Atdtda22: [42.1i] Modern poetry, 607

[Paul Nightingale]

[607.26-27] I'm not much for modern poetry, but I know codes when I see them
...

The modernist text announces itself as text; it refuses to hide, even when
resisting interpretation. Cf. the opening to Ch7 ('Modernism and
Imperialism') of Jameson's The Modernist Papers:

This is a time in which, at least in part owing to what is called
postmodernism, there seems to be renewed interest in finding out what
modernism really was, and in rethinking that now historical phenomenon in
new ways, which are not those we have inherited from the participants and
the players, the advocates and the practitioners themselves. But this has
also been a time, over perhaps an even longer span of years, in which the
matter of what imperialism still is and how it functions has been a subject
of intense debate and discussion among the theorists, and not only the
economists, the historians and the political scientists. (152)

That "renewed interest in finding out what modernism really was" is as good
a description as any of Pynchon's novel.

Jameson continues:

For the emphasis on form and formal innovation and modification implies that
our privileged texts and objects of study here will be those that scarcely
evoke imperialism as such at all; that seem to have no specifically
political content in the first place; that offer purely stylistic or
linguistic peculiarities for analysis. One of the most commonly held
stereotypes about the modern has of course in general been that of its
apolitical character, its turn inward and away from the social materials
associated with realism, its increased subjectification and introspective
psychologization, and, not least, its aestheticism and its ideological
commitment to the supreme value of a now autonomous Art as such. None of
these characterizations strikes me as adequate or persuasive any longer;
they are part of the baggage of an older modernist ideology which any
contemporary theory of the modern will wish to scrutinize and to dismantle.
(153)

See also: Ann L. Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880-1922,
Cambridge University Press, 2002. In particular, Ch4, "Mapping the
Middlebrow in Edwardian England": in the course of this section, Aychance
has distanced himself from both modernist and classical art.

And so to Leavis, without whom no discussion of modern poetry would be
complete:

The potentialities of human experience in any age are realized only by a
tiny minority, and the important poet is important because he belongs to
this (and has also, of course, the power of communication). Indeed, his
capacity for experiencing and his power of communicating are
indistinguishable; not merely because we should not know of the one without
the other, but because his power of making words express what he feels is
indistinguishable from his awareness of what he feels. He is unusually
sensitive, unusually aware, more sincere and more himself than the ordinary
man can be. He knows what he feels and knows what he is interested in. He is
a poet because his interest in his experience is not separable from his
interest in words; because, that is, of his habit of seeking by the
evocative use of words to sharpen his awareness of his ways of feeling, so
making these communicable. And poetry can communicate the actual quality of
experience with a subtlety and precision unapproachable by any other means.
But if the poetry and the intelligence of the age lose touch with each
other, poetry will cease to matter much, and the age will be lacking in
finer awareness. What this last prognostication means it is perhaps
impossible to bring home to any one who is not already convinced of the
importance of poetry. So that it is indeed deplorable that poetry should so
widely have ceased to interest the intelligent.

From: F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study of the
Contemporary Situation, Chatto & Windus, 1932, 13-14.