Modernism in the Second World War: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Basil Bunting, and Hugh MacDiarmid by Keith Alldritt (review)

HUMANITIES '43 ouvrage qui, je crois, fera date et suscitera des reactions de tout genre de la part de la communaute intellectuelle. (PAUL j. PERRON) Keith Alldritt. Modernism in the Second World War: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound, T.S. E[iot, Basi[ Bunting, and Hugh MacDiarmid Peter Lang. 121. US $37.95 The author has selected one work by each of four major twentieth-century poets in order to delineate what he considers to be the modernist poetic response to the Second World War. This may well appear a risky enterprise - the sample seems a trifle small- but Alldritt does succeed in establishing the thematic presence of the modern Zeitgeist in these works, as the poets grapple individually, and at close quarters, with the unprecedented dehumanizing enormity of that war. Through a meticulous examination of T.S. Eliot's 'Little Gidding: Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos, Basil Bunting's The Spoils, and Hugh MacDiarmid's 'On Reading Professor Ifor Williams's "Canu Aneurin" In Difficult Days: Alldritt demonstrates how the four poets explicitly strive to establish a context of meaning into which the events of the war can be placed. If one doesn't accept his assertion that this work constitutes a new stage of modernism ('high modernism'), distinguished from pre-war modernism by 'a heightened awareness of experience' - and I do not - it remains the case that, for all their differences in personal circumstances and ideology, the poets were forceful exponents of the modernist sensibility, and the four long poems chosen are reliable exemplars. It was an essential element of that sensibility (contrasted with the postmodernist one to which many of us seem to have awakened in medias res) that behind the bewildering jumble of seemingly unrelated fragments ofthe modem experience there was felt to lurk a unity, an eclipsed network of spiritual meaning. The poet's task was to uncover that one-in-the-many, to find/ construct meaning in the absence of the living universal myths of other ages. The corrosive doubt which was another aspect of modernism often served to spur on and to undermine the poet at the same time, although moments ofserenity and certainty could be achieved by means of elaborate poetic argument which replaced, if ephemerally, those absent myths. In his study of the Pisan Cantos, Alldritt indicates all too clearly the transitory nature of these moments of certainty. He refers to the conclusion of the dream vision section of the Cantos, a visitation from Aphrodite, which quickly fades (a strikingly similar event occurs in Hugh MacDiarmid 's 1926 long"poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle), then the uncertainty in Canto 82, then the calm of the final Canto in the series. These moments of affirmation are hard-won, given the lack of an 'architectonic of 144 LEITERS IN CANADA 1990 belief' upon which poets of previous ages could rely. Pound's strategy of mining the past for aesthetic vocabulary to make sense of the present is only occasionally successful in this respect. T.S. Eliot, in his tortuous attempts to realize Christianity, is moved to look for a larger context in which the Second World War is but an aberrant episode. Alldritt quotes the fine passage in which a kind ofunity (in death) is found, beginning: 'These men, and those who opposed them / And those whom they opposed / Accept the constitution of silence / And are folded in a single party: He fails to note the Christian significance of the word 'folded: but recognizes the 'rare and manifestly hard-earned statement of philosophical detachment' which the passage expresses. Basil Bunting, too, seeks a panoramic historical context into which war can be placed, in order, as Alldritt puts it, to tap 'those sustaining powers existing beyond, yet on occasion accessible to, the individual mind'; or, in Bunting's own words, the 'artesian gush of our past: I was delighted to see Hugh MacDiarmid included as a spokesperson for the modem, since until recently he seemed to be confined, against his own will and everything he stood for, to a Scottish cultural ghetto. As the founder of the ScottishLiterary Renaissance,MacDiarmid fought all his life for an internationalismbased upon a profound...