Late Modernist Poetics

Book excerpt: This book explores the uncanny afterlife of modernist ideals in the second half of the twentieth century. Rejecting the familiar notion that modernism dissolved during the 1930s, it argues that the fusion of rationalism and mysticism which characterizes modernist poetics was sustained long after its politics had been discredited by the events of World War Two. This wide-ranging contextual study focuses on the poetry of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Paul Celan, and J H Prynne.