Where to start with modernist poetry
Eliot and Rilke make fragmentation, allusion, and spiritual pressure audible before any footnote can explain them.
The Waste Land's references have made difficulty feel like an entrance exam, but the sound and pressure of the poems still draw you in.
Picking up the Waste Land first, hitting the polyglot footnotes, treating the poem as a puzzle to be solved with a guide, and never letting the music work. Or starting at Four Quartets and walking away thinking modernism is late religious patience, when modernism's central shock is the much earlier moment a single voice could no longer pretend to be confident, and the form had to admit it. The footnotes are not the form. The voice is the form.
Books in order
- Prufrock and Other Observations — Read Prufrock aloud, in one sitting. Watch how the voice undoes itself in the asking — the questions that are never quite asked, the women who come and go, the trouser-cuffs and the eternal Footman. Modernism in English begins inside this voice; the rest of the movement is unintelligible without it.
- The Waste Land — Read it without the footnotes the first time. The poem's collage of voices — pub talk, mythic figures, fragments of song, snatches of liturgy — is doing the work, and identifying every reference is the second-pass reading, not the first. Read the closing lines slowly; the broken music is doing the argument the footnotes can't.
- Duino Elegies — Rilke at full intensity — ten long elegies on angels, lovers, and what consciousness is for. Read in a parallel-text edition if you can find one; the German is doing work the English can only suggest. Take the first elegy slowly; the famous opening cry sets the form, and the rest of the sequence is the slow patient earning of an answer to it.
- Four Quartets — Eliot twenty-five years after Prufrock, in four meditative movements on time, memory, and the still point of the turning world. Read it last in the Eliot sequence — Four Quartets is what modernism becomes when it has finally earned a calm voice, and reading it after Prufrock and the Waste Land lets that calm be heard as something hard-won rather than as the genre's natural register.
Further reading
- Harmonium — Wallace Stevens's first book — the poems most readers know him by (Sunday Morning, The Snow Man, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird). Read it after the three above; Stevens is the American modernist working in a different key than Eliot or Pound, and his lines are the sequence's most rewarding lyric counterweight.
- Trilogy — H. D.'s wartime trilogy — three long sequences written under the Blitz, drawing on Egypt, Christianity, and alchemy without footnoting any of it. Read it after the sequence has trained you for difficulty; H. D. is one of the modernist poets most often skipped in the standard syllabus, and the trilogy is one of the period's masterworks.
- Selected Poems (Paul Celan) — Paul Celan writing after the Holocaust in the language of the people who killed his parents — modernist technique pushed to the place where it was most needed and most damaged. Read him last; the poems require the patience the earlier sequences will have built, and they ask the reader to sit with a difficulty that is no longer formal but historical.
- The Cantos — Pound's eight-hundred-page sequence of cantos. The most ambitious modernist long poem and the most often abandoned. Save it for last, if at all; the politics are ugly, the difficulty is real, and almost every reader who fails modernist poetry as a project fails by overcommitting to Pound too early.