Explore
This book examines the dialectical turn of modernist poetry over the interwar period, arguing that late modernism inverts the method of Ezra Pound’s “poem including history” to conceive a negated mode of epic, predicated on the encryption of disarticulated historical content. Compelled to register the force of a totality it cannot represent, this negated epic reorients the function of poetic language and reference, remaking the poem, and late modernism generally, as a critical instrument of dialectical reason. Part I reads The Waste Land alongside the review it prefaced, The Criterion, arguing that the poem establishes the editorial method with which T. S. Eliot constructs the review’s totalizing account of culture. Dividing the epic’s critical function from its style, Eliot not only includes history differently, but also formulates an intricately dialectical account of the interwar crisis of bourgeois culture, formed in the image of a Marxian critique it opposes. Part II turns to the second war’s onset, tracing the dislocated formal effects of an epic gone underground. In the elegies and pastorals of W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, lyric forms divulge the determining force of unmentionable but universal events, dividing experience against consciousness. With H.D.’s war trilogy, produced in a terse exchange with Freud’s Moses, even the poetic image lapses, associating epic with the silent historical force of the unconscious as such.
This book is included in DOAB.
Why read this book? Have your say.
You must be logged in to comment.
Rights Information
Are you the author or publisher of this work? If so, you can claim it as yours by registering as an Unglue.it rights holder.Downloads
This work has been downloaded 0 times via unglue.it ebook links.
- 0 - pdf (CC BY-NC-ND) at OAPEN Library.
Keywords
- dialectics
- Epic
- Interwar period
- late modernism
- modernist
- Negation
- Poetry
- thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DC Poetry::DCC Modern and contemporary poetry (c 1900 onwards)
- thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DS Literature: history and criticism
- thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DS Literature: history and criticism::DSB Literary studies: general
- thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DS Literature: history and criticism::DSB Literary studies: general::DSBH Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000
- thema EDItEUR::D Biography, Literature and Literary studies::DS Literature: history and criticism::DSC Literary studies: poetry and poets
Links
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199844715.001.0001Editions