Modernist Figures brings together three decades of Peter Nicholls’s scholarship on poetry and poetics, tracing how modernism redefined literary form, skepticism, and cultural authority. The collection ranges across American, British, and European traditions, Volume I (New Poetries) beginning with Melville’s transatlantic encounters with skepticism and cynicism, and then repositioning Swinburne as the creator of a distinctively “modern” poetics. Essays on Leopardi, Mallarmé, Ungaretti and Valéry develop the theme of “foreignness” in the new poetry, while later pieces chart how lyric both sustained and was unsettled by modernist innovations in Eliot, Pound, Oppen, and Howe. New Poetries explores divergent American modernisms through Stein and Hemingway, the centrality of allusion in modernist writing, and the complex afterlives of Surrealism in England and in America (the poetry of Lorine Niedecker). Later essays juxtapose metaphysical and materialist strains of modernism, considering poetic “presence” in Oppen, Celan, and Bonnefoy, and analyzing Mina Loy’s feminist “lexicophilia” alongside Pound’s evolving aesthetics.
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