Abstract

The argument put forward in The Poetry of Modernity: Anglo/American Encodings is that certain recent Anglo/American poets incisively articulated the postmodern situation well before, or irrespective of, the theorisation of "Postmodernism". It illuminates how, building on literary Modernism, like-minded poets pioneered awareness of pressing global realities -such as the rise of the new media, increasing internationalism, growing awareness of environmental limitations or the "return" of a spiritual "repressed" - in ways which anticipated and remain to challenge the emphases of the post-modern debate. Reappraising specific poetic "zones", from the late work of W. H. Auden, through Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery to the later work of R. S. Thomas, it highlights the prophetic role of poetry in a complex, contemporary world and confirms the achievements of certain recent poets as a precedent for future verse-production.