Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer: On the Poetics of Community

Description

Despite the brevity of its run and the diminutive size of its audience, The English Intelligencer is a key publication in the history of literary modernism in the British Isles. Emerging in the mid-1960s from a dissatisfaction with the prevailing norms of ‘Betjeman’s England’, the young writers associated with it were catalysed by the example of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry as they sought to establish a revitalized modernist poetics. Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer gives the first full account of the extraordinary history of this publication, bringing to light extensive new archival material to establish an authoritative contextualization of its operation and its relationship with post-war British poetry. This material provides compelling new insights into the work of the Intelligencer poets themselves and, more broadly, the continued presence of an international poetic modernism as a vital force in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century. Cover Half-title Title Copyright Dedication Contents Acknowledgements Series Editors’ Preface Introduction: Later than Late: The English Intelligencer and Modernism 1. Publishing, Community and Exchange in The English Intelligencer 2. ‘An essential structural unity’: Modernist Ideals and The English Intelligencer 3. Beyond the Whole: The Breakdown of Late Modernismin The English Intelligencer 4. ‘A relationship between the formal | & the unpredictable’: From Condensare to Détournement in the Poetry of John James 5. Displacing the Polis: The English Intelligencer and the Long Poem in the 1970s Conclusion: ‘The proper microscope after all’: Reading The English Intelligencer Appendix: Contents Listing of The English Intelligencer Notes Bibliography Index