Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2. Origins 3. ‘Modernism’s Lost Masterpiece’: Hope Mirrlees, Paris: A Poem 4. ‘The Age Demanded’: Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 5. To Carthage: T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land 6. Paralysed Form: T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’ 7. Arden to Ardennes: Richard Aldington, A Fool I’ the Forest 8. The ‘Emotions of Aftermath’: Nancy Cunard, Parallax 9. Afterword Notes Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

Explores how writers such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Hope Mirrlees turned to the form of the modernist long poem to confront the cultural trauma of the Great War.

About the Author

Oliver Tearle is Lecturer in English at Loughborough University, UK. He is the author of T.E. Hulme and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Reviews

[The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem] virtues at both the micro and macro levels—its trenchant close readings and synoptic scope—recommend it to any serious reader of T. S. Eliot.
*Time Present: The Newsletter of the International T. S. Eliot Society*

Draws pleasingly together canonical texts and works by under-analyzed modernist authors, offering for the first time a focused account of this form of post-war writing ... This book will be useful to scholars in First World War and modernist studies, and the well-defined and effectively developed central concepts of the long poem and homorhyme might also be used profitably in other contexts.
*The Review of English Studies*

Oliver Tearle has done a good and timely job on bringing his reader back into the micro-climate of the poetry produced at the time by some of the twentieth century giants such as TS Eliot and Ezra Pound and their lesser known (today) contemporaries, including Ford Madox Ford (Antwerp, 1915), Hope Mirrlees (Paris: A Poem, 1920), Richard Aldington, (A Fool I’ the Forest: A Phantasmagoria (1925) – from As You Like It: “A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the forest, / A motley fool; a miserable world!”) and Nancy Cunard, (Parallax, 1925).
*Dublin Review of Books*

In this engaging, learned study, Oliver Tearle takes for his subject what he calls a “miniature genre-within-a-genre,” the modernist long poem, and he seeks to explore the relation of this genre to the Great War…His book provides an excellent introduction to all six poems. If at first this seems most valuable when it comes to Paris, A Fool i’ the Forest, and Parallax, the whole is yet greater than the parts, for the book offers a rich and compelling picture of modernist poetry in the decade after the Great War.
*Affirmations of the Modern*