Paul Goetsch: Motifs and Themes in Modern British and American Poetry (Schriftenreihe Literaturwissenschaft, 89).

This collection of fourteen diverse essays both in English and German, some published here for the first time, is unified by an overarching concept: the study of modern transformations of motifs and themes. These are literary traditions that, as Horst and Ingrid Daemmrich correctly observe in their handbook Themes and Motifs in Western Literature (1987), transcend time and location, illuminating the historical position of writers and changes in intellectual history. Goetsch’s categorization of motifs and themes from ancient heritage, biblical traditions, the public world, and poetology in his Introduction (pp. 6–15) is useful, though his categories are constructed on different levels and necessarily overlapping. The view of London from Westminster Bridge (built between 1739 and 1750 and rebuilt 100 years later) has been a frequent theme for poems from the public world, from William Wordsworth’s famous sonnet (MS 1802) via re - writings by Arthur Hugh Clough (‘To the Great Metropolis’, c. 1850), Robert Bridges (‘London Snow’, 1880), John Davidson (London, 1894), Alfred Douglas (‘Impression de Nuit: London’, 1894), through to Charles Tomlinson (‘Westminster Bridge from the Eye’, 2006). These poems show the various poets’ changing responses to the growth of ondon and general urbanization, and vary between acceptance and rejection, belief and cepticism.