The vein of experimental love poetry examined in this project takes advantage of the friction generated by charging both form and content with innovation. The troubled relationship between sex and power is knit directly into the long and dynamic history of love poetry, but there has yet to be a published monograph on the modernist love poem and its implications for literary history. This dissertation fills a major gap in scholarship and speaks to the broader social concerns addressed by public discourse on sex, sexuality, and eros. The body of modernist love poetry includes allusions to traditional love poetry—a tradition in lyric extending from the earliest written poems and culminating in nineteenth-century sentimentality—as well as explicit erotic content, satire, polemic, violence, and anxiety. It

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"The Bellows / of Experience": The Modernist Love Poem and Its Legacy

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Dirty Modernism: Ecological Objects in American Poetry

Anthologizing modernism: New verse anthologies, 1913-53

This dissertation is a critical re-assessment of Imagism and Vorticism in relation to the European avant-garde, which both movements aspired towards in their reactions against the contemporary English arts and letters. I explore the implementation of such aspirations in the English arts by chronicling the complex relationship between the English movements and Cubism, the Parisian avant-garde, Italian Futurism and German Expressionism. The thesis argues that Imagism and Vorticism simultaneously modelled themselves on and reacted against their Continental counterparts, in terms of aesthetic concepts, artistic techniques and promotional tactics in creating a modern art.

As movements with contributors of different nationalities and working in different artistic media, including poetry, painting and sculpture, there necessarily exists many aesthetic varieties within Imagism and Vorticism apart from foundational consensus shared by group members. In order to address the complexity of the groups’ make-up and the interdisciplinarity of their avant-garde aesthetics, the enquiry is made through a two-fold approach: firstly, by conducting contextual and comparative studies of significant individuals of the movements, including T. E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, to gauge their individual perspectives on literature, visual arts and aesthetic theories; secondly, by considering the heterogeneous nature of these movements and exploring the group dynamics, tensions and rivalries within the movements and with other contemporary groups.

With this dual focus, my thesis reconstructs the cultural milieu through the artists’ works and correspondence, as well as the circulation network of little magazines, publicity and patronage, in order to reconcile the aesthetic and social contexts of Imagism and Vorticism, both in England and beyond. Ultimately, my thesis provides a more comprehensive analysis of the evolution of the English movements’ aesthetics, their relationship with the European avant-garde, and their impact on artistic and literary experimentation in modernist English literature and visual arts.

Aesthetics of experiment : Imagism, Vorticism and the European avant-garde

In June 2011 ACSIS arranged its fourth biennial conference on cultural research, this time on the subject “Current Issues in European Cultural Studies”. The conference provided an updated inventory ...

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Current Issues in European Cultural Studies, June 15–17, Norrköping, Sweden 2011

Ezra Pound termed a new strain in Post-Modernist poetry 'Logopoeia - the dance of the intellect among words', and in this collection of essays, Marjorie Perloff examines this new strain in poetics. These essays focus on the poetry of Swinburne, Yeats, Stevens, Joyce, Williams, Cage, and Pound, among others. Through her analyses, the author traces a new direction in Post-Modernist poetry to Pound, whose legacy is present throughout this volume, even in essays not specifically devoted to him. Professor Perloff finds that the Symbolist elements that Yeats rejected - fragments, purely metrical or visual impressions, and theoretical concepts - became increasingly important to later poets. She also argues that the Romantic and Modernist cult of the personality has given way to a denial of the authoritative ego. These developments, combined with other cultural influences which Perloff identifies, such as the art of the Italian Futurists, lead to a new strain in poetry.

Joseph G. Kronick

Papers

The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition.