Volume 50, Number 8 · May 15, 2003
Making It New
By Al Alvarez
The Short Sharp Life of T.E. Hulme
by Robert Ferguson
London: Allen Lane, 314 pp., £20.00
Wilfred Owen
by Dominic Hibberd
Ivan R. Dee, 424 pp., $30.00
One of the mysteries of the Modernist movement in literature, especially during its experimental heyday in the first decades of the last century, is how few Englishmen were involved. Nearly all the dominant figures writing in English were either American or Irish—Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Joyce, Stevens, Marianne Moore—and even a generation later, a master technician like Auden at his innovative, nervy peak was never Modernist and experimental in a way that came naturally to Beckett. The line of English verse in the twentieth century runs directly from the Victorians, via Hardy and Housman, to Larkin and Hughes, almost as if Modernism had never happened.
Review, 4118 words
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