A survey of modernist poetry - Laura

The books paired here make up the first collaborative study of 'Modernist' poetry by two of the twentieth century's most important and original poets. In "A Survey of Modernist Poetry", Laura Riding and Robert Graves produce a contemporary reaction to the early experimentation of writers such as Eliot, Pound and E.E.Cummings. Their close critical readings are deployed, along the way, in an engagement with Shakespeare's punctuation, issues of populism and elitism and an attempt to define - perhaps to invent - that elusive creature known as 'the common reader'. The Survey contains groundbreaking readings of modern poems and movements and is an illuminating and polemical account of the beginnings of modernism. It is an important resource but also a valuable critical text in the reception and development of modernist poetry in English. "A Pamphlet Against Anthologies" is an entertaining tirade against the perceived iniquities of the trade anthology. A statement of poetic integrity, it poses awkward questions about the production and consumption of art in the mass markets of twentieth and twenty-first centuries.