BOOK REVIEW A History of Modernist Poetry. Edited by Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. vi1532. I have never written a review of a collection of essays by diverse hands on a general historical topic. And I never will again. The more I read the less I understand the genre. Is the basic purpose to give and organize information for curious nonspecialists, or is it to organize professional work exploring new modes of knowledge and the sustained analyses or readings they make possible? I fear that the two possible purposes conflict with each other and so weaken many of the essays. Insofar as the essays commit to giving and organizing information they tend to be not very exciting for specialists, in part because they think of audiences as needing simple generalizations and information rather than close readings. There is little imaginative testing of the conceptual structures deployed to organize the information. And when the essays do take their audience as colleagues in the field, there is a still a lurking teacherly mentality that feels the need for posing general arguments in the form of easily comprehended binary oppositions, without careful qualification or bold and complex synthetic arguments. There are exceptions of course, so let us begin with these. There is a finely conceived and beautifully written essay on the place of decadence in modernism by Vincent Sherry that stresses repeated presence with modernism of a temporal dispossession at the core of temporal experience, where the imaginative apprehension of the moment has always already fallen away from the wholeness of a possessed present (149). Charles Bernstein puts his intricate intelligence to the task of exploring how Gertrude Stein produces the fullest realization in modernist poetry of the turn to language and the most perfect realization of wordness, Modern Philology, volume 115, number 1. Published online February 13, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact journalpermissions@press.uchicago.edu. E8
Book Review E9 where word and object merge (259). This sense of Stein dissolving the antagonistic relation between word and object, the thing and its description (270) seems to be a promising shift in focus for Bernstein s work as well as a commentary on Stein s. Mark Whalen on Afro-American poets engaging modernist motifs and senses of violence, Mark Scroggins on the place of the Objectivists in the history of American poetry, and Eric Falci on late, unseasonable modernist British and Irish poems grappling with their unfittingness (435) all do a superb job in combining the teacherly role of conveying and organizing information with lively arguments drawing surprising and rich connections. But for teacherly eloguence combined with a care for evaluating prevailing paradigms there is no equal to Jahan Ramazani s expositon of how some postcolonial poets read Eliot and then on how we might assess the four prevailing general models for analyzing their interrelations. The rest of the essays in the main body of the book are not bad. They do their job competently, which is bad only for the reviewer who must slog through all this competence. And at this point in history, competence means in part buying into the bromides of the new modernist studies, especially its easy nondialectical pluralism, its lack of responsiveness to what is original and challenging about the old modernist values, and its absurd hunger for ethically redemptive renderings by imaginations that typically thrive in very different kinds of exploratory roles. These essays are divided by the editors into three sections, introduced by a quite useful chronology even though the principles of selection are not clear. (It lists the publication date of Wittgenstein s Tractatus but not of his Investigations and Santayana but not Bertrand Russell, Nolde but not Roger Frye.) Part 1 considers the formal innovations and intellectual contexts of Modernism through a series of chapters analyzing the poetic techniques and devices, mythography and enthnography, politics, gender and race, and material manifestations of modernism in the shape of the periodical (9). The scope of these essays requires considerable theorizing but none of the authors is up to the task. For example, the first essay purports to talk about form but is content to make observations about stylistic choices as individuating features. Form in Wallace Stevens then can be found in character (31) and tone (34 35) and for Marianne Moore in her fascination with Joints and grafts (37), with no mention of how syntax and structure work in either poet. The second essay, by Michael Bell, breaks the poets interest in myth down to an opposition between Nietzsche s view of myth as an aspect of creativity aligning will to being and Freud s view of it as an expression of fragile control by the civilized principle over a permanently rebellious and cunningly deceptive life of the instincts (51). Alas, there is little effort to adjudicate between the two or specifiy how the particular authors might
E10 MODERN PHILOLOGY have intended roles for their reach into the mythic. I dislike even more Michael Tratner s essay on politics because there is no forceful taking of a position except for buying into this idea: Modernism was canonized as part of the 1950s vast defense of a Universal Western Liberalism. To achieve that goal, modernism was recast as an art of abstraction, created by individual geniuses escaping from everything as mundane as politics (78). Has the author never read Lionel Trilling or Randall Jarrell or Tate s essays against liberalism or Matterson s essay in this volume? Essays on race and on gender in part 1 are decent though predictable. Then we get Paige Reynolds s essay on periodicals that tries to flavor its banal descriptive task by gesturing toward a theory that the material manifestations of modernism take shape in how the instability of periodical production encourages a performative view of writing (119). But there is no significant definition of performativity (or materiality ), nor is there a sense of how periodical work differs in this regard from poems published only in volumes. That modernists were interested in performativity goes without saying. That this would not have happened without the periodical seems to me to boggle common sense but then what is an author to do to put sparkle into an inherently dull topic about which to generalize? The editors claim that part 2 develops modernism s origins in late nineteenth-century decadence (9). But only Sherry s essay makes that its focus. (The index lists only two uses of the term in part 2 that do not refer to Sherry s essay.) Instead the focus is on the various movements out of which Pound, Eliot, Yeats, and H.D. shape their careers and influence the poetry of the next generation. None of the essays here is without merit, but none is compelling. They cover considerable swaths of concrete information without much interesting argument or complex close reading. It is part 3 of the book that is its major claim to distinction because it focuses on the years between the world wars and so provides different and useful perspectives on the course of modernism, especially because the essayists are careful to show how those years culminated in the new orientations taken by American poetry in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This is where the essays I praised occur. And the other essays vary between being quite informative without interesting arguments and being lively but flawed efforts to bring theory to bear on the literary materials. Jason Harding is particularly useful on Later Eliot and Pound. And I found helpful the sense of cultural background in the misplaced essay by Bart Eeckhout and Glen MacLeod, American Poetry in the 1910s and 1920s. The theory-inflected essays were invigorating to grapple with but for me impossible to believe. Adam Piette s War Modernism, 1918 1945 makes use of a binary opposition between repressed war experience and fear of the future, between violent war-mongering Id and scientific reason, between communist or nationalist revolution and fascist militarism (417).
Book Review E11 These oppositions make for dramatic writing, but I am not sure they are useful to capture the intricacies and subtleties of poetic imaginings that tend to be more focused on either learning to accept conflicting impulses or on displacing them into more manageable concerns. Indeed, Piette needs the concept of political unconscious to develop his case, and once the concept of any kind of general unconscious is deployed, there seems no place for attention to the disciplines of artistic making. We get claims like Eliot s The Waste Land presents its fragments as symptomatic debris speaking of the effects of war on the sexual unconscious (418), when it might better to envision Eliot s poemasdefining multiple versions of spiritual emptiness that becomes a source for war. And his insistence on the self-destructive impulse must take Didi and Gogo as suicidal men (425), when I would think one mystery of Beckett s play is that suicide seems so rational and calmly determined that there is an immense gulf between his personages and what we might call the standard psychology of impulses and driven actions. Sarah Crangle also seems to me to let the binaries driving the novelty of her argument override any nuanced appreciation of what is distinctive to her subject, Mina Loy s imagination. Crangle offers a lively and complex theory of the abject, taken largely from Kristeva. But is the theory really well suited to Loy s intensely performative intelligence that at every moment fights off any kind of subjection, including the ways love destroys individuality for women? For Crangle, Loy examines abjection to challenge the master narratives of Western culture (277). That Loy issues such challenges is undeniable. That a poem like Gertrude Stein relies on abjection to make that challenge seems simply absurd: Curie of the laboratory of vocabulary she crushed the tonnage of consciousness congealed to phrases to extract a radium of the word. (The Lost Lunar Baedeker [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996], 94) Even Loy s most intense involvement in the physical in her earlier poems is always under control, under a power to make objective what other people take as spaces of fantasy so that the situation becomes subject not to fantasy but to the kind of diction that subsumes fantasy into the power of accurate naming. And when Loy does deal intensely with the abject in her great late poems, there is no energy for challenging the master narratives
E12 MODERN PHILOLOGY of Western culture. By this point in her life there is the reign of sheer pathos that intelligence can only register but not alter. The editors save the best essay in the book for last, setting it off as a coda but perhaps not sufficiently taking to heart how powerfully Anthony Mellors s Modernism after Modernism implicitly criticizes some of the prevailing attitudes of the new modernist studies that I have mentioned earlier. Mellors argues that the basic antagonist for the major modernists, as well as their heirs, is a commercial mainstream where freedom is identified with the expressive capabilities of sovereign individuals rather than with the objective and semiotic criteria that characterizes the modernist approach to poetry (484 85; see also his summary on 486). So Eliot s thinking about impersonality is considerably more insightful and provocative than what the editors see as securing poetry s place as a privileged genre and fostering the fetishized notion of the poem as an autotelic and impersonal artwork (7). Eliot develops a dynamic principle shared by most of the major modernists because its basic route to engaging reality is by developing alternatives for how poets typically treat the roles of subjectivity in social and self-reflexive situations (see 490 91). Mellors argues that the modernist poem enacts the loss of subjective presence instead of doting on the personal experience of loss (494). The voices of modernist poetry range from the outwardly inward to the inwardly outward so that voice itself takes on an almost independent existence (495). So then textual fragmentation can register holes in the symbolic order instead of fantasizing a whole (494). And he beautifully explains the possible ways these tears in the symbolic order interact with life in a description of how J. H. Prynne continues the modernist project of refusing to locate the centre of the poem in continuous self-controlling subjectivity because that would be to abdicate responsibility to a less comprehensible lifeworld in which the self is infected by its transitional objects (496). From Mellors s perspective, impersonality and the textual devices that accompany it even have the power to counter the appeal of a rhetoric of ethics because they position us to assess the costs of how ethics constrains thought by seeking judgment rather than clarity in discrete situations. The old modernism might even survive the new critical stances academic interests have produced, even if it needs Mellors s Lacan to do it. Charles F. Altieri University of California, Berkeley