Modern Isms

As I continue reading responses to postmodernism by people who were never really on the fronts of it, I find there's a problem with the definitions of modernism used by people who have encountered it primarily in English. They seem to leave out aspects related to the futurisms in Italy and Russia; and Dada, Surrealism and Cubism in France, Spain, and Germany.

Americanists seem to have the greatest problem, perhaps since their attitudes seem colored by responses to TS Eliot's New Criticism. Eliot wrote some bold and beautiful poetry, but for all of his perception, the movement was retrogressive on several counts.

• His near-fascist politics


• He cast the issues of "hard language" and the "objective correlative" as an eschewing of emotion instead of a recognition of perspectivist dissonance between author and reader.


• He incorporated the essentialist Anglican metaphysics and many aspects of 18th Century French symbolism as parts of modernism as it became institutionalized. In doing so, he marginalized in the US and Britain the anti-essentialist concepts that had been the heart of modernism in the teens and twenties, including the irrational, the unconscious in its various forms, zaum, decentering of the author.

These issues finally returned in various ways in the 50's and thereafter, but adherents of the various schools, critics perhaps more than artists, often miss the larger synthesis of the earlier movement that included the innovations on the continent.

For what it's worth, a good sampling of at least the poetry that they lack can be found in Rothenberg and Joris' Poems for the Millenium VOL I. The second volume is grand, too, but the first covers the area that most of us would call modernism.