Sean Pryor

Diverse modernist poems, far from advertising a capacity to prefigure utopia or save society, understand themselves to be complicit in the unhappiness and injustice of an imperfect or fallen world. Combining analysis of technical devices and aesthetic values with broader accounts of contemporary critical debates, social contexts, and political history, this book offers a formalist argument about how these poems understand themselves and their situation, and a historicist argument about the meanings of their forms. The poetry of the canonical modernists T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens is placed alongside the poetry of Ford Madox Ford, better known for his novels and his criticism, and the poetry of Joseph Macleod, whose work has been largely forgotten. Focusing on the years from 1914 to 1930, the book offers a new account of a crucial moment in the history of British and American modernism.

Emphasizing the interplay of aesthetic forms and religious modes, Sean Pryor's ambitious study takes up the endlessly reiterated longing for paradise that features throughout the works of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats and Pound define poetry in terms of paradise and paradise in terms of poetry, Pryor suggests, and these complex interconnections fundamentally shape the development of their art. Even as he maps the shared influences and intellectual interests of Yeats and Pound, and highlights those moments when their poetic theories converge, Pryor's discussion of their poems' profound formal and conceptual differences uncovers the distinctive ways each writer imagines the divine, the good, the beautiful, or the satisfaction of desire. Throughout his study, Pryor argues that Yeats and Pound reconceive the quest for paradise as a quest for a new kind of poetry, a journey that Pryor traces by analysing unpublished manuscript drafts and newly published drafts that have received little attention. For Yeats and Pound, the journey towards a paradisal poetic becomes a never-ending quest, at once self-defeating and self-fulfilling - a formulation that has implications not only for the work of these two poets but for the study of modernist literature.

GLOSSATOR 10 (2018)Astern in the Dinghy: Commentaries on Ezra's Pound's Thrones de los Cantares 96-109Edited by Alexander HowardYou in the dinghy (piccioletta) astern there (CIX/788)Mr. Pound Goes to WashingtonAlexander Howard (University of Sydney)Some Contexts for Canto XCVIRichard Parker (University of Surrey)Gold and/or Humaneness: Pound's Vision of Civilization in Canto XCVIIRoxana Preda (University of Edinburgh)Hilarious Commentary: Ezra Pound's Canto XCVIIIPeter Nicholls (New York University)"Tinkle, tinkle, two tongues" Sound, Sign, Canto XCIXMichael Kindellan (University of Sheffield)"In the intellect possible" Revisionism and Aesopian Language in Canto CAlex Pestell (Independent Scholar)Deep Rustication in Canto CIMark Byron (University of Sydney)Shipwrecks and Mountaintops: Notes on Canto CIIMark Steven (University of Exeter)Revised Intentions: James Buchanan and the Antebellum White House in Canto CIIIJames Dowthwaite (University of G ttingen)Exploring Permanent Values: Canto CIVArchie Henderson (Independent Scholar)Canto CV: A Divagation?Alec Marsh (Muhlenberg College)So Slow: Canto CVISean Pryor (University of New South Wales)'The clearest mind ever in England' Pound's Late Paradisal in Canto CVIIMiranda Hickman (McGill University)Three Ways of Looking at a Canto: Navigating Canto CVIIIKristin Grogan (Exeter College, University of Oxford)'To the king onely to put value' Monarchy and Commons in Pound's Canto CIXAlex Niven (University of Newcastle)

Diverse modernist poems, far from advertising a capacity to prefigure utopia or save society, understand themselves to be complicit in the unhappiness and injustice of an imperfect or fallen world. Combining analysis of technical devices and aesthetic values with broader accounts of contemporary critical debates, social contexts, and political history, this book offers a formalist argument about how these poems understand themselves and their situation, and a historicist argument about the meanings of their forms. The poetry of the canonical modernists T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens is placed alongside the poetry of Ford Madox Ford, better known for his novels and his criticism, and the poetry of Joseph Macleod, whose work has been largely forgotten. Focusing on the years from 1914 to 1930, the book offers a new account of a crucial moment in the history of British and American modernism.

Emphasizing the interplay of aesthetic forms and religious modes, Sean Pryor's ambitious study takes up the endlessly reiterated longing for paradise that features throughout the works of W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats and Pound define poetry in terms of paradise and paradise in terms of poetry, Pryor suggests, and these complex interconnections fundamentally shape the development of their art. Even as he maps the shared influences and intellectual interests of Yeats and Pound, and highlights those moments when their poetic theories converge, Pryor's discussion of their poems' profound formal and conceptual differences uncovers the distinctive ways each writer imagines the divine, the good, the beautiful, or the satisfaction of desire. Throughout his study, Pryor argues that Yeats and Pound reconceive the quest for paradise as a quest for a new kind of poetry, a journey that Pryor traces by analysing unpublished manuscript drafts and newly published drafts that have received little attention. For Yeats and Pound, the journey towards a paradisal poetic becomes a never-ending quest, at once self-defeating and self-fulfilling - a formulation that has implications not only for the work of these two poets but for the study of modernist literature.