A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After

This is the second of two volumes that together unfold the history of modern poetry from the 1890s to the present. The first volume ended in the mid-1920s. By this time major works of high Modernist poetry had been published-T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Ezra Pound’s A Draft of XVI Cantos (1925), Wallace Stevens’ Harmanium (1923), D.H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923)-and the critical hegemony of Eliot, which was to last for another twenty-five years, was already beginning in Great Britain. That volume traced the ways in which the Romantic, essentially popular style of poetry of the nineteenth century was abandoned or transformed, and in three phases. The Aesthetic-Impressionist-Symbolist poetry of the 1890s was followed, after a conservative reaction, by the phase of “Popular Modernism” that began approximately in 1910 and lasted until the end of the First World War. The latter style was widespread. It was briefly exemplified before the First World War in the poetry of Yeats, Pound, and Williams, and is also represented by, among many others, the Imagists, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost. The third phase was that of the “high Modernist style,” which was fully mature in T.S. Eliot’s Poems (1919) and Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). Yeats was the major figure throughout the entire period covered in the first volume, which closed with a chapter on his career. The principal theme of the present volume is the continuing effort of poets since the 1920s to modify or break away from the high Modernist style.