Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

Are the margins of modernism shifting? Two books, Paul Hoover's Fables of Representation (Michigan) and Linda A. Kinnehan's Lyric Interventions: Feminism, Experimental Poetry, and Contemporary Discourse (Iowa), both outside the purview of our era, examine the rhetorical terrain of contemporary "new" or "experimental" poetry as a development of modernist stylistic and philosophical concerns. Hoover discusses Jorie Graham in relation to Wallace Stevens. Kinnehan shows how poets of two generations, Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser, both associated with language poetry but not defined by it, are situated within "the crossing and vectors" of modernist and postmodernist definitions of avant-garde practice. Both Guest and Fraser claim H.D. as a lyric precursor. Guest, born in 1920 and for years a critically neglected member of the New York school, wrote one of the first acclaimed studies of H.D., Herself Defined, in 1984. Fraser, now in her sixties, the editor of HOW(ever) and its later electronic incarnation, HOW(2), has long situated women's contemporary "postmodern" writing in relationship to "the tradition of marginality" that frames women and modernism. The critical renegotiations between modernism and the postmodern are not new ones by any means, and there is a journal devoted to these crossings, Modernism/modernity. Nevertheless, I come away from the criticism published in 2004 with the sense that our own collective crossing into the 21st century has spurred critics to engage the modern as part of a continuum instead of a discrete historical or aesthetic category.

It also seems to me that much recent criticism of modernist poets and poetics depends on approaches that are frankly postmodern in style, that is, informed by an awareness that critics make creative choices in the way they stage books and essays. Walter Jost, for example, divides his excellent Rhetorical Investigations (Virginia) into two parts or "books" that represent two "parents" (or are they really three?)—philosophy and rhetoric on one side and Frost as the poet of "home" on the other. And delightfully, Michael Hinds and Stephen Matterson, the editors of Rebound, import a now conventional poetic practice, the use of epigraphs, into the title page of a scholarly volume devoted to the architecture of poetry books. At first blush, their book looks like a volume of poems.

It has been a quiet year for women poets, perhaps because 2002 and 2003 saw remarkable contributions of a new edition of Marianne Moore's Collected Poems and an outpouring of critical work on H.D. Neither of these poets is given particular attention in 2004.

i Robert Frost

Notions of home, homeliness, and American "low modernism" appeal to Walter Jost, whose Rhetorical Investigations argues that rhetoric bridges the two modes of thinking that matter most to him, philosophy and poetry. For such a critic Frost is an irresistible subject, not only for his cagey identification with philosophy but also for his seemingly homey subjects rendered in accessible diction—the woodpile, the burial at home, apple picking, and so on. (I have always encountered the chilly unheimlich in Frost's world of the farm, but no matter.) Jost is interested in the "nexus of questions about the everyday and ordinary, language, experience, common sense, judgment, and exemplarity" and their possible applications to literary criticism. His book advances the philosophical background for the practice of an "ordinary language criticism" in the tradition of Stanley Cavell's ordinary language philosophy, Ezra Pound's "logopoetics," and Angus Fletcher's "noetics." Fletcher's description in Colors of the Mind of a noetic approach to poetry, quoted in Jost's introduction, is especially useful: "Thinking the poem implies such things as taking the poem as an occasion for thought; thinking through the poem; being aware of one's thoughts as one reads a poem; looking for some logic in the poem; allowing the poem to trigger certain lines of thought; looking in the poem for what Coleridge called its 'implicit metaphysic'; asking if what one is experiencing is Heidegger's 'what is called thinking'; thinking about whether the poem is getting one to think." It seems to me that many poets approach their work...