british poetry in the age of modernism

resemble its opposite, sophisticated modernist dissonance, since thanks to Davies’s simple, unreflective refusal to sort his ide ...

Mare’s delicate rhythmic probings of the uncanny in his hypersensitively textured verse. But for the modern reader coming to Dav ...

Davies’s images return with such frequency – the screaming bird occurs a third time in ‘A Bird’s Anger’ – that the innocuous tit ...

makes Thomas and de la Mare’s admiration for him even more puzzling, for such direct self-promotion is at odds with their own at ...

wound or sore, but on each corresponding wave of repulsion. Walking round Spitalfields, Jack London catalogued the ‘welter of ra ...

cruelty of the wardens, but when her analysis describes the dirt, it protests her incompetence (‘I can hardly describe the feeli ...

And so it seems to have done. This is not to say that the book is without emotion, only that emotions are events that happen wit ...

happened to anyone (and often does), rather than what was unique to Davies. Making no difference between the two means his life ...

rejoice in bad weather because the roads are empty.^39 The renter of a gypsy caravan ‘casts aside all conventions’ and ‘can laug ...

contraries – Thomas, Davies, Arthur Ransome and John Freeman along- side Wyndham Lewis, F. S. Flint and Douglas Goldring – indic ...

dissolute remnant’.^49 Thomas Holmes thought the tramp was harking back to ‘the life of the idle savage’.^50 The effect of these ...

Each man sat in a huddled heap, Carried to work while fast asleep. Ten cars rushed down the waterside Like lighted coffins in th ...

Such gentility does not prepare the reader for the modern directness of the blousy visitor herself, ‘big with laughter at the br ...

This, and the sardonic final ‘Next!’ in ‘The Hospital Waiting-Room’ gives the voice of the modern anyone a characteristically kn ...

The Welshman’s heaven is singing airs – No matter who feels sick and swears. For if Davies can write with such irony, then in th ...

with the sophisticated modernism of the St Ives group. Because Davies’s work will not subordinate or proportion any of its eleme ...

chapter 5 Hardy’s indifference Hardy was always meticulous about observing anniversaries, and in 1916 , on the tercentenary of S ...

unchecked. The idea that Shakespeare’s writing is as careless of its effect as the wind owes more to Romantic conceptions of gen ...

aesthetics, and particularly the Symbolist strand of it which leads towards certain versions of modernism. His supporters ever a ...

‘quivers’, like ‘pace’ two lines later, is a verb that has a stress but no underlying beat. A chastened re-reading gives the ver ...