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Britain Today Has no Shelly or Blake or Woolf

A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that  “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life.” No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damns the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin reveal the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw have no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was the last to raise his voice. Among the insistent voices of consumer-feminism, none echoes Virginia Woolf, who described  “the arts of dominating other people … of ruling, of killing, of acquiring land and capital.” — J ohn Pilger