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.

A COMPANION TO MODERNIST POETRY A Companion to Modernist Poetry A Companion to Modernist Poetry presents contemporary approaches to modernist poetry in a uniquely in-depth and accessible text. The first section of the volume reflects the attention to historical and cultural context that has been especially fruitful in recent scholarship. The second section focuses on various movements and groupings of poets, placing writers in literary history and indicating the currents and countercurrents whose interaction generated the category of modernism as it is now broadly conceived. The third section traces the arcs of twenty-one poets’ careers, illustrated by analyses of key works. The Companion thus offers breadth in its presentation of historical and literary contexts and depth in its attention to individual poets; it brings recent scholarship to bear on the subject of modernist poetry while also providing guidance on poets who are historically important and who are likely to appear on syllabi and to attract critical interest for many years to come. Edited by two highly respected and notable critics in the field, A Companion to Modernist Poetry boasts a varied list of contributors who have produced an intense, focused study of modernist poetry.

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

Exploring works by Djuna Barnes, David Jones, F.T. Prince, Denise Riley, Paul Muldoon, and Ted Hughes, this volume traces the relationship between twentieth-century poetry and art to question the role of art in society.

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.

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.

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.

A History of Modernist Poetry examines innovative anglophone poetries from decadence to the post-war period. The first of its three parts considers formal and contextual issues, including myth, politics, gender, and race, while the second and third parts discuss a wide range of individual poets, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, as well as key movements such as Imagism, Objectivism, and the Harlem Renaissance. This book also addresses the impact of both World Wars on experimental poetries and the crucial role of magazines in disseminating and proselytizing on behalf of poetic modernism. The collection concludes with a wide-ranging discussion of the inheritance of modernism in recent writing on both sides of the Atlantic.

The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to re-imagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974): representing the first extended study of the influence of early medieval English culture and history on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). Jones's second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), The Anathemata fuses Jones's visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival material including manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, and, most significantly, the marginalia from David Jones's Library, this volume reads with Jones in order to trouble the distinction between poetry and scholarship. Placing this underappreciated figure firmly at the centre of new developments in Modernist and Medieval Studies, Poet of the Medieval Modern brings the two fields into dialogue and argues that Jones uses the textual and material culture of the early Middle Ages--including Old English prose and poetry, Anglo-Latin hagiography, early medieval stone sculpture, manuscripts, and historiography--to re-envision British Catholic identity in the twentieth-century long poem. Jones returned to the English record to seek out those moments where the histories of the Welsh had been elided or erased. At a time when the Middle Ages are increasingly weaponised in far-right and nationalist political discourse, the book offers a timely discussion of how the early medieval past has been resourced to both shore-up and challenge English hegemonies across modern British culture.

This book recognizes that modernist poetry can be both difficult and rewarding to teach. Leading scholars and poets from the UK and the US offer practical, innovative, up to date strategies for teaching the reading and writing of modernist poetry across its long diverse histories, taking in experimentation, performance, hypertext and much more.