I'm an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Languages and World Literatures at the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus. I earned a Ph.D. in Modernist Literature from Western University, following an M.A. and an H.B.A. in English Literature from the University of Toronto. My fields of interest include Transatlantic Modernism, 20th-Century British and Irish Literature, World Literature, and modernist cultural politics in the years between the world wars. Address: University of British Columbia
1148 Research Rd. |CCS 365
Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7 Canada
Estetas fascistas y antifascistas: La vanguardia española, el modernismo americano y la política del poder, 2021
En el ambiente general de totalitarismo que rodea la Guerra Civil sobresalen cuatro escritores qu... more En el ambiente general de totalitarismo que rodea la Guerra Civil sobresalen cuatro escritores que, cada uno a su modo, contribuyeron a la política cultural del momento y coincidían en el alto grado de intransigencia de sus posturas: Ernesto Giménez Caballero, José María Pemán, Ezra Pound y Virginia Woolf.
Por mucho que sus filosofías políticas se contrapusieron, juntos representaron una de las muestras más influyentes de la intelligentsia modernista. A su vez, también disfrutaron de un acceso privilegiado a las más altas esferas del poder en la España, Italia e Inglaterra del momento.
Este ensayo contrapone algunas obras de estos autores, que ocupan espacios liminares entre el arte y la propaganda. Considerando el fascismo como una hoja de ruta teórica y retórica, el libro realiza un estudio comparativo cuyo principal objetivo es examinar espacios tradicionalmente descuidados por el estudio literario del modernismo.
Published in 1938, Guide to Kulchur encapsulates Ezra Pound’s chief concerns: his cultural, histo... more Published in 1938, Guide to Kulchur encapsulates Ezra Pound’s chief concerns: his cultural, historiographic, philosophical, and epistemological theories; his aesthetics and poetics; and his economic and political thought. In its fifty-eight chapters and postscript, it constitutes an interdisciplinary and transhistorical cultural anthropology that exemplifies his slogan for the renovation of ancient wisdom for current use—“Make It New.” Guide to Kulchur is paramount among Pound’s prose works. This is also to say that it is inescapable in any serious study of Pound, even if it is likely more often cited than read in its entirety. Wildly encyclopedic, allusive and recursive, the book is notoriously difficult. The Cantos’s prose twin, Guide can be as abstruse and mystifying as anything in Pound’s monumental poetic experiment.
A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur addresses the formidable interpretive challenges his most far-reaching prose tract presents to the reader. Providing page-by-page glosses on key terms and passages in Guide, the Companion also situates Pound’s allusions and references in relation to other texts in his vast body of work, especially The Cantos. Striking a balance between rigorous scholarly standards and readerly accessibility, the book is designed to meet the needs of the specialist while keeping the critical apparatus unobtrusive so as also to appeal to students and the general public. A long-needed resource, A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur joins Carroll Terrell’s landmark A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound with the aim to make a lasting contribution to the growing number of editorial and critical studies on the work of one of the most influential and controversial literary figures of the twentieth century.
This article undertakes a close comparative reading of the work of two key World War I English po... more This article undertakes a close comparative reading of the work of two key World War I English poets: Jessie Pope, a then immensely popular Home Front poet–journalist and staunch supporter of the Allied war effort; and Wilfred Owen, a soldier–poet whose verse would evolve from its Romantic-Georgian and pastoral roots to yield some of the most scathing indictments of the war. In focus are the poets’ chief compositions, Pope’s jingoist ballad, ‘The Lads of the Maple Leaf’ (1915), and the several drafts of Owen’s antiwar trench lyric, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ (1917–1920). The author argues that although the poems are diametrically opposed – politically and ideologically – they nonetheless share a set of cultural, historical, and literary markers which converge on Horace’s ancient slogan in praise of an honourable death in battle, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Significantly, the article locates for the first time Pope’s forgotten ballad as the most likely catalyst for Owen’s famous gas poem. With Pope’s poetry as a nexus, the discussion takes Owen’s original mock-dedication of ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ to her and other pro-war poets as a point of departure for examining Pope’s investment in the tropes and memes of Britain’s imperial project, especially in relation to Canada. The aim is to explore Pope’s mythopoeic glorification of Canadian troops in light of the non-partisan hellish vision of Owen’s warrior poet. Given that Pope’s poem establishes at the outset Canadians’ submissive loyalty to the British Empire, the article enlists Canadian combatant and non-combatant poetry to illustrate the colonial–imperial traffic of ideas informing the belligerent poetic–aesthetic turn the war provoked in Canada and Britain. The argument thus sheds new light on one of the best-known war poems, whilst bringing Pope’s long-neglected agitprop ballad out of the shadows.
In January 1928, The Dial published T. S. Eliot’s review of Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra... more In January 1928, The Dial published T. S. Eliot’s review of Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (1926). Even as he acknowledges his indebtedness to his fellow American poet-critic, Eliot seems bewildered by Pound’s belief system, which in his estimation is a heady mix of mysticism, occultism, pseudoscience, and Confucianism. With a touch of exasperation, he ends the review by asking provocatively, “what does Mr. Pound believe?” Although he would never give an answer that Eliot would find satisfying, Pound would revisit the question time and again in his prose and poetry. In the process, he reveals more about his eccentric set of creeds than even Eliot might have bargained for. Striving to synthesize a range of philosophical and polytheistic traditions, Pound would cast off the Presbyterianism of his early youth. From the 1930s onward, his deepening affiliation with Italian Fascism and near-cultic devotion to Mussolini would add yet another layer to his spectrum of beliefs. With Eliot’s query in The Dial functioning as a recurring point of reference, this essay examines Pound’s religious beliefs as a shifting panoply of mythico-theological, aesthetic, and political ideas. The picture that emerges is as complex as it is difficult to pin down, blurring the boundaries of what constitutes “faith” itself.
This article examines T. S. Eliot’s review-essay of five seminal studies of Italian Fascism and c... more This article examines T. S. Eliot’s review-essay of five seminal studies of Italian Fascism and critically interconnects the key arguments put forth in each book. Published in 1928 in the <i>Criterion</i>, the poet-critic’s influential literary magazine, the omnibus book review constitutes his most sustained, if skeptical, exploration of the radical political movement, still a rising phenomenon at the time. Although Eliot presents himself as politically naïve, he exhibits a surprisingly cogent and nuanced understanding of Fascism’s political economy, mass psychology, and mythico-heroic apparatus. Contrasting his Christian-inflected antifascist political and cultural thought with the Fascist commitments of Ezra Pound, his one-time collaborator and fellow American modernist poet, the present article argues that Eliot advocated a tradition-based separation of church and state as a hedge against all forms of totalitarian ideology.
This article undertakes a close comparative reading of the work of two key World War I English po... more This article undertakes a close comparative reading of the work of two key World War I English poets: Jessie Pope, a then immensely popular Home Front poet–journalist and staunch supporter of the Allied war effort; and Wilfred Owen, a soldier–poet whose verse would evolve from its Romantic-Georgian and pastoral roots to yield some of the most scathing indictments of the war. In focus are the poets’ chief compositions, Pope’s jingoist ballad, ‘The Lads of the Maple Leaf’ (1915), and the several drafts of Owen’s antiwar trench lyric, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ (1917–1920). The author argues that although the poems are diametrically opposed – politically and ideologically – they nonetheless share a set of cultural, historical, and literary markers which converge on Horace’s ancient slogan in praise of an honourable death in battle, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Significantly, the article locates for the first time Pope’s forgotten ballad as the most likely catalyst for Owen’s famous gas poem. With Pope’s poetry as a nexus, the discussion takes Owen’s original mock-dedication of ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ to her and other pro-war poets as a point of departure for examining Pope’s investment in the tropes and memes of Britain’s imperial project, especially in relation to Canada. The aim is to explore Pope’s mythopoeic glorification of Canadian troops in light of the non-partisan hellish vision of Owen’s warrior poet. Given that Pope’s poem establishes at the outset Canadians’ submissive loyalty to the British Empire, the article enlists Canadian combatant and non-combatant poetry to illustrate the colonial–imperial traffic of ideas informing the belligerent poetic–aesthetic turn the war provoked in Canada and Britain. The argument thus sheds new light on one of the best-known war poems, whilst bringing Pope’s long-neglected agitprop ballad out of the shadows.
Imagism: Essays on Initiation, Impact and Influence, Aug 7, 2013
Imagism is often seen as the forerunner of Vorticism, a perception that has lasted for nearly a c... more Imagism is often seen as the forerunner of Vorticism, a perception that has lasted for nearly a century. As such, critical attention to the relationship between the two aesthetic experiments has mapped a more or less smooth transition from one to the other. In The Pound Era, to cite a well-known study, Hugh Kenner states unequivocally that “The Imagist propaganda merged into the Vorticist,” illustrating this merger with the following excerpt from the Vorticist creed that appeared in the movement’s little magazine, Blast 1: “Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form.” Here, Kenner presumably has in mind Pound’s famous Imagist dictum, “An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” That this proverb-like aphorism is reproduced in Blast 1 under the heading “Ancestry” (and again under “The Primary Pigment”) suggests precisely the foundational kinship Kenner puts forth. Yet, Kenner also characterizes Imagism in no uncertain terms as an inferior precursor to the Vortex. Imagism, in his own words, “soon entailed negotiating with dim and petulant people: Fletcher, say, or Flint, or Aldington, and eventually Miss Lowell.” My paper seeks to show that far from breaking free from Imagism and Imagists, as the dean of Pound studies suggests, Pound’s collaboration with fellow Vorticists, including Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, Ford (then-Hueffer), Sanders, and Dismorr, among others, was sustained by key elements of the Imagist aesthetic. It is not insignificant, then, to find Richard Aldington among the signatories of the Vorticist Manifesto in Blast 1. My discussion aligns itself with the idea proposed by Eliot, himself a one-time contributor to Blast, that Imagism may be seen as “the starting-point of modern poetry.” I will discuss the intersections of Imagist principles in close readings of less-known Vorticist poems published in the “War issue” of Blast in 1915. My purpose is to investigate the extent to which Imagist principles inform and perhaps complicate our reading of hitherto neglected specimens of Vorticist art.
In The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (2002), Jason Ha... more In The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (2002), Jason Harding describes Eliot’s political philosophy as “based upon an ecclesiastical conception of hierarchy.” My paper builds upon Harding’s conclusion, while interrogating the stringent “religio-political” binary that all too often attends Eliot studies. I seek to trace a few of the origins of hierarchical principles in Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic sensibility. As such, I begin with the etymology of “hierarchy” itself, as coded in the tripartite angelic orders established by first century Paulinian convert to Christianity, Dionysius the Areopagite, the first Bishop of Athens. The principal works ascribed to Dionysius by a sixth-century Neoplatonist (known as “Pseudo-Dionysius”), The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, establish a direct correlation between the divine and clerical ranks, as the titles imply. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1911) bears the imprint of Dionysius’ mystic theology. In turn, her hierarchical phases of “mystic consciousness”— “1. Awakening or Conversion; 2. Self-knowledge or Purgation; 3. Illumination; 4. Surrender, or the Dark Night; 5. Union”—would inform Eliot’s adherence to religious dogma and drive him further away from his family’s Unitarian faith.
Coincidentally, but no less instructive, the OED locates the first distinctly political use of “hierarchy” in the English language in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named The Gouernour (1531). That Elyot’s guide for rulers was influenced by Machiavelli, Plato, and Xenophon, among other sources, attests to its syncretic, classicist-humanist approach to political economy and the chain of command. Eliot, as we know, greatly admired his Tudor ancestor. The concept of “clerisy” that Eliot would advocate in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) arguably fuses Elyot’s moral-political with the theological reading of hierarchy. While I agree with Roger Kojecky that it was Charles Maurras’ concept of hierarchy that brought Eliot “into easy association with Catholicism” (T.S. Eliot’s Social Criticism, 1971), I also seek to foreground the Anglican side of Eliot’s Catholicism. That is, I focus on what Eliot himself referred to as the “English Catholic Church” (my emphasis), with the Anglican Church founded as a national institution independent of papal jurisdiction. As Eliot puts it in “Lancelot Andrewes,” the spirit of Anglicanism entails a via media between “Papacy and Presbytery." Significantly, in the same essay Eliot terms the Church of England at the end of the Elizabethan era “a masterpiece of ecclesiastical statesmanship.”
I discuss key differences between the two strains of Catholicism, mapping Eliot’s postures in relation to divergences in sacrament, liturgy, and hierarchy. Finally, I also give brief but needed attention to his opposition to the Fascist Gerarchia, the corporative structure of the Italian state under Mussolini. Unlike totalitarian hierarchy, Catholicism appealed to Eliot as a “coherent traditional system of dogma and morals,” as he writes in his essay on Dante. Yet, more important, only Anglicanism could conjoin for Eliot “the element of humanism and criticism,” as he would write soon after his conversion. It is, then, the “Anglo-Catholic” dialectic that he would deem vital in preventing “a Catholicism of despair” (“The Humanism of Irving Babbitt”).
Image and Imagery: Re-making, Re-writing, Re-discovery—Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang. 3-14. Print., 2010
The twenty-four essays in Rewriting Texts Remaking Images: Interdisciplinary Perspectives examine... more The twenty-four essays in Rewriting Texts Remaking Images: Interdisciplinary Perspectives examine the complex relationships between original creative works and subsequent versions of these originals, from both theoretical and pragmatic perspectives. The process involves the rereading, reinterpretation, and rediscovery of literary texts, paintings, photographs, and films, as well as the consideration of issues pertaining to adaptation, intertextuality, transcodification, ekphrasis, parody, translation, and revision. The interdisciplinary analyses consider works from classical antiquity to the present day, in a number of literatures, and include such topics as the reuse and resemantization of photographs and iconic images.
In 1915, Jessie Pope, a pro-War English poet, published “The Lads of the Maple Leaf” in The Fiery... more In 1915, Jessie Pope, a pro-War English poet, published “The Lads of the Maple Leaf” in The Fiery Cross: An Anthology of War Poems. The rousing ballad establishes at the outset Canadian troops’ filial-colonial subservience to the British Empire, even unto death. The young “men of the Maple,” the poet affirms, are “Eager to show their mettle, ready to shed their blood.” This is no doubt the kind of sentiment Wilfred Owen sought to undercut in his sardonic dedication to Pope in the manuscript draft version of his iconic anti-war poem dramatizing a gas attack, “Dulce et Decorum Est.” In turn, the fourth and fifth sections of Ezra Pound’s long poem, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), echo much of Owen’s animus against the war, particularly the “old Lie” that both poets deride: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country”). This paper enlists Horace’s ancient slogan in praise of war as a point of departure to examine its political resonance in the work of Pope, Owen, and Pound. Specifically, I aim to explore the colonial subtext of Pope’s mythopoeic glorification of Canadian troops in light of the non-partisan hellish vision of Owen’s soldier-poet and the satirical indictment of Western civilization in Pound’s anti-War sequence in Mauberley.
Estetas fascistas y antifascistas: La vanguardia española, el modernismo americano y la política del poder, 2021
En el ambiente general de totalitarismo que rodea la Guerra Civil sobresalen cuatro escritores qu... more En el ambiente general de totalitarismo que rodea la Guerra Civil sobresalen cuatro escritores que, cada uno a su modo, contribuyeron a la política cultural del momento y coincidían en el alto grado de intransigencia de sus posturas: Ernesto Giménez Caballero, José María Pemán, Ezra Pound y Virginia Woolf.
Por mucho que sus filosofías políticas se contrapusieron, juntos representaron una de las muestras más influyentes de la intelligentsia modernista. A su vez, también disfrutaron de un acceso privilegiado a las más altas esferas del poder en la España, Italia e Inglaterra del momento.
Este ensayo contrapone algunas obras de estos autores, que ocupan espacios liminares entre el arte y la propaganda. Considerando el fascismo como una hoja de ruta teórica y retórica, el libro realiza un estudio comparativo cuyo principal objetivo es examinar espacios tradicionalmente descuidados por el estudio literario del modernismo.
Published in 1938, Guide to Kulchur encapsulates Ezra Pound’s chief concerns: his cultural, histo... more Published in 1938, Guide to Kulchur encapsulates Ezra Pound’s chief concerns: his cultural, historiographic, philosophical, and epistemological theories; his aesthetics and poetics; and his economic and political thought. In its fifty-eight chapters and postscript, it constitutes an interdisciplinary and transhistorical cultural anthropology that exemplifies his slogan for the renovation of ancient wisdom for current use—“Make It New.” Guide to Kulchur is paramount among Pound’s prose works. This is also to say that it is inescapable in any serious study of Pound, even if it is likely more often cited than read in its entirety. Wildly encyclopedic, allusive and recursive, the book is notoriously difficult. The Cantos’s prose twin, Guide can be as abstruse and mystifying as anything in Pound’s monumental poetic experiment.
A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur addresses the formidable interpretive challenges his most far-reaching prose tract presents to the reader. Providing page-by-page glosses on key terms and passages in Guide, the Companion also situates Pound’s allusions and references in relation to other texts in his vast body of work, especially The Cantos. Striking a balance between rigorous scholarly standards and readerly accessibility, the book is designed to meet the needs of the specialist while keeping the critical apparatus unobtrusive so as also to appeal to students and the general public. A long-needed resource, A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur joins Carroll Terrell’s landmark A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound with the aim to make a lasting contribution to the growing number of editorial and critical studies on the work of one of the most influential and controversial literary figures of the twentieth century.
This article undertakes a close comparative reading of the work of two key World War I English po... more This article undertakes a close comparative reading of the work of two key World War I English poets: Jessie Pope, a then immensely popular Home Front poet–journalist and staunch supporter of the Allied war effort; and Wilfred Owen, a soldier–poet whose verse would evolve from its Romantic-Georgian and pastoral roots to yield some of the most scathing indictments of the war. In focus are the poets’ chief compositions, Pope’s jingoist ballad, ‘The Lads of the Maple Leaf’ (1915), and the several drafts of Owen’s antiwar trench lyric, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ (1917–1920). The author argues that although the poems are diametrically opposed – politically and ideologically – they nonetheless share a set of cultural, historical, and literary markers which converge on Horace’s ancient slogan in praise of an honourable death in battle, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Significantly, the article locates for the first time Pope’s forgotten ballad as the most likely catalyst for Owen’s famous gas poem. With Pope’s poetry as a nexus, the discussion takes Owen’s original mock-dedication of ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ to her and other pro-war poets as a point of departure for examining Pope’s investment in the tropes and memes of Britain’s imperial project, especially in relation to Canada. The aim is to explore Pope’s mythopoeic glorification of Canadian troops in light of the non-partisan hellish vision of Owen’s warrior poet. Given that Pope’s poem establishes at the outset Canadians’ submissive loyalty to the British Empire, the article enlists Canadian combatant and non-combatant poetry to illustrate the colonial–imperial traffic of ideas informing the belligerent poetic–aesthetic turn the war provoked in Canada and Britain. The argument thus sheds new light on one of the best-known war poems, whilst bringing Pope’s long-neglected agitprop ballad out of the shadows.
In January 1928, The Dial published T. S. Eliot’s review of Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra... more In January 1928, The Dial published T. S. Eliot’s review of Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (1926). Even as he acknowledges his indebtedness to his fellow American poet-critic, Eliot seems bewildered by Pound’s belief system, which in his estimation is a heady mix of mysticism, occultism, pseudoscience, and Confucianism. With a touch of exasperation, he ends the review by asking provocatively, “what does Mr. Pound believe?” Although he would never give an answer that Eliot would find satisfying, Pound would revisit the question time and again in his prose and poetry. In the process, he reveals more about his eccentric set of creeds than even Eliot might have bargained for. Striving to synthesize a range of philosophical and polytheistic traditions, Pound would cast off the Presbyterianism of his early youth. From the 1930s onward, his deepening affiliation with Italian Fascism and near-cultic devotion to Mussolini would add yet another layer to his spectrum of beliefs. With Eliot’s query in The Dial functioning as a recurring point of reference, this essay examines Pound’s religious beliefs as a shifting panoply of mythico-theological, aesthetic, and political ideas. The picture that emerges is as complex as it is difficult to pin down, blurring the boundaries of what constitutes “faith” itself.
This article examines T. S. Eliot’s review-essay of five seminal studies of Italian Fascism and c... more This article examines T. S. Eliot’s review-essay of five seminal studies of Italian Fascism and critically interconnects the key arguments put forth in each book. Published in 1928 in the <i>Criterion</i>, the poet-critic’s influential literary magazine, the omnibus book review constitutes his most sustained, if skeptical, exploration of the radical political movement, still a rising phenomenon at the time. Although Eliot presents himself as politically naïve, he exhibits a surprisingly cogent and nuanced understanding of Fascism’s political economy, mass psychology, and mythico-heroic apparatus. Contrasting his Christian-inflected antifascist political and cultural thought with the Fascist commitments of Ezra Pound, his one-time collaborator and fellow American modernist poet, the present article argues that Eliot advocated a tradition-based separation of church and state as a hedge against all forms of totalitarian ideology.
This article undertakes a close comparative reading of the work of two key World War I English po... more This article undertakes a close comparative reading of the work of two key World War I English poets: Jessie Pope, a then immensely popular Home Front poet–journalist and staunch supporter of the Allied war effort; and Wilfred Owen, a soldier–poet whose verse would evolve from its Romantic-Georgian and pastoral roots to yield some of the most scathing indictments of the war. In focus are the poets’ chief compositions, Pope’s jingoist ballad, ‘The Lads of the Maple Leaf’ (1915), and the several drafts of Owen’s antiwar trench lyric, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ (1917–1920). The author argues that although the poems are diametrically opposed – politically and ideologically – they nonetheless share a set of cultural, historical, and literary markers which converge on Horace’s ancient slogan in praise of an honourable death in battle, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Significantly, the article locates for the first time Pope’s forgotten ballad as the most likely catalyst for Owen’s famous gas poem. With Pope’s poetry as a nexus, the discussion takes Owen’s original mock-dedication of ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ to her and other pro-war poets as a point of departure for examining Pope’s investment in the tropes and memes of Britain’s imperial project, especially in relation to Canada. The aim is to explore Pope’s mythopoeic glorification of Canadian troops in light of the non-partisan hellish vision of Owen’s warrior poet. Given that Pope’s poem establishes at the outset Canadians’ submissive loyalty to the British Empire, the article enlists Canadian combatant and non-combatant poetry to illustrate the colonial–imperial traffic of ideas informing the belligerent poetic–aesthetic turn the war provoked in Canada and Britain. The argument thus sheds new light on one of the best-known war poems, whilst bringing Pope’s long-neglected agitprop ballad out of the shadows.
Imagism: Essays on Initiation, Impact and Influence, Aug 7, 2013
Imagism is often seen as the forerunner of Vorticism, a perception that has lasted for nearly a c... more Imagism is often seen as the forerunner of Vorticism, a perception that has lasted for nearly a century. As such, critical attention to the relationship between the two aesthetic experiments has mapped a more or less smooth transition from one to the other. In The Pound Era, to cite a well-known study, Hugh Kenner states unequivocally that “The Imagist propaganda merged into the Vorticist,” illustrating this merger with the following excerpt from the Vorticist creed that appeared in the movement’s little magazine, Blast 1: “Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form.” Here, Kenner presumably has in mind Pound’s famous Imagist dictum, “An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” That this proverb-like aphorism is reproduced in Blast 1 under the heading “Ancestry” (and again under “The Primary Pigment”) suggests precisely the foundational kinship Kenner puts forth. Yet, Kenner also characterizes Imagism in no uncertain terms as an inferior precursor to the Vortex. Imagism, in his own words, “soon entailed negotiating with dim and petulant people: Fletcher, say, or Flint, or Aldington, and eventually Miss Lowell.” My paper seeks to show that far from breaking free from Imagism and Imagists, as the dean of Pound studies suggests, Pound’s collaboration with fellow Vorticists, including Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, Ford (then-Hueffer), Sanders, and Dismorr, among others, was sustained by key elements of the Imagist aesthetic. It is not insignificant, then, to find Richard Aldington among the signatories of the Vorticist Manifesto in Blast 1. My discussion aligns itself with the idea proposed by Eliot, himself a one-time contributor to Blast, that Imagism may be seen as “the starting-point of modern poetry.” I will discuss the intersections of Imagist principles in close readings of less-known Vorticist poems published in the “War issue” of Blast in 1915. My purpose is to investigate the extent to which Imagist principles inform and perhaps complicate our reading of hitherto neglected specimens of Vorticist art.
In The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (2002), Jason Ha... more In The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain (2002), Jason Harding describes Eliot’s political philosophy as “based upon an ecclesiastical conception of hierarchy.” My paper builds upon Harding’s conclusion, while interrogating the stringent “religio-political” binary that all too often attends Eliot studies. I seek to trace a few of the origins of hierarchical principles in Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic sensibility. As such, I begin with the etymology of “hierarchy” itself, as coded in the tripartite angelic orders established by first century Paulinian convert to Christianity, Dionysius the Areopagite, the first Bishop of Athens. The principal works ascribed to Dionysius by a sixth-century Neoplatonist (known as “Pseudo-Dionysius”), The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, establish a direct correlation between the divine and clerical ranks, as the titles imply. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1911) bears the imprint of Dionysius’ mystic theology. In turn, her hierarchical phases of “mystic consciousness”— “1. Awakening or Conversion; 2. Self-knowledge or Purgation; 3. Illumination; 4. Surrender, or the Dark Night; 5. Union”—would inform Eliot’s adherence to religious dogma and drive him further away from his family’s Unitarian faith.
Coincidentally, but no less instructive, the OED locates the first distinctly political use of “hierarchy” in the English language in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named The Gouernour (1531). That Elyot’s guide for rulers was influenced by Machiavelli, Plato, and Xenophon, among other sources, attests to its syncretic, classicist-humanist approach to political economy and the chain of command. Eliot, as we know, greatly admired his Tudor ancestor. The concept of “clerisy” that Eliot would advocate in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) arguably fuses Elyot’s moral-political with the theological reading of hierarchy. While I agree with Roger Kojecky that it was Charles Maurras’ concept of hierarchy that brought Eliot “into easy association with Catholicism” (T.S. Eliot’s Social Criticism, 1971), I also seek to foreground the Anglican side of Eliot’s Catholicism. That is, I focus on what Eliot himself referred to as the “English Catholic Church” (my emphasis), with the Anglican Church founded as a national institution independent of papal jurisdiction. As Eliot puts it in “Lancelot Andrewes,” the spirit of Anglicanism entails a via media between “Papacy and Presbytery." Significantly, in the same essay Eliot terms the Church of England at the end of the Elizabethan era “a masterpiece of ecclesiastical statesmanship.”
I discuss key differences between the two strains of Catholicism, mapping Eliot’s postures in relation to divergences in sacrament, liturgy, and hierarchy. Finally, I also give brief but needed attention to his opposition to the Fascist Gerarchia, the corporative structure of the Italian state under Mussolini. Unlike totalitarian hierarchy, Catholicism appealed to Eliot as a “coherent traditional system of dogma and morals,” as he writes in his essay on Dante. Yet, more important, only Anglicanism could conjoin for Eliot “the element of humanism and criticism,” as he would write soon after his conversion. It is, then, the “Anglo-Catholic” dialectic that he would deem vital in preventing “a Catholicism of despair” (“The Humanism of Irving Babbitt”).
Image and Imagery: Re-making, Re-writing, Re-discovery—Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang. 3-14. Print., 2010
The twenty-four essays in Rewriting Texts Remaking Images: Interdisciplinary Perspectives examine... more The twenty-four essays in Rewriting Texts Remaking Images: Interdisciplinary Perspectives examine the complex relationships between original creative works and subsequent versions of these originals, from both theoretical and pragmatic perspectives. The process involves the rereading, reinterpretation, and rediscovery of literary texts, paintings, photographs, and films, as well as the consideration of issues pertaining to adaptation, intertextuality, transcodification, ekphrasis, parody, translation, and revision. The interdisciplinary analyses consider works from classical antiquity to the present day, in a number of literatures, and include such topics as the reuse and resemantization of photographs and iconic images.
In 1915, Jessie Pope, a pro-War English poet, published “The Lads of the Maple Leaf” in The Fiery... more In 1915, Jessie Pope, a pro-War English poet, published “The Lads of the Maple Leaf” in The Fiery Cross: An Anthology of War Poems. The rousing ballad establishes at the outset Canadian troops’ filial-colonial subservience to the British Empire, even unto death. The young “men of the Maple,” the poet affirms, are “Eager to show their mettle, ready to shed their blood.” This is no doubt the kind of sentiment Wilfred Owen sought to undercut in his sardonic dedication to Pope in the manuscript draft version of his iconic anti-war poem dramatizing a gas attack, “Dulce et Decorum Est.” In turn, the fourth and fifth sections of Ezra Pound’s long poem, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), echo much of Owen’s animus against the war, particularly the “old Lie” that both poets deride: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (“It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country”). This paper enlists Horace’s ancient slogan in praise of war as a point of departure to examine its political resonance in the work of Pope, Owen, and Pound. Specifically, I aim to explore the colonial subtext of Pope’s mythopoeic glorification of Canadian troops in light of the non-partisan hellish vision of Owen’s soldier-poet and the satirical indictment of Western civilization in Pound’s anti-War sequence in Mauberley.
The theory of cognitive dissonance has been foundational for the study of social cognition since ... more The theory of cognitive dissonance has been foundational for the study of social cognition since Stanford psychologist Leon Festinger proposed it in 1957. Cognitive dissonance is the psychological discomfort one experiences in the presence of logical inconsistencies or, as Festinger puts it, “nonfitting relations among cognitions.” Cognition as such signifies any ideas, knowledge, values, principles, perceptions, and emotive affect. In this model, the frustration a reader without knowledge of Greek may experience upon first reading “∆ὡpia,” the Greek title of Ezra Pound’s lyric of 1912, entails a linguistic disconnect or dissonance. Yet cognitive dissonance itself is most likely to emerge in the semantic rift between the Greek title and the English poem or, broadly speaking, between the unknown and the known. The experience may be so alienating as to drive novice readers away from Pound. As Festinger argues, in the presence of dissonance a person “will actively avoid situations and information which would likely increase the dissonance.” In principle, this would seem not to bode well for the reception of the labyrinthine aesthetic of modernist art and literature, Pound’s being no exception. Yet evidently not all is lost. Undergraduate and postgraduate courses, seminars, roundtables, and conferences on his work continue to thrive, while hypertextual technology at a glance promises to do away with (or at least lessen) cognitive and interpretive dead ends. This talk aims to show that the wide body of research on cognitive dissonance can enhance our understanding of how new technologies inform and condition the ways in which students typically engage Pound's often cryptic and always allusive poetry.
In 1922, as Joyce and Eliot published Ulysses and The Waste Land, respectively, Pound also kept b... more In 1922, as Joyce and Eliot published Ulysses and The Waste Land, respectively, Pound also kept busy with his Cantos. In the following year, an early version of Canto 8, the first of the four poems in the suite known as the Malatesta Cantos, would appear in print. Though it might be a stretch to see 1923 as Pound’s own annus mirabilis, I propose to look at Canto 8 as a seminal modernist text. In particular, my talk posits the graphic quarrel between Truth and Calliope “sous le lauriers” as an emblem of modernist bricolage. To Clio, Calliope is a “slut” since she does not adhere to the strict truth, while Clio is a “bitch” in Calliope’s estimation since she complains of every little exaggeration or deviation from historical accuracy. Too often lost sight of in critical readings, however, is the kinship between Clio and Calliope, both daughters of Mnēmosynē (Memory). While Clio signifies fame (kleos), especially the fame of heroic exploits transmitted to future generations by the poet, Calliope expresses the richness of sung speech that endows poetry with vitality. Moreover, both employ the epic poem to inscribe memory. The laurel, Apollo’s tree, evokes the sacralization of poetic memory in the Hesiodic tradition. The rod of wisdom or skeptron that the daughters of Mnēmosynē give to Hesiod when they teach him the truth is cut from a laurel tree. By incorporating fragments of historical documents within his own epic poem, Pound, like his modernist peers, thus stands as a modern-day Hesiod, mediating between history and art.
The first Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (MRF) held in Rome from 1932 to 1934 was commissioned... more The first Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (MRF) held in Rome from 1932 to 1934 was commissioned by Mussolini to showcase fascist art and aesthetics. Yet, as Jeffrey Schnapp notes, the MRF also staged the “first Modern(ist) politics of spectacle.” In keeping with Schnapp, my paper argues that the fusion of fascist culture, politics, and spectacle promoted in the exhibit informs much of Ezra Pound’s fascination with Italian Fascism in the 1930s. My talk also traces the roots of the fascist aesthetic in Georges Sorel’s Réflexions sur la violence (1908), a seminal text for Fascism’s exploitation of myth and spectacle.
Like many poets of his generation, Richard Aldington fought in the Great War. His experiences o... more Like many poets of his generation, Richard Aldington fought in the Great War. His experiences on the Western Front left deep scars, as evinced in his 1919 poetry collections, Images of War and Images of Desire. Yet in his memoir, Life for Life’s Sake (1941), Aldington reveals that “everything or almost everything I have to say about the war of 1914-18 has been said in Death of a Hero and Roads to Glory.” While significant in their own right, these prose works published in 1929 and 1930, respectively, arguably lack the raw immediacy of his war poetry. Hence my talk situates Aldington’s less-known war verse as a defining moment of his aesthetic. As a point of departure, it is worth noting that in a laudatory review of Images of War in 1920 Harold Monro dubs Aldington a “war-poet” on a par with none other than the celebrated Georgian soldier-poet, Siegfried Sassoon. However, as I suggest, Aldington’s spartan war poetry incorporates the economy of Imagism to offset the jingoistic, fustian sentiment of much of Georgian poetry.
Ancient Egypt aside, the Middle East has received almost no scholarly attention insofar as Pound’... more Ancient Egypt aside, the Middle East has received almost no scholarly attention insofar as Pound’s interest in non-Western cultures is concerned. Even more scant is scholarship on the reception of Pound’s work in the region. This is not surprising, as Pound had very little to say about this part of the world. In Guide to Kulchur, he recommends a classic of modern travel literature, Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888), as a register of “what goes on before, and/or without, the inconveniences still bound up with mechanical civilization” (267). Today, however, Pound would probably be shocked if he were to find himself in the futuristic city-state of Dubai, a postmodern megalopolis that is about as far as it gets from the primitivist exoticism of Doughty’s travelogue. Pound would also be surprised, no doubt, to learn that his works are taught regularly in this part of the Arabian Peninsula. This paper concerns my experience in teaching Pound’s poetry and prose at the American University of Sharjah, near Dubai, to a cosmopolitan, international body of undergraduate students, many of whom have never studied his works. The student demographic here presents unique opportunities and challenges in this regard. On the one hand, students come to Pound without the preconceptions that many of their North American and European counterparts may already have internalized about his radical politics, anti-Semitism, alleged phallogocentrism, etc., while on the other hand they often lack the literary-cultural capital needed to decode his multiverse of ideas and references. Citing specific texts taught in literature courses, I aim to open a new vein in the study and teaching of Pound outside the West.
This paper considers the controversial dialectic between political propaganda and literary-cultur... more This paper considers the controversial dialectic between political propaganda and literary-cultural production in Wyndham Lewis’ polemics, Hitler (1931) and The Hitler Cult (1939). Together, these books register what is arguably the single most extreme political about-face in the history of interwar modernism—while the 1931 text reads as a thinly-disguised hagiography of Hitler, the 1939 sequel amounts to an anxious, phobic retraction. Yet I argue that in both books Lewis cloaks his self-disruptive politics in apocalyptic and prophetic tropes. The prophetic mode in Hitler, I argue, enables Lewis to aestheticize and sublimate his radical politics by avoiding direct engagement with politics as such, while The Hitler Cult grudgingly concedes and seeks to expiate for the limitations of his prophetic vision. Lewis portrays the startling rise of the Hitler Movement in Hitler as “something comparable only to a national-religious upheaval,” while dubbing the would-be Führer himself as an “armed prophet,” who would crush the seedy underworld of Berlin’s “flagellation-bars,” “nacktballeten,” and “Negertanz palaces.” The heady brew of fear and loathing that Berlin’s subcultures elicit in Lewis informs both books. However, while in Hitler Lewis excitedly recounts having witnessed firsthand the cultic passions that animated the Hitler phenomenon at a 20,000-strong rally of Nationalsocialists led by Goebbels and Göring at the Sportpalast in Berlin, in The Hitler Cult the same “Hitler-worship” becomes the object of ruthless satire. Here, too, Lewis aligns the cult of Hitler with his antipathy to other mechanistic and deadening “cults,” among these the “child-cult” with which he mocks the alleged infantile obsession with irrationality and primitivism in Stein, Conrad, Zola, and Picasso. Lewis, I contend, enlists a visionary mode and quasi-religious rhetoric in his political and aesthetic discourse so as to keep politics and art in creative tension.
Imagism is often seen as the forerunner of Vorticism, a perception that has lasted for nearly a c... more Imagism is often seen as the forerunner of Vorticism, a perception that has lasted for nearly a century. As such, critical attention to the relationship between the two aesthetic experiments has mapped a more or less smooth transition from one to the other. In The Pound Era, to cite a well-known study, Hugh Kenner states unequivocally that “The Imagist propaganda merged into the Vorticist,” illustrating this merger with the following excerpt from the Vorticist creed that appeared in the movement’s little magazine, Blast 1: “Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form.” Here, Kenner presumably has in mind Pound’s famous Imagist dictum, “An Image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” That this proverb-like aphorism is reproduced in Blast 1 under the heading “Ancestry” (and again under “The Primary Pigment”) suggests precisely the foundational kinship Kenner puts forth. Yet, Kenner also characterizes Imagism in no uncertain terms as an inferior precursor to the Vortex. Imagism, in his own words, “soon entailed negotiating with dim and petulant people: Fletcher, say, or Flint, or Aldington, and eventually Miss Lowell.” My paper seeks to show that far from breaking free from Imagism and Imagists, as the dean of Pound studies suggests, Pound’s collaboration with fellow Vorticists, including Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, Ford (then-Hueffer), Sanders, and Dismorr, among others, was sustained by key elements of the Imagist aesthetic. It is not insignificant, then, to find Richard Aldington among the signatories of the Vorticist Manifesto in Blast 1. My discussion aligns itself with the idea proposed by Eliot, himself a one-time contributor to Blast, that Imagism may be seen as “the starting-point of modern poetry.” I will discuss the intersections of Imagist principles in close readings of less-known Vorticist poems published in the “War issue” of Blast in 1915. My purpose is to investigate the extent to which Imagist principles inform and perhaps complicate our reading of hitherto neglected specimens of Vorticist art.
Uploads
Books by Anderson Araujo
Por mucho que sus filosofías políticas se contrapusieron, juntos representaron una de las muestras más influyentes de la intelligentsia modernista. A su vez, también disfrutaron de un acceso privilegiado a las más altas esferas del poder en la España, Italia e Inglaterra del momento.
Este ensayo contrapone algunas obras de estos autores, que ocupan espacios liminares entre el arte y la propaganda. Considerando el fascismo como una hoja de ruta teórica y retórica, el libro realiza un estudio comparativo cuyo principal objetivo es examinar espacios tradicionalmente descuidados por el estudio literario del modernismo.
A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur addresses the formidable interpretive challenges his most far-reaching prose tract presents to the reader. Providing page-by-page glosses on key terms and passages in Guide, the Companion also situates Pound’s allusions and references in relation to other texts in his vast body of work, especially The Cantos. Striking a balance between rigorous scholarly standards and readerly accessibility, the book is designed to meet the needs of the specialist while keeping the critical apparatus unobtrusive so as also to appeal to students and the general public. A long-needed resource, A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur joins Carroll Terrell’s landmark A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound with the aim to make a lasting contribution to the growing number of editorial and critical studies on the work of one of the most influential and controversial literary figures of the twentieth century.
Papers by Anderson Araujo
hierarchy.” My paper builds upon Harding’s conclusion, while interrogating the stringent “religio-political” binary that all too often attends Eliot studies. I seek to trace a few of the origins of hierarchical principles in Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic sensibility. As such, I begin with the etymology of “hierarchy” itself, as coded in the tripartite angelic orders established by first century Paulinian convert to Christianity, Dionysius the Areopagite, the first Bishop of Athens. The principal works ascribed to Dionysius by a sixth-century Neoplatonist (known as “Pseudo-Dionysius”), The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, establish a direct correlation between the divine and clerical ranks, as the titles imply. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1911) bears the imprint of Dionysius’ mystic theology. In turn, her hierarchical phases of “mystic consciousness”— “1. Awakening or Conversion; 2. Self-knowledge or Purgation; 3. Illumination; 4. Surrender, or the Dark Night; 5. Union”—would inform Eliot’s adherence to religious dogma and drive him further away from his family’s Unitarian faith.
Coincidentally, but no less instructive, the OED locates the first distinctly political use of “hierarchy” in the English language in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named The Gouernour (1531). That Elyot’s guide for rulers was influenced by Machiavelli, Plato, and Xenophon, among other sources, attests to its syncretic, classicist-humanist approach to political economy and the chain of command. Eliot, as we know, greatly admired his Tudor ancestor. The concept of “clerisy” that Eliot would advocate in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) arguably fuses Elyot’s moral-political with the theological reading of hierarchy. While I agree with Roger Kojecky that it was Charles Maurras’ concept of hierarchy that brought Eliot “into easy association with Catholicism” (T.S. Eliot’s Social Criticism, 1971), I also seek to
foreground the Anglican side of Eliot’s Catholicism. That is, I focus on what Eliot himself referred to as the “English Catholic Church” (my emphasis), with the Anglican Church founded as a national institution independent of papal jurisdiction. As Eliot puts it in “Lancelot Andrewes,” the spirit of Anglicanism entails a via media between “Papacy and Presbytery." Significantly, in the same essay Eliot terms the Church of England at the end of the Elizabethan era “a masterpiece of ecclesiastical statesmanship.”
I discuss key differences between the two strains of Catholicism, mapping Eliot’s postures in relation to divergences in sacrament, liturgy, and hierarchy. Finally, I also give brief but needed attention to his opposition to the Fascist Gerarchia, the corporative structure of the Italian state under Mussolini. Unlike totalitarian hierarchy, Catholicism appealed to Eliot as a “coherent traditional system of dogma and morals,” as he writes in his essay on Dante. Yet, more important, only Anglicanism could conjoin for Eliot “the element of humanism and criticism,” as he would write soon after his conversion. It is, then, the “Anglo-Catholic” dialectic that he would deem vital in preventing “a Catholicism of despair” (“The Humanism of Irving Babbitt”).
Full Depth: The Raymond Knister Poems, by Micheline Maylor.
Love Where the Nights Are Green, by Rienzi Crusz.
Talks by Anderson Araujo
Por mucho que sus filosofías políticas se contrapusieron, juntos representaron una de las muestras más influyentes de la intelligentsia modernista. A su vez, también disfrutaron de un acceso privilegiado a las más altas esferas del poder en la España, Italia e Inglaterra del momento.
Este ensayo contrapone algunas obras de estos autores, que ocupan espacios liminares entre el arte y la propaganda. Considerando el fascismo como una hoja de ruta teórica y retórica, el libro realiza un estudio comparativo cuyo principal objetivo es examinar espacios tradicionalmente descuidados por el estudio literario del modernismo.
A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur addresses the formidable interpretive challenges his most far-reaching prose tract presents to the reader. Providing page-by-page glosses on key terms and passages in Guide, the Companion also situates Pound’s allusions and references in relation to other texts in his vast body of work, especially The Cantos. Striking a balance between rigorous scholarly standards and readerly accessibility, the book is designed to meet the needs of the specialist while keeping the critical apparatus unobtrusive so as also to appeal to students and the general public. A long-needed resource, A Companion to Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur joins Carroll Terrell’s landmark A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound with the aim to make a lasting contribution to the growing number of editorial and critical studies on the work of one of the most influential and controversial literary figures of the twentieth century.
hierarchy.” My paper builds upon Harding’s conclusion, while interrogating the stringent “religio-political” binary that all too often attends Eliot studies. I seek to trace a few of the origins of hierarchical principles in Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic sensibility. As such, I begin with the etymology of “hierarchy” itself, as coded in the tripartite angelic orders established by first century Paulinian convert to Christianity, Dionysius the Areopagite, the first Bishop of Athens. The principal works ascribed to Dionysius by a sixth-century Neoplatonist (known as “Pseudo-Dionysius”), The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, establish a direct correlation between the divine and clerical ranks, as the titles imply. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1911) bears the imprint of Dionysius’ mystic theology. In turn, her hierarchical phases of “mystic consciousness”— “1. Awakening or Conversion; 2. Self-knowledge or Purgation; 3. Illumination; 4. Surrender, or the Dark Night; 5. Union”—would inform Eliot’s adherence to religious dogma and drive him further away from his family’s Unitarian faith.
Coincidentally, but no less instructive, the OED locates the first distinctly political use of “hierarchy” in the English language in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke named The Gouernour (1531). That Elyot’s guide for rulers was influenced by Machiavelli, Plato, and Xenophon, among other sources, attests to its syncretic, classicist-humanist approach to political economy and the chain of command. Eliot, as we know, greatly admired his Tudor ancestor. The concept of “clerisy” that Eliot would advocate in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) arguably fuses Elyot’s moral-political with the theological reading of hierarchy. While I agree with Roger Kojecky that it was Charles Maurras’ concept of hierarchy that brought Eliot “into easy association with Catholicism” (T.S. Eliot’s Social Criticism, 1971), I also seek to
foreground the Anglican side of Eliot’s Catholicism. That is, I focus on what Eliot himself referred to as the “English Catholic Church” (my emphasis), with the Anglican Church founded as a national institution independent of papal jurisdiction. As Eliot puts it in “Lancelot Andrewes,” the spirit of Anglicanism entails a via media between “Papacy and Presbytery." Significantly, in the same essay Eliot terms the Church of England at the end of the Elizabethan era “a masterpiece of ecclesiastical statesmanship.”
I discuss key differences between the two strains of Catholicism, mapping Eliot’s postures in relation to divergences in sacrament, liturgy, and hierarchy. Finally, I also give brief but needed attention to his opposition to the Fascist Gerarchia, the corporative structure of the Italian state under Mussolini. Unlike totalitarian hierarchy, Catholicism appealed to Eliot as a “coherent traditional system of dogma and morals,” as he writes in his essay on Dante. Yet, more important, only Anglicanism could conjoin for Eliot “the element of humanism and criticism,” as he would write soon after his conversion. It is, then, the “Anglo-Catholic” dialectic that he would deem vital in preventing “a Catholicism of despair” (“The Humanism of Irving Babbitt”).
Full Depth: The Raymond Knister Poems, by Micheline Maylor.
Love Where the Nights Are Green, by Rienzi Crusz.