Diverse modernist poems, far from advertising a capacity to prefigure utopia or save society, understand themselves to be complicit in the unhappiness and injustice of an imperfect or fallen world. Combining analysis of technical devices and aesthetic values with broader accounts of contemporary critical debates, social contexts, and political history, this book offers a formalist argument about how these poems understand themselves and their situation, and a historicist argument about the meanings of their forms. The poetry of the canonical modernists T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and Wallace Stevens is placed alongside the poetry of Ford Madox Ford, better known for his novels and his criticism, and the poetry of Joseph Macleod, whose work has been largely forgotten. Focusing on the years from 1914 to 1930, the book offers a new account of a crucial moment in the history of British and American modernism.

'Poetry, Modernism, and an Imperfect World offers a compelling account of poetic modernism's ambivalent relationship to a fallen modernity through nuanced readings of a spectrum of canonical and lesser-known British and American poets, among them Ford Madox Ford, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Edith Sitwell, and Joseph Todd Gordon Macleod. Bookended by his absorbing account of Ford's 'On Heaven' and his recuperation of Macleod's extraordinary esoteric masterpiece, The Ecliptic, Sean Pryor's exploration of 'the incompatibility of poetry and heaven' is a significant intervention in modernist studies.'

Lee Jenkins - University College Cork, Ireland

'Pryor’s account of the poem is subtle and generative, demonstrating that the real strength of his book lies more in its close textual encounters …'

Peter Nicholls Source: Modern Philology

'An insightful meditation on modernist poetry as at once a reflection of a fallen world and an attempt to grapple with that condition through poetic forms that are by necessity doomed to fail in their endeavours, Pryor’s work is remarkably clear in its argument and moving in its articulation of how and why modernist poetry recognizes its own limitations when faced with the problem of the world it inhabits, and with the problem of its own generic identity.'

Matthew Levay Source: The Year’s Work in English Studies