Abstract
Currently taking place in Britain is a remarkable flourishing of poetic activity, in which the advances of modernism—long treated by the British literary mainstream as a historical aberration, thankfully now defunct—are being embraced anew and pursued in thrilling, and thrillingly unpredictable, directions. It is to celebrate and interrogate this flourishing that we have assembled the essays that make up Modernist Legacies. However, Modernist Legacies does not simply comment upon this flourishing; acting as a forum in which critics and practitioners debate, harangue, proselytize, and provoke, it also seeks to embody it. It follows from this that Modernist Legacies makes no claim to be a definitive or exhaustive account of the landscape of contemporary practice in Britain, either in that the topics it treats are exhaustive of the work currently being done, or in that it treats its topics exhaustively. Rather, it offers a cross-section of current activity, myriad points of entry into a body of work characterized by its sheer diversity.
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Notes
James Acheson and Romana Huk, Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Practice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 1.
John Wilkinson The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2007), 95.
Charles Bernstein, “Leaking Truth: British Poetry in the ‘90s,” Sulfur 14 (1994): 204–212, 206.
Richard Price, “Basil Bunting and the Problem of Patronage,” in The Star You Steer by: Basil Bunting and British Modernism, ed. James McGonigal and Richard Price (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 98–108, (101).
Donald Davie, “The Varsity Match,” Poetry Nation 2 (1973): 72–80, 74.
Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 203.
Donald Davie Purity of Diction in English Verse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 99.
Ezra Pound The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941 (New York: New Directions, 1971), 124.
Rod Mengham Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2004), xviii.
Peter Barry The Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle for Earls Court (Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2006), 7–8.
Carrie Etter Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (Exeter: Shearsman, 2010), 11.
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© 2015 Abigail Lang and David Nowell Smith
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Smith, D.N., Lang, A. (2015). Introduction. In: Lang, A., Smith, D.N. (eds) Modernist Legacies. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488756_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137488756_1
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