39 - Modernist and modern poetry: an overview

Summary

At the turn of the twentieth century, English poets might have been expected to take note of the clamour for political and sexual reform, or to gauge the effects of a period of unprecedented urbanisation and technological change. However, when Robert Bridges succeeded Alfred Austin as Poet Laureate in 1913, his intricately crafted poetry appeared less preoccupied by the need to confront modernity than by his meticulous study of classical quantitative metres. If a younger generation of poets, launched in 1912 by Edward Marsh’s popular ‘Georgian’ anthologies, extended the subject matter and idioms of modern English poetry, their innovations were mild in comparison to the Modernist revolt inspired by the European avant-garde. Marinetti’s Italian Futurist manifestos, for example, proposed a complete break with the cultural past, the dislocation of poetic syntax and reverence for the machine age of cars and aeroplanes. Partly as a response to Futurism’s London publicity, the American émigré Ezra Pound organised an ‘Imagist’ manifesto, proclaiming a radical overhaul of the diction and metric of English poetry, followed by an anthology, Des Imagistes (1914). The radicalism of Pound’s Imagist school was overtaken by the profound cultural upheaval which accompanied the First World War, dispersing their group momentum.

It was another American resident in London, T. S. Eliot, who theorised a way forward for post-war reconstruction. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), he argued for an impersonal modern aesthetic that selectively re-appropriated those elements of the literary past that could be made to live in the present. Oddly, Eliot’s tradition needed to be actively fragmented before it could be inherited. Eliot rejected the extremist pure sound poems of Dadaism and what he perceived to be the debased romanticism of Georgian poetry, in favour of a return to the nervous and turbulent energies of seventeenth-century drama and lyric.