ENH245 - J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: Battling Modernism: Poets

Four months after Cummings's death in September 1962, his widow, the photographer Marion Morehouse, collected the typescripts of 29 new poems. These poems, as well as uncollected poems published only in periodicals up to that time, make up 73 Poems. This is the final volume in Liveright's reissue of Cummings's individual volumes of poetry, with texts and settings based on E. E. Cummings: The Complete Poems 1904-1962.

Many years ago the prodigious and famously prolific E. E. Cummings sat in his study writing and thinking about sex. His private brooding gave way to poems and drawings of sexual and romantic love that delight and provoke. Here, collected for this first time in a single volume, are those erotic poems and sketches, culled from Cummings’s original manuscripts by the distinguished editor George James Firmage. from “16” may i feel said he (i’ll squeal said she just once said he) it’s fun said she (may i touch said he how much said she a lot said he) why not said she

Different as they were as poets, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and Williams Carlos Williams grappled with the highly charged literary politics of the 1930s in comparable ways. As other writers moved sharply to the Left, and as leftist critics promulgated a proletarian aesthetics, these modernist poets keenly felt the pressure of the times and politicized literary scene. All four poets saw their reputations critically challenged in these years and felt compelled to respond to the new politics, literary and national, in distinct ways, ranging from rejection to involvement.nbsp; Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics closely examines the dynamics of these responses: what these four poets wrote—in letters, essays, lectures, fiction (for Williams), and most importantly, in their poems; what they believed politically and aesthetically; how critics, particularly leftist critics, reviewed their work; how these poets reacted to that criticism and to the broader milieu of leftism. Each poet’s response and its subsequent impact on his poetic output is a unique case study of the conflicting demands of art and politics in a time of great social change.nbsp;

This critical edition of T. S. Eliot's Poems establishes a new text of the Collected Poems 1909-1962, rectifying accidental omissions and errors that have crept in during the century since Eliot's astonishing debut, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." As well as the masterpieces, the edition contains the poems of Eliot's youth, which were rediscovered only decades later, others that circulated privately during his lifetime, and love poems from his final years, written for his wife Valerie Eliot.

his volume brings together the full contents of Prufrock and Other Observations(1917), Poems (1920), and The Waste Land(1922), together with an informative introduction and a selection of background materials. Included as well are two of Eliot's most influential essays, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) and "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921).
As with other volumes in this series, the material appearing here is for the most part drawn from The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, acclaimed as "the new standard" in the field. Appendices include a wide range of contextual materials pertaining to Modernism; writings by Ezra Pound, H.D., and Mina Loy; reviews of The Waste L∧ art by Wyndham Lewis; and excerpts from essays by Virginia Woolf and others.

The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the twentieth century's most famous poet and its most influential literary arbiter, T.S. Eliot has long been thought to be an obscure and difficult poet--forbiddingly learned, maddeningly enigmatic. Now, in this brilliant exploration of T.S. Eliot's work, prize-winning poet Craig Raine reveals that, on the contrary, Eliot's poetry (and drama and criticism) can be seen as a unified and coherent body of work. Indeed, despite its manifest originality, its radical experimentation, and itsdazzling formal variety, his verse yields meaning just as surely as other more conventional poetry. Raine argues that an implicit controlling theme--the buried life, or the failure of feeling--unfolds in surprisingly varied ways throughout Eliot's work. But alongside Eliot's desire "to live with allintensity" was also a distrust of "violent emotion for its own sake." Raine illuminates this paradoxical Eliot--an exacting anti-romantic realist, skeptical of the emotions, yet incessantly troubled by the fear of emotional failure--through close readings of such poems as "The Love Song of J AlfredPrufrock," "Gerontion," The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and many others. The heart of the book contains extended analyses of Eliot's two master works--The Waste Land and Four Quartets. Raine also examines Eliot's criticism--including his coinage of such key literary terms as the objectivecorrelative, dissociation of sensibility, the auditory imagination--and he concludes with a convincing refutation of charges that Eliot was an anti-Semite. Here then is a volume absolutely indispensable for all admirers of T.S. Eliot and, in fact, for everyone who loves modern literature.

A comparative study of T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, and their struggle with the humanist background of late 19th century Harvard.

In The Birth of Modernism Leon Surette challenges our traditional understanding of modernism by situating the origins of modernist aesthetics in the occult.

Poetic visionary Ezra Pound catalyzed American literature's modernist revolution. From the swirling center of poetic change he excited the powerful energies of Eliot, Joyce, and William Carlos Williams and championed the Imagism and Vorticism movements. This volume, the most comprehensive collection of his poetry and translations ever assembled, gathers all his verse except The Cantos. In addition to the famous poems that transformed modern literature, it features dozens of rare and out-of-print pieces, such as the handmade first collection Hilda's Book(1905-1907), late translations of Horace, rare sheet music translations, and works from a 1917 "lost" manuscript. Pound's influential Cathay(1915), Lustra(1917), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley(1920)-as surely as his later masterly Confucian odes and Sophoclean dramas-followed the poet's own directive to "make it new," opening fresh formal pathways into ancient traditions. Through these works and others representing more than 30 different volumes and dozens of pieces that Pound never collected, Poems and Translationsreveals the breadth of his daring invention and resonant music: lyrics echoing the Troubadors and Browning, chiseled 1920s free verse, and dazzling translations that led Eliot to call Pound "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time." An extensive chronology offers guidance to Pound's tumultuous life. Detailed endnotes of unprecedented range and depth clarify Pound's fascinatingly recondite allusions.

The early poems spanning from A LUME SPENTO to THE SAN TROVASO NOTEBOOK. With annotations and notes.

An incisive study of modern American literature, casting new light on its origins and themes.Exploring canonical American writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner alongside less familiar writers like Djuna Barnes and Susan Glaspell, the guide takes readers though a diverse literary landscape. It considers how the rise of the American metropolis contributed to the growth of American modernism; and also examines the ways in which regional writers responded to an accelerated American modernity. Taking in African American modernism, cultural and geographical exile, as well as developments in modern American drama, the guide introduces readers to current critical trends in modernist studies. Key Features Presents American literary modernism as emerging from a broad intellectual and philosophical landscape Extends the timeframe, definition and intellectual parameters of American modernism Provides close critical and contextual analysis of more than thirty American writers and key texts including Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land

In The Birth of Modernism Leon Surette challenges our traditional understanding of modernism by situating the origins of modernist aesthetics in the occult.

In "Ezra Pound and Confucianism," Feng Lan offers the first study of Ezra Pound's project of establishing a Confucian humanism as an alternative to Western modernism. While Pound scholars are familiar with the American poet's commitment to Confucianism, the question of how Confucianism systematically shaped Pound's thoughts has not been convincingly answered. Lan shows that when confronted with what appeared to him a dehumanising modern world, Pound discovered in Confucianism possible solutions to issues that he encountered in language, politics, and religion, which Western intellectual tradition as a whole had failed to provide. By integrating Confucian doctrines with received ideas from Western tradition, Pound developed a humanist discourse and brought it to bear on the historical conditions of his time.The result was a discourse characterized primarily by the following beliefs: the human mind as the source of creation, the individual's moral will as the basis of truth and social order, the human partnership with the world of nature, the self-perfectibility of human beings, and their innate capability for internal transcendence in spiritual life.Lan examines the strategies with which Pound reconstructed Confucianism into a systematic modern discourse, focusing on his controversial translation of Confucian scriptures, his rethinking of the nature of language and poetry, his political theory of the individual and the state, and his formulation of an unorthodox spirituality.Situating Pound's works in diverse cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts, "Ezra Pound and Confucianism" demonstrates that, despite its frequent divergence from the Confucian canon, Pound's Confucian humanism gives his poetry an ideological coherence, enriches the Western humanist tradition, and asserts its relevance to the historical and cross-cultural development of Confucianism in modern times.

This brings together all the shorter poems and poetical sequences of Hilda Doolittle written before 1945. Divided into four parts, this landmark volume, now available as a New Directions Paperbook, includes the complete Collected Poems of 1925 and Red Roses For Bronze.

In The American H.D., Annette Debo considers the significance of nation in the artistic vision and life of the modernist writer Hilda Doolittle. Her versatile career stretching from 1906 to 1961, H.D. was a major American writer who spent her adult life abroad; a poet and translator who also wrote experimental novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and a children's book; a white writer with ties to the Harlem Renaissance; an intellectual who collaborated on avant-garde films and film criticism; and an upper-middle-class woman who refused to follow gender conventions. Her wide-ranging career thus embodies an expansive narrative about the relationship of modernism to the United States and the nuances of the American nation from the Gilded Age to the Cold War. Making extensive use of material in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale--including correspondences, unpublished autobiographical writings, family papers, photographs, and Professor Norman Holmes Pearson's notes for a planned biography of H.D.--Debo's American H.D. reveals details about its subject never before published. Adroitly weaving together literary criticism, biography, and cultural history, The American H.D. tells a new story about the significance of this important writer. Written with clarity and sincere affection for its subject, The American H.D. brings together a sophisticated understanding of modernism, the poetry and prose of H.D., the personalities of her era, and the historical and cultural context in which they developed: America's emergence as a dominant economic and political power that was riven by racial and social inequities at home.

Exploring the intersection of religious sensibility and creativity in the poetry and prose of the American modernist writer, H.D., this volume explores the nexus of the religious, the visionary, the creative and the material. Drawing on original archival research and analyses of newly published and currently unpublished writings by H.D., Elizabeth Anderson shows how the poet's work is informed by a range of religious traditions, from the complexities and contradictions of Moravian Christianity to a wide range of esoteric beliefs and practices. H.D and Modernist Religious Imagination brings H.D.'s texts into dialogue with the French theorist H#65533;l#65533;ne Cixous, whose attention to writing, imagination and the sacred has been a neglected, but rich, critical and theological resource. In analysing the connection both writers craft between the sacred, the material and the creative, this study makes a thoroughly original contribution to the emerging scholarly conversation on modernism and religion, and the debate on the inter-relation of the spiritual and the material within the interdisciplinary field of literature and religion.

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February 3, 1874, to an affluent Jewish family, spent her early childhood in Vienna and Paris, and later grew up in Oakland, California. At Radcliffe College she studied under William James, who remained her lifelong friend, and then went to Johns Hopkins to study medicine. Abandoning her studies, she moved to Paris with her brother Leo in 1903. At 27 rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein lived with Alice B. Toklas, who would remain her companion for forty years. Not only was she an innovator in literature and a supporter of modern poetry and art, she was the friend and mentor of those who visited her at her now-famous home: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Guillaume Appollinaire. Her first important book was Three Lives (1909), then Tender Buttons (1914), followed by her magnum opus, The Making of Americans (1925), and the book which became a huge popular success, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Just before her death at the age of 72 on July 27, 1946, she asked Alice Toklas from her hospital bed, “What is the answer?” Getting no answer, she then asked, “In that case, what is the question?”

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February 3, 1874, to an affluent Jewish family, spent her early childhood in Vienna and Paris, and later grew up in Oakland, California. At Radcliffe College she studied under William James, who remained her lifelong friend, and then went to Johns Hopkins to study medicine. Abandoning her studies, she moved to Paris with her brother Leo in 1903. At 27 rue de Fleurus, Gertrude Stein lived with Alice B. Toklas, who would remain her companion for forty years. Not only was she an innovator in literature and a supporter of modern poetry and art, she was the friend and mentor of those who visited her at her now-famous home: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jean Cocteau, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Guillaume Appollinaire. Her first important book was Three Lives (1909), then Tender Buttons (1914), followed by her magnum opus, The Making of Americans (1925), and the book which became a huge popular success, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Just before her death at the age of 72 on July 27, 1946, she asked Alice Toklas from her hospital bed, “What is the answer?” Getting no answer, she then asked, “In that case, what is the question?”

A beautiful new edition—the first in nearly twenty years—of the work of Wallace Stevens, a founding father of contemporary American poetry, with a dazzling range of work that is at once emotional and intellectual. As John N. Serio reminds us in his elegant introduction, Stevens has written more persuasively than any other poet about the significance of poetry itself in everyday life: “The imagination—frequently synonymous with the act of the mind, or poetry, for Stevens—is what gives life its savor, its sanction, its sacred quality.” This rich and thorough selection—published in the 130th anniversary year of Stevens’s birth—carries us from the explosion of Harmonium in 1923 to the maturity of The Auroras of Autumn in 1950 and the magisterial Collected Poems published by Knopf in 1954. To be drawn in once more by “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” to name only a few, is to experience again the mystery of a poet who calls us to a higher music and to a deeper understanding of our vast and inarticulate interior world. This essential volume for all readers of poetry reminds us of Stevens’s nearly unparalleled contribution to the art form and his unending ability to puzzle, fascinate, and delight us.

These Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover editions are popular for their compact size and reasonable price which do not compromise content. Poems: Stevens contains a selection, chosen by Helen Vendler, of over sixty of Stevens's poems, revealing with renewed force his status as our supreme acrobat of the imagination.

Frank Kermode is among our greatest contemporary critics. He has written and edited many works, among them The Sense of Ending and Shakespeare’s Language.

Universally lauded poet Robert Hass offers a stunning, wide-ranging collection of essays on art, imagination, and the natural world—with accompanying photos throughout. What Light Can Do is a magnificent companion piece to the former U.S. Poet Laureate’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning poetry collection, Time and Materials, as well as his earlier book of essays, the NBCC Award-winner Twentieth Century Pleasures. Haas brilliantly discourses on many of his favorite topics—on writers ranging from Jack London to Wallace Stevens to Allen Ginsberg to Cormac McCarthy; on California; and on the art of photography in several memorable pieces—in What Light Can Do, a remarkable literary treasure that might best be described as “luminous.”

Wallace Stevens is one of the major poets of the twentieth century, and also among the most challenging. His poems can be dazzling in their verbal brilliance. They are often shot through with lavish imagery and wit, informed by a lawyer's logic, and disarmingly unexpected: a singing jackrabbit, the seductive Nanzia Nunzio. They also spoke--and still speak--to contemporary concerns. Though his work is popular and his readership continues to grow, many readers encountering it are baffled by such rich and strange poetry.

In this graceful book, Helen Vendler brings her remarkable skills to bear on a number of Stevens short poems. She shows us that this most intellectual of poets is in fact the most personal of poets; that his words are not devoted to epistemological questions alone but are also words chosen out of desire.

A collection of 192 poems, some of which were published at the author's death.

Dylan Thomas was the best lyric poet of his age, who, by his life as well as his work, brought a new mass audience to his craft. A writer of rare and wonderful gifts, capable of producing some of the most beautiful lines in the language, Dylan was also capable of consuming devastating amounts of alcohol. Dylan the Bard explores how and why this enormously talented writer, torn between a search for personal peace and international notoriety, was slowly defeated by his own self-destructive nature.Mining new material, including personal letters from the poet himself and recently discovered photographs, Andrew Sinclair casts new light on the life, work and death of Dylan. He examines the divisions and tensions of Dylan's Welsh working-class heritage and puritanical English upbringing, and offers fresh, compelling insight into the relation between Dylan's poetry and his life. From Dylan's dream of Wales, to the brawling and boozing in Fitzrovia in the thirties and forties, to the American lecture tour that finally killed him in the early fifties, Dylan the Bardis the tragic and exuberant story of a cult figure in his own time and a poet for all time.

Written between 1920 and 1932, all five were first published in small editions, three of them in France. These are pivotal and seminal works, books in which a great writer was charting the course he later would follow, experimenting freely, boldly searching for a new kind of prose style to express "the power of the imagination to hold human beings to life and propel them onward.” The prose-poem improvisations (Kora in Hell) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages (Spring and All and The Descent of Winter) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing "The Great American Novel" in America . . . automatic writing (A Novelette) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.

So that readers could more fully understand the extent of Williams' radical simplicity, all of his published poetry, excluding Paterson, was reissued in two definite volumes, of which this is the first.

This concordance is a non-contextual alphabetical listing of all the words contained in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, excluding only English-language articles (a, an, and the).

Acclaimed essayist and poet Wendell Berry was born and has always lived in a "provincial" part of the country without an established literary culture. In an effort to adapt his poetry to his place of Henry County, Kentucky, Berry discovered an enduringly useful example in the work of William Carlos Williams.

It has been variously labelled'Language Poetry','Language Writing','L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing'(after the magazine that ran from 1978 to 1981), and'language-centred writing'. It has been placed according to its geographical positions, on East or West coasts; its venues in small magazines, independent presses and performance spaces, and its descent from historical precursors, be they the Objectivists, the composers-by-field of the Black Mountain School, the Russian Constructivists or American modernism à la William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein. Indeed, one of the few statements that can be made about it with little qualification is that'it'has both fostered and endured a crisis in representation more or less since it first became visible in the 1970s. In Poetry & Language Writing David Arnold grasps the nettle of Language poetry, reassessing its relationship with surrealism and providing a scholarly, intelligent way of understanding the movement. Poets discussed include Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer and Barrett Watten.