Late Modernist Poetics

This book explores the uncanny afterlife of modernist ideals in the second half of the twentieth century. Rejecting the familiar notion that modernism dissolved during the 1930s, it argues that the fusion of rationalism and mysticism which characterises modernist poetics was sustained long after its politics had been discredited by the events of World War Two. The book's central concern is why the aesthetic mysticism that Walter Benjamin called the faith of those 'who made common cause with Fascism' continued to be a guiding principle for literary elites and countercultural movements alike. New light is shed on the relationship between occultism and the Pound tradition, especially in terms of Pound's influence on post-1945 Anglo-American poetry, and a critical theory of 'late modernism' is offered which shows how belated notions of cultural redemption have survived in contemporary poetry. This wide-ranging contextual study focuses on the poetry of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Paul Celan, and J H Prynne, and explores the development of modernist culture through its theories of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, science, ethnography, and ancient history.

ISBN 0719058856   Pages 240 ISBN13 9780719058851 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Manchester University Press   Weight (grammes) 408 Imprint Manchester University Press   Published in Manchester Format Hardback   Series title Angelaki Humanities S. Publication date 20 Jan 2005   Height (mm) 216 Library of Congress 2005298395   Width (mm) 138 DEWEY 809.1911209045   Spine width (mm) 24 DEWEY edition DC22   Academic level Professional / Scholarly, General

1		Hermetic poetry and late modernism		14
2		Cunning man : Ezra Pound and secret wisdom		52
3		Maximal extent : Charles Olson and C. G. Jung		90
4		Shamanism and the poetics of late modernism : J. H. Prynne		117
5		The spirit of poetry : Heidegger, Trakl, Derrida and Prynne		144
6		Obscurity, fragmentation and the uncanny in Prynne and Celan		167

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