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The Yale Journal of Criticism 13.1 (2000) 1-2



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Introduction

Pocket Epics: British Poetry After Modernism

Nigel Alderman


This issue of The Yale Journal of Criticism is devoted to British poetry written since 1945, and it takes its bearings from the belief that in the wake of the formal and poetic experimentations of high modernism, British poetry produced a diverse and still largely unexamined genre of minor or local epics, works positioned between modernism and postmodernism and in the political tension between the canonical ambitions of their predecessors and the particular demands of their own historical geographies. Throughout Britain, poetry over the decades after the publication of The Waste Land and the early Cantos increasingly took this ambivalence as a point of origin and a formal dilemma, attempting to devise, in a phrase of Roy Fisher's that recurs throughout these essays, "a poem which gains its effects by the superimposition of landscape upon landscape rather than rhythm upon rhythm." This mode of writing begins with poems such as Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, W. H. Auden's The Orators, David Jones's The Anathemata, and Basil Bunting's Briggflatts, poems which self-reflexively situate themselves in the fissures of poetic genre. They are not unfinished, ever-expanding structures like Pound's Cantos; they are not lyric sequences; they don't have the organizing mythic narrative of Eliot's The Waste Land; and they refuse at crucial moments the global expansion described by Franco Moretti's term "modern epic." Nevertheless, they clearly have epic ambitions and tendencies: they certainly seek to tell, in Pound's use of Kipling's phrase (so central to Michael Bernstein's work), the "tale of the tribe." 1 This impulse, however, is strictly delimited, partly because their insistence on the local refuses the imperialist expansion of the epic, and partly because their particular locales preclude clear nationalist identity. In literary-historical terms they are uncomfortably located in the gap between modernism and postmodernism, and they emerge from regional sites and contexts that refuse to conform to the national and postcolonial paradigms of contemporary theorizing.

The pocket epic seems a useful heuristic term, simultaneously suggesting an ambitious project of mapping some form of totality and its deliberate restriction. 2 Pocket implies a position secreted within the folds of the major canonical economy of the epic and perhaps hints at some form of obdurate resistance. The term offers itself not in a taxonomic or positivist sense, but rather as a tacking point around which various concerns--poetic and political, formal and thematic, literary and historical--coalesce. The essays as a whole register these concerns as a series of related tensions: between the grandiose projects of high modernism and the diminished [End Page 1] anti-modernism for which the Movement can stand as the marker; between the Poundian line as a basic formal unit and the demands of English syntax; between the lyric and longer narrative forms; between individual subjectivity and some larger social collective; between a hegemonic history and forgotten histories; between the emerging devolution of various regional and national sites and the residual power of an imperial center; between a desire for some new local center and a belief in the productivity of the periphery; between a global economy and a local one. 3 In other words, this issue of The Yale Journal of Criticism does not suggest a single taxonomic genre or tradition, but rather a particular (and continuing) historical-literary situation that has to be navigated by any poet in the archipelago who seeks to produce a longer poem that, in Pound's phrase, "includes history." Each of the essays in turn participates in this moment, and taken together they provide eleven different but related ways of looking at British poetry after modernism.

We hope this issue takes its place in the current challenge to the received opinion that British poetry is a "diminished thing," refusing to take the pressure of modernism and limiting itself to the well-made lyric. 4 Aware of all the poets and poems...

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