The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry

Abstract

Modernist poems are some of the twentieth-century's major cultural achievements, but they are also hard work to read. This wide-ranging introduction takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world. In-depth chapters on Pound, Eliot, Yeats and the American modernists outline how formal experiments take on the new world of mass media, democracies, total war and changing religious belief. Chapters on the avant-gardes and later modernism examine how their styles shift as they try to re-make the community of readers. Howarth explains in a clear and enjoyable way how to approach the forms, politics and cultural strategies of modernist poetry in English.

A Comparative Study of Ezra Pound's Cantos on the domain of symbolism and W. B. Yeats's occultism through A Vision

“…Peter Howarth (2011) restates Alex Owen's idea of that most people had the tendency towards the occult between the 1880s and 1930s because this spiritual world was offering a better warranty to fill the void, and a sort of spiritual power to endure the circumstances of the Modern world.…”

“…Peter Howarth (2011) depicts that The Preface to A Vision holds the process of the principal presentations of occult history with the support of his wife George, by using spiritual instructional method of automatic writing sessions. This is a kind of writing that occurs to the writer without being consciously aware of what is written.…”

“…In this point, he seeks for an answer upon the chain of being. Peter Howarth (2011) gives quoted lines, "For intellectual no longer knows/ from the Ought, or Knower from the Known". This quotation from A Dialogue of Self and Soul illuminates the difference between the inability of earthly life and the magnitude of the competence of poetry to recuperate from the incompetence reflected by self.…”

“…Towards the end of the era, the effects of the First World War left considerable marks on politics, society and financial regulation of the era which inevitably affected Modernist poetry in terms of breaking with past. Furthermore, Peter Howarth (2011) addressed that the change in perspective paved the way for the fact that people of the era showed tendency to search for inner self. In this sense, For Patrick Deane (2015), catastrophic consequences of the First World War led those who left behind into a mystical circle in the hope of relief.…”

‘Hauntings of Celticism’: Fionn Mac Colla and the Myth of History

“…34 Yeats expounded a Coleridgean 'extremes meet' philosophy in pursuit of a creative unity of being, but, as Peter Howarth points out, this 'has serious problems as a view of history, since if all enemies can be seen as anti-selves, then all conflict is really a process toward unity, and an artistic necessity' . 35 In the first of these lectures he claimed that the 'strict dualism' of the Cartesian system was responsible for forging 'two separate worlds totally different from each other' . 36 The dualism of the Cartesian worldview, which Mac Colla equates with the Mask, divides reality into two categories, above all 'I' and 'not-I' , 'self ' and 'other' .…”