I like my poetry hard, like my men.
2012 / Ebook / 276 pages / UK
***
Mainly providing the biographical context that threatens to ruin the classics if anything, this was a handy starting point to making my selections, even if I wussed out of The Cantos.
Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme, Ripostes of Ezra Pound; Whereto Are Appended the Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme, With Prefatory Note
1912 / Ebook / 64 pages / USA
**
The best part's the strange 'Adventures of Ned Flanders'-style appendix that pads out the page count with a handful of poems from someone more interesting.
"Above the quiet dock in mid night,
Tangled in the tall mast's corded height,
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child's balloon, forgotten after play."
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
*
This reads like a deranged mistranslation of a homewares catalogue. It's literally not poetry. It could be art, but shit art. Shame she wasn't a painter.
"Rhubarb is susan not susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places not in neglect and vegetable not in fold coal age not please."
Various, Des Imagistes: An Anthology
1914 / Ebook / 63 pages / USA/UK/Ireland
***
Having only committed to memory those two Imagist poems every English graduate knows (not included), I was looking forward to a compilation of relentlessly laser-focused haikus describing a bit of wainscoting or something, but instead mainly got romantic Grecian odes spread across several pages at a time. Either I've misunderstood Imagism or half of the writers did.
"O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside."
Various, Catholic Anthology 1914-1915
1915 / Ebook / 107 pages / USA/UK/Ireland
****
Pound isn't pushing a manifesto this time, just curating the cream of contemporary poetry as he sees it. Some of these selections would become immortal academic fixtures (Eliot's famous early ones are in there), others are misfires (WCW goes off on a weird one), most are obscure delights.
The War's still in its adolescence, but it gets the odd look-in and sets the tone, firmly stomping out the poesy.
"Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?"
Hope Mirrlees, Paris: A Poem
1920 / Ebook / 23 pages / UK***
An over-educated flâneuse has a day out in Paris and thinks way too much. The Waste Land Lite, it's a great introduction to this smart-arse movement, its undeserved obscurity in the canon doubtless due to a limited print run from Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. Well, you wouldn't want everyone knowing where you get your crazy ideas from.
"Paris is a huge home-sick peasant,
He carries a thousand villages in his heart."
1922 / Audiobook/ebook / 64 pages / USA
*****
Not as grim and overbearing as I remembered, partly thanks to the warm tones of Alec Guinness, there's lots of sombre beauty in Eliot's hellish collage. It's a defining exhibit of why it's probably better to be content in ignorance than wise to what a mental shitshow everything is.
"I had not thought death had undone so many."
William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
1923 / Ebook / 96 pages / USA
**
I was expecting scenic minimalism, not an apocalyptic essay on art with occasional, merciful interruptions of vivid poetry begging to be salvaged for a best-of. If you don't have enough poems to fill a book, just release an E.P. next time.
"To hell with you and your poetry
You will rot and be blown
through the next solar system
with the rest of the gases"
Wallace Stevens, Harmonium
1923 / Ebook / 140 pages / USA**
Maybe it's because he's always left to the end, when my not sizeable patience for poetry has worn thin, but I found Stevens a stuffy bore at university too. This is a generous-sized collection by these poets' standards, but it was a chore to get through.
"An apple serves as well as any skull
To be the book in which to read a round"
Mina Loy, Lunar Baedeker
1923 / Ebook / 45 pages / UK
***
The Futurists are as time-bound as any other forward-thinking movement, but this pacy, dehumanising onslaught with sexual cynicism that makes The Waste Land look prudish makes Mina Loy the modernest Modernist I've met, even if she's still fixated on the classics.
"From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete"
Marianne Moore, Observations
1924 / Ebook / 120 pages / USA
***
Moore observed more of the world than her more bookish peers, turning to the animal kingdom over mythology most of the time when she wants an enigmatic metaphor, but she still peppers her aesthetically-sculpted stanzas with quotes as mysterious as the rest of this deceptively stream-of-consciousness topiary. I didn't give it the time and attention it deserved, but I like her way with words.
"It may be said of all of us
that we do not admire what we cannot understand;
enigmas are not poetry."
W. B. Yeats, The Tower
1928 / Ebook / 112 pages / Ireland***
I don't know why the Irish nationalist occultist didn't get much of a look-in at university, outside of some swan rape. Maybe the lyrical throwback and – would you believe it – rhyme! – make it harder to conveniently slot him in chronologically. The longer ones are trying, but if I'm not going to bother studying the context and rhyme schemes, I don't deserve to get it.
"Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect."
