‘Our London, my London, your London’: the Modernist moment in the metropolis

Abstract

It has become something of a truism to observe that Modernism emerged in tension both with the forces of modernisation and tendencies in social, economic and political modernity. The example of London was to bear this out, especially through the complex cultural and political sea-change of World War I. By 1920 Ezra Pound had given up on London and had already drafted the Hell Cantos which took London as their subject. Ford Madox Ford retreated after the war to the country and thence to Paris and the USA. Lewis went underground, then shifted to the USA and Canada. Only Eliot of the canonic men of 1914 found ways to negotiate the post-war conservatism which had driven others from the capital. This antagonism between Modernist culture and modern metropolitan society was an expression of relations between the individual artist and the social mass, new regimens of work, and the apparatuses of mass production and consumption, but it was expressed in another way, too, by London’s relation to the cities positioned historically, geographically and mythologically either side of it. Paris, the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, was in this scheme of things a city of European sophistication and advanced artistic culture; New York, on the other hand, was a brazen emblem of the new, the coming city of the twentieth century, and already in the 1900s an emerging finance capital and model of consumerism whose cultural life, at least in the eyes of its expatriate artists, was at best embryonic.