English Poetry Down The Ages: A Recollection Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

English poetry down the ages, how to charter the course of it from its beginning, from Anglo-Saxon poetry to the present times with accuracy and expertise as it is no easy task to dispense with? To know it is to be conversant with the European society, art, culture and nomenclature; France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Russia and so on; the history of a race and its creativity. Old English poetry, bewixtBede and Caedmon, hymns and ecclesiastical matters, how to take to?
Medieval English poetry a journey by bullock-cart with Langland and Chaucer taking on a pilgrimage to sacred shrines and staying at inns, telling the gossips of joviality, merry-making, fun, humour and comic, virtue and vice through fables and versified narratives, an exchange between the hosts and guests of countrified, pastoral, secluded environs with the peoples growing with age, trying to dispel darkness through knowledge and wisdom, but how to shed the ignorance, blackness around, rid of superstitions and societal hypocrisies and rigidities?
Modern age of modern times and modernity, Yeats, Eliot, people trying to be modern with modern tools and appliances, instruments and inventions, getting mechanical, technological, civil, electrical, trying to bestable, measuring time and distance with the watch, the radio, the cycle and the train, the post-office, the motorbus, the newspaper, the office and administration, but frustrated with warfare and its after-effects.
But today the age full of anxiety and bewilderment, of Auden, Spender, Heaney, of the television, the computer, the smartphone, the media and telecommunications, the automobiles and superfast trains, airbuses, shopping malls, skyscrapers, disco jockeys, anchors, business magnets and tycoons, global positioning system, ATMS, internet banking, You Tube, Google Search, Instagram, Face book, WhatsApp, messenger, fashion and apparel designing, beauty pageants and contests.