Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer, and Arthur Brodeur: avant-garde poetics, the pedagogy of Old English at mid-century, and a counterfactual critical history, or, the importance of a broadly conceived English studies department

Differing intimacies

“…85 Although Brodeur largely agrees with J. R. R. Tolkien's assessment of Beowulf as consisting of a structurally balanced whole, 86 his suggestive instructions proved 'pedagogically transformative' for students of his who first tried their hands at translating the poem and later became major postmodern poets themselves, hinting at avenues for further experiments in long-form verse following Pound and others. 87 More recently, James W. Earl argues for simply accepting the confusing and inconsistent elements of the poem, rather than trying to 'fill in the gaps' of passages that seem to jump around in time and space, as editors and critics have tended to do since Tolkien. Of the 'Swedish war' digressions in the second half of Beowulf, he writes, 'the poet seems to have gone out of his way to make this part of the poem difficult to follow'.…”