Pastoral Revisions in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Espalier

Sylvia Townsend Warner’s early poetry maps her vision of England through a sustained engagement with the pastoral mode in its many variations. Warner’s revisions of pastoral more typically involve complex ironies of character, situation and social observation. Such ironies are what make her poems modern, if not straightforwardly modernist. Because of its capacity for social criticism and its power to accommodate ironies, the pastoral mode offers a suggestive way of reading Sylvia Townsend Warner’s poetry. Her pastoral modernism is deeply ironic, employing traditional modes and forms to question gender roles and social injustice.