POETRY, MODERNISM, AND AN IMPERFECT WORLD

Product description Review 'Poetry, Modernism, and an Imperfect World offers a compelling account of poetic modernism's ambivalent relationship to a fallen modernity through nuanced readings of a spectrum of canonical and lesser-known British and American poets, among them Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Edith Sitwell, and Joseph Todd Gordon Macleod. Bookended by his absorbing account of Ford's 'On Heaven' and his recuperation of Macleod's extraordinary esoteric masterpiece, The Ecliptic, Sean Pryor's exploration of 'the incompatibility of poetry and heaven' is a significant intervention in modernist studies.' Lee Jenkins, University College Cork, Ireland'Pryor's account of the poem is subtle and generative, demonstrating that the real strength of his book lies more in its close textual encounters …' Peter Nicholls, Modern Philology'An insightful meditation on modernist poetry as at once a reflection of a fallen world and an attempt to grapple with that condition through poetic forms that are by necessity doomed to fail in their endeavours, Pryor's work is remarkably clear in its argument and moving in its articulation of how and why modernist poetry recognizes its own limitations when faced with the problem of the world it inhabits, and with the problem of its own generic identity.' Matthew Levay, The Year's Work in English Studies Book Description This book shows how modernist poetry understood itself to be complicit in the social injustice and unhappiness of its time. About the Author Sean Pryor is Senior Lecturer in English in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and poetics. He is the author of W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Poetry of Paradise (2011), and co-editor of Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies (with David Trotter, not yet published). He also co-edits the journal Affirmations: Of the Modern. Read more