Modernism Aside

In 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', T. S. Eliot puts forward the view that the creation of a new work of art changes the understanding of the art that preceded it. Such was the case when Philip Larkin's poetry and essays spurred the reconsideration of early twentieth century British poets including Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, and Thomas Hardy. These poets are the subjects of Peter Howarth's book, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism, which seeks to reassert their importance as alternatives to the modernist tradition.

The book is set, as Howarth writes in the introduction, 'at the beginning of the poetry wars, the revolutionary decade between 1912 and 1922 when Eliot and Pound introduced the poetic styles and cultural values that would change the rest of the country's poetry for good'. Or for bad: Howarth writes in defence of, or at least in sympathy with, the side in the 'war' that is gunning for (not really 'gunning', but the war imagery leads to some exaggerations) Eliot and Pound. He asks the question of the non-modernists, 'what did they have to say which could not be said in the forms of their modernist contemporaries?' Whether the poetry war trope is useful in answering this question is questionable. Fortunately, Howarth acknowledges, 'this is not to claim that the configurations of the poetry wars are the real and only way to understand modernism in British poetry . . . my aim is to show how vividly the work of these particular poets demonstrates the vicissitudes of the battle that would come to be fought in their name'. Nonetheless, 'Introduction: The Poetry Wars', claims that this war represents 'the rigid opposition' in contemporary British poetry: the followers of the modernists against the followers of the non-modernists. Is it the School of Phil against the Tribe of Tom? The trouble is that no division can be so simple; some poets don't enlist at all, while others cross to the enemy's country. Howarth admits that Derek Walcott fits neither category; Geoffrey Hill is amongst those not admitted to the discussion at all.

The first chapter, 'Inside andOutside Modernism', is the most ambitious in scope. It explores the sources of early twentieth century poetics, as Howarth traces two lines of descent from Romanticism to the early twentieth century, moving through a legion of poets and philosophers, including Wordsworth, Coleridge, Schiller, Schlegel, T. E. Hulme, Bergson, Pound and Eliot. This is a vivid picture of the early twentieth century poetic scene. TheGreatWar is underway, Harold Munro is publishing anthologies of Georgian poets, Pound is impetuous about Imagism, Eliot is undergoing self-formation. Words such as insincerity, sincere, authentic, and rhetoric shoot from all parties. 'Such similarities of argument only underscore the difference in the actual poetry, of course', but Howarth gives hardly any attention to the poetry itself.

The essential division that Howarth establishes in the first chapter, anticipating the split between modernists and non-modernists, is between Coleridge and Wordsworth. For Howarth, the formal features of Wordsworth's poetry register the blows and buffets of the world, and the coercions of language. Howarth demonstrates this by a reading of Wordsworth's 'Simon Lee', finding a self-critique of its sentimental notions of charity in its final off-rhyme. As a contrast to Wordsworth, he quotes Schiller, who influenced Coleridge's aesthetic theories: 'True art is thoroughly "assimilated" into unity, and because unified, free from external determination'. But Coleridge's poems often strain against the currents of life. Coleridge, as well as Wordsworth, wrote poems whose formal features critique their subject matter, and which grapple with an imperfect medium. In the final section of the chapter, where Howarth eloquently articulates poetry's continuity with the complexities and contingencies of the world, he seems to believe that what he says is true for non-modernist poets only: 'To think about the moments when the sounds and rhythms of a poem's structure run, if ever so gently, counter to its ostensible content...