The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

✍ Scribed by Peter Howarth

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 277
• Series: Cambridge Introductions to Literature
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Modernist poems are some of the twentieth-century's major cultural achievements, but they are also hard work to read. This wide-ranging introduction takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world. In-depth chapters on Pound, Eliot, Yeats and the American modernists outline how formal experiments take on the new world of mass media, democracies, total war and changing religious belief. Chapters on the avant-gardes and later modernism examine how their styles shift as they try to re-make the community of readers. Howarth explains in a clear and enjoyable way how to approach the forms, politics and cultural strategies of modernist poetry in English.

✦ Table of Contents

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry......Page 2
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgements......Page 11
Why write like this?......Page 12
Oppositions and unities......Page 16
Fragments/Unity......Page 17
Inner-driven/Outer-driven......Page 18
Present/Past......Page 19
Ends/Means......Page 20
Modernist style and modern society......Page 21
The individual and the collective......Page 27
War......Page 29
Séances......Page 30
City......Page 32
Adverts and newspapers......Page 33
Technology and recording......Page 34
Modernism and enchantment......Page 37
Recommended Further Reading......Page 42
Poetry and politics......Page 44
The anthologist as selector......Page 47
The anthologist as compiler......Page 52
The anthologist as teacher......Page 56
The Cantos......Page 61
Where did it all go wrong?......Page 65
Recommended Further Reading......Page 67
The paradoxes of self and world......Page 68
Eliot's early criticism......Page 73
The Waste Land......Page 79
Eliot's later criticism......Page 84
Eliot's Christianity......Page 88
Recommended Further Reading......Page 92
Love and conflict......Page 93
The occult poet......Page 96
The dynamic union of opposites......Page 98
Poets remake mankind......Page 102
Yeats's times......Page 106
Recommended Further Reading......Page 114
Modernism and America: Whitman and Crane......Page 115
William Carlos Williams......Page 121
Marianne Moore......Page 132
Wallace Stevens......Page 140
Recommended Further Reading......Page 151
The culture of the avant-gardes......Page 152
The minority, the masses and the manifesto......Page 153
Mina Loy and Futurism......Page 158
Gertrude Stein......Page 164
H. D.......Page 169
Modernism and difficulty......Page 177
... because ordinary life is wrong......Page 181
... because difficulty does art's job......Page 182
... because it's good for you......Page 184
... because it's a way into the elite......Page 187
Adorno's argument......Page 191
Difficulty and diversity......Page 194
The changing cast of modernism......Page 196
Inside and outside modernism......Page 199
Harlem Renaissance......Page 202
War poetry......Page 206
Modernism and the left......Page 208
Documentary modernism......Page 210
Zukofsky and the Objectivists......Page 213
Marginalised modernism: Bunting and Niedecker......Page 220
When did modernism end?......Page 225
Notes......Page 234
Index......Page 258
Cambridge Introductions to .........Page 276