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The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry

Why write like this?

Imagine yourself, three or four generations younger, walking along Devonshire Street in London on a warm July evening in 1920, and passing Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop. You were trying to find a shortcut to King’s Cross station, perhaps, but you fear you may have gone the wrong way: the street is narrow and rather dirty, with shrieks from small, poor Italian children running a hoop on the pavement. Ahead, an ex-soldier with a missing leg is limping towards you.

You realise he is going to ask, shamefacedly, for money, like so many in London now; to avoid refusing him, you turn abruptly into the bookshop itself. Inside, it is quieter, and smells of beeswax from the carved wooden shelves and seats, relics of that brief pre-war fashion for peasant arts in which the shop began, and now looking heavy and a bit tired. On display are various recent publications, including one of the bookshop’s in-house anthologies, Georgian Poetry 1918–19.

The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry

Even used as a stylistic term, however, ‘modernism’ has its own difficulties. It’s a label first given to the poets by American and English critics in the 1920s rather than a term the poets themselves devised, and it has to cover a very wide range of poetic forms, from the avant-garde sound-poetry of a Kurt Schwitters to the frigid hymn-forms of ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’. It has even been suggested we should talk about modernisms in the plural, because the modernist groups from Moscow or Berlin or New York have such varying priorities.HD movies download from Ibomma Telugu

4 But they are all still kinds of modernism, so perhaps the best analogy is to see modernism as an umbrella term like jazz: a recognisable genre of music which emerged among various artists who found themselves part of a growing ‘movement’, rather than being invented singlehandedly at one time or place. Like jazz, it has different but related sub-genres within it (Futurism, Imagism, Objectivism, Surrealism and many others), some intense internal rivalries (William Carlos Williams vs.

Eliot, say, or Futurism vs. Pound) and much creative fusion with other art forms, which in turn generate lots of controversy between different keepers of the flame about what’s really jazz, or modernism, and what isn’t. As with jazz, too, many years of academic study makes some of its features clearer than they would have been at the time; the similarities between artists who were only dimly aware of each others’ work, for example, or the gradual formation of ideas and allegiances which promoted poets such as Eliot and Pound, and sidelined others, such as Mina Loy or H. D. That overview, in fact, is what restores Paris: A Poem to us, for it dropped off every cultural radar screen shortly after its appearance, and was for a long time afterwards suppressed for its blasphemy by Mirrlees herself after her conversion to Roman Catholicism

Oppositions and unities

In terms of style, though, perhaps the most essential feature of Paris: A Poem is that it resists the kind of synoptic, detached overview you probably bought this book for. An ‘overview’ implies that poems are like objects, spread out before us for contrast and comparison. But the experience of actually reading a lot of modernist poetry is more like an immersion, where there is no longer a clear distance between what you are seeing and the position you are invited to see it from. All Movies HD Download free from here F95Zone

Things are being said, but it’s not clear who is saying them, or why they matter. Grammatically, it is often uncertain who is the subject and what is the object, or what is a main clause and what a subclause, and without knowing these things your mind cannot place or frame the scene, and has to keep a number of phrases in suspension without knowing which will be the central one. Since your working memory can only keep a few unattached lines in play at once, reading is tiring and makes you uncomfortably aware that meanings are always shooting past or being buried. Being unable to find a narrative framework or a sense of scale, you are also unable to predict what is going to come next, and what is going to be important. Plz Visit For Breweries Food

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