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A Survey of Modernist Poetry

Laura Riding and Robert Graves

Edited by Patrick McGuinness and Charles Mundye

Cover Picture of A Survey of Modernist Poetry
Imprint: Lives and Letters
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (258 pages)
(Pub. Sep 2002)
9781857545685
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Authors
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • The books paired here make up the first collaborative study of 'Modernist' poetry by two of the twentieth century's most important and original poets. In A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Laura Riding and Robert Graves produce a contemporary reaction to the early experimentation of writers such as Eliot, Pound and e.e.cummings. Their close critical readings are deployed, along the way, in an engagement with Shakespeare's punctuation, issues of populism and elitism and an attempt to define - perhaps to invent - that elusive creature known as 'the common reader'.

    The Survey contains groundbreaking readings of modern poems and movements and is an illuminating and polemical account of the beginnings of modernism. It is an important resource but also a valuable critical text in the reception and development of modernist poetry in English. A Pamphlet Against Anthologies is an entertaining tirade against the perceived iniquities of the trade anthology. A statement of poetic integrity, it poses awkward questions about the production and consumption of art in the mass markets of twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
    Laura Riding
    Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) is among the most influential yet misread writers of the twentieth century. She renounced poetry after her Collected Poems in 1938, a body of work which left its mark upon Auden, Ashbery and many others. Her collaborations and her own essays, stories and poems are central to ... read more
    Robert Graves
    Robert Graves (1895-1985), poet, classical scholar, novelist, and critic, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. Athough he produced over 100 books he is perhaps best known for the novel I, Claudius (1934), The White Goddess (1948) and Greek Myths (1955). Robert Graves was born in Wimbledon, South ... read more
    Patrick McGuinness
    Patrick McGuinness was born in 1968 in Tunisia. In 1998 he won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry from the Society of Authors and his work has appeared in the Independent, PN Review, Poetry Wales, Leviathan and other journals and magazines, as well as the anthology New Poetries ... read more
    Awards won by Patrick McGuinness Long-listed, 2011 Wales Book of the Year, English Language Category in The Western Mail (Jilted City)
    Praise for Patrick McGuinness 'When T.E. Hulme was killed in Flanders in 1917, he was known to a few people as a brilliant talker, a brilliant amateur of metaphysics, and the author of two or three of the most beautiful poems in the English language... he appears as the forerunner of a new attitude of mind...'
    T.S. Eliot, The Criterion, 1924
    'There is a huge amount to savor, learn from and enjoy here. Anyone with pretensions to know British writing of the 1940s should read it.'
    Paul St John Mackintosh, TeleRead
    'Patrick McGuinness has constructed a rough guide to a lonely planet, full of unquenchable cultural curiosity and irresistible ironies... Alive to every undulation of the linguistic landscapes in which he moves, McGuinness’s poems often pivot on the cross-cultural possibilities of a single isolated word.'
    New Welsh Review
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