Poetry, Modernism, and an Imperfect World

This book shows how modernist poetry understood itself to be complicit in the social injustice and unhappiness of its time.

Sean Pryor (Author)

9781107184404, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 March 2017

226 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.5 cm, 0.47 kg

'An insightful meditation on modernist poetry as at once a reflection of a fallen world and an attempt to grapple with that condition through poetic forms that are by necessity doomed to fail in their endeavours, Pryor's work is remarkably clear in its argument and moving in its articulation of how and why modernist poetry recognizes its own limitations when faced with the problem of the world it inhabits, and with the problem of its own generic identity.' Matthew Levay, The Year's Work in English Studies

Diverse modernist poems, far from advertising a capacity to prefigure utopia or save society, understand themselves to be complicit in the unhappiness and injustice of an imperfect or fallen world. Combining analysis of technical devices and aesthetic values with broader accounts of contemporary critical debates, social contexts, and political history, this book offers a formalist argument about how these poems understand themselves and their situation, and a historicist argument about the meanings of their forms. The poetry of the canonical modernists T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens is placed alongside the poetry of Ford Madox Ford, better known for his novels and his criticism, and the poetry of Joseph Macleod, whose work has been largely forgotten. Focusing on the years from 1914 to 1930, the book offers a new account of a crucial moment in the history of British and American modernism.

Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Ford's fall
3. Eliot's line
4. Loy's cries
5. Stevens's accidence
6. Macleod's signs
7. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Poetry anthologies [various poets DCQ], Poetry [DC], Literature & literary studies [D]