the great war and modernist poetry France: the enchantments of depravity or disaster, the somewhat narcotic calm of
shockand horror, all in all the ruined and ruinous beauty that is the muse of the
mainstream tradition of modernist poetry over the long turn of the century.
It is not surprising, then, to find in Jones’s poem a kind of history-in-miniature of
literary modernism. The practices and attitudes of that now accomplished literary
tradition—discontinuous or episodic narratives, verbal textures that mix idiomatic
concision with dense allusive references, acast of dramatic characters-in-voice that
matches the range of speakers inThe Waste Land—serve inJones’s workto represent
his memory of the event that stands indeed as the signal instance of ‘The Break’,
the watershed catastrophe that marks off the old and new worlds and so provides
the ground, a more than nominal provocation, for the novelties of modernism. So
it is surprising, equally, to find that Jones’s work is really the only major modernist
poem to come out of the actual experience of combat. If this assertion might be
contested by critics who have argued for an expansion of the classificatory category
of modernism, it is still true that, at least among the established canonical male
modernists—Joyce, Pound, Lawrence, Yeats, Jones, Wyndham Lewis—only Lewis,
whose most important work was not in poetry, saw service in France (Hulme, who
died in Flanders in 1917, had written no poems since 1911). This dearth of ‘combat
modernist verse’ might be taken as one more grim statistic of war dead—how many
proto-modernist poets perished in the trenches?—but the other major modernist
poets who lived out the war in London, specifically Pound and Eliot and Yeats,
provide a coherent and revealing engagement with the cultural experience of this
moment in history. Variously in discursive and personal prose, in the technical
incentives as well as the local references of their verse, these poets record the
profound impact that this Great War had on political and cultural and literary
traditions, and so recover in deep detail the main lines of crisis and change that
define the war’s meaning in modern British history.
If the awareness these writers shared results inthe main workof poetic modernism
in English, as typified byThe Waste Land,itisperhapsbesttostartthisconsideration
with a reading ofIn Parenthesis. This work is obviously influenced by Eliot’s poem,
but conditioned equally strongly, and indeed immediately, by the reality of the
experience that establishes the main historical conditions of literary modernism. We
may then turn to a reading of the wartime writings of Pound and Eliot, who witness
the political and cultural upheaval in the British capital, marking this watershed and
assimilating its impact in the fabric of their own imaginative language. We may con-
clude by sounding the record of this same historical experience in the verse of Yeats,
who was embroiled at this moment in the struggles for Irish independence, and
attempttoassessthesignificanceofthedifferencethathisownIrishconcernsmakein
his representation of the event of this World War. We may thus provide some com-
prehensive coverage of the major verse of literary modernism in Britain and Ireland
in contact with the circumstances that provide for its timely import and resonance.