Kirjahaku

If Modernist poetry dominated the early twentieth century, what did it mean for British poets like Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen not to be Modernist? This is the first critical account of how non-Modernist poetry responded to the Modernist revolution. Peter Howarth uncovers the origins of the battles over poetic style still being fought today, and connects the early twentieth-century controversy about poetic form with contemporary social and political developments and the trauma of the First World War. Howarth argues that at the heart of the division between modern and traditional poetic form are different ideas of freedom, power and individuality. Scholars and students of twentieth-century poetry will find this an informative and inspiring account of the themes and debates that have shaped British poetry of the last hundred years.

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.