Subject
Modernism (Literature) Books
Best books
Horace Barnett Samuel
Modernities
"Modernities" by Horace Barnett Samuel is a collection of essays written in the early 20th century. This volume presents multifaceted studies of significant figures from the modern movement since the French Revolution, capturing the essence of modernity through their lives and works. The book features various notable personalities including Stendhal, Heine, and Disraeli, elucidating their contributions and the cultural currents of their times. At the start of "Modernities," the author introduces the overarching theme of modernity and its transient nature, emphasizing that the subjects of the essays were at one time emblematic of this spirit. The introductory portions hint at the complex and often contradictory characters of modern figures, specifically focusing on Stendhal as a quintessential intellectual balancing action and thought amidst a backdrop of personal turmoil and societal change. Samuel sketches Stendhal's tumultuous childhood, intellectual pursuits, and evolving views on love and society, setting the stage for a deeper exploration of how such figures navigated and influenced the modern condition.
Laura Riding
A survey of modernist poetry
"A survey of modernist poetry" by Laura Riding and Robert Graves is a work of literary criticism written in the early 20th century. It explores why modernist poems look and read the way they do, how they challenge the “plain reader,” and what new techniques—of form, diction, punctuation, and layout—aim to achieve. The authors argue that experiment serves clarity of experience, not obscurity for its own sake, and that readers must meet the poems with more active, precise attention. The opening of the book sets up the debate between modernist innovation and the plain reader’s expectations, using E. E. Cummings as a test case. It closely reads his short “Sunset” piece to show how spacing, sound-patterns, and omission create a concentrated experience, then reconstructs a conventional version to prove how banality and cliché return when the innovations are removed. From there it weighs French Symbolist influences (Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Valéry), Japanese suggestiveness, and the problem of form versus subject-matter, arguing for organic design over fixed molds; it illustrates flexible structure with Hart Crane and biblical parallelism, and contrasts Eliot’s The Waste Land, whose transitions bind a unified whole, with Tennyson’s In Memoriam, whose uniform stanza masks digression. A chapter on punctuation shows how Cummings’ typography encodes meaning and guards against misreading, then compares that editorial vulnerability to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, demonstrating how modernized punctuation and spelling can flatten Shakespeare’s dense, interwoven sense. Finally, the start of the next chapter frames modernism’s “unpopularity,” and analyzes another Cummings piece (a jolting train scene) to show how unorthodox layout precisely transmits movement and perception.
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