What became of Modernism?

C.K. Stead

• Five American Poets by John Matthias, introduction by Michael Schmidt
  Carcanet, 160 pp, £3.25, November 1979, ISBN 0 85635 259 4
• The New Australian Poetry edited by John Tranter
  Makar Press, 330 pp, £6.50, November 1979, ISBN 0 00 000097 3
• Carpenters of Light by Neil Powell
  Carcanet, 154 pp, £6.95, November 1979, ISBN 0 85635 219 5
• Mirabell: Books of Number by James Merrill
  Oxford, 182 pp, £3.25, June 1979, ISBN 0 19 211892 7
• The Book of the Body by Frank Bidart
  Faber, 44 pp, £4.50, October 1979, ISBN 0 374 11549 4
• Skull of Adam by Stanley Moss
  Anvil, 67 pp, £2.50, May 1979, ISBN 5 646 46041 7
• Poems 1928-1978 by Stanley Kunitz
  Secker, 249 pp, £6.50, September 1979, ISBN 0 436 23932 9

What became of the Modernist movement? It was initiated by Pound and Eliot about the time of the First World War, and in America it set off a further wave of innovation (often referred to as ‘post-Modernism’) after the Second. Beats, Black Mountain Poets, the New York school of the Fifties – all these and others, though clearly different, are unimaginable without Pound, early Eliot, William Carlos Williams and perhaps Wallace Stevens as forerunners. This is the main stream of modern American poetry. In England the picture is very different. Pound is grudgingly acknowledged, distrusted, kept at a distance. Eliot holds his place, but not the revolutionary Eliot. Eliot didn’t convert England – England converted him; and Four Quartets is Modernism neutralised by good form. Who then won the poetic war in England?