900 to 1940 — Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Lawrence, Forster — which broke with Victorian forms to render consciousness, fragmentation and the shock of the modern world, with stream of consciousness, free verse, myth and collage.
Nayī Kahānī
The “New Story” movement in Hindi fiction of the 1950s and 1960s — Mohan Rakesh, Kamleshwar, Rajendra Yadav, Nirmal Verma, Mannu Bhandari, Bhisham Sahni, Krishna Sobti — which turned from Premchand’s village and idealism to the lonely, uprooted urban middle class of independent India and its broken relationships.
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related by shared connections
James Joyce
The Dublin exile who never wrote about anywhere but Dublin — author of Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake — who remade the novel with stream of consciousness, parody, myth and wordplay, and became the central figure of literary modernism.
Joseph Conrad
The Polish-born master mariner who became one of the great novelists in English, his third language — author of Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes — whose stories of isolation, moral failure and the darkness at the heart of empire opened the way to modernism.
Dante Alighieri
The Florentine poet of the Divine Comedy — the journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise that summed up medieval thought and created the Italian language.
Homer
The legendary blind poet of Greece to whom the Iliad and the Odyssey are attributed — the founding works of Western literature, and for the Greeks the “educator of Hellas”.
Gautama Buddha
The prince who left his palace to seek an end to suffering, awoke under the Bodhi tree, and taught the Four Noble Truths, the Middle Way and no-self (anattā).
John Donne
The greatest of the metaphysical poets — Catholic-born rake turned Dean of St Paul’s — whose argumentative, dramatic, startling love poems (“The Flea”, “The Sun Rising”, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”) and Holy Sonnets (“Death, be not proud”) fused passion and intellect; and the preacher of “No man is an island”.