Modernism, poetry and the term modernism, with or without capitalization, has inspired a vast literature of definition, commentary, and contentious discussion. Nuanced, scholarly distinctions dividing proto- or early modernism from high modernism and from spin-offs like Anglo-American modernism fill library bookshelves.

But as Peter Nicholls explains in his study Modernisms: A Literary Guide, no persuasive definition of modernism (as a monolithic term) has yet been elaborated because no coherent movement by that name ever came to pass. Instead, numerous intersecting theories and practices donned the sobriquet, and many strands of literary fashion calling themselves modernist sprang up in the 20th century from literary circles all over the world. “Modernism was not an organic phenomenon whose characteristics can be catalogued according to some ideal taxonomy, but a series of anguished questions about identity, desire, memory, culture, and the nature of modernity itself,” as Lawrence Rainey explained in his review of Nicholls’s book.

Rainey himself produced a thick volume, Modernism: An Anthology, the purpose of which is to lay out key texts from a number of literary avant-garde movements whose modernist experiments with language have been variously subclassified—as cubist, dadaist, expressionist, futurist, modernist, surrealist, and vorticist. But even this volume of over 1,200 pages does not venture beyond the European scene. To that rich tradition other literatures have added their own versions of a modernist poetics and an associated literary history.

From Brazil emerged what Luis Madureira has labeled “Cannibal Modernities”, literary circles that appropriated, consumed, metabolized, and expelled European influences while producing a new indigenous literature, saturated in the imagery and reality of the Brazilian landscape and indigenous ways. A hispanophone modernismo—which privileged intuition, symbolism adapted from the occult sciences, and an antibourgeois attitude—materialized from Central America with the poetry of Rubén Darío (Nicaragua, 1867–1916) at about the same time that Aimé Césaire (Martinique, b. 1913) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal, b. 1906) were elaborating a modernism they called Negritude.

The American modernismo was cosmopolitan in outlook and Francophile in literary taste and personal style, while the Negritude Movement looked to Africa and its epic history for aesthetic inspiration. A collection of essays edited by art scholar and critic Kobena Mercer, Cosmopolitan Modernities, explores some of the intersections between modernist artistic innovations and the historical crises of colonialism in different nations and cultures.

The cosmopolitan ethos of modernist poetics emerged in the East as well as in the West, and poets like China’s Duo Duo and Gu Cheng and Japan’s Yosano Akiko invented ways in their languages of renewing perceptions, creating evocative discontinuities, and merging tradition with contemporary diction to break through conventional associations and stale habits of thought.

The modernist poets published in little magazines and founded a great many, including—to mention only those in English—The (New) Adelphi (1923–55), Art and Letters (1917–20), BLAST (1914–15), Blue Review (1913), The Chapbook (1919–25), Close-up (1927–33), Contact (1920–23), Coterie (1919–20), The Criterion (1922–39), The Egoist (1914–19), The Enemy (1927–29), (New) English Review (1908–37), Experiment (1928–31), The London Aphrodite (1928–29), The London Mercury (1919–39), The New Coterie (1925–27), Open Window (1910–11), The Owl (1919–23), (New) Oxford Outlook (1919–32), Oxford Broom (1923), The Palatine Review (1916–17), The Poetry Review (1912–present), Purpose (1929–40), Rhythm (1911–12), Transatlantic Review (1924–25), transition (1927–38, published in France and Holland), The Tyro (1921–22), Voices (1919–21), Wheels: An Anthology of Verse (1916–21), and The Window (1930).

Modernist poems make it fairly obvious that many if not most modernist poets were fascinated by dreams, archetypes, and the subconscious; alluded to local folk legends and world mythology; deployed multiple and simultaneous perspectives; and were inspired by cubist art, “primitivisms,” and the theory of relativity from physics.

They deplored the stodginess of Victorian-era realism, the maudlin exhaustions of the romantics, and the prolix and bankrupt sentimentalities of the philistine bourgeoisie. Their rebelliousness took the form of uninhibited interest in taboo, fringe politics, erotics and erotica, and avant-garde lifestyles. Yet what makes modernist poetry interesting is not its general message, but the keen particularities of its individual and widely divergent phenomenologies and poetic experimentation.

The critically acknowledged giants of modernist poetry, worldwide, are Anna Akhmatova, Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, Gotfried Benn, André Breton, Paul Celan, René Char, Rubén Darío, T. S. Eliot, Gu Cheng, Hagiwara Sakutaro, Nazim Hikmet, Juana de Ibarbourou, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Ivan Lalić, Else Lasker-Schüler, Federico García Lorca, Osip Mandelstam, Joyce Mansour, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Eugenio Montale, Fernando Pessoa, Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, George Seferis, Edith Södergran, George Trakl, Marina Tsvetaeva, Tristan Tzara, and Yosano Akiko.

André Breton

Among the many learned journals featuring contemporary scholarship on modernism are Modernism/Modernity, published by Johns Hopkins University Press; Journal of Modern Literature, published by Indiana University Press; and Twentieth-Century Literature, published by Hofstra University.

John Cook’s Poetry in Theory is the best collection of world modernist poetry available to date. Cook provides, alongside the poetry, important tracts on aesthetics, culture, the modern imagination, and modernist theories about language written by critics as well as the poets themselves. Organized chronologically, the book includes texts translated from French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian as well as writing from Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, Ireland, India, and the United States. To date no anthology has been published of world modernist poetry that includes writing from the Middle East and the Far East. In view of that lack, this volume provides useful bibliographies in the entries on individual modernist poets listed above and on other poets and poems generously cross-referenced throughout.

The Poetics of Modernism: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

Bibliography

Aching, Gerard. The Politics of Spanish American Modernismo: By Exquisite Design. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Cook, John. Poetry in Theory: An Anthology, 1900–2000. London: Blackwell, 2004.
Davies, Alastair. An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Modernism. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1982.
Edwards, Steve, and Paul Wood. Art of the Avant-Gardes (Art of the Twentieth Century). New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.
Frank, Joseph. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” In The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963, 3–63.
Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era. Woodacre, Calif.: Owl Press, 1992.
Madureira, Luis. Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.
Mainardi, Patricia. “The Political Origins of Modernism.” Art Journal 45 (1985): 11–17.
McCabe, Susan. Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995.
Rainey, Lawrence. Modernism: An Anthology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005.
Wood, Paul. Varieties of Modernism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.

Categories: British Literature, Literary Terms and Techniques, Literature

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