C.K. Stead

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?

In 1949 when a panel of his fellow poets (including T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden and Allen Tate) awarded Ezra Pound the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos there was an immediate and angry public debate. The reaction is not surprising and might have been worse had the texts of Pound’s wartime broadcasts over Rome Radio been publicly available. What is surprising is that the award was made to him and that thirty years later it appears to have been thoroughly deserved. Pound’s broadcasts contained naked anti-semitism and economic balderdash. His support for Mussolini in Italy was unwavering, even after the defeat. Canto 74 opens with ‘the tragedy’ of the death of Mussolini, who in the course of the sequence is bracketed with Manes, the Albigenses, and Pound himself, as heretic martyrs. In Canto 84, written during October 1945, Pound not only honours the memory of Mussolini (‘Il Capo’) and various dead Fascist ministers, but salutes the traitor premiers, Laval and Quisling, as they go to face their firing-squads.

Katherine Mansfield was born in 1888, Sylvia Ashton-Warner in 1908 and Janet Frame in 1924 – three New Zealand women each of whom has achieved some measure of literary fame or reputation outside the country in which she was born. They have in common that they have worked uneasily in (and always breaking out of) the fictional mode. The fictions of all three are forms of autobiography while autobiography tends towards fiction. It is the self they are struggling always to define, or to create, and the self is founded on fact but not exclusively composed of it.

Our friend the novelist seventy – eight next week and he says he’s written his last book can’t think any more can’t write

connected sentences can’t remember the plots of his favourite Dickens he used to rehearse scene after scene not even sometimes the names

of his own novels can’t answer letters put down among cups pills other letters where forgotten one...

Matthew Arnold worried that a literary reputation in England, unconfirmed by ‘the whole group of civilised nations’ (by which he meant Europe), might be merely provincial. At the same time he was pretty confident about which poets Europe ought, in due course, to favour. Wordsworth was admired at home but not abroad; and since Arnold was sure Wordsworth as a poet in English ranked second only to Shakespeare and Milton, and that among European poets of the 18th and 19th centuries only Goethe was superior, he anticipated a European recognition of Wordsworth which has never come. Arnold also liked to qualify and trim the literary verdicts which Europe had already handed down. Thus Byron had been overrated; and Goethe’s observations on Byron were manipulated by Arnold both to acknowledge a greatness and to set limits on it – a ‘splendid personality’ in poetry, but a slovenly artist and a childish intellect.