Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (review)

Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers. Keith Tuma. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Pp. ix + 299. $69.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

The spirit of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley--"out of key with his time" and striving "to resuscitate the dead art / Of poetry"--hangs powerfully over this book. ¹ Unlike the Poundian figure recalled in his title, however, Keith Tuma finds his most obstinate adversaries not among the poets, those who since Pound's intervention have continued to toil among countless modernisms and avant-gardes, but rather among the American critics who have neglected or simply forgotten their work. In a far-ranging excursion across the decades between Mauberley's moment and this one, Tuma investigates the death (or rather the several deaths, periodically proclaimed but more frequently presumed) of British poetry--its slow relegation to an appropriately moribund modernist archive or imperial source-text retaining slight currency in an age of prose and American hegemony--as well as its truculent afterlife. The result is, at its core, an impassioned plea for poetry as such and a necessary provocation on behalf of modernism in all of its formal challenge, a modernism that (anxieties of postmodernism and rumors to the contrary aside) has not gone away.

Of course such broad and familiar terms merit considerable suspicion, entailing positions within a structure of literary history that Tuma is careful to disclaim. Largely shunning static conceits of nation and genre, as well as the epochal orthodoxies that have conveniently divided the century into unevenly matched halves on either side of the Atlantic and 1945, his approach instead seeks after the more subtle hybridities that have shaped recent poetic generations. Under this account, each such generation has found itself embroiled in the renegotiation of a shifting landscape, staking the relative boundaries of avant-garde and mainstream, the experimental and the genteel, in a series of dueling anthologies and outright dismissals, anxiously measuring the progressive autonomization of British and American forms. Tuma plots his history in reverse, moving from the controversies of the Thatcher era to the retrenchments of the Movement to the proliferation of minor modernisms in the 1930s. At each juncture, he recovers the possibility of an "eclecticism within and beyond the nation," adventurous enough for example to read Joseph Gordon Macleod alongside W. H. Auden, Basil Bunting alongside Philip Larkin (9). The critical practice implied in that eclecticism depends finally upon the diffusion and complication of a sort of modernism-effect: poetry offers itself not merely as style but more crucially as the site of a complex sedimentation where layered modes of production and representation coexist in a contrast without contradiction. The gradual marginalization of poetry in general and of national poetries in particular, in the academy and in the marketplace, confers its own melancholic freedom, casting the poetic as globalization's unwitting formal index.

In the case of British poets and American readers, however, the effect of increasing cross-pollination arrives in an ironically Hegelian reversal. The ideological identification of modernity with America--the question "how might one be modern elsewhere?" (139)--has imprinted itself on British poetry even while contributing to the almost solipsistic parochialism of the American academy. Modernist exportation, that is, did not end with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot or even with Auden, but rather continues in a series of largely underground borrowings, from Black Mountain to language poetry. In consequence, the "posthumous" life of British poetry has become more varied and more important even as it has become less visible. Tuma's histories, then, provide a necessary prologue to reading, and at their best, the readings that follow distill the tactical force of the broader polemic. The recovery of a figure like Macleod or Morton Dauwen Zabel, his American advocate at Poetry, sends modernist poetics down a different track and resituates in the process an entire field of peripheral texts...