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  • Pages from Tales:Narrating Modernism's Aftermaths
  • Edward Ragg

MORE OR LESS a century ago, T. S. Eliot published Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" having appeared in Harriet Monroe's Poetry in 1915. Although modernism in all its cultural manifestations traces its origins to prior to World War One, both "Prufrock" and The Waste Land (1922), to which Ezra Pound also notably contributed, have clearly come to represent seminal moments in the narration of literary modernism in English. Wallace Stevens's Harmonium (1923) was understandably overshadowed by Eliot's experimental 1922 poem published with targeted Transatlantic reach in The Dial and The Criterion (with Eliot the critic already in the making). W. B. Yeats, of a clearly different generation and significantly different cultural background from Stevens and Eliot, was already a more established figure than either. Yeats had recently published Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) and had been actively involved in the Irish National Theatre, first conceived as early as 1902, the year the young James Joyce met Yeats personally only to inform the elder poet he was too old to be of any help to younger writers (see Yeats xxiii). Yeats's "Easter, 1916," collected in that volume, testifies to the Irish poet's measure of contemporary events—as would "Meditations in Time of Civil War," collected later in The Tower (1928). But the poet, playwright, and one-time Senator of the Irish Free State, for all the modernizing of his lyric diction, would never be accounted modernist, despite or maybe because of his contact with and differences from Joyce, Eliot, and Pound.

Great poetry written in the English language was, of course, produced in the early twentieth century without recourse to modernist techniques or even overt modernist influence. Yeats's work up to his death in 1939 was massively influential, and not only in Irish literary circles, not least in the case of W. H. Auden. Auden was very much attuned to both Eliot's and Yeats's poetries, out of which he fashioned his own uniquely modern English idiom, having been published by Eliot at Faber in 1930 as well as producing "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" (1939), Auden's first work on arriving in the United States—one that shows both Yeats's influence and Auden's transformation of the older poet's work. [End Page 1]

When we consider, therefore, both modernism and its aftermaths and the legacies of such different poets as Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens, especially together, some caution must be taken in terms of what the contemporary critic wants to achieve. With modernism now so much more thoroughly understood in what are seemingly ever-widening and more culturally nuanced investigations of a truly international phenomenon, there is the danger of losing sight of what made each of these poets not only very much of their times but both unique and even visionary. That said, it is precisely through the new modernist studies that a greater appreciation of the novelty of each of these poets' works may be realized, especially if one considers Yeats's peripheral relationship with modernism and Stevens's development beyond the early modernist phase of Harmonium.

This Special Issue stems from a panel entitled "Yeats, Stevens, Eliot: Re-triangulating the Transatlantic Canon," assembled at the 2017 MLA Convention in Philadelphia. Several of that panel's contributors—Margaret Mills Harper, Benjamin Madden, and Hannah Simpson—subsequently transformed their presentations into the essays published here, now flanked by contributions from Marjorie Perloff, Lee Jenkins, Tony Sharpe, and Sarah Kennedy. Our aim has been to assemble a wide range of experienced and upcoming voices: Yeats scholar Harper, Eliot scholar Kennedy, and readers of Stevens with significant experience of modernism (as well as Yeats and Eliot) including Perloff, Jenkins, Sharpe, Madden, and new voice Simpson. This lineup has proved fittingly international. For, in Philadelphia, what began as a Transatlantic discussion quickly morphed into a more wide-ranging analysis of the fates of Yeats, Stevens, and Eliot globally. Madden, as he does in his invaluable essay here, illustrated the Australian reception of Stevens and Eliot, whereas Harper spoke of Yeats's afterlives in India, Korea...

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