British Poetry & Modernism

As Peter Howarth's title implies, there is a difference between "British Poetry in the Age of Modernism" and "modernist poetry in Britain." Plenty of poets who cannot be described as modernists had impressive careers in the early twentieth century. But the success with which T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound defined and advocated a self-consciously intellectual, cosmopolitan modernism has since marginalized most British poets who did not, so to speak, sign on with the program. In contextualizing and rereading the work of Edward Thomas, W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, Thomas Hardy, and Wilfred Owen—once-prominent poets who were contemporaries of Pound and Eliot but did not embrace their aesthetics—Howarth has done important work to expand our sense of the wider "British poetry" scene obscured by modernist critical hegemony. Howarth thus joins such authors as Jane Dowson, whose Women, Modernism, and British Poetry 1910–1939 surveys more than a dozen women poets left in modernism's shadow, and Dillon Johnston, whose Poetic Economies of England and Ireland, 1912–2000 posits an "empirical tradition" of nonmodernist poetry, in beginning to fill in the considerable blank spaces in the period's literary history.

But British Poetry in the Age of Modernism is not exclusively (or even primarily) a recovery project, nor is it an attack on modernism. Though it insists on the seriousness and value of these poets of the "so-called Georgian line," it insists equally on viewing them in context and in dialogue with the modernists, since the hard-and-fast divisions between modernists and "Georgians" or "traditionalists" are themselves fictions, after-the-fact rhetorical constructions of various partisan observers. Indeed, as Howarth notes, the modernist/Georgian distinction was first posited by the modernists themselves, in their effort to differentiate their work amidst a vigorous revival of poetry in the early 1910s. In his resourcefully researched introduction, "The Poetry Wars," Howarth demonstrates that, in the poetic ferment just before World War I, both the proto-modern Imagists and the retro-Wordsworthian Georgians were viewed as avant-gardes. Both were seeking a poetry truer to immediate experience, more direct in diction, and above all less rhetorical than Victorian verse. Georgians and Imagists—some of whom would not have recognized the terms at the time—shared space in little magazines and anthologies and at the podium in Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop. The modernist/Georgian distinction was thus invented for instrumental purposes; it only gradually became real by providing an identity and a program for poets on both sides of the line. This distinction has been sustained through such polemics as those of Philip Larkin, who later reinscribed the divide between (hyper-intellectual, obscure, cosmopolitan) modernism and its (popular, accessible, English) counterpart in the course of championing the latter.

But modernists and their purported antagonists were linked not only by the interlocking networks of magazines, editorships, and circles of friends that marked London literary life but, more crucially, by the shared poetic problem of how to eliminate rhetoric from poetry. This topic forms the core of Howarth's brilliant first chapter, "Inside and Outside Modernism," which traces the problem of rhetoric back to the debates between Wordsworth and Coleridge. If, as Coleridge argued, the form of the true poem emerges directly and "organically" from the author's perception, then poetic form and poetic content are identical: there is no "inside" and no "outside" to the poem: the combination of inspiration and intellection that constitutes the poet's work are of a piece, and neither the desire to move the audience in any specific way nor the imperatives of poetic form—rhyme, meter, verse form—should exert any a priori influence on composition. Coleridge articulated this aesthetic in the process of critiquing Wordsworth's "Michael," which, he felt, went off track in Wordsworth's too-conscious efforts to control his readers' responses. In a beautifully nuanced argument, which draws on everything from the German aestheticians who influenced Coleridge to the crucial, early modernist theory of T. E. Hulme, Howarth asserts...