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Reading Modern English Poetry with the Theme of Fire

Fire with water, earth, and air has provided poets’ imagination with nutrition. Fire of the four elements has changed itself and provided English poetry with images, metaphors, and symbols abundantly from Greek mythology to modern magic. The paper aims to inquire into how the poetics of fire is represented in modern English poems and search for the possibility of opening such subject as “Modern English Poetry and the Poetics of Fire” or “Reading Modern English Poetry with the Theme of Fire.” In Greek mythology, fire is originated from Prometheus. In Greek philosophy, it is considered as one of the four elements. In Christianity, it is connected with rebirth through destruction or the experience of ‘baptism by fire’, in alchemy it is linked with sulfur, and in Tarot cards it symbolizes change or passion. Fire has ambivalence of purification and destruction, and has been considered as the power which produces energy of life and change. And it destroys and regenerates everything. The nature of fire is divided into heat and light, and then heat is the impulse of Eros and light that of Logos. Reading modern English poems with the theme of fire through Gaston Bachelard's poetics is the subject that can provide students with plentiful interest and stimulation. By reading the theme of fire in modern English poems, students can learn the rhetoric including image, metaphor, symbol, synecdoche, paradox, and oxymoron, and perceive the poetics and poetic world of modern poets.