The Very Dead of Winter: Notes Towards an Enquiry into English Poetry after Eliot

Abstract

What happened to modernism in English poetry? This question used to bother me a good deal. What followed The Waste Land in the poetry of the thirties and later seemed, when I first began to read it thirty years ago, to have had nothing to do with The Waste Land - and the literary history (or polemical theory) I had learned at school had made a development onwards from modernism seem morally imperative, and its non-appearance reprehensible, a verdict upon England, a verdict confirming the tragic diagnosis of its postwar condition by D. H. Lawrence.2