The book begins with the mouth itself, demonstrating why the persistently undertheorized “lower sense” of taste is such a potent site for thinking about queer pleasure. Modernist writers’ interest in taste signals a shift in bodily figuration at the turn of the twentieth century. If, as Gail Turley Houston argues, the stomach often served as “the synecdoche of the Victorian body politic,” modernist writers turned to the mouth, substituting the embodied pleasure of taste for the cogitative metaphor of digestion. Rather than a metaphor for gradual understanding, queer modernists required a way of thinking past understanding, emphasizing immediacy, embodiment, and illegible forms of pleasure. As “gay” and “lesbian” subjects were becoming legible, modernists sought new ways to talk about queer subjectivity that weren’t delimited by these newly normative identities. As demonstrated through readings of early poems by H. D. and T. S. Eliot, this turn to the mouth both figured and enacted a queering of genre, as the depiction of new forms of pleasure enabled new forms of literary pleasure.

Critical accounts of the modes in which modernist poetry responds to the First World War continue to place an emphasis on men’s responses to war, either non-combatants such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, or those who served, among them Richard Aldington and Wyndham Lewis. This chapter does consider the men of the poetic avant-garde but also focuses on women of the avant-garde – H.D., Marianne Moore, Mina Loy and Juliette Roche – to unearth the generative impact of the First World War on their poetry. As this chapter explores, the war features as subject matter and stimulus for the poetries of modernism and in the pages of modernist magazines, generating new forms and perspectives alongside the vivid expressions of anger, trauma, loss, and disillusionment. However, as this chapter also argues, women poets wrote the conflict differently; in confronting both patriarchal and military violence, the First World War became a key impetus for their feminist avant-garde poetic.