Journal of Modern Literature

Hass, Robert Bernard, 1962-
(Re) Reading Bergson: Frost, Pound and the Legacy of Modern Poetry
Journal of Modern Literature - Volume 29, Number 1, Fall 2005, pp. 55-75

Indiana University Press

Robert Bernard Hass - (Re) Reading Bergson: Frost, Pound and the Legacy of Modern Poetry - Journal of Modern Literature 29:1 Journal of Modern Literature 29.1 (2005) 55-75 (Re) Reading Bergson: Frost, Pound and the Legacy of Modern Poetry Robert Bernard Hass Edinboro University of Pennsylvania One of the most conspicuous and troubling features of high modernism is that it never coalesced into the major literary movement its early practitioners hoped for. Despite the myriad manifestos and self-conscious efforts on behalf of the period's leading figures to fashion an aesthetic equal to modern experience, high modernism expired by 1939 and could not be resuscitated (Clausen 94-96, Gelpi 166). Why this happened is one of the most vexing problems in twentieth-century criticism -- a problem all the more disquieting because poets and critics alike recognized, almost from the beginning, that something had gone terribly wrong with the modernist experiment. As early as 1927, Laura Riding and Robert Graves had grown critical of the new regime and attributed the decline of the movement to the failure of its practitioners to renounce the "wrongly-conceived habits and tactics of the past" (Riding and Graves 262-263, qtd. in Clausen 87). In other words, what Riding and Graves quickly discerned was that modernism was predicated on an apparent paradox -- that in order to express modernity successfully, one had to leap beyond the recent past and revive the poetic...