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  • Flint on a Bright Stone: A Revolution of Precision and Restraint in American, Russian, and German Modernism
  • Adrian Wanner (bio)
Flint on a Bright Stone: A Revolution of Precision and Restraint in American, Russian, and German Modernism. By Kirsten Blythe Painter. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006. 306 pp. $60.00.

This book is devoted to what the author dubs "Tempered Modernism," a poetic style that emerged around 1910 in various European countries in reaction to Symbolism and encompassed such movements as Imagism in England and Acmeism in Russia. Although there is no evidence that the [End Page 374] Imagists and the Acmeists knew of each other, the parallels between the two groups are rather tantalizing, and prior to Painter's book, they had never been systematically explored. Espousing an international perspective, Painter's discussion focuses mainly on the early work of such poets as Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilev and Osip Mandelstam, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) and William Carlos Williams, as well as Rainer Maria Rilke's Neue Gedichte [New Poems]. The title of the book is a quote from H. D.'s poem "Sea Lily." As Painter explains, "[t]he image of 'flint on a bright stone' captures the contradictory dynamics of H. D.'s poetics (at the heart of beauty there is something both vulnerable and fierce) as well as the thrust of Tempered Modernism (the locus of poetic art is in emotional sharpness and the unadorned, incisive detail)" (192).

The subtitle of the book sounds at first sight like an oxymoron, since "precision" and "restraint" are hardly qualities that we associate with revolution. What Painter has in mind with "revolution" is the revolt of the Tempered Modernists against their Symbolist predecessors. Much of her book is taken up with this conflict. A whole chapter is devoted to a presentation of the Symbolist movement, which Painter defines by the key characteristics of "imprecision," "mysticism," and "subjectivity." By contrast, the main tenets of Tempered Modernism are such features as "the precise, the subtle and the subdued," "hardness" and "sharpness," "clarity," "concise simplicity," "equilibrium," "earthliness," and a focus on the "thingness" of things. Painter contrasts the poetics of Tempered Modernism not only with Symbolism, but also with the avant-garde. Although radical modernist movements like Futurism, Expressionism, and Dadaism are usually considered a more decisive departure from Symbolism, Painter makes a convincing case that they represented a greater continuity with the fin-de-siècle tradition than did the Tempered Modernists, as seen in their penchant for obscurity, a focus on the music of the verbal signifier and the desire to "shock the bourgeois." As Painter puts it: "The Tempered Modernists were more traditional in their relationship to the word, representation, and culture, yet they broke more strongly with Symbolist mysticism, imprecision, and grandiosity. Tempered Modernism was not merely a pale, less adventurous brother of Radical Modernism but a viable alternative notion of the modern" (62).

By now it becomes clear that Painter's book is not just a presentation of the Tempered Modernists, but a proclamation of their superiority over their Symbolist predecessors and radical contemporaries. In Painter's formulation: "Their works show us that poetry does not have to travel into the heavens in order to be poetic—nor does it have to throw in rotten oranges and oozing saliva in order to be innovative and compelling" (146). This is no doubt the [End Page 375] case, although Painter's presentation of the decadent and radical competitors of Tempered Modernism verges at times on caricature. In its intermediate position between Symbolism and Radical Modernism, Tempered Modernism, as presented by Painter, resembles Aristotle's definition of virtue as the happy medium between two extremes. Neither otherworldly nor vulgar, it also "occupies a moderate position between [the avant-garde's] radical dehumanization and Symbolist self-absorption" (151).

Painter is an effective advocate for the poetry of the Tempered Modernists, which she clearly and rightfully admires. Her beautifully-written book exemplifies in itself the qualities of clarity, simplicity, and elegance that she sees as the hallmark of the movement she discusses. Her close readings of numerous poems, which are given both in the Russian, German, or French...

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