Quantum Poetics

• List of illustrations; Notes on references; Introduction; Part I. Yeats's Waves: 1. Yeats's figures as reflections in water; 2. Yeats and the avant-garde; 3. The theme of homunculus: Yeats and Wyndham Lewis; 4. Yeats and the sublime; Part II. Pound's Particles: 5. Minima (elementary particles of modernist poetry); 6. Symbol (Yeats's precursor to Pound's image); 7. The decay of symbols; 8. Things in themselves (Pound's anti-allegorism); 9. Image (Kandinsky, Brancusi, Tchelitchew); 10. Units of rhythm (Antheil); 11. Ideogram; 12. Vortex; 13. The decay of vortices; 14. The null set (Hugh Selwyn Mauberley); Part III. Eliot's Waves: 15. Monadological metaphors in Eliot's early work; 16. Narratives tied in knots; 17. Christ-particles in Eliot's late work (relief form the waves); Bibliography; Index.

'Quantum Poetics offers a better context in which to make sense of Modernism's obsessive need to isolate elementary literary units: 'classicism', for example, might explain the temperament that produced the vortex, but reference to science explains the force and motion of the vortex itself. Best of all, Albright gives us a new way to understand how Modernism's various characteristic ambivalences resolve themselves.' Journal of English and Germanic Philology