Volume 24, Number 1 · February 3, 1977
From Yeats to Yeats
By Richard Ellmann
A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode
by David Perkins
Belknap/Harvard University Press, 623 pp., $17.50
Brave men, and women too, might quail before undertaking to describe the history of poetry in English during the last eighty-five years. It was a period during which poets changed from being smiths to being miners. The difficulties are manifold: so many poets born, and made, before and after and between the wars, and in such different countries as England, Ireland, and the United States. And among them so few were content, as Housman was, to publish two thin volumes and call it quits. The best of them exhibited an unhelpful inclination to outstrip their earlier work and, by renewing themselves in later life, to blur those distinctions into decades which historians cherish. David Perkins candidly admits, 'The great figures present problems to which there are no perfect solutions.' Mr. Perkins, a professor at Harvard and the author of two books on the romantic period, has shouldered his new burden with daring and carried it with poise. He tries to give both the sense of poetry as an ongoing enterprise of many people responding to temporal pressures, and the sense of major figures working out self-imposed problems as well as those conferred by the 'Body of Fate.'
Review, 1400 words
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