Late Modernist Poetics

This book explores the uncanny afterlife of modernist ideals in the second half of the twentieth century. Rejecting the familiar notion that modernism dissolved during the 1930s, it argues that the fusion of rationalism and mysticism which characterizes modernist poetics was sustained long after its politics had been discredited by the events of World War Two. This wide-ranging contextual study focuses on the poetry of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Paul Celan, and J H Prynne.

This monograph offers a decisive reappraisal of both the literary history and the literary geography of Anglophone modernism by focusing attention on poetry from both sides of the Atlantic. Where recent studies of late modernism tend to regard it as an inter-war or mid-century phenomenon, this book contends that the period 1945-1975 marks a major phase of experiment and achievement in late modernist poetry.

"Epic Negation examines the dialectical turn of modernist poetry over the interwar period, arguing that late modernism inverts the method of Ezra Pound's "poem including history" to conceive a negated mode of epic, predicated on the encryption of disarticulated historical content. Compelled to register the force of a totality it cannot represent, this negated epic reorients the function of poetic language and reference, remaking the poem, and late modernism generally, as a critical instrument of dialectical reason. Part I reads The Waste Land alongside the review it prefaced, The Criterion, arguing that the poem establishes the editorial method with which T. S. Eliot constructs the review's totalizing account of culture. Dividing the epic's critical function from its style, Eliot not only includes history differently, but also formulates an intricately dialectical account of the interwar crisis of bourgeois culture, formed in the image of a Marxian critique it opposes. Part II turns to the second war's onset, tracing the dislocated formal effects of an epic gone underground. In the elegies and pastorals of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, lyric forms divulge the determining force of unmentionable but universal events, dividing experience against consciousness. With H.D.'s war trilogy, produced in a terse exchange with Freud's Moses, even the poetic image lapses, associating epic with the silent historical force of the unconscious as such"--

Despite the brevity of its run and the diminutive size of its audience, The English Intelligencer is a key publication in the history of literary modernism in the British Isles. Emerging in the mid-1960s from a dissatisfaction with the prevailing norms of 'Betjeman's England', the young writers associated with it were catalysed by the example of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry as they sought to establish a revitalised modernist poetics. Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer gives the first full account of the extraordinary history of this publication, bringing to light extensive new archival material to establish an authoritative contextualisation of its operation and its relationship with post-war British poetry. This material provides compelling new insights into the work of the Intelligencer poets themselves and, more broadly, the continued presence of an international poetic modernism as a vital force in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.

What do we mean when call something a lyric poem? How many kinds of lyric are there? Are there fewer now than there were in 1920 or 1820 or 1620? The purpose of Forms of Late Modernist Lyric is to show that our oldest styles of poetic articulation - the elegy, the ode, the hymn - have figured all too briefly in modern genealogies of lyric, and that they have proved especially seductive, curiously enough, to avant-garde practitioners in the Anglophone tradition. The poets in question - Jorie Graham, Frank O'Hara, Michael Haslam, J. H. Prynne, Claudia Rankine, and others - have thickened the texture of lyric practice at a time when the growing tendency in critical circles has been to dissolve points of difference within the genre itself. The broader aim of this volume is to demonstrate that experimental poets since 1945 have not always been rebarbative and anti-traditional, but rather that their recourse to familiar forms and shapes of thought should prompt us to reconsider late modernism as a crucial phase in the evolving history of lyric. CONTRIBUTORS: Ruth Abbott, Edward Allen, Gareth Farmer, Fiona Green, Drew Milne, Jeremy Noel-Tod, Sophie Read, Matthew Sperling, Esther Osorio Whewell, John Wilkinson

First appearing in the social sciences in the last decade, the New Materialism offers a fresh way of looking at the ways in which humanity views its relationship to the material world. This study picks up on those key insights, analyzing works that challenge the anthropocentric worldview that has defined Western thinking for millennia. Poetry drawn from the period known as Late Modernism (roughly 1930s-1970s) is examined, with particular attention paid to the ways in which the authors anticipate New Materialist perspectives. The authors include influential figures representing various anglophone traditions. Special attention is paid to the long poems of each writer: Hugh MacDiarmid’s “On a Raised Beach,” Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, David Jones’s The Anathemata, Melvin Tolson’s Harlem Gallery, Louis Zukofsky’s “A,” and Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems. A concluding chapter briefly looks ahead to the persistence of materialist thinking in a key Postmodernist text: Armand Schwerner’s The Tablets. As New Materialism teaches, and these texts demonstrate, a renewed reckoning of humanity’s interaction with the material world can help engender a greater self-awareness that humanity is not the only, or best, measure of the universe.

After the publication of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, a complex series of debates occurred over the traditions of English poetry. Analyzing these diverse discussions in a wide range of well-known periodicals during the late modernist period, Chambers uncovers how poetry was shaped by avant-garde ideas, setting poetic trends for the 20th century.

"Epic Negation examines the dialectical turn of modernist poetry over the interwar period, arguing that late modernism inverts the method of Ezra Pound's "poem including history" to conceive a negated mode of epic, predicated on the encryption of disarticulated historical content. Compelled to register the force of a totality it cannot represent, this negated epic reorients the function of poetic language and reference, remaking the poem, and late modernism generally, as a critical instrument of dialectical reason. Part I reads The Waste Land alongside the review it prefaced, The Criterion, arguing that the poem establishes the editorial method with which T. S. Eliot constructs the review's totalizing account of culture. Dividing the epic's critical function from its style, Eliot not only includes history differently, but also formulates an intricately dialectical account of the interwar crisis of bourgeois culture, formed in the image of a Marxian critique it opposes. Part II turns to the second war's onset, tracing the dislocated formal effects of an epic gone underground. In the elegies and pastorals of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, lyric forms divulge the determining force of unmentionable but universal events, dividing experience against consciousness. With H.D.'s war trilogy, produced in a terse exchange with Freud's Moses, even the poetic image lapses, associating epic with the silent historical force of the unconscious as such"--.