Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 David Jones: The Sites of History
- 2 Basil Bunting’s Regional Modernism
- 3 W. S. Graham: Between Places
- 4 Lorine Niedecker: Life by Water
- 5 Charles Olson’s Mappemunde
- 6 Gwendolyn Brooks: From Bronzeville to the Warpland
- Conclusion: After Late Modernism
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 David Jones: The Sites of History
- 2 Basil Bunting’s Regional Modernism
- 3 W. S. Graham: Between Places
- 4 Lorine Niedecker: Life by Water
- 5 Charles Olson’s Mappemunde
- 6 Gwendolyn Brooks: From Bronzeville to the Warpland
- Conclusion: After Late Modernism
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This book undertakes a detailed literary geography of late modernist poetry in the three decades following the end of the Second World War. Its focus is upon the work of a diverse group of mostly second-generation modernists who were active on both sides of the Atlantic during the second half of the twentieth century, long after the death of modernism had been proclaimed. Part of my purpose is to contribute to a wider critical reappraisal of the literary history of Anglophone mod¬ernism, with particular attention to its later manifestations. A familiar and much-rehearsed literary-historical narrative traces the origins of Anglophone modernism to 1890 or 1900, identifies its zenith in the golden age of the 1920s, and chronicles its terminal decline during the Depression years of the 1930s. According to this account, modernism came to an end with the twin disasters of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939) and the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany on 1 September 1939. One problem with this tale of literary modernism's rise and fall is that it ignores the tenacious survivals of late modernism well into the post-war period. In particular, the three decades from 1945 to 1975 marked a major new phase of experiment and achievement in Anglophone modernist poetry, an aspect of late modernism that has received little serious critical attention to date. This period saw the publication of such important (though often neglected) late modern¬ist texts as William Carlos Williams's Paterson (1946–1958), Wallace Stevens's The Auroras of Autumn (1950), Lynette Roberts's Gods with Stainless Ears (1951), David Jones's The Anathémata (1952), Melvin Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), W. S. Graham's The Nightfishing (1955), Hugh MacDiarmid's In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), Louis Zukofsky's “A” 1–12 (1959), Marianne Moore's O to Be a Dragon (1959), Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems (1960), H. D.'s Helen in Egypt (1961), Charles Reznikoff's Testimony: The United States (1885–1900) (1965–1968), Basil Bunting's Briggflatts (1966), George Oppen's Of Being Numerous (1968), Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca (1968), Lorine Niedecker's North Central (1968), and Brian Coffey's Advent (1975). Furthermore, New Directions published the first nearly complete edition of Ezra Pound's The Cantos in 1970, though the poem was begun more than half a century earlier.
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- Late Modernism and the Poetics of Place , pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022