A survey of modernist poetry

IT must be assumed for the moment that poetry not characteristically “modernist” presents no difficulty to the plain reader; for the complaint against modernist poetry turns on...

MODERN French poetic theory lays a great deal of emphasis on the phonetic sense of words; and has done so increasingly since the Symbolists. For a long time, indeed, the French...

THE objections that are raised against the ‘freakishness’ of modernist poetry are usually supported by quotations from poems by E. E. Cummings and others which are not only diff...

THE eighteenth-century reading public had poetry made clear for it, both by the way in which new poetry was written and previous poetry, early English and Classical, rewritten....

THE refusal of the reading public to spend time on contemporary poetry can to a great extent be excused when we recall the decrepitude to which poetry was reduced by the death o...

A DECLARATION of the independence of the poem naturally causes a change in the attitude of the poet towards himself. This does not mean that the poet ceases to be important; he...

THE vulgar meaning of modernism, especially when the word is employed as a term of critical condemnation or by poets themselves as a literary affectation, is modern-ness, a keep...

THE plain reader whose introduction to poetry is generally not through personal compulsion or curiosity but through the systematic requirements of his education, naturally assoc...

THE motto to Mr. Hemingway’s modernist novel _The Sun Also Rises_ is: ‘“You are all a lost generation”--Gertrude Stein, in conversation.’ The title (“The sun also ariseth”) is t...

So far our sympathy with modernist poetry has been contemporary sympathy. We have been writing as it were from the middle of the modernist movement in order to justify it if pos...