Oliver Tearle - The Great War, the Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem

In the 1920s, a long poem was published, the most ambitious that its author had yet undertaken. It fused images of the First World War with the ancient world and descriptions of modern-day London. The poem is highly multilingual, alludes to numerous works of literature in different languages, and utilizes many different styles and forms, from rhyming couplets to snatches of popular song. The I who speaks in the poem is several different characters, who are all designed to represent one consciousness. The poem, in taking modern post-war Europe as one of its settings, attempts to speak for the world at large but is also a very personal depiction of a poets dissatisfaction with urban modernity and the loss of poetry in the new, post-war age. The process of writing the poem and confronting his own life and experiences led to the poet having a nervous breakdown.

All of this could apply to T. S. Eliots The Waste Land, a landmark work of modernist poetry published in 1922. But it might also apply to an altogether less well-known poem published three years later and written by a different modernist poet indeed, a poet who was uncomfortable with much of modernism by this stage of his career. The author of this other Waste Land was Eliots sometime friend and fellow modernist Richard Aldington, whose 1925 poem A Fool i the Forest was, in part, a response to Eliots more famous post-war poem about decaying Europe. Other poets including another of Eliots friends Ezra Pound as well as less celebrated writers such as Hope Mirrlees and Nancy Cunard would also write long poems in the modernist mode during the years immediately succeeding the end of the war. At least one of these, Hope Mirrleess Paris, was written three years before The Waste Land was published and anticipates Eliots poem in startlingly specific ways. Yet this history of the modernist long poem, which is so little known as to be almost a secret history, has not been told in full. This is surprising given the centrality of The Waste Land to our understanding of modernist poetry of the 1920s; yet Hope Mirrleess striking precursor to Eliots poem remains largely unknown, even among avid readers and students of modernist literature. This book tells the story of these other poems, and in doing so offers a significant and original contribution to our understanding of modernist poetry produced in the years following the Great War.

Why were modernist poets drawn to the long poem during the immediate post-war years? Stephen Spender recalled Eliot confiding to him that The Waste Land could not have been written at any moment except when it was written a remark which, while biographically true in regard to his own life, is also true of the poems time in European history after World War I. The sense that Western civilization was in a state which was the realization of historic doom lasted from 1920 to 1926. Pound and Hope Mirrlees, among others, demonstrate this. To treat