Modernism after 1945

Language and Agency after Modernism: A Reading of J. H. Prynne's "Die A Millionaire (pronounced: 'diamonds in the air')" Poetry, as a peculiar form of engagement with language, had to redefine itself in the early second half of the twentieth century, a time when language itself had become the object of multifarious scrutiny. Language is a means of orientation in the world, with entrapping as well as liberating qualities, as Leo Spitzer suggested in an essay from the early 1950s, a high time of structuralism and New Criticism, but also a time fraught with the legacy of High Modernism: Language is not only a banal mass of communication and self-expression, but also one of orientation in this world: a way that leads toward science and is perfected by science, and on the other hand also a means for freeing us from this world thanks to its metaphysical and poetic implications. (Spitzer 1953, 93) Poetry, as verbal art, uses language in inventive ways, drawing from, affirming, challenging , or even deconstructing institutionalised uses of language and the language of everyday life. When poets grapple with the question of how to approach through verbal art recurring existential questions such as the question of subjectivity and agency in a globalised, disenchanted world with complex legacies, these poems can be read as a special kind of cultural work. A reading of Jeremy Halvard Prynne's poem "Die A Millionaire (pronounced: 'diamonds in the air')" will help describe the challenges faced by poets writing after Modernism and in the midst of a disenchantment with language that was fuelled by the strongly felt impression of language's limitations, inadequacies, and potential complicity, as rhetoric, with propagandistic or commercial ends. I will explore how Prynne, by developing and following a distinct poetics of language, dealt with these challenges creatively. In a pun, the title of Prynne's long poem "Die A Millionaire (pronounced: 'diamonds in the air')", which first appeared in the collection Kitchen Poems (Prynne 1968, n.p.), 1 draws attention to a tension between materiality, essence, and value on the one hand and relations on the other. Accepting that semantic relations inhere in the visual and phonological qualities of poems is crucial for an understanding of Prynne's oeuvre, which tends to be habitually characterised as "notoriously difficult" (Mellors 2005, 9), but also praised for having appeal and a certain mystic quality. 2 "Die A Millionaire 1 Permission to quote consecutive lines of the poem could not be obtained. Since its publication in Kitchen Poems (1968) the poem has not been revised for later publications. My references to line numbers can therefore be traced in Kitchen Poems and the three editions of Poems (Prynne 1982, 13-17, Prynne 1999 and 2005, 13-16 respectively). 2 According to the reviewer Robert Potts, "it appears so alien to our habits of reading […]. It feels more like a painting or a piece of music, or perhaps a sculpture; something to experience both intellectually and sensually" (Potts 2004).