Myth, Language and Tradition

Book excerpt: How can poetry embrace morality through focusing on metaphrasts? What is the relation between an allummette and the alpha rhythm? How come that money has turned into a metonym of goodness? And above all is it still possible to think of the human subject as a viable category in late modernity? These are some of the questions that J. H. Prynne’s poetry deals with. “Levity of Design” voices a critique of the present-day society very much from within and demonstrates how Prynne has contrived to single-handedly overcome the impasse created by the legacy of poststructuralism. In a milieu of avant-garde linguistic experiment developed from modernist techniques of Pound and Olson, but also the early Eliot as well as Velimir Khlebnikov, and against the background of the writings of Heidegger and Adorno, these poems are demonstrated to seek a language in which the notion of man can be restituted.