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  • Editor's Introduction:Modern Poetry
  • Jean-Michel Rabaté

The adjective in the general heading chosen for this double issue devoted to poetry, "modern," could be understood as an apocope for "modernist." Why not use "modernist" straightaway in the title, then? Besides, isn't it common knowledge that the Journal of Modern Literature specializes in modernist authors or issues? My answer to these legitimate questions would be twofold. First, while there is now a broad agreement among scholars that the term "modernism" can be used for almost anything that was published in the first half of the 20th century, there is no similar consensus about the historical period and the exact generic pigeonhole into which poets like Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, or Allen Ginsberg might fit. Yet they needed to be represented in an issue that surveys dominant trends in last century's poetics. There is also a sense that the word "postmodern" has not totally disappeared yet, or rather that it is still being worn out, more or less actively eroded or worked through, whenever we discuss late twentieth century British or American poetry. Why not call the issue quite simply "twentieth century poetry?" Beyond a desire to keep modest proportions, this heading would not do since one will soon perceive, I hope, that the critics gathered here believe in the novelty or modernity (whatever term one may prefer, provided it is not too loaded) of the authors they examine. Moreover, they also seem ready to attack other, more canonical poets, as "not modern" or even "anti-modernist."

In fact, a better reason to choose this apocope is a wish to avoid two recurrent tropes, two obstinate figures that have dominated our critical reception of modernism until recently: the old anaphora, the ugly specter of "Male Modernism"; the no less disturbing hyperbole of "high Modernism." Precisely because most essays in this issue overturn these clichés by probing either the complexity of Stevens's creation of a paradoxically "fat" masculinity that underpins his poetic project (as Ann Mikkelsen argues) or the decidedly feminine self-fashioning at work in Marianne Moore (as Alison Rieke shows when she examines Moore's predilection for furs and other objects of consumerist desire), we are dealing with a modernism that is not opposed to popular culture or restricted to a self-canonizing male elite. It eschews the elitism of cultural sublimity or the gender bias entailed by a purely male sublime. Thus, it seems that today Eliot interests us more for his bawdy verses, rejection letters, or editor's blurbs than for his lofty critical pronouncements. Which is why Sebastian Knowles opens the issue with a sustained meditation on the impact of sound technology—the gramophone playing the role of central attractor—on international modernism. At the same time, while undergoing this process of modernization that brings it quite simply closer to us, "modernism" loses its capital—it is with a deliberate lower case "m" that we will write the M-word, to be in conformity with a more and more current (although not universal) usage, as one can see in Bradshaw's excellent Companion.1 It might also be that the same process will deprive modernism of a capital in the sense of a geographical center: such an expanded modernism takes place not just in London, New York, or Paris but also in Frankfort and Hartford, Chicago and Swansea, Madrid and Rapallo. [End Page v]

London should nevertheless keep pride of place as it remains, no doubt, the city of all cities for Eliot, whose works are examined here in their historical, cultural and technological context by Knowles and others. Loretta Johnson pays more attention to the unpublished bawdy verse than to the Waste Land while Suman Gupta analyzes the role played by Eliot as a publisher. Joanna Gill compares Eliot with Anne Sexton with regard to the vexed issue of impersonality, Christopher Baker stresses the presence of Keats (implying the permanence of an undigested Romanticism) in his critical essays. Ronald Schuchard attempts to give a final answer to a question that he had left open in his Eliot's Dark Angel—what do we really know about the encounter between Eliot and...

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