Written by
Reginald P.C. Mutter Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Sussex, Brighton,
England. Editor of The History of Tom Jones. Anglo-American Modernism: Pound, Lewis,
Lawrence, and EliotFrom 1908 to 1914 there was a remarkably productive period of innovation and
experiment as novelists and poets undertook, in anthologies and magazines, to challenge the literary
conventions not just of the recent past but of the entire postRomantic era. For a brief moment, London,
which up to that point had been culturally one of the dullest of the European capitals, boasted an avantgarde
to rival those of Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, even if its leading personality,
Ezra Pound, and many of its most notable figures were American.
The spirit of Modernisma radical and utopian spirit stimulated by new ideas in
anthropology, psychology, philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis—was in the air, expressed rather mutedly by the pastoral and often anti-Modern poets of the Georgian
movement (1912-22; see Georgian poetry) and more authentically by the English and American poets
of the Imagist movement, to which Pound first drew attention in Ripostes (1912), a volume of his own
poetry, and in Des Imagistes (1914), an anthology. Prominent among the Imagists were the English poets
T.E. Hulme, F.S. Flint, and Richard Aldington and the Americans Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and Amy Lowell.
Reacting against what they considered to be an exhausted poetic tradition, the Imagists
wanted to refine the language of poetry in order to make it a vehicle not for pastoral
sentiment or imperialistic rhetoric but for the exact description and evocation of mood.
To this end they experimented with free or irregular verse and made the image their
principal instrument. In contrast to the leisurely Georgians, they worked with brief and economical forms.
Meanwhile, painters and sculptors, grouped together by the painter and writer Wyndham
Lewis under the banner of Vorticism, combined the abstract art of the Cubists with the
example of the Italian Futurists who conveyed in their painting, sculpture, and literature
the new sensations of movement and scale associated with modern developments such as
automobiles and airplanes. With the typographically arresting Blast: Review of the Great
English Vortex (two editions, 1914 and 1915) Vorticism found its polemical mouthpiece
and in Lewis, its editor, its most active propagandist and accomplished literary exponent.
His experimental play Enemy of the Stars, published in Blast in 1914, and his experimental
novel Tarr (1918) can still surprise with their violent exuberance.
World War I brought this first period of the Modernist revolution to an end and, while not
destroying its radical and utopian impulse, made the Anglo-American Modernists all too
aware of the gulf between their ideals and the chaos of the present. Novelists and poets
parodied received forms and styles, in their view made redundant by the immensity and
horror of the war, but, as can be seen most clearly in Pound’s angry and satirical Hugh
Selwyn Mauberley (1920), with a note of anguish and with the wish that writers might
again make form and style the bearers of authentic meanings.
In his two most innovative novels, The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), D.H.
Lawrence traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization in his view only too
eager to participate in the mass slaughter of the war—to the effects of industrialization
upon the human psyche. Yet as he rejected the conventions of the fictional tradition,
which he had used to brilliant effect in his deeply felt autobiographical novel of
working-class family life, Sons and Lovers (1913), he drew upon myth and symbol to
hold out the hope that individual and collective rebirth could come through human
intensity and passion.
On the other hand, the poet and playwright T.S. Eliot, another American resident in
London, in his most innovative poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and
The Waste Land (1922), traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization that,
on the evidence of the war, preferred death or death-in-life to life—to the spiritual
emptiness and rootlessness of modern existence. As he rejected the conventions of the
poetic tradition, Eliot, like Lawrence, drew upon myth and symbol to hold out the hope
of individual and collective rebirth, but he differed sharply from Lawrence by supposing
that rebirth could come through self-denial and self-abnegation. Even so, their satirical
intensity, no less than the seriousness and scope of their analyses of the failings of a
civilization that had voluntarily entered upon the First World War, ensured that Lawrence
and Eliot became the leading and most authoritative figures of Anglo-American
Modernism in England in the whole of the postwar period.
During the 1920s Lawrence (who had left England in 1919) and Eliot began to develop
viewpoints at odds with the reputations they had established through their early work. In
Kangaroo (1923) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lawrence revealed the attraction to
him of charismatic, masculine leadership, while, in For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style
and Order (1928), Eliot (whose influence as a literary critic now rivaled his influence as a
poet) announced that he was a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics and
anglo-catholic in religion” and committed himself to hierarchy and order. Elitist and
paternalistic, they did not, however, adopt the extreme positions of Pound (who left
England in 1920 and settled permanently in Italy in 1925) or Lewis. Drawing upon the
ideas of the left and of the right, Pound and Lewis dismissed democracy as a sham and
argued that economic and ideological manipulation was the dominant factor. For some,
the antidemocratic views of the Anglo-American Modernists simply made explicit the
reactionary tendencies inherent in the movement from its beginning; for others, they
came from a tragic loss of balance occasioned by World War I. This issue is a complex
one, and judgments upon the literary merit and political status of Pound’s ambitious
but immensely difficult Imagist epic The Cantos (1917–70) and Lewis’s powerful
sequence of politico-theological novels The Human Age (The Childermass, 1928;
Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, both 1955) are sharply divided.
Celtic Modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Jones, and MacDiarmid
Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot were the principal male figures of Anglo-American Modernism, but important contributions also were made by the Irish poet and
playwright William Butler Yeats and the Irish novelist James Joyce. By virtue of nationality,
residence, and, in Yeats’s case, an unjust reputation as a poet still steeped in Celtic mythology, they
had less immediate impact upon the British literary intelligentsia in the late 1910s and early 1920s than
Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot, although by the mid1920s their influence had become direct and
substantial. Many critics today argue that Yeats’s work as a poet and Joyce’s work as a novelist are
the most important Modernist achievements of the period.
In his early verse and drama, Yeats, who had been influenced as a young man by the
Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite movements, evoked a legendary and supernatural Ireland
in language that was often vague and grandiloquent. As an adherent of the cause of Irish
nationalism, he had hoped to instill pride in the Irish past. The poetry of The Green
Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914), however, was marked not only by a more
concrete and colloquial style but also by a growing isolation from the nationalist
movement, for Yeats celebrated an aristocratic Ireland epitomized for him by the family
and country house of his friend and patron, Lady Gregory.
The grandeur of his mature reflective poetry in The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), Michael
Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), and The Winding Stair (1929) derived
in large measure from the way in which (caught up by the violent discords of
contemporary Irish history) he accepted the fact that his idealized Ireland was illusory.
At its best his mature style combined passion and precision with powerful symbol, strong
rhythm, and lucid diction; and even though his poetry often touched upon public themes
, he never ceased to reflect upon the Romantic themes of creativity, selfhood, and the
individual’s relationship to nature, time, and history.
Joyce, who spent his adult life on the continent of Europe, expressed in his fiction his
sense of the limits and possibilities of the Ireland he had left behind. In his collection of
short stories, Dubliners (1914), and his largely autobiographical novel A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man (1916), he described in fiction at once realist and symbolist the
individual cost of the sexual and imaginative oppressiveness of life in Ireland. As if by
provocative contrast, his panoramic novel of urban life, Ulysses (1922), was sexually frank
and imaginatively profuse. (Copies of the first edition were burned by the New York
postal authorities, and British customs officials seized the second edition in 1923.)
Employing extraordinary formal and linguistic inventiveness, including the
stream-of-consciousness method, Joyce depicted the experiences and the fantasies of
various men and women in Dublin on a summer’s day in June 1904. Yet his purpose was
not simply documentary, for he drew upon an encyclopaedic range of European
literature to stress the rich universality of life buried beneath the provincialism of
pre-independence Dublin, in 1904 a city still within the British Empire. In his even more
experimental Finnegans Wake (1939), extracts of which had already appeared as Work in
Progress from 1928 to 1937, Joyce’s commitment to cultural universality became
absolute. By means of a strange, polyglot idiom of puns and portmanteau words, he not
only explored the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious but also
suggested that the languages and myths of Ireland were interwoven with the languages
and myths of many other cultures.
The example of Joyce’s experimentalism was followed by the Anglo-Welsh poet David
Jones and by the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (pseudonym of Christopher Murray
Grieve). Whereas Jones concerned himself, in his complex and allusive poetry and prose,
with the Celtic, Saxon, Roman, and Christian roots of Great Britain, MacDiarmid sought
not only to recover what he considered to be an authentically Scottish culture but also to
establish, as in his In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), the truly cosmopolitan nature of
Celtic consciousness and achievement. MacDiarmid’s masterpiece in the vernacular, A
Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926), helped to inspire the Scottish renaissance of the
1920s and ’30s.
For more, please see :https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature/The-literature-of-World-War-II-1939-45