Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The subject of this volume, twentieth-century poetry in English, is vast, hetero-geneous and paradoxical. To say that it attempts to represent the poetry of a hundred years and more than twenty countries is to suggest only one dimension of the difficulty of the project. The phrase ‘in English’ is no mere neutral description, but signifies a complex, violent and still bitterly felt political and cultural history: some contributors question the division between poetry in English and other languages, and rightly transgress it; for others the historical role of the English language in shaping the culture and consciousness of poets is itself the main theme. This subject exists because of the successive historical phenomena of British imperialism and American cultural, economic and political dominance. The volume begins with the transatlantic connection in modernism and ends with contemporary postcolonial poetry. The trajectory of the century - of the English language and its poetry - is from a predominantly bipolar axis to an increasingly decentred heterogeneity. The country in which the English language originated had already ceded the leading role to America in the modernist era, and by the end of the century its current poetic production has little influence on the rest of the Anglophone world. If poetry from England still manages to hold up its head in this volume it is partly because ... log in or subscribe to read full text