The Poetry of Postmodernity
Anglo/American Encodings
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Dennis Brown
Literature
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Chapter
Basil Bunting: Briggflatts
Basil Bunting’s major poem Briggflatts (1966)1 was published in a cultural world still dominated by the Movement poets, despite A. Alvarez’s challenging anthology The New Poets of 1962. Quite apart from its prior...
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Vernon Watkins and R. S. Thomas
Vernon Watkins (1906–1967) and R. S. Thomas (1915-) have both expressed preoccupations of Anglo-Welsh verse in the latter half of this century. Special numbers of Poetry Wales,1 in particular, have considered the...
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Book
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R. S. Thomas’s “Amen”
R. S. Thomas’s 1986 collection, Experimenting with an Amen,1 begins with the intriguing word “and”; the poem “Formula” commences “And for the soul/in its bone tent … ” (1). If the latter phrase reminds us of Sylv...
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Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel”
Sylvia Plath’s posthumous collection Ariel1 was published in 1965 and rapidly transformed her life and life’s work into a legend which remains compelling, controversial2 and proleptically contemporaneous. She is ...
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Conclusion
R. S. Thomas’s Experimenting with an Amen carries the argument of this book virtually into the nineties — especially if a realistic reader-reception period is allowed.1 However, all but one of the poets considere...
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Geoffrey Hill’s “Mercia”
“Genesis”, the first poem in Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Poems (1985),1 constitutes one of the most apparently self-confident declarations in recent writing in English. First published in the pamphlet Fantasy Poems...
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W. H. Auden’s “Hermes”
With a typical sense of timing (and placement), W. H. Auden signed his “Under Which Lyre”1 — a commissioned poem — “Harvard, 1946”. Both the year and the placing are resonant of the beginnings of the postmodern e...
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Ted Hughes’ “Crow”
Crows1 (1970) is probably the most jarringly innovative cycle of British poems written since the Second World War. It decisively parts company with the naturalistic “empiricism” through which Hughes’ career was l...
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John Ashbery’s “Wave”
The extraordinary free-verse meditation “A Wave” (1983) is the last essai in John Ashbery’s Selected Poems of 1987.1 The evocative title can be read as a cannily ambiguous try-on: it immediately suggests oceanic ...
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Introduction
I have called this book The Poetry of Postmodernity. The situational term “postmodernity” signals a residual suspicion of the word “postmodernism” — and of its necessary relevance to poetry of the recent era. Nev...
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Allen Ginsberg’s “America”
Ginsberg’s two most celebrated poems, “Howl” and “Kaddish”, are both love songs and requiems of a kind — the first for a “buddy” (Carl Solomon) and, by extension, for a generation, the second for his mother “N...
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John Berryman’s “Henry”
In the “Dream Songs”,1 written between the mid-fifties and late sixties, Sylvia Plath’s foreshortened career (along with the careers of other such poets as Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz) ...
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Book
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Introduction
Intertextual Dynamics is a book which focuses on textual manifestations of mutual influence within the core group of English literary Modernism. In some respects, then, it constitutes quite conventional academic ...
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The First Heave
Joyce had completed most of the rewriting of his Stephen Hero1 material by the time he began corresponding with Pound. The completed Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man2 ends boldly: ‘Dublin, 1904; Trieste, 191...
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Lost in the Labyrinth
The beginning of ‘Work in Progress’1 marks Joyce’s ultimate rendezvous with history and himself: the style is almost wholly unique. If, as I suggested, Ulysses constitutes a stylistic journey — starting with a sy...
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To Announce a New Age
James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were all children of the 1880s. Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 in a south Dublin suburb; Lewis on 18 November of the same year, on board a yacht docked...
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The Great Decade
The book-publication of Ulysses1 in 1922 inaugurated the great era of literary Modernism. It also marked a major shift in the balance of power within the 1914 group. Whereas Lewis’s contribution was supreme in, s...
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These the Companions
Finnegans Wake was published in London and New York on 4 May 1939. Joyce had insisted on as early a date as possible since, as he put it in terms of his usual priorities: ‘War is going to break out, and nobody wi...
