Introduction: Pocket Epics: British Poetry After Modernism

Abstract

This issue of The Yale Journal of Criticism is devoted to British poetry written since 1945, and it takes its bearings from the belief that in the wake of the formal and poetic experimentations of high modernism, British poetry produced a diverse and still largely unexamined genre of minor or local epics, works positioned between modernism and postmodernism and in the political tension between the canonical ambitions of their predecessors and the particular demands of their own historical geographies. Throughout Britain, poetry over the decades after the publication of The Waste Land and the early Cantos increasingly took this ambivalence as a point of origin and a formal dilemma, attempting to devise, in a phrase of Roy Fisher's that recurs throughout these essays, "a poem which gains its effects by the superimposition of landscape upon landscape rather than rhythm upon rhythm." This mode of writing begins with poems such as Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, W. H. Auden's The Orators, David Jones's The Anathemata, and Basil Bunting's Briggflatts, poems which self-reflexively situate themselves in the fissures of poetic genre. They are not unfinished, ever-expanding structures like Pound's Cantos; they are not lyric sequences; they don't have the organizing mythic narrative of Eliot's The Waste Land; and they refuse at crucial moments the global expansion described by Franco Moretti's term "modern epic." Nevertheless, they clearly have epic ambitions and tendencies: they certainly seek to tell, in Pound's use of Kipling's phrase (so central to Michael Bernstein's work), the "tale of the tribe." 1 This impulse, however, is strictly delimited, partly because their insistence on the local refuses the imperialist expansion of the epic, and partly because their particular locales preclude clear nationalist identity. In literary-historical terms they are uncomfortably located in the gap between modernism and postmodernism, and they emerge from regional sites and contexts that refuse to conform to the national and postcolonial paradigms of contemporary theorizing.