Modernist War Poetry: Combat Gnosticism and the Sympathetic Imagination, 1914-19

This study examines the work of the principle architects of Anglo-American modernist poetics - T.S. Eliot, H.D., Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Edward Thomas and Wallace Stevens - and their response to the challenge of combatant war poetries. It argues that these civilian poets sought to negotiate directly with the combatant’s gnosticism, specifically with the combatant’s assertion that only those present at a catastrophe could properly represent its horrors. The modernists rightly identified that gnosticism was a threat to their own representational claims on an increasingly traumatic modernity. How was the imagination to be salvaged in order that it could still feel into the wounded experience of others? In response to this challenge, the modernists drafted their own imagined war poems, developing in the process several different and contradictory poetic systems. Whereas scholarship ordinarily tells the story of intra-war modern poetry as a series of different schools - the trench lyric, the home front elegy and the modernist long poem - each moving in a different direction, this study brings those traditions back together into one history by treating them as idiosyncratic responses to the same aesthetic problem.

Dr Jamie Wood is an independent scholar focused on Anglo-American literary modernism between 1910 and 1950. He is particularly interested in the genealogy of high modernist aesthetics, the trauma of modernity and the interconnection between literature and finance capitalism. He is the author of several journal articles published in Biography (2018), College Literature (2018), Modernist Cultures (2015) and Modernism/modernity (2010), and of articles in edited collections published or forthcoming by Edinburgh University, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and the Société Française. He has written extensively on the work of Wyndham Lewis and George Orwell, and in 2014 was the winner of the British Association of Modernist Studies Essay Prize for work on F.T. Marinetti’s visit to London in 1910.