Well, whatever you think of him, Eliot was very obviously 'Britain's', a
large rocky mass, with topsoil, off the coast of Europe, 'greatest
modernist poet'. There are also people like MacDiarmid and David Jones. It's
an embarrasing fact, but the early centre of modernist in English poetry was
as much Britain as the USA. True, there were as an overwhelmingly
conservative middlebrow readership, but that was in both countries, and it
still applies today, with fresh paint, as it were.
Couple of stray facts - in the House of Lords in the 1920s there was a
debate on the poor state of contemporary English poetry - Eliot's 'The Waste
Land' excepted. John Ashbery's significant early poetic guide: Nicholas
Moore.
On 17 March 2011 14:35, Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 'Bunting was Britain’s greatest Modernist poet (by some way, although
> admittedly the field isn’t large) and yet he is slipping away from us.'
>
> But then he is also a major Modernist poet, not just in Britain, & over in
> North America his, admittedly small during his lifetime, readership did
> recognize that.
>
> One of the ones to re-read.
>
> Doug
> On 2011-03-17, at 2:05 AM, Max Richards wrote:
>
> > 7172959.ece
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
>
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>
> Just a late night pilgrim
> Looking for redemption in the underground.
> Lord, won't you help a late night pilgrim
> When the morning comes around.
>
> Tift Merritt
>
--
David Joseph Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet
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