A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry (original) (raw)
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English Studies
In academic work on modern British poetry, there is a tacit assumption that any poet belonging to the first rank must needs be a "Modernist". Consequently, scholars and critics are keen to have poets they admire fit in under the "Modernism" umbrella. That desire has led to an extension of the conceptalways notoriously hard to defineto the point of meaninglessness. Proceeding from a conviction that modernity affected every poet in the early twentieth century, and that no tenable line of demarcation between different "schools" survives careful scrutiny of what people actually wrote, Marianne Thormählen proposes that "Modernism" in the context of British poetry be employed as a designation for the period from 1910 to 1939. Used as a chronological term, the concept would no longer carry a presumption of quality (or a lack of it). Hitherto neglected good poetry from the period would stand to gain the attention it deserves, as academics abandon the literary quarrels of a bygone age in order to focus on why and how poetry matters.
Cultures of the Avant Garde Oxford 21st
This essay considers the early twentieth-century London avant-garde, concentrating specifically on the early poetics of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and their circle. In calling for experimentation with 'regular' forms and a new modern mode of composition, these avant-gardistes sought to capture the changing 'spirit' of their time, which, they felt, existing forms and techniques could no longer accommodate. What unites the different avant-garde practices of the time is the belief that poetry (art in general) ought to spearhead all means of communication. This conviction underlies the avant-garde distinction between 'prose' (or conventional language) and 'poetry' (direct, immediate, language), an opposition which, in turn, at least in the case of Hulme and Pound, carries severe ideological implications.
Counterpoetics of Modernity: On Irish Poetry and Modernism
Counterpoetics of Modernity: On Irish Poetry and Modernism, 2022
This study puts contemporary Irish poetry in dialogue with major debates and concerns of European and American poetics. David Lloyd tracks the traits of Irish poetic modernism, from fragmentation to the suspicion of representation, to nineteenth-century responses to the rapid and unsettling effects of Ireland’s precocious colonial modernity, such as language loss and political violence. He argues that Irish poetry’s inventiveness is driven by the need to find formal means to engage with historical conditions that take from the writer the customary certainties of cultural continuity, identity and aesthetic or personal autonomy, rather than by poetic innovation for its own sake. This reading of Irish poetry understands the innovative impetus that persists through Irish poetry since the nineteenth century as a counterpoetics of modernity. Opening with chapters on Mangan and Yeats, the book then turns to detailed discussions of Trevor Joyce, Maurice Scully, and Catherine Walsh; major Irish contemporary poets never before the focus of a book-length study. https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-counterpoetics-of-modernity.html
This essay considers the early twentieth-century London avant-garde, concentrating specifically on the early poetics of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and their circle. In calling for experimentation with 'regular' forms and a new modern mode of composition, these avant-gardistes sought to capture the changing 'spirit' of their time, which, they felt, existing forms and techniques could no longer accommodate. What unites the different avant-garde practices of the time is the belief that poetry (art in general) ought to spearhead all means of communication. This conviction underlies the avant-garde distinction between 'prose' (or conventional language) and 'poetry' (direct, immediate, language), an opposition which, in turn, at least in the case of Hulme and Pound, carries severe ideological implications.
Late Modernism: British Literature at Midcentury
This essay examines the relatively new field of late modernist studies. It gives an overview of the development of late modernism as a literary historical category during the debates over postmodernism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. From there, the essay surveys recent efforts in modernist studies to conceptualize and historicize late modernism with greater precision. Attention then shifts to a range of modernist activity in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Each of these sections serves a double function: first, they offer close readings of late modernist texts that detail how modernism endured and transformed in relation to historical pressures; second, they plot these readings alongside recent critical work that is reshaping how we understand the political and aesthetic dimensions of late modernist writing. The conclusion addresses the promises and risks of the study of late modernism.
Modernism revisited : transgressing boundaries and strategies of renewal in American poetry
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Acknowledgements Paul Scott DERRICK: Introduction I. Reflections on Modernity: The Aura of Modernism Marjorie PERLOFF: The Aura of Modernism II. Transgressing Boundaries: Some Modernists Revisited Barry AHEARN: Frost's Sonnets, In and Out of Bounds Helene AJI: Pound and Williams: The Letters as Modernist Manifesto Zhaoming QIAN: Pao-hsien Fang and the Naxi Rites in Ezra Pound's Cantos Viorica PATEA: T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and the Poetics of the Mythical Method Isabelle ALFANDARY: Poetry as Ungrammar in E. E. Cummings' Poems Bart EECKHOUT: Wallace Stevens' Poetry of Resistance III. Strategies of Renewal: Modernism in a Broader Context Gudrun M. GRABHER: In Search of Words for "Moon-Viewing": The Japanese Haiku and the Skepticism towards Language in Modernist American Poetry Ernesto SUAREZ-TOSTE: Spontaneous, not Automatic: William Carlos Williams versus Surrealist Poetics Manuel BRITO: Instances of the Journey Motif through Language and Selfhood in...