I won't push it David, it's not that important, but Paris was the focal point, I don't see how anyone can argue with that really, or even why they would want to. Spain, Russia, wherever, their eyes were on Paris. It was not a French thing, it was an international thing, yes, but it sat in the middle of old empires, except ours.

Tim A.

On 30 Aug 2009, at 14:54, David Bircumshaw wrote:

It's odd, you know, but I was raised in the understanding that the most important or 'significant' poetry in European languages in the first half of the twentieth century was in Spanish (American and Iberian) and Russian (all sorts of nationalities). With the Poles and the Greeks next in line. People like Bowra and J.M.Cohen and Seymour-Smith taught me that in their writings, and that English language modernist poetry (British or US or whatever) was a somewhat lesser matter.

2009/8/30 Tim Allen <[log in to unmask]>
Well, ummm, it depends on what you mean by accident, and what you mean by nationality.
There are some well documented reasons why France became such an early modernist hothouse, and it is not too difficult to understand why the US, a young country that embraced the new, followed on tentatively until after WW1 when it took over. The US was this strange creature where the backward and the forward existed side by side - still is I suppose.

Tim A.


On 30 Aug 2009, at 12:36, Jeffrey Side wrote:

I agree. I don’t think nationality, per se, has anything to do with it. It
is just an accident of history that modernism developed from the French
and US poets.



--
David Bircumshaw
"A window./Big enough to hold screams/
You say are poems" - DMeltzer
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