48 results
A systematic review of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of school-based identification of children and young people at risk of, or currently experiencing mental health difficulties
- Joanna K. Anderson, Tamsin Ford, Emma Soneson, Jo Thompson Coon, Ayla Humphrey, Morwenna Rogers, Darren Moore, Peter B. Jones, Emmet Clarke, Emma Howarth
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- Journal:
- Psychological Medicine / Volume 49 / Issue 1 / January 2019
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 13 September 2018, pp. 9-19
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Background
Although school-based programmes for the identification of children and young people (CYP) with mental health difficulties (MHD) have the potential to improve short- and long-term outcomes across a range of mental disorders, the evidence-base on the effectiveness of these programmes is underdeveloped. In this systematic review, we sought to identify and synthesise evidence on the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of school-based methods to identify students experiencing MHD, as measured by accurate identification, referral rates, and service uptake.
MethodElectronic bibliographic databases: MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, ERIC, British Education Index and ASSIA were searched. Comparative studies were included if they assessed the effectiveness or cost-effectiveness of strategies to identify students in formal education aged 3–18 years with MHD, presenting symptoms of mental ill health, or exposed to psychosocial risks that increase the likelihood of developing a MHD.
ResultsWe identified 27 studies describing 44 unique identification programmes. Only one study was a randomised controlled trial. Most studies evaluated the utility of universal screening programmes; where comparison of identification rates was made, the comparator test varied across studies. The heterogeneity of studies, the absence of randomised studies and poor outcome reporting make for a weak evidence-base that only generate tentative conclusions about the effectiveness of school-based identification programmes.
ConclusionsWell-designed pragmatic trials that include the evaluation of cost-effectiveness and detailed process evaluations are necessary to establish the accuracy of different identification models, as well as their effectiveness in connecting students to appropriate support in real-world settings.
13 - ‘Water's Soliloquy’: Soundscape and Environment in Alice Oswald's Dart
- from Part III - Geopoetics: Landscape, Language, Form
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- By Peter Howarth, University of London
- Edited by Neal Alexander, David Cooper
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- Poetry & Geography
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- Liverpool University Press
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- 25 July 2017
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- 31 December 2013, pp 190-203
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Summary
Alice Oswald's book-length poem Dart (2002) is plainly a geographical poem. It is structured by the flow of the river Dart from its emergence at Cranmere Pool on Dartmoor, down through Two Bridges, Staverton, Buckfast and Totnes before it reaches the sea at Dartmouth; and, although it is written in a complex weave of voices, it is perfectly easy to see how its stages correspond to the river's progress on an Ordnance Survey map. But although Oswald herself calls it a ‘map poem’, its own kind of mapping is far more than a representation or description of people in given locations. Dart traces the river's flow through its human environment, the lives of the walkers, naturalists, tin-miners, canoeists, woodsmen, carpet-makers, poachers, milk-bottlers, sewage-farm workers and ferrymen who live on it and near it; people whom Oswald interviewed as she walked up and down the river, and from whose words she created the poem as a continuous interweaving current. As she put it in an interview:
So the poem's full of voices. It's made of scraps of talk from people who live and work on the Dart. Not entirely by me at all. I wanted to give the poetic voice the slip, to get through to technical, unwritten accounts of water.
Dart, in other words, makes a poem by using what Marcus Doel calls the ‘affective texturing’ of the river's space, the continual interaction of water and its setting with the language, needs, memories and imagination of the human social world. The poem's transitions are ‘geographical, not rational’, in Oswald's words, not just because its sections simply flow on from one another, but because her sense of what the ‘geographical’ means is not the rationalised, detached, framed ‘representations of space’ of economists and planners decried by Henri Lefebvre. Dart 's awareness of the landscape is shaped by the water itself, sensitive to the river's flow at multiple, simultaneous scales: the shivers of an impulse or a wave, the spinning threads at the Buckfast carpet factory, the inflows of tribes and groups in the river's settlements, and the aeons-old rock strata whose folds form the river's shape are all held together in its continual, sliding movement.
2 - Poetic Form and the First World War
- from Part I - Historical and Critical Contexts
- Edited by Santanu Das, King's College London
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- The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War
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- 18 December 2013
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- 11 November 2013, pp 51-66
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Notes on Contributors
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- By Fran Brearton, Sarah Cole, Neil Corcoran, Santanu Das, Simon Featherstone, Christine Froula, Sandra M. Gilbert, David Goldie, Margaret R. Higonnet, Peter Howarth, Tim Kendall, Edna Longley, Michael Longley, Andrew Motion, Adrian Poole, Mark Rawlinson, Vincent Sherry, Jon Stallworthy, Elizabeth Vandiver, Jay Winter
- Edited by Santanu Das, King's College London
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- The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War
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- 18 December 2013
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- 11 November 2013, pp xiii-xvii
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Night-time Lookout Duty: The Role of Ambient Light Levels and Dark Adaptation
- Tony Wynn, Peter A. Howarth, Bert R. Kunze
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- The Journal of Navigation / Volume 65 / Issue 4 / October 2012
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- 17 July 2012, pp. 589-602
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- October 2012
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The aim of this research was to clarify and quantify the demands of the working environment and watch-keeping regime for large commercial ships in relation to dark adaptation. The night lookout task requires the identification of the relatively bright navigational lights of other ships against the dark background of the sky and sea. The probability of detection is determined by the ambient lighting conditions on the bridge and the dark adapted state of vision. Light levels were such that threshold sensitivity (after 15 minutes) was reduced by around 2 log units in comparison to complete darkness. This has implications for the effective range of navigational lights at sea as defined in regulations. The intensity and position of navigation lights on larger vessels is such that the sensitivity of the eye under typical bridge conditions is likely to be sufficient for their visibility to be acceptable. This may not be the case for less well lit small craft.
Chapter 1 - Why write like this?
- Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
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- The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry
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- 05 June 2012
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- 10 November 2011, pp 1-32
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Summary
Why write like this?
Imagine yourself, three or four generations younger, walking along Devonshire Street in London on a warm July evening in 1920, and passing Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop. You were trying to find a shortcut to King's Cross station, perhaps, but you fear you may have gone the wrong way: the street is narrow and rather dirty, with shrieks from small, poor Italian children running a hoop on the pavement. Ahead, an ex-soldier with a missing leg is limping towards you. You realise he is going to ask, shamefacedly, for money, like so many in London now; to avoid refusing him, you turn abruptly into the bookshop itself. Inside, it is quieter, and smells of beeswax from the carved wooden shelves and seats, relics of that brief pre-war fashion for peasant arts in which the shop began, and now looking heavy and a bit tired. On display are various recent publications, including one of the bookshop's in-house anthologies, Georgian Poetry 1918–19. You flip through and your eye is caught by some poems by a Siegfried Sassoon, whose name you vaguely remember in connection with some fuss caused by his letter to The Times a few years back denouncing the war as an exercise in arms profiteering. Well, perhaps he was right, you think, hearing the soldier shuffle past the bookshop window. Sassoon's poems include some brisk little satires in pretty up-to-date language, and you wonder whether to buy them; you are no philistine, after all, and the anthology seems a good-value way to catch up with what's been happening to modern poetry, as well as to atone for not giving to the soldier. As you move to the counter, however, your eye is caught by a small pamphlet covered in what looks like Christmas wrapping paper. You open it. Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees, published by the Hogarth Press not far away in Mecklenburgh Square. But Paris does not appear to be a poem at all. It is more like the page of a notebook; scraps of phrases, a shopping list, memos in some private language, Métro stations:
I want a holophrase
NORD-SUD
ZIG-ZAG
LION NOIR
CACAO BLOOKER
Black-figured vases in Etruscan tombs
RUE DU BAC (DUBONNET)
SOLFERINO (DUBONNET)
CHAMBRE DES DEPUTES
Brekekekek coax coax we are passing under the Seine
DUBONNET
The Scarlet Woman shouting BYRRH and deafening
St John at Patmos.
What kind of poem is it? It doesn't rhyme. It's not in regular metre. It doesn't seem to be a poet speaking noble ideas. It's not telling you about anything, particularly. The ‘St’ has been inserted in ink: evidently the poem's crazy typography baffled Hogarth's own proof-reader, never mind its ordinary readers. It's in two, no three languages, as your grammar-school education dimly recalls the chorus ‘Brekekekek’ from Aristophanes’ ancient comedy, The Frogs. But what are Aristophanes and Etruscan vases doing alongside Blooker's cocoa, or Lion Noir shoe-polish, or French liqueurs, or St John deafened by the Whore of Babylon, who is now reduced to selling another liqueur? It doesn't move you in any way, or lead you to any deeper thought. It all seems rather precious compared to Sassoon. You flip through. There are street signs in capitals; copies of plaques on famous people's houses, some bars of music and one section where the lines are only one letter wide. Jottings about the Virgin Mary, carnivals and spring. It must be some continental art-as-nonsense clique, probably, like those ‘Futurists’ and their music-hall stunts before the war. You pay for your Georgian Poetry and, picking your way past the invalids in Queen Square, come with relief upon Russell Square tube station. As you wait on the platform down below, though, a thought strikes you. Undergrounds. The Paris Métro's Nord--Sud line. Etruscan tombs. The shopping list is the adverts you see in motion as the underground train rattles on. Blackness in the dark, or in ‘Lion Noir’ shoe polish. And the Frogs…didn't they sing their song in the underworld, where Dionysos the god went to bring the poet Euripides back, so he could write new poems and stop Athens from continuing a crazy war? Maybe Paris wasn't all nonsense. But if Hope Mirrlees wanted to write poems to stop wars, she was going about it in an odd way. Why not just say it straight, like Sassoon? Why on earth would anyone want to write like this?
Notes
- Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
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Chapter 8 - Inside and outside modernism
- Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
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- The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry
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Summary
The changing cast of modernism
The history of who matters to modernist poetry is shaped like an hour-glass. It begins wide, when no one was sure what this new movement would become, and its artists found common ground where they could. If you are only used to the selection of modernists in well-trimmed compilations, it is an eye-opening experience to follow the long list of now-forgotten contributors to the various Imagist anthologies, or to magazines like Alfred Kreymborg's Others. By the time of Marianne Moore's 1926 survey ‘New Poetry since 1912’, on the other hand, modernism as we know it is beginning to take shape. As she attempts to summarise the new direction poetry has taken, Moore puts Stevens, Loy, Pound, H. D., Williams and Eliot now well to the fore, though her radar has a still wider sweep, picking up well-known not-quite modernists such as Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg, and writers now almost forgotten such as Witter Bynner or Marjorie A. Sieffert. It was when academic critics tried to put together the really distinctive features of ‘modernism’ in the 1930s and 1940s, however, that the range began to contract more sharply, and to centre on Eliot and Pound as the poets most alive to their time. Part of the reason for this intense focus was the sheer quality of their poetry, certainly. Another was the growing conservative turn in American Cold War culture, which was suspicious of the left-wing tendencies widespread in 1930s poetry, and ignored many poets with socialist commitments. And a third was the story critics needed to tell about modernism to make it admirable in such a climate, which has been adroitly summarised as ‘the legend of the free creative spirit at war with the bourgeoisie’. Modernism was a heroic revolution against the Romantic self-deceptions of middle-class taste, the story went, which wanted art to be soothing or decorative, but not to tell the truth about its own hypocritical values of ‘civilisation’; values which the war or industrial degradation or aimless consumerism had shown to be bankrupt. So the ‘men of 1914’ were tellers of unwelcome truths, and their stylistic difficulty was the necessary result of being fully alive in a half-dead world. Unfortunately, this sidelined the poets who were not the ‘men of 1914’, or who had other enemies than middle-class taste, or other aims than heroic individual resistance. But the heroic story persisted, not least because of the subtle flattery it offered to the critics and their student readers. For it implied that working your way through the complexity of a modernist poem was an education in learning to think authentically and heroically, at the very time that ‘modernism’ was becoming an institution protected by the academy. It also suggested that the teacher helping his students see how the poem worked was closing the very gap between the modernist writer and the public which the poets had despaired of, making the university seminar or creative writing class a precious enclave of cultural unity. With so much culture at stake – but also so much culture on offer – it is hardly surprising that the poets whose writing seemed to reward the critics’ model got the lion's share of attention.
Index
- Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
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Chapter 4 - W. B. Yeats
- Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
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Summary
Love and conflict
In 1908, William Butler Yeats finally got what he had sought for so long, and it was not what he had hoped. Since the day in 1889 that the hansom cab bearing Maud Gonne – former débutante, dislocated aristocrat and passionate Irish nationalist – drew up outside the bohemian Yeats family home in Bedford Park, London, the young poet had been besotted. Nurtured on Shelley and the Pre-Raphaelites, his young dreams had been of remote, tragically beautiful women, powerful, independent and yet vulnerable, and now that dream had arrived at his front door. For the next twenty years her image would hypnotise his love poetry and, with it, his imagination of what an Ireland free from British rule would look like. Believing that ‘there is no fine nationality without literature, and…there is no fine literature without nationality’, their joint cause was to found an Ireland that had thrown off the divisive, materialistic culture of the British and discovered a national unity through recreating ‘the ancient arts…as they were understood when they moved a whole people and not a few people who had grown up in a leisured class’. While she drew his politics towards her unflinching republicanism, he in turn introduced her to his occult and mystical societies, bent on discovering in the supernatural tales of the Irish peasantry ancient truths which would create a symbolic order adequate to the coming nation. But to Yeats's despair, political and mystical collaboration did not make her love him, and his Celtic Twilight poetry of these years would have to mix its solemn, ritualised search for the ‘red-rose-bordered hem’ of ancient Eire's dress with a disappointment that he had not yet been fit to touch Gonne's. Over the years, their intense ‘spiritual friendship’ pitched the poet between a desperate hope and successive disenchantments, as he came to learn of her lovers and children, to see her married, and particularly after the Jubilee Riots of 1897, to fear her enthusiasm for violent revolutionary crowds. But despite his growing dislike of populist nationalism, her image would always electrify him, and several other affairs foundered because of it.
The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry
- Peter Howarth
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- 05 June 2012
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- 10 November 2011
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Modernist poems are some of the twentieth-century's major cultural achievements, but they are also hard work to read. This wide-ranging introduction takes readers through modernism's most famous poems and some of its forgotten highlights to show why modernists thought difficulty and disorientation essential for poetry in the modern world. In-depth chapters on Pound, Eliot, Yeats and the American modernists outline how formal experiments take on the new world of mass media, democracies, total war and changing religious belief. Chapters on the avant-gardes and later modernism examine how their styles shift as they try to re-make the community of readers. Howarth explains in a clear and enjoyable way how to approach the forms, politics and cultural strategies of modernist poetry in English.
Chapter 3 - T. S. Eliot
- Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
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- The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry
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Summary
The paradoxes of self and world
T. S. Eliot was a creature of paradoxes, and paradoxes which he did his best to cultivate and sustain. He wrote a jumpy, fragmented poetry about terrifying isolation, while insisting he was keeping with the oldest traditions of civilisation and order. The Waste Land has come to be seen as the poem of the twentieth century, and yet Eliot was profoundly unhappy with that century, and distrusted his contemporaries’ reasons for thinking they understood him. He was the American who thought the English were so ‘very different from ourselves’ in 1917, while at the same time positioning himself as the guardian of the truest English culture. He deplored using poetic learning for the ‘more pretentious modes of publicity’, and yet worked night and day to write the literary journalism and cultivate the contacts which would make him the authority in mid-century English letters. Part of his campaign involved attacking other poets for insincerity and rhetoric, immediately after he had written a PhD thesis which argues that there is absolutely no fixed boundary between the inner life and social experience, and that ‘the self is a construction’. He criticised many rival poets for not being individual enough, and then advised them to ‘surrender’ to tradition. He felt good poetry would have only a small but discerning public, and that it depended on popular culture to survive. And these various judgements are each delivered with complete assurance and mordant criticism of his opponents. This mandarin conviction – and his own generation's willingness to be impressed by it – would give younger critics ample reasons to want to pull Eliot off his pedestal, and they have been helped by new information about his wretched first marriage, new searchlights turned on his anti-Semitic and misogynistic writing, and revealing detective work about the far-right politics of his associates.
Now that Eliot's reputation is not what it was, though, more sympathetic critics have turned back to these paradoxes as evidence of Eliot's relentless self-irony, undercutting all that he appears to say most dogmatically. Or they have seen his capacity to argue on either side of the case as a ruthlessly pragmatic way to outflank his opponents. Eliot's paradoxes certainly have these useful effects, allowing him to sound like he has anticipated all possible positions without being restricted by any of them. But part of Eliot's distinctiveness comes from the way he really believes in those paradoxes. His criticism works tremendously hard to insist that opposites really are related, that self and world really are two sides of the same coin, that the individual and the tradition or the elite and the popular are mutually interdependent. And the emotions around the separation and fusion of irreconcilable points of view are a signal feature of the poetry itself. ‘Opposition is true friendship’, remarked Blake, a poet whose influence is stronger in Eliot's oeuvre than Eliot's criticism would lead you to suspect, and it's a motto for the fencing-match between ‘you and I’ maintained by Eliot's most famous early success, J. Alfred Prufrock.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Since we never learn anything more about the ‘you’ here, most people think ‘you and I’ are two aspects of Prufrock himself, and that the poem is about a pathological self-consciousness in which the ‘I’ is constantly seeing itself as ‘you’, like a vain TV actor wondering if the cameras are catching him in the best light (‘they will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”’). The idea is supported by a passage from Eliot's PhD thesis written a few years later, in which he describes how there is an unbridgeable gulf between the way we know the world by practical experience, and the way theoretical, objective philosophy knows it, because both ways make the world ‘a construction’:
We can never, I mean, wholly explain the practical world from a theoretical point of view, because this world is what it is by reason of the practical point of view and the world which we try to explain [theoretically] is a world spread out upon a table – simply there!
The engaged ‘I’ perspective can never share the same world as the ‘I’ described from the outside as a ‘you’ or ‘he’. This philosophical split between an internal and external knowing which must, on some other unattainable level, be part of the same thing, becomes in Prufrock's case a spiralling of perspectives; from the self he feels to the self known to others (‘upon a table’), to the self which knows and fears what others think when they see him, to the self which is then aware it is falsifying those original feelings by being so self-conscious about them, to a self which despairs of its own divorce from itself, and so forth. Prufrock is the ageing would-be dandy, a remnant of the type noted by Baudelaire and cultivated by Laforgue in the nineteenth century, who mentally ‘live and sleep before the mirror’. Possessed by the need to ‘make himself an original’, the dandy's self-appointed mission was to revolt against the soulless, democratic homogeneity of the masses through faultless self-possession in manners, and an expensively minimalist, ‘absolute simplicity’ of dress: ‘my necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin’ supplies the perfect touch of menswear-ad narcissism. Eliot was first attracted to the dandy ethos of individualism when he came across Arthur Symons's description of Baudelaire's and Laforgue's own verse as a ‘revolt against exteriority, against rhetoric, against a materialistic tradition’ and, like him, Prufrock loathes the ‘eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase’ and pin him ‘wriggling on the wall’ for all to see.
Chapter 7 - Why is it so difficult?
- Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
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Summary
Modernism and difficulty
When I tell people that I teach poetry for a living, it is rarely long before someone says, half-guiltily and half-defiantly, ‘I don't understand poetry.’ If pressed, they will admit that they don't have a problem with nursery rhymes or Wordsworth's ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, but it's modern poetry that's so difficult. If I decide to ruin the chances of making a lasting friendship and ask what's wrong with difficult poetry, the language of discrimination swiftly follows. Modern poetry is ‘inaccessible’, as if it put its would-be reader in a wheelchair and unfairly denied her access up the steps of culture. It is ‘exclusive’, as if poetry were a universal right which the poets were deliberately keeping away from entitled citizens. And it is ‘elitist’, a poetry deliberately designed to keep ordinary people from gaining cultural authority. As well as telling me just how deeply embedded Schiller's idea that art should be democratic is, these responses viscerally connect difficulty with the feeling of being shut out.
Yet the poems which first created this alienation were meant to make reading it an absorbing experience. Stevens's dizzying switches between literal and metaphoric, or the floating syntax of The Cantos, or the hypnotising stop--start chatter of Gertrude Stein are all ways to immerse the reader's attention, and draw the reader's mind into its whole way of thinking. When we talk about difficulty, then, the paradox is that the language which makes poems difficult is both inviting and off-putting. It immerses you in a flow of words and signs, but if they can't begin to connect in your mind, the stream becomes an ice sheet which leaves you scrambling for a foothold. Presenting a welter of unresolvable points of view can make the poem seem absolutely indifferent to what its reader thinks, and yet it can also clear a space within the reader's mind for the poem to work in an unexpected and highly personal manner. Understanding why modernist poetry is difficult is understanding how difficulty can be inclusive and exclusive at the same time.
Frontmatter
- Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
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Acknowledgements
- Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
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Chapter 5 - Modernist America
- Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
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Summary
Modernism and America: Whitman and Crane
Modernist poetry was not invented in America, but so many of its leading English-language poets were American that it is scarcely surprising how deeply its poetics are entwined with American cultural ideals. ‘Make it new’ was Pound's literary slogan and equally America's encouragement to all its citizens, immigrant and native-born, that the past could always be left behind and a future re-made. Like America, modernism demanded that forms of expression had to be found or chosen for oneself, rather than handed down or adopted through politeness. Breaking the rules of poetic form for freer self-expression also perfectly replayed America's democratic break from rule by the British crown, and its later citizens’ escapes from other tyrannies. Explaining why he had adopted his radically all-inclusive free verse in Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman told Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1874 that ‘the genius of all foreign literature is clipped and cut small, compared to our genius, and is essentially insulting to our usages, and to the organic compacts of These States’. It's a beautiful metaphor: European poetic forms are like palace topiary, artificial shapes clipped by the servants, but America and its poetry can never be hedged in or belong to privilege. Forty years later, the American modernist poetry magazine Others described its ‘revolutionary’ experiments as ‘the expression of a democracy of feeling rebelling against the aristocracy of form’. Modernist poetry's insistence that formal principles and intellectual meanings could never be found separately from an ongoing experience of encounter with the material was also thoroughly in keeping with the pragmatist strain in American philosophy. Unity was always in the process of achievement for William James, for a finished state has the wrong kind of politics:
Things are ‘with’ one another, in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes…the pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom.
The idea that things are ‘with’ each other but never contained by any overarching system is a principle of modernist syntax and modernist difficulty alike. And, of course, the modernist techniques of jumps and montages went well with the speed and multifarious levelling of America's roaring twenties, in its newly confident cities where people from every background were mingling, where the streets were a forest of competing signs and adverts, and relays of telephone switchboards could put anyone in touch instantly with anyone else. All modern cities had these, but America was proud of being distinctly further ahead and more modern than the rest. As Mina Loy noticed after her arrival from Europe, the avant-garde's experiments with hybrid and fused language encountered their real-world counterpart in American cities:
where latterly a thousand languages have been born, and each one, for the purposes of communication at least, English – English enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voice-inflection of many races, in novel alloy with the fundamental time-is-money idiom of the United States. Out of the welter of this unclassifiable speech, while professors of Harvard and Oxford labored to preserve ‘God's English,’ the muse of modern literature arose, and her tongue had been loosened in the melting pot.
Chapter 2 - Ezra Pound
- Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
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Summary
Poetry and politics
Pound is one of the most important figures of modern poetry, and one of the most controversial. To his admirers, he rethought what poetry was for the modern world, a world of banks and arms manufacturers as well as meadows and larks. To his enemies, Pound's innovations were motivated by a contempt for the ordinary reader that sent modern poetry fatally off course, an error confirmed by his slide into fascist politics. To see what we are dealing with, take Figure 1, a not untypical section of Pound's epic The Cantos, begun as he lay a prisoner of US Forces in Pisa, Italy, in 1945, following his inflammatory and anti-Semitic broadcasts on behalf of Italian fascism during the Second World War, and finished in St Elizabeth's psychiatric hospital, New Jersey, where he was remanded after being found unfit to stand trial:
It is written in a mixture of English, Italian, Greek, Latin, Provençal and Chinese. It looks like an unrelated series of cryptic references, which, when unpacked by years of patient scholarship, turn out to be:
A link between three Chinese men praised by Confucius for their resistance to the cruel Emperor Cheou-sin, three leading Italian fascists (including il Capo Mussolini) and three fascist collaborators recently executed by Allied forces.
A comparison between US Ambassador and later Major William Bullitt (whom Pound insinuates had moved into diplomacy when tipped off that his business interests were about to slide) with Pound's wife Dorothy, who sold her inherited shares at a loss so as not to be implicated in the arms industry.
A line from Dante's Purgatory where the poet Arnaut Daniel asks for Dante's prayers when he ‘comes to the top of the stair’ to Paradiso (retranslated back from Italian into Daniel's native Provençal); the untranslatable Greek word ‘ethos’ meaning ‘character’ or ‘custom’ from which we get our word ‘ethics’; the Chinese ideograms ming (meaning ‘light’ and ‘clarity’) and chung (‘middle’ or ‘balance’); the great architects of American democratic balance, President John Adams, and his brother Samuel Adams, as well the Georgian grace of the architects and designers Robert and John Adam.
And all this in a passage officially in praise of clarity. That, Pound's critics say, is where Pound's kind of modernism leads: the slivers of incoherent phrase, the intimidatingly wide references, the swagger in splicing his own story and great historical figures, the aggressive tone and ruthless politics, all these are of a piece, and stem from the revolution he began thirty years earlier.
Chapter 6 - Avant-gardisms
- Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
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Summary
The culture of the avant-gardes
If the names of the modernist avant-gardes are exotic – Futurists, Vorticists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Simultaneists, Constructivists – then their ways of making poetry happen were even more so. The Futurists put on music-hall shows in which poems without syntax were screamed at the audience through a megaphone, with the audience encouraged to fight back. At the original Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Hugo Ball, dressed in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, had to be carried off stage after becoming intoxicated by bellowing his poetry made of abstract sounds, the audience joining in. His wife Emmy Hennings would mix poetry with demonic puppet shows, while Ball's own sound-poems were often accompanied by Sophie Taüber's abstract, masked, robotic dances. Later Dadaists made Apollinaire's ‘simultaneist’ verse into a performance by reading overlapping lines of texts in different voices at the same time. Another avant-garde technique was to combine poetry with objects. Blaise Cendrars layered a semi-delirious travelogue of his semi-imaginary journey from Moscow to Manchuria against Sonia Delaunay's abstract curves and swoops to create a poem which is a two-metre-long fold-out-book and painting as well, the Prose du Transsibérien (1913). The Constructivist Kurt Schwitters would paste words and sentences together into drawings, and then drive nails into them to make objects which were simultaneously pictures, sculptures and poems. Later he would develop the sound-cluster ‘fmsbw’ by Raoul Hausmann into the forty-minue Ursonate, scoring phonemes like musical notes in themes, variations and repeats. The avant-gardes also experimented with random or automatic processes of composition: the Dadaist Tzara made a poem-recipe from cutting up newspaper fragments, shaking them in a bag, and reading out the results. The Surrealists played ‘exquisite corpse’, where poems are composed one word at a time by different people unawares. Compared to these relentlessly anti-personal, multimedia performances, slim modernist pamphlets in free verse look rather tame.
Contents
- Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 10 November 2011, pp vii-ix
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22 - Georgian poetry
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- By Peter Howarth, University of London
- Edited by Jason Harding, University of Durham
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- Book:
- T. S. Eliot in Context
- Published online:
- 05 August 2012
- Print publication:
- 31 March 2011, pp 221-230
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Summary
Eliot's reviews of his contemporaries and rivals, the Georgian poets, look like a thorough hatchet job. Written between 1917 and 1922 as Eliot began to establish his place in the London literary world, they leave the reader in little doubt that modern English poetry is morally, poetically and culturally bankrupt. According to Eliot, the Georgians are sentimentalists who substitute ‘Georgian emotions for human ones’. They produce ‘a style quite remote from life’. With their complete ignorance of foreign poetry, their verse is technically complacent and morally lightweight. It offers no real culture to its smug middle-class readership, only decoration of what its audience are already proud of feeling. Contented in their own littleness and humility, the emotional self-satisfaction of the Georgians is the correlative of both a provincial insularity and an aversion to taking risks of any sort.
Unfortunately, if one turns the pages of the later Georgian anthologies, Eliot's verdict seems depressingly just. The first of the five volumes of Georgian Poetry had created a stir when it appeared in 1912, because it allowed readers to sample work from younger poets with a new ethos of uninhibited writing, and – by the standards of the time – direct emotions in plain language. D. H. Lawrence summed up the aims of the contributors – who included Rupert Brooke, W. H. Davies and Walter de la Mare – as a fearless ‘exultation in the vast freedom’ from restrictive nineteenth-century ideals of verse writing.