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What is
modernist literature? |
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Modernist literature represents a broad plexus of concerns
that are variably represented in 120 years of European
writing, notably experimentation, anti-realism, individualism
and intellectualism. Styles within the movement – if
movement it was – have varied from the dense formalism
of Robert Lowell and Hart Crane to conversational looseness
in Marianne
Moore and William
Carlos Williams. Everyone has their favourites, but these
may be the better known poets: Wallace Stevens, E
E Cummings, W
H Auden, William
Empson, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath,
James Wright, and Ted
Hughes. |
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Who's writing it? |
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Most
serious poets today write
in some aspect or offshoot of Modernist literature, at least
in western societies. The founding fathers were Ezra
Pound, TS
Eliot, WB Yeats, and to some extent William
Carlos Williams – and these are still recalled
in doctrinal disputes. An introductory grouping of aims
might be: experiment/open form (Ezra
Pound, Charles
Olson), critical intelligence (TS Eliot, William Empson),
contra-civilisation (DH Lawrence, Robinson
Jeffers), counter-culture Frank
O'Hara, Robert
Bly, Allen
Ginsberg), and social comment (Randall Jarrell, Philip
Larkin).
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Why so successful? |
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For a long time it wasn't. Only in the 1940s and 50s
did modernist literature become acceptable to the academic
and literary establishment, and in turn popular with a wide
reading public. Now you can read contemporary examples in
all the better ezines and Internet literary magazines. For
listings try the poetrykit,
poetrymachine,
poetrymagic,
or the LHS Poetry Online listings box. Among the more popular
of ezines are: Archipelago,
Beloit, Brown
Critique Missouri
Review and Oyster
Boy Review. |
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Books on modernist literature
and poetry? |
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Good introductions
are: A History of Modern Poetry (1987) by David Perkins,
Modernism by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (1976/1991),
A Map of Modern English Verse (1969) by John Press, Modern
Poetry and the Tradition by Cleanthe Brooks (1930) and
The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner (1971).
Useful bibliographies follow the American Poetry and
Free Verse entries in The New Princeton Encyclopedia
of Poetry and Poetics (1993). There are many anthologies:
these are well known: The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century
Verse (1975), New Poets of England and America
(1957) and The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry
in English (1999). |
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