A History of Modernist Poetry

A History of Modernist Poetry examines innovative anglophone poetries from decadence to the post-war period. The first of its three parts considers formal and contextual issues, including myth, politics, gender, and race, while the second and third parts discuss a wide range of individual poets, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, as well as key movements such as Imagism, Objectivism, and the Harlem Renaissance. This book also addresses the impact of both World Wars on experimental poetries and the crucial role of magazines in disseminating and proselytizing on behalf of poetic modernism. The collection concludes with a wide-ranging discussion of the inheritance of modernism in recent writing on both sides of the Atlantic.

1. Form in modernist poetry Fiona Green; 2. Myths and texts Michael Bell; 3. Politics and modernist poetry Michael Tratner; 4. Modernist poetry, sexuality, and gender Georgia Johnston; 5. Modernist poetry and race Timothy Yu; 6. Modernist magazines Paige Reynolds; 7. Modernism and decadence Vincent Sherry; 8. Edwardianism, Georgianism, Imagism, and Vorticism Helen Carr; 9. Early Eliot, Pound, and H. D. Miranda Hickman; 10. Yeats, modernism, and the Irish revival Gregory Castle; 11. The First World War and modernist poetry Andrew Palmer and Sally Minogue; 12. Gertrude Stein Charles Bernstein; 13. Mina Loy Sara Crangle; 14. Pound and Eliot: the years of l'entre deux guerres Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins; 15. American poetry in the 1910s and '20s: Stevens, Moore, Williams, and others Bart Eeckhout and Glen MacLeod; 16. American modernism from the 1930s to the '50s: Williams and Stevens to Black Mountain and the Beats Stephen Matterson; 17. African American modernism Mark Whalan; 18. Objectivist poets Mark Scroggins; 19. Later Eliot and Pound Jason Harding; 20. War modernism, 1918–45 Adam Piette; 21. Modernist peripheries: stony limits Eric Falci; 22. Postcolonial modernisms Jahan Ramazani; 23. Modernism after modernism Anthony Mellors.

Alex Davis is Professor of English at University College Cork. He is the author of A Broken Line: Denis Devlin and Irish Poetic Modernism (2000) and many essays in anglophone poetry from decadence to the present day. He is co-editor, with Lee M. Jenkins, of Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry (2000) and The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (2007), and, with Patricia Coughlan, of Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s (1995).
Lee M. Jenkins is Senior Lecturer of English at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author of Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order (1999), The Language of Caribbean Poetry: Boundaries of Expression (2004), and The American Lawrence (2015). Jenkins has published many articles on American literature, modernism, and Caribbean poetry, and has contributed chapters to The Black and Green Atlantic, The Cambridge Companion to British and Irish Women's Poetry, and The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry.