As western Roman society refashioned itself into multiple ‘little Romes’ in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, the Visigothic kingdoms of Toulouse and Toledo actively preserved and transformed much of the Roman world that preceded them. They were not alone in this, as several other kingdoms, including the eastern Roman empire, explored the legacy of Rome while navigating the social, political, and economic shifts that accompanied the transition to the early medieval period. The ‘Romanness’ of such kingdoms, as well as what being Roman actually meant in the post-Roman west, frequently plays a pivotal role in debates about the ‘transformation’ of the Roman world, functioning for some scholars as a key marker of continuity and change across the period.

In post-Roman Iberia and southern Gaul, scholarly debate over the legacy of Rome in the Visigothic kingdom has long grappled with the survival of Roman (or so-called Germanic) identities and practices and with the importation of Roman traditions from other polities. To a large extent, the modern origins of this debate trace back to discussions of the nature of Visigothic institutions, particularly the controversy over the putative Roman or Germanic origins of Visigothic law. Those who stressed the Visigoths’ romanitas were also particularly interested in Visigothic relations with the empire in the east. As Céline Martin explores in her contribution to this volume, art historians and archaeologists have long spoken of a ‘Byzantine imprint’ on Iberian evidence, a characterization which scholars eventually extended to political culture as well. In the twentieth century, the political and diplomatic policies of the Francoist regime strongly shaped Spanish scholarly insistence on Iberian uniqueness within the western Mediterranean and on the markedly ‘imperial’ influences on Visigothic art, culture, and institutions. Outside of Spain, many Anglophone scholars argued for a strong imperial presence within the Iberian peninsula as well, such as P. D. King's statement that there are ‘plenty of examples […] of the constant Byzantine influence in practically every walk of Visigothic life’. For those advocating for imperial models, however, the source of these models was far less clear, and scholars debated whether the Visigoths drew on the late Roman empire, the Byzantine political centre of Constantinople, the ‘East’ more generally, or closer Byzantine societies such as Ravenna, southern Iberia, or northern Africa.

Introduction

Studies that examine Byzantine influence or presence in Hispania tend to focus on two locations: the nascent Visigothic court at Toledo that developed from the mid-sixth century onwards, and the province that was established under Justinian on the southern coast of Hispania in the mid-sixth century, the capital of which lay at Cartagena. Historical and art historical scholarship has tended to focus geographically on the imperial presence in the south-east of the Iberian peninsula, on elite-level religious and political interactions, and on the ‘influence’ that Byzantine culture and theology exerted on the Visigothic kingdom. Archaeologists, meanwhile, have tended to address economic issues. The roles of what are assumed to be peripheral regions and the people that inhabited them have, in general, been overlooked in favour of examples of imperial-royal interactivity.

This approach to relations between the Byzantine world and post-Roman Hispania is at odds with much recent work on the Iberian peninsula, which has adopted a regional perspective. Many scholars, often drawing more directly on material evidence, have sought to move beyond centralizing sources and the Toledo-focused narratives that they propagated. This chapter focuses on connectivity (evidence for linkages to the eastern Mediterranean and the north of Africa) and interactivity (cases in which we can see active engagement and/or reciprocal exchange with such regions) on a micro-regional level.

America and the War in Poetry

Although ‘The New Elizabethans and the Old’ never found its way into The Sacred Wood and scholars have disregarded it, the essay was important for T. S. Eliot. A few weeks following its publication in The Athenæum he mentioned to his mother an upcoming lecture on 31 May at London University. Eliot either abandoned it or we have lost the manuscript, but Eliot planned, he said, to cover the younger generation of poets. It may well have been a version of the lecture he finally gave to the Arts League in October 1919, discussed later in this chapter. However, given Eliot wagered his London University lecture was to be on a delicate subject it is unlikely it merely attacked the Georgians. Poetries of war were the especially delicate subject in London during 1919. It was a society marked by the mass demobilisation of its armies, the tending of its wounded and the commemoration of its dead.

On 9 July Eliot sent ‘The New Elizabethans and the Old’ to John Quinn. He recommended it for inclusion in the volume Alfred Knopf would eventually publish as Poems (February 1920). Initially this was to be a volume entitled A Book of Verse and Prose. Eliot told Quinn that the essay might address the interest of the American public in the war. Although the combined volume of prose and poetry never happened, Eliot ensured the link to the war in Poems (1920) via its dedication to Jean Verdenal. Eliot had originally published the same dedication in Prufrock and Other Observations but felt it was unnecessary in Ara Vos Prec, the English edition of Poems, where he used Dante instead. The reference to Dante differentiated, as in ‘In silent corridors of death’, between those souls forced to suffer and those souls wishing to suffer as penitents as they journeyed through purgatory.

What American interest was Eliot referring to when he sent ‘The New Elizabethans and the Old’ to Quinn? There was certainly no straightforward evidence of that interest in the internationalist oriented Little Review. There is a clear shallowness to the single blank page that Margaret Anderson inserted into the April 1917 edition of the magazine as the United States entered the war. Anderson’s caveat that the Little Review might be censored for this non-statement is not redemptive.

This series of monographs on selected topics in modernism is designed to reflect and extend the range of new work in modernist studies. The studies in the series aim for a breadth of scope and for an expanded sense of the canon of modernism, rather than focusing on individual authors. Literary texts will be considered in terms of contexts including recent cultural histories (modernism and magic; sonic modernity; media studies) and topics of theoretical interest (the everyday; postmodernism; the Frankfurt School); but the series will also reconsider more familiar routes into modernism (modernism and gender; sexuality; politics). The works published will be attentive to the various cultural, intellectual and historical contexts of British, American and European modernisms, and to inter-disciplinary possibilities within modernism, including performance and the visual and plastic arts.

Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley

In 1929 T. S. Eliot told E. M. Forster that his analysis of The Waste Land had exaggerated the impact of the war. Eliot’s denial of that influence reflected a position the modernists nurtured from the beginning of the war in August 1914 through to the summer of 1919. There was no looking back. It was a position consolidated in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) where ‘war-poetry’ became no more than ‘Georgianism’s second-wind’. There was no place for the genre at all in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), just a single index entry, ‘Sentimental, and the war’, where the trope is introduced by I. A. Richards as ‘the pathetic and terrible change that can too often be observed in the sentiments entertained towards the War by men who suffered from it and hated it’. In New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) F. R. Leavis’s ‘“war-poets”’ are in scare quotes. W. B. Yeats’s ‘distaste’ of 1936, whilst infamous, was then somewhat belated and it has always seemed in any case a little contorted. It is hard to untangle from Yeats’s nationalism. It is also prey to both a potential misreading of the ‘passive suffering’ Yeats took from Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna ([1852]) and the accusation of hypocrisy given the terms on which Yeats rejected Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie (1929). Eliot’s original position became for him a creed, evidenced by his Harvard lecture notes of 1933, the occasional poem ‘A Note on War Poetry’ (1942) and the essay ‘T. S. Eliot on Poetry in Wartime’ (1942). In these texts Eliot claimed that we need to distinguish between two types of poets: the real poet who finds himself thrown into war and the soldier who finds himself prone to poetry. Eliot remained unpersuaded that poetry could ever be written from within the experience of war.

Has Modernist War Poetry then followed Forster and exaggerated the importance of the war in the genealogy of modernist poetics? It has argued that the modernist long poem arose, in part, as a response to the arrival of the twentieth century’s moral witness, to the combatant’s absolute claim on the representation of an increasingly traumatic modernity, a claim epitomised by, but not exclusive to, the trench lyric.

Combat Gnosticism: Henri Barbusse, C. R. W. Nevinson, Isaac Rosenberg

In Kangaroo (1923) D. H. Lawrence perfectly captured the changing mood as the appalling events of 1915 gave way to the widespread recognition of an unfolding disaster:

Lawrence had in mind quite specific personal circumstances in these lines: the ongoing suppression of his work, his eventual retreat to Cornwall and fear of conscription. The image still suggests a more generalised emptiness, a cultural vacuum at the eye of the storm. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound would fill the space created by war. Eliot finished his delayed postgraduate dissertation in April 1916 and, after the publication of work on Gottfried Leibniz in October, his focus turned to literature with the first in a series of lectureships. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was dead. Henry James died in February 1916. Ford Madox Ford was on the Somme by the summer of that year, Richard Aldington with the Expeditionary Force by December. Both T. E. Hulme and Wyndham Lewis either returned from or began military training in March 1916 and they both embarked for France in May. By the summer of 1917, the stage was clear for Eliot and Pound to work through what was common and different in their approaches. In a much later essay of 1932, Pound termed the resulting period a ‘“movement to which no name has ever been given”’. Pound soon became Foreign Editor at the Little Review and Eliot the Assistant Editor at The Egoist. Together they held the means to write the blank agenda left by the vortex. Unlike their conscripted European peers, until well into 1918 they sat beyond the coercive reach of their own governments.

The English public first heard the distraught voice of the moral witness in the summer of 1916. We need to be precise in the dating of this event. As the first evidence take Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu, the novel Jay Winter identifies as the seminal account of moral witnessing in modernity.

Rupert Brooke, Modernist Piñata

The war’s vicious turn in the months leading up to Easter 1915 left an indelible imprint on modernist cultures. The deaths of Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Jean Verdenal and then Henri Gaudier-Brzeska occurred within the space of six weeks in that spring. Those months also marked the first use of chlorine gas, the sinking of the Lusitania and an escalation of atrocity stories. Public confidence in the war effort waned and the military finally broke ranks from government policy. Sir John French, the British Expeditionary Force’s Commander-in-Chief, collaborated with the editorial team at The Times on 14 May to describe how British casualties at Aubers Ridge resulted from a series of shell shortages. The question of institutional culpability accelerated a week later with the Quintinshill rail disaster. Following a signalling problem, five trains collided and became engulfed by a gas fire in what is still the worst rail accident in British history. Over 200 victims, including troops, were trapped alive or splintered by shrapnel. Charlotte Mew’s ‘May, 1915’ (first published 1929), composed the day after Quintinshill, the day also of Ezra Pound’s first concrete reference to the evolution of his long poem, captured this historical moment. The poem implores readers to hold on to the hope that the natural world, marked by the arrival of spring, will provide some rearrangement to the order of things. Despite this, its opening confidence progressively leaks away into melancholia. We can see the idea that the war might be quick or civilised leeching out of English society in ‘May, 1915’, especially when the unavoidable reality of the body in pieces stood in the way of poetry.

It was within this mood of mounting anxiety and anger that Brooke rose to public fame and poetic ignominy. There was an element of fortuity in this. Although Brooke drafted his series of famous war sonnets, ‘1914’, in the autumn and finished them in early 1915, the January edition of New Numbers in which they first appeared was not in circulation until February 1915 at the earliest. The TLS published several sonnets under Walter de la Mare’s patronage although not until 11 March. This set the stage for Dean Inge’s famous canonisation of Brooke’s (alleged) religiosity in his Easter Day sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral. The Times duly recorded Inge’s sermon and established Brooke’s fame in the popular imagination.