I

‘But all this beauty is exactly what does not exist’, says the creature in Kafka’s ‘Der Bau’, ‘and I must get to work’.Footnote ¹ The creature has been speculating about the form his burrow could have taken, the happiness he could have had, and now he resolves to work on the burrow again, to implement another plan and so attempt another form of happiness. The creature’s resolution pivots from a contrast between the world he can imagine and the world as it is, to a contrast between the world as it is and the world he can make. Probably he cannot make a burrow as beautiful as the burrow he can imagine, though they both oppose the state of things, and possibly such beauty is only ever what does not exist. Possibly the thought of such beauty is oppressive. At the beginning of the story the creature had seemed pleased: ‘I have established my burrow, and it seems to be a success.’Footnote ² But that beauty exceeds this success, and he must get to work.

Imagine the creature’s resolution as a motto for the great labours of modernity, aesthetic and political, from modernism to socialism: the tremendous effort to get to work because of what exists. Kafka’s creature must work precisely with what exists, including the burrow he has made for himself, and the burden of that work is part of what makes the present world ugly and unhappy. But the burrow he creates and recreates, a work in perpetual progress, is a refuge from the world which proves no refuge at all. It offers an allegory for the isolations and anxieties of modern life, and for a labour of thinking which can never rest, which incessantly dissatisfies. The burrow seems an allegory for Kafka’s story too, and more broadly for the work of art: a part of the world which promises a refuge from that world. The creature’s resolution is a model for the projects of modernity in this, that with a simple enigmatic conjunction (‘and’) it holds together art and the world, imagination and work. These oppositions do not coincide, for art means both imagination and work, and so does the world which art opposes. The friction between the oppositions generates the energy, the compulsion, the ‘must’. Even art fails the beauty which does not exist, or not yet.

It seems to me that modernism could not but resolve to redeem or transform a new world of ugliness, suffering, and injustice, and at the same time reflect on its failure or its inability to do so. In 1929, looking back on the renaissance which had promised so much, and having helped to edit the Little Review for more than a decade, Jane Heap remarked that the ‘actual situation of art today is not a very important or adult concern’.Footnote ³ ‘Art is not the highest aim of man’, she says; ‘it is interesting only as a pronounced symptom of an ailing and aimless society’. Heap speaks without melodrama of ‘the passing of the arts’; the transformations required today are just ‘too big a job for art’. Others believed that those very transformations would eliminate the need for art. If modernist aesthetics were the symptom of a ‘historically unstable form of society and an undecided epoch, in which drastically variable futures were lived as immediately possible – among them, saliently but not exclusively, socialist revolution’Footnote ⁴ – then the advent of one or more of those futures promised not just the passing of modernism, but the passing of the aesthetic. Were life ‘ever to be ordered within the perfect state’, Nietzsche prophesied, ‘there would no longer exist in the present any motive whatever for poetry and fiction’.Footnote ⁵

This book is about modernism as the art of an imperfect or fallen world, and modernity as a world in which art is imperfect or fallen. Most of all, this book is about poetry. I want to argue that modernist poetry responds to these dilemmas with power and insight when it understands itself as a fallen art in a fallen world. The poems I read here bring their complicity to self-consciousness; they present their complicity and implicate poetry as such. They do so by confessing their participation in some other compromised category, as for instance when The Waste Land (1922) represents the ruin of civilisation and represents itself as a product of civilisation, or when Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923, 1925) represents learning language as a fall into the semiotic, and so damns itself for using language. More importantly, these poems do so by implicating in that world of ugliness, suffering, and injustice precisely what distinguishes them from short stories, philosophical treatises, political speeches, and casual conversations: the verbal devices, cultural expectations, and aesthetic values which make them poetry. For these poems, whatever hope, happiness, or consolation poetry offers, poetry is also and as a consequence wretched, unhappy, and unconsoling.

Yet Matthew Arnold hoped that poetry could save us,Footnote ⁶ and more recent theorists sometimes call poetry ‘a form of utopia’, since poetry ‘invents within language new ways of being with oneself, others, and the world’.Footnote ⁷ Whether in the poems of today or of the past, some critics find a poetics ‘capable of birthing a new, and newly redemptive, culture’.Footnote ⁸ Poetry’s ‘complex testing operations’ represent ‘an anxious utopianism’,Footnote ⁹ or a particular poetic movement, such as Objectivism, is driven by an ‘aesthetic-political utopian impulse’.Footnote ¹⁰ If this is true for the poems I discuss, it is only because they know they cannot redeem themselves and cannot redeem the world. Their promise is negative. Writing in the Dial in 1920, Maxwell Bodenheim called the poet ‘brilliantly futile’, even as she makes a ‘daring attempt to show men the potentialities which forever slumber within them’.Footnote ¹¹ Bodenheim’s ‘forever’ forecloses utopia; his ‘futile’ makes it possible. Although art ‘is compelled toward absolute negativity’, compelled to oppose the fallen world, ‘it is precisely by virtue of this negativity that it is not absolutely negative’.Footnote ¹² But it must be unremittingly negative, even towards itself, and even the poems I have chosen probably fail that imperative. I do not therefore make the sociological argument that, despite appearances, poetry serves capital or power or the existing state of things. Art is social, says Adorno, it participates in the social world,

The autonomy is complicit. Modernist works engage with their social world through ‘forms of relative autonomy’, contingent upon and compromised by their historical situation.Footnote ¹⁴ ‘The detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant’, and ‘the only advantage of the former is insight into his entanglement’.Footnote ¹⁵

So certain modernist poems bring their complicity to self-consciousness, and they do so by implicating poetry in the ‘fallen society’ of modernity,Footnote ¹⁶ ‘the fallen world of the here and now’.Footnote ¹⁷ The features which, for these poems, distinguish the art of poetry, and on which my readings focus, are sometimes technical and sometimes conceptual. They range from lineation to the desire for every element or aspect of a poem to be necessary and significant. But no criterion for poetry is secure or binding, and in the first decades of the twentieth century, every criterion was contested. ‘If we speak of a work like the Orlando Furioso as a poem’, reasoned Richard Aldington in 1920, ‘can we deny that praise to a work like Du Côté de Chez Swann, which contains beauties, perceptions, and thoughts of which Ariosto was incapable?’Footnote ¹⁸ Metre and rhyme may define verse, or may have defined it once upon a time, but they do not define poetry. Technical distinctions thus seem to yield to conceptual identities. ‘Even if you make poetry a matter of verbal harmony’, Aldington continues, ‘there are in M. Proust’s book finer cadences, more lovely conjunctions of sound, more original rhythms’.Footnote ¹⁹ And yet Aldington derives even these criteria from works categorised by other criteria. He cannot call Du Côté de Chez Swann (1913) a poem without thinking of Orlando Furioso.

Many other modernists sought to define the matter of poetry, and the way that poetry matters or no longer matters, and they did so in many other ways. The problem remained a source of fascination, a spur to experiment, and the cause of some anxiety; I shall return to it repeatedly. The situation of poetry, for modernism, was one of acute crisis. ‘Modern civilization seems to demand that the poet should justify himself not only by writing poems’, observe Laura Riding and Robert Graves, ‘but furthermore by proving with each poem the contemporary legitimacy of poetry itself’.Footnote ²⁰ This tension between the instance and the idea, between poems and poetry, is crucial. It means that, as Peter Nicholls puts it, ‘the exemplary modernist poem deliberately invites the question “Is it poetry?”’Footnote ²¹ Each work had to earn the name of poetry anew, as classification or evaluation. Descending to the particular, it could try to do so by employing techniques of versification. Ascending to the universal, it could try to do so by epitomising the concept of art. Yet neither those techniques nor that concept are eternal laws; they are the measures of a historical moment. In modernism, poetry opposes a necessary other at every level: prose, narrative, the novel, the world. It opposes science, religion, and capitalism. It opposes mechanical reproduction: ‘A prose kinema, not […] the “sculpture” of rhyme’, writes Ezra Pound in 1920,Footnote ²² before criticising a passage in the drafts of The Waste Land as mere ‘photography’.Footnote ²³ Given this situation, poetry vanishes in a cloudy abstraction or crumbles into that contingent set of verbal devices, cultural expectations, and aesthetic values. At every level, poetry is a refuge which proves no refuge. My argument is that modernist poetry engages powerfully with the fallen world when it reflects on its peculiar falls or failings, and so this book attends to some of those distinguishing features.

II

The labours of modernity are not separate. Both the notion that poetry is a form of utopia and the notion that poetry is complicit in an imperfect world involve aesthetic work in politics. In the first decades of the twentieth century, political work involved aesthetics, too, and it involved poetry in particular. This, like the crisis concerning the nature of the art, characterised its situation. To a surprising degree, social criticism and political comment turned to poetry in order to understand fallen modernity. So as to appreciate what is at stake when, in 1922 or 1925, a poem implicates poetry in the present state of things, I want to spend some time working through these contemporary arguments. For socialists and conservatives alike, whether in London or in New York, the problem was to decide whether poetry only imagines a beauty which can never exist, or instead makes a beauty which has not yet existed.

When A. R. Orage and Holbrook Jackson relaunched the New Age on 2 May 1907, the magazine appeared under a new subtitle: ‘An Independent Socialist Review of Politics, Literature, and Art’. The first editorial then set out the magazine’s guiding concept of socialism. Just as ‘Religion is the will of the individual towards self-perfection’, the editors declare, so socialism is ‘no less than the will of Society to perfect itself’.Footnote ²⁴ Orage and Jackson thus invert Oscar Wilde’s claim, in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891), that socialism works towards the perfection of the individual.Footnote ²⁵ (In that same first issue, Jackson calls for a cheap reissue of Wilde’s ‘important essay’ as ‘a matter of urgency’.Footnote ²⁶) But like Wilde, the editors of the New Age develop their argument by comparing socialism to religion. In order to span politics, literature, and art, the editorial paints its programme in the broadest of brush-strokes. The new magazine did address specific political and economic issues. Its very first pages treat the purpose and the fate of the British Empire, then being debated at the Colonial Conference in London; the budget recently delivered by Asquith, Chancellor of the Exchequer; and major reforms to the British Army about to be passed through Parliament. In each case, the magazine offers direct judgements and specific recommendations. ‘The Socialist objection to the army is that it is a class army’, and the only remedy is ‘to make the army national and democratic and transfer its control from a class to the whole people’.Footnote ²⁷ But the socialism of the New Age always had one eye on the stars: a beauty beyond shadowed the work being done today.

Over the next fifteen years, the New Age featured prominent articles and regular columns by Orage, Florence Farr, G. K. Chesterton, Ramiro de Maeztu, T. E. Hulme, Hilaire Belloc, and Edwin Muir.Footnote ²⁸ H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw argued vigorously against private property. Katherine Mansfield and Wyndham Lewis published short stories, F. S. Flint published poems and reviewed others’ poetry, and Pound reviewed art and music, provided countless articles on sundry other topics, and published his own poetry too. The magazine quickly found a new subtitle, becoming simply ‘A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature, and Art’. Many of its contributors set about analysing the failures of modern Britain and, more broadly, of modernity, and Orage gave space to conflicting opinions and approaches. But balancing the emphasis on modern life was a sense that life’s imperfection was older or more permanent. On 3 October 1907, in the first instalment of a series entitled ‘Towards Socialism’, Orage wrote that

Tennyson has King Arthur depart for ‘the island-valley of Avilion’,Footnote ³⁰ and the long history of such dreams of the otherworld implies that our earthly condition is fixed, but in fact Orage heralds an imminent and drastic change. Where poets had failed, socialists could succeed: ‘at last, our great men are venturing to fix their heaven upon earth. We desire, said one of them recently, that the heaven which men expect after their death shall be attained on earth during their life.’Footnote ³¹ Like Heap, Orage subordinates art to social transformation, but he lacks her disillusionment. The urgent task was twofold. It was crucial to imagine the perfection towards which society should aim, and it was crucial to imagine that perfection is possible. It was as if to say, ‘all this beauty is exactly what does not exist, and we must get to work to bring it into existence’. ‘We must kill the force in us that says we cannot become all that we desire’, Farr counselled in the same issue, ‘for that force is our evil star which turns all opportunity into grotesque failure’.Footnote ³²

Across the Atlantic, social and cultural critics in New York made comparable arguments. Take, for example, the magazine Seven Arts, founded in 1916 by James Oppenheim.Footnote ³³ Seven Arts published work by D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, Amy Lowell, and Alfred Kreymborg, and though Pound criticised the magazine’s compromise with popular taste, he did offer Oppenheim the manuscript of Ernest Fenollosa’s essay on ‘The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry’ (1919).Footnote ³⁴ Perhaps the essay seemed, as Pound suspected it would, too ‘exotic’, for it was declined. Oppenheim’s attention was turned to more immediate matters, for in the July 1917 editorial he announces ‘the coming of a new heaven and a new Earth’.Footnote ³⁵ The good news of this redemption had been ‘heard in France during the Terror’, had been ‘heard by such different spirits as Karl Marx and Nietzsche’, and had most recently resounded in revolutionary Russia: ‘we see Russia now as that hopeful chaos, that confusion of the nebula, out of which a new world shapes itself’. The February Revolution had erupted but four months earlier, and the October Revolution would soon follow. That April, caught by the fervour of epochal change and hailing Jefferson, Lincoln, and Whitman as America’s ‘national poets’, Oppenheim demands a twentieth-century successor, someone to lead the United States towards its heaven on earth: ‘A new poet must appear among us.’Footnote ³⁶

So whereas Orage envisions socialism superseding poetry, Oppenheim’s grandiloquence conflates the two. Max Eastman took a third approach during his tenure as editor of the socialist magazine the Masses, choosing to juxtapose poetry with politics as parts of a common project. Just as at the New Age, Eastman and his contributors ‘addressed a variety of issues’ beyond the strictly political and economic: ‘suffragism, free love, birth control, religion, race relations’.Footnote ³⁷ In a 1913 essay, having distinguished between genuine revolution and mere reformism, ‘between the party of the people and the parties of the people’s money’, Eastman pauses to consider the state of contemporary poetry.Footnote ³⁸ He scorns ‘the connotations and the music of ancient phrases’ and instead urges poets to ‘go down to the street, and out into the fields and quarries and among the sips [sops?] and chimneys, the smoke and glory of living reality’. Other issues of the Masses featured Eastman’s own poems, including a ballad for Wat Tyler,Footnote ³⁹ and in his 1913 critical study, Enjoyment of Poetry, Eastman proclaims the poet a ‘restorer’ and a ‘prophet’.Footnote ⁴⁰ ‘All creeds and theories serve’ the poet, he writes, for the poet imparts to us ‘the spirit of bounteous living’. But Eastman never argues that the poetry of fields and quarries will deliver revolution; instead he makes poetry one aspect of a broader social and cultural project. In a similar vein, many contributors to the Masses aligned socialism with religion or framed socialism in religious terms. The May 1912 issue featured essays on Christian charity by Will Irwin and on the temptation of Jesus by Charles P. Fagnani, professor at Union Theological Seminary. Moses is ‘the class-conscious hero of the Hebrews’, Fagnani writes, and Christ ‘the supreme class-conscious hero of humanity’: ‘Without class-consciousness we cannot be saved.’Footnote ⁴¹ So, too, in January that year the magazine’s founder, Piet Vlag, attacked the American Federation of Labor for compromising with capital. Mere ‘individualists’, its members have ‘no dream of a better world’.Footnote ⁴² Their ‘heaven is a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay for themselves’, Vlag protested, not a new earth for and through the collective. ‘What is Socialism?’ asked Frank Stuhlman in October 1911: ‘Socialism is Salvation!’Footnote ⁴³

Such conjunctions of politics, religion, and art were more than passing rhetorical ploys. At the New Age, Orage ‘promoted the need for a cultural revolution to sit alongside revolutionary political change’,Footnote ⁴⁴ and in general British socialism tended ‘to evoke the socialist future not through conventional political declarations or detailed policy formulations but through aesthetics, myth, Christian symbolism and idioms, metaphor and other forms of literary embellishment, dreams and various kinds of utopian imagining’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Many radical and progressive American writers did so, too. But these analogies and tropes introduce conceptual complications. Christianity teaches that salvation is impossible without God’s grace, however much an individual may will it, and for some writers socialism was similarly limited by our earthly condition. ‘We know that individual interests and raw temperaments will always clash’, Eastman warns in October 1916.Footnote ⁴⁶ To believe ‘that anything remotely approaching a Brotherhood of Man’, he then continues, ‘can be engendered in a race with our hereditary nature, is as utopian a dream as it is unexciting’. In the November 1907 issue of the New Age Cecil Chesterton remarks that the abolition of class would be ‘as near an approach to justice as we are likely to get in this imperfect world’.Footnote ⁴⁷ But for Orage such arguments betray an entrenched conservatism, the conviction that things ‘will never improve, and there is no salvation’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Instead, true socialism aims at nothing less than ‘the re-creation of Eden’. Seizing on this second way, Orage rises to a Pelagian proclamation: ‘Men must redeem themselves, and they must redeem the world.’ And yet in time Orage’s convictions changed. In October 1918, more than a decade after calling for a new Eden and a few weeks before the armistice, he laments the decline of the religious spirit, since religion is ‘the study and practice of perfection’, but rather than heralding perfection as an imminent future, Orage now calls it an ‘impossible and infinite aim’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Women and men must work to redeem themselves, knowing that they never will.

In this way, though these magazines’ various contributors analysed poverty, labour, class, and gender, they often addressed what Jackson called ‘the more remote and philosophic aspects of Socialism’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Hulme was no socialist, but it was in the New Age that he elaborated his opposition of romanticism and classicism, recasting Orage’s early distinction between socialism and conservatism. Classicism, Hulme explains in October 1915, means

Two months later, Orage countered that, though an insistence on original sin may be necessary, the ‘complementary doctrine of the Redemption’ was ‘equally in need of affirmation’.Footnote ⁵² Hulme believed humanity to be ‘radically imperfect’,Footnote ⁵³ while Orage urged that ‘there are no base instincts, no evil tendencies’.Footnote ⁵⁴

On the one hand, such arguments obscure pressing problems of political economy with an old theological conundrum, with appeals to an unchanging human nature. On the other hand, the recovery of old theological, mythological, and philosophical solutions was itself a symptom of the moment. These debates emerged out of well-established nineteenth-century controversies. Nietzsche, for instance, had chastised the ‘paradisiac prospect’ envisioned by socialism, its demand for the rights of ‘Man in his original goodness’.Footnote ⁵⁵ But the unprecedented catastrophe of the Great War gave these debates new urgency, as did the revolution in Russia. In February 1916 Hulme argued that pacifists foolishly rely on the goodness of human nature, confident that progress will of its own accord deliver a harmonious society. War is necessary, Hulme counters, not because it will achieve some ‘great liberation of mankind’, but ‘merely in order that bad may not get worse’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Hulme calls this a ‘quite abstract matter’, but the problem of the condition of women and men on earth was inseparable from the problems of contemporary society. The war gave the theory its concrete occasion, making its abstractions possible and valuable. The same logic allowed Hulme to herald the return to an austere and geometric aesthetic, proposing an art conscious of human limitation as the art of the new century,Footnote ⁵⁷ and it allowed Maeztu to protest that liberal democracy merely caters to humanity’s inherent hedonism.Footnote ⁵⁸ Having abandoned his early socialism, Maeztu first diagnoses the progress of civilisation as the development of self-consciousness and self-interest, and then, rather paradoxically, calls that development ‘the apple that Adam and Eve ate in the Garden of Eden’.Footnote ⁵⁹ An ahistorical condition thus figures a historical process. Maeztu laments that the ‘ideal of perfection has almost disappeared in modern men’, and deduces that this ‘is why the consciousness of original sin has also become so weak’.Footnote ⁶⁰ It is as if modernity had newly fallen from the Fall.

On the contrary, said Muir: ‘The belief in Original Sin – that was itself Man’s original sin.’Footnote ⁶¹ Muir stridently opposed Hulme and Maeztu. ‘A battle in which victory is impossible’, he complained in 1917; ‘a contest in which man has to climb continually in order not to fall lower; existence as the tread mill: that is what is meant by Original Sin’.Footnote ⁶² Later that year, Matthew Walker Robieson warned that to ‘drag the doctrine of Original Sin into politics suggests a day of humiliation in which we all in a general confession admit that we are miserable criminals’.Footnote ⁶³ The ‘modern problem’ therefore needs ‘a new solution’, Muir argues, not a reversion ‘to the old dogmas’.Footnote ⁶⁴ He blames ‘the aridity of modern life’ on familiar culprits:Footnote ⁶⁵ ‘man appears as the helpless appendage of a machine too mighty for him’,Footnote ⁶⁶ ‘Religion has dried up’,Footnote ⁶⁷ and ‘Art has decayed from an idealisation of life into a reflection of it.’ Muir ties the fate of art to the fall into modernity, but he also ties society’s hope to art’s resurrection: after religion, only art can envision society’s proper perfection. If Arnold conceives of culture as ‘the study and pursuit of perfection’,Footnote ⁶⁸ Muir proclaims that ‘in the ideal society of the future everyone will be a poet’.Footnote ⁶⁹ When Orage launched the New Age he had hoped that socialists might achieve what poets had only dreamt about. Writing in October 1921, less than a year before Orage left the magazine, Muir declares that perfection would consist in practising ‘life as an art’.Footnote ⁷⁰ He gazes from an imperfect world and its imperfect art to a heaven in which the world and art are perfected, reconciled. Still, Muir probably did not imagine life in that society to be like the poems published alongside his article. In the same issue, for example, Maurice Reckitt put new words to the tune of the old Scottish song ‘Bonnie Dundee’ and gave the refrain to a ‘Chorus (of Real Creditors)’:

Satire in support of Social Credit seems a far cry from art’s idealisation of life, but in dreaming of the ideal society Muir idealised poetry.

Seven Arts held out equally high hopes. In its inaugural issue, Romain Rolland hailed the ‘writers and thinkers of America’: ‘You must make of your culture a symphony that shall in a true way express your brotherhood of individuals, of races, of cultures banded together. You must make real the dream of an integrated and entire humanity.’Footnote ⁷² The issue’s editorial then prophesied an American renaissance, in which the arts would ‘become not only the expression of the national life but a means to its enhancement’.Footnote ⁷³ And whereas the editorials of this and other early issues featured Oppenheim’s rousing prose, those of the final three issues rhapsodised in verse. In the August 1917 editorial Oppenheim cries out for a ‘prophet of the proletariat’, apostrophising ‘holy Russia’:

Here, political idealism undoes poetic triumph or success. Indeed, the pretensions of idealistic poets and the conflation of poetry and politics were ripe for satire. In the January 1916 issue of the Masses, William Rose Benét mocks the substitution of art for action: ‘It is easy to preach Revolution’, he sings, ‘But if ever it came to an uprising of the people, / How many pale poets would stand in the leaders’ shoes?’Footnote ⁷⁵

Nevertheless, the fate of society was regularly bound to the fate of poetry. When Harold Monro launched Poetry Review, two years before the war and ten years before The Waste Land, he reflected in a preface that ‘the best poetry of the time is the poetry of despair, a cry of the lost’.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the past, however, there had ‘been periods when labour was joyful and beautiful, and the poet sang because the community required his song’. Monro’s simple conjunction, his ‘and’, makes the poetry of the present a product and an expression of life under capital: the alienation and division of labour, the ideology of the individual, and the antagonism of art and society. Monro recognised that the cry of the lost was better, now, than deceived or disingenuous cries of joy: ‘the expression of our joy has fallen into the hands of literary tinkers and pedlars, or it is muffled in the roar of cities’. But Monro dreamt of a future when poetry would again ‘become natural and keen’, when ‘there will be improvisatori again, who will lavish us their poems carelessly, like a plant its flowers’.Footnote ⁷⁷ ‘In its final majestic simplicity’, Monro concludes, poetry ‘will flower into natural and perfect language, bright with dreams and tense with meaning’. The substance of this stirring call to quills is typical: both Mallarmé and Pound dreamt of perfect languages. It is the resolution of a writer who understands what exists, including the poetry of his time, and yet who also, caught in the dialectic of that time, imagines the beauty which does not exist to involve poetry too.

III

The debates pursued in these little magazines are the background of my picture, and the figures in the foreground are the subjects of each chapter: Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, Wallace Stevens, and Joseph Macleod. Eliot did read the New Age, which published a letter by Ford in 1911.Footnote ⁷⁸ Ford’s essay on literary Impressionism appeared in Monro’s second journal, Poetry and Drama, while Eliot published essays and poems in Monro’s third journal, the Chapbook. I return to Hulme’s theories in particular in my chapter on Eliot. When Oppenheim launched Seven Arts Loy had recently arrived in New York, and when Vlag launched the Masses Stevens was working there as a lawyer, though many years later, despite describing himself as ‘headed left’, he dismissed ‘the ghastly left’ of the New Masses.Footnote ⁷⁹ But the little magazines matter because they represent common preoccupations, not because they were decisive influences on or sympathetic forums for these poets. In 1907, when Orage proclaimed from London that men must redeem themselves and the world, Loy moved from Paris to Florence and Eliot was studying at Harvard. In 1912, when Monro envisioned poetry’s final majestic simplicity, Macleod was still a boy. Moreover, only Macleod became a socialist, and many modernists drifted instead towards fascism, or hurtled towards it. Socialism and poetry were names for work which resists the state of things, but the temptation of the time was to conflate politics and art too swiftly, to force their relation, to make an analogy a programme.Footnote ⁸⁰ Still, Orage separates the impotent speculation of poets from the real work of socialists, even as he proposes their common dream, and Eastman makes poetry but one part of a broader social and cultural revolution. Not even Monro promises that poetry alone will solve the problems of political economy, only that, those problems solved, poetry will be magnificently transformed. These little magazines respond to the pressing problems of their historical moment, and they do so by thinking about the situation and the nature of poetry. This book is about the response of poetry itself: the ways in which some modernist poems, rather than idealising life or reflecting the fallen world of the here and now, probe their part in that world.

One of the most powerful aesthetic values at this time was, as we have seen, the idea of poetry as ideal. In the happy society of the future, Muir muses, everyone will be a poet. In reading Ford’s ‘On Heaven’ (1914) I examine conflicts between this ideal and the ideal of heaven, both in its orthodox theological forms and in its secular adaptations. These conflicts place Ford’s poetry in an impossible position, caught between metaphysics and materialism, leisure and labour, sincerity and satire, the poetic and the prosaic. I then argue that these contradictory imperatives bring both the poem and its heaven down to earth; poetry itself becomes fallen, incapable of marrying aesthetic success and heavenly bliss. In my reading of Stevens’s Harmonium (1923, 1931) I turn to conflicts between happy order and joyless necessity, cruel chance and blissful accidence. Here, too, modernist poetry responds to contemporary preoccupations, from anxieties about mechanical causality, through the monotony of the modern working day, to the enduring notion that the poem is ‘a world ideal in its harmony and its permanence’.Footnote ⁸¹ In a poem, that is, every element should be deliberate and significant. I show how Stevens’s first volume reworks this aesthetic value by conceiving of accidence as another form of happiness, and that this bliss thus remains beyond both the art of poetry and the mundane world of necessity and routine.

My readings of The Waste Land and Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose turn instead to prosodic techniques which, believed by some to be quintessential to poetry, were the subject of intense debate: the verse line and phonemic repetition. In order to understand how Eliot involves lineation in the wretchedness of modernity I place his work in the context of the politics of the 1920s, of the belief in original sin, and of contemporary arguments about free verse. The movement of Eliot’s lines, continually determining and negating each other, both represents and participates in the antagonisms of an ugly, unhappy, unjust world. To show that Loy’s phonemic repetition condemns poetry to this world too, I consider her work in relation to Freud’s theory of verbal wit and to her contemporaries’ theories of rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and other forms of patterned sound. Exceeding every customary justification for such devices, the sounds of her poem prove more than satiric or beautiful; they are also indifferent to the fallen world of which the poem speaks, and they thereby confess poetry’s inability to redeem that world.

Eliot’s and Loy’s poems involve prosodic techniques in a broader tensing of poetry, taut between the existing state of things and a transformed state of things, between the present and the future. This invokes an age-old cultural expectation, the idea of poetry’s powers of prophecy, to which I turn, finally, in reading Macleod’s The Ecliptic (1930). Structured according to the sequence of the zodiac, Macleod’s long poem narrates the birth, life, and death of the modern subject, fractured within and isolated without. Though the use of the zodiac implies cosmic determinism and secure foresight, in fact Macleod’s complex constellations of astrological, literary, and linguistic signs mean that each of its prognostic or revolutionary signs only ever delivers another sign. Thus, whereas Oppenheim happily uses verse to celebrate imminent revolution, Macleod’s poetry refuses to imagine a new heaven and a new earth, suggesting instead that every dream of an integrated society forestalls its realisation.

In this way, even as these various features distinguish poetry as an art, crystallising its opposition to the fallen world and promising happiness, they betray the poems and their distinction to that world. In attending to these features, my readings keep low to the ground, though I do also offer accounts of contemporary aesthetic debate, of social context, and of political history. I take this approach, not because phonemic repetition is intrinsically wretched or guilty, but because the poems themselves frame such features as complicit. This, then, is a formalist argument about poems negating themselves, and it is a historical argument about the meaning of those forms and negations at a particular time.

My book concentrates on a brief but important moment in the history of poetry in English, from about 1914 to 1930 or so. This period put poetry under a pressure different from that which, for example, drove W. B. Yeats’s struggles to emerge from the 1890s, and from that which spurred the most interesting developments of the 1930s, whether in the work of W. H. Auden or Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Madge or Louis Zukofsky. Each chapter examines a particular poem or volume. Though I sometimes make comparisons with other works from this period, from The Hollow Men (1925) to the poems of Edith Sitwell, I rarely discuss the later works of the writers in question, wonderful as are Loy’s last poems, written in the Bowery, or Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) and The Rock (1954). My chronology follows Tyrus Miller’s suggestion that something different takes hold towards the end of the 1920s, a development he calls late modernism.Footnote ⁸² David Trotter has recently repeated this argument, thinking in particular of the scientific and technological advances which emerged on the scene in or around 1927, and of their rapid impact on literary experiment.Footnote ⁸³ Even at the time, there seemed something distinctive about the poetry which was written between the beginning of the Great War and the General Strike of 1926, or between December 1910, when, as Virginia Woolf famously put it, ‘human character changed’, and the Wall Street Crash of October 1929.Footnote ⁸⁴ In 1928 Riding diagnosed the situation of her contemporaries as

This is the period or pause or crisis on which I focus.

But I should explain my unlikely choice of poets. The story I have to tell about poetry’s complicity is only one of the stories of modernism. Some writers shared the hope that poetry could herald or deliver the beauty that does not exist. Pound once poked fun at Henry Newbolt for defining poetry as ‘man’s universal longing for a world more perfect’, but that is a rather good account of The Cantos, Pound’s poem on and for a paradiso terrestre.Footnote ⁸⁶ In 1924 Lascelles Abercrombie wrote that ‘Every poem is an ideal version of the world we most profoundly desire; and that by virtue of its form.’Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet I do not mean to insist on strict divisions. The works I discuss implicate poetry in an imperfect world with particular force and rigour, but other works by other writers do so, too, and other works by Ford, Eliot, Loy, Stevens, and Macleod do not. I have also tried to balance major and minor writers, partly in order to question that distinction, and I have tried to balance writers for whom poetry was their major form with writers who worked successfully in other literary forms and other arts. Though there were long periods in which he wrote no poetry, Stevens was centrally a poet, but Loy trained as a painter, wrote novels and short stories, and constructed found-art assemblages. In 1917, while living in New York, she appeared in the Evening Sun as the epitome of the ‘modern woman’; if Loy was modern throughout her career, poetry was only one of many arts open to her, and in this her work measures the possibilities of poetry.Footnote ⁸⁸ So, too, Macleod wrote novels as well as poems, and for a time he worked as an actor, director, and playwright. Perhaps Eliot seems pre-eminently a poet, though he spent much of his career as an essayist and editor, and eventually turned from poetry to the theatre, while we tend to think of Ford as a novelist and editor who also penned memoirs and dabbled with poems. Ford sometimes encouraged that judgement. To understand the situation of poetry it can help to look from the outside.

So the differences between these figures, and the different ways in which they approached poetry, are instructive. In these chapters I read the works of an American in England, an Englishwoman on the Continent, a Scot in England, an American, and an Englishman. The poems in question were published during the heyday of modernism, or of high modernism, though it is notoriously difficult to define modernism in any secure or stable fashion. One could argue either that ‘On Heaven’ represents an early modernism alongside Cathay (1915), or that it anticipates a modernism soon to arrive, a precursor to A Draft of XVI. Cantos (1925). In either case, arguments about Ford’s and Pound’s formal experimentation would necessarily involve some biographical account of their mutual influence: the modernism would lie both in the works and in the histories of their production and reception. At the same time, one might argue that Thomas Hardy’s Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928), one of the great volumes of this period, is contemporary with but independent of modernism.Footnote ⁸⁹ For my purposes, it is helpful to think of modernism neither as a label for everything written between two dates nor as the life-long commitment of particular writers, but as an available mode or moment. Hope Mirrlees is a good example, publishing the audaciously experimental poem Paris in 1919 and never again repeating the experiment. At least according to some definitions, Macleod never published so modernist a work as The Ecliptic, moving later to a socialist and documentary poetics spliced with a prosody adapted from the Gaelic. Perhaps the path from The Waste Land to Little Gidding (1942) is, if less drastic, comparable. Works like Paris and The Ecliptic may measure modernism as well as Geography and Plays (1922) or Spring and All (1923). They represent modernist aesthetics passing through writers who do not quite belong, or not yet: poets who could like a seismograph register the impact of the earthquake, and poets whose impacts we might still register.