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BOOK REVIEWS vember 1927). Today, as technologically devised images become one's landscape, multitudes of "invisible humanity" one's community, Dorothy Richardson's question has evolved into present tense: "What is it doing to us?" Editors James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus have compiled an anthology of admirable usefulness. In addition to their excellent essays of introduction, they have provided appendices for further reference which include: a list of the contents of each issue of Close Up; a chronological comparison of coeval events for cultural context; notes citing relevant scholarly articles and books. One could wish for better quality in the physical book—the reproductions of stills convey no sense of the fine photographic gloss of the originals printed for Close Up in Dijon, France, by Maurice Darantiere. The oddly orange cover of the volume is mitigated, however, by a stunning shot of H.D. from a lost film, Wing Beat. Charlotte Mandel __________________ Cedar Grove, New Jersey Survey of Modern British Poetry James Persoon. Modern British Poetry, 1900-1939. New York: Twayne, 1999. 207 pp. $32.00 IN HIS PREFACE James Persoon explains that the limitations of the series for which his book is written (Twayne's Critical History of Poetry Studies) require the omission of four major modern poets: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Hardy. The first three are excluded as non-British (it would be interesting to hear the case against Yeats) and Hardy as belonging more to the nineteenth-century than to the twentieth. To his credit Persoon does not omit these four entirely, but quite rightly discusses them as powerful influences on those who remain eligible within the scope of this volume in the series. The absence of any full treatment of these major poets, however, allows Persoon to pay more attention to lesser-known poets, and, indeed, one of the virtues of this book is that it introduces readers to writers often neglected by other surveys. The exclusion of a few poets, then, creates an opportunity for the inclusion of many: Wilfrid Owen, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, D. H. Lawrence, H.D., Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Muir, Louis MacNeice, Alfred Austin, Henry Newbolt, Arthur Symons, Rudyard Kipling, Rupert Brooke, Frances Cornford, Wilfrid Gibson, W. H. Davies, Siegfried Sas485 ELT 43 : 4 2000 soon, Richard Aldington, Osbert Sitwell, Charlotte Mew, Eleanor Farjeon , Anna Wickham, David Jones, Vernon Watkins, Basil Bunting, and Hugh MacDiarmid. Persoon carries this egalitarian principle a step further by giving more or less equal attention to them all, which means that Wilfrid Gibson, say, or Charlotte Mew gets more than others pay, but also that W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas get less. Within the constraints of discussing many poets in only 178 pages of text, Persoon does very well, his typical method being to place the poet in context (a context determined by chapter or section of chapter) and then to analyze one or two poems, extracting essential qualities. The analyses are judicious and insightful. The contexts are historical, in keeping with the chronological organization of the book, but they are thematic as well, and the central theme is war, since World War I is the great historical event of the 1900-1939 period. The first two chapters deal with the prewar Georgians and Edwardians, the third chapter with the war poets, the fourth with the war's aftermath in the 1920s, and the final chapter with the approach of World War II in the 1930s. As Persoon notes in his preface, there were also conflicts of different kinds during this period: class war, war between the sexes, the struggle for Irish home rule, conflicts among artistic movements, and war between generations. These also provide contexts for the poets of the period, as do such literary periods and movements as Georgian, Edwardian, impressionism, imagism, and modernism. For the most part the subdivision of the five chapters by these secondary contexts works well, but on occasion the author encounters problems with the placement of his poets. For example, Stevie Smith appears in a section of Chapter Five titled "Women's Voices," where she belongs, and also fifteen pages later in...

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