Modernist War Poetry

Dr Jamie Wood is an independent scholar focused on Anglo-American literary modernism between 1910 and 1950. He is particularly interested in the genealogy of high modernist aesthetics, the trauma of modernity and the interconnection between literature and finance capitalism. He is the author of several journal articles published in Biography (2018), College Literature (2018), Modernist Cultures (2015) and Modernism/modernity (2010), and of articles in edited collections published or forthcoming by Edinburgh University, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and the Société Française. He has written extensively on the work of Wyndham Lewis and George Orwell, and in 2014 was the winner of the British Association of Modernist Studies Essay Prize for work on F.T. Marinetti’s visit to London in 1910.

• TimelinesAcknowledgmentsIntroductionThe problem with combat gnosticismModernisms and the warCombat gnosticism as threat Argument, structure, scope1. Early Modernist Responses to Combatant Poetry: 1914–Spring 1915Modernist poetics on the eve of warRidicule and the new patriotic verseTheorising afterwardnessThe first modernist war poetries: D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Wallace Stevens, W.B. YeatsEzra Pound’s Cathay: the poem in nature2. Reassessing Disaster: 1915Rupert Brooke, modernist piñataMay Sinclair’s combatant impressionImagining trenches at St. Eloi: T.E. Hulme/Ezra PoundGnosis and a model of shockDissenting modernisms: Mina Loy, H.D.3. The Three Lives of Gnosticism: 1916–Summer 1917One, combat gnosticism: Henri Barbusse, C.R.W. Nevinson, Isaac RosenbergThe gnosticism of Gertrude SteinThe ends of the ImageTwo, combat agnosticism: H.D. and Edward ThomasModernist doubtsThree, non-combat gnosticism: Wallace Stevens and citation4. An Emergent Critique of War Experience: Autumn 1917–Spring 1919Transmutations into poetryT.S. Eliot’s war, F.H. Bradley’s legacyTom, Maurice and the corridor into The Waste LandJohn Middleton Murry’s critique of crying aloudRedefining age and wisdom, countering The New Elizabethans5. The Form and Practice of Modernist Distaste: Summer–Autumn 1919America and the war in PoetryA counter verse of the present moment‘All Life in a Life’ and T.S. Eliot’s racial slurA theory of non-combat gnosticism: ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’Impersonality in practice: ‘Gerontion’ConclusionBibliographyIndex

This book is literary scholarship at its very best. The research is immaculate, the thinking profound and the style masterly. It magnificently illustrates developing poetic thought in relation to the First World War, experience and the imagination, guiding the reader authoritatively through the months of 1914 to 1920 to produce a brilliant micro-literary history.