Reading Modernist Poetry

This essential guide to modernist poetry enables readers to make sense of a literary movement  that is considered to be difficult and intimidating. Through close examination of poems by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and others, the book examines the literary forms and structures, and wider cultural context for modernist poetry, as well as the ideological implications of subject matter, and key techniques, such as diction, rhythm, and allusion.

Readers are encouraged to engage with the texts, to form their own interpretations, and to understand that the difficulty of modernist poetry is used to create meaning. Reading Modernist Poetry demonstrates that the ambiguities of the text do not necessarily need to be resolved in favour of one interpretation or another.  Rather, readers are encouraged to move away from the question of what a poem says in favour of considering what a poem does.

Preface and Acknowledgements.

1 Introduction.

Part I Subject Matter.

2 Reflexivity.

3 Landscapes, Locations, and Texts.

4 Explorations of Consciousness.

Part II Techniques.

5 Interpreting Obscurities, Negotiating Negatives.

6 The Sound of the Poem.

7 Allusion and Quotation.

8 The Language of Modernist Poetry: Diction and Dialogue.

9 Literal and Metaphorical Language.

10 Mythology, Mythography, and Mythopoesis.

11 Who is Speaking?

Part III Form, Structure, and Evaluation.

12 Form.

13 Subjects and Objects in Modernist Lyric.

14 Temporality and Modernist Lyric.

15 The Dramatic Monologue.

16 Modernism, Epic, and the Long Poem.

17 Modernist Endings.

18 Value and Evaluation.

Glossary.

Further Reading.

Index.

Michael H. Whitworth is University Lecturer in Twentieth–Century Literature, and a Tutorial Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. He is the author of Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist Literature (2001) and Virginia Woolf (2005), and of other articles and chapters on modernist literature. He edited Modernism: A Guide to Criticism (2007), and he is an editor of the Review of English Studies.

"It is well structured, well researched, clearly written, and full of innovative insights."  ( M/C Reviews, September 2010)