Revisiting Henry James: High Modernists and Objectivists

Year 2014, Issue: 40, 55 - 64, 01.10.2014

Richard Parker

https://izlik.org/JA86JG58AX

Abstract

This article addresses the manner in which two generations of American modernists read and responded to Henry James. It identifies readings by the first-generation modernist poets Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams and the second-generation modernist poets Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen as significant and then goes on to suggest that the approach towards James of the second-generation modernists also implies a complex and revealing relation to their modernist forebears

Keywords

Henry James , Ezra Pound , T.S. Eliot , William Carlos Williams , Louis Zukofsky , George Oppen , Modernism , Objectivist Verse , Poetry

References

• Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems, 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt, 1991. Print.
• Hejinian, Lyn. Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen. Ed. Steve Shoemaker. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2009. Print.
• James, Henry. The American Scene. Collected Travel Writings, Great Britain and America: English Hours, The American Scene, Other Travels. New York: Library of America, 1993. 351-736.
• ---. “Daisy Miller: A Study.” The CompleteTales of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. Vol. 4. London: Hart-Davis, 1962. 141-207. Print.
• ---. “The Jolly Corner”. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. Vol. 12. London: Hart-Davis, 1964. 193-232. Print.
• ---. “The Story in It”. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel. Vol. 11. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964. 307-26. Print.
• Jennison, Ruth. The Zukofsky Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Print.
• Moody, A. David. The Young Genius, 1885-1920. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. Vol. 1. of Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work.
• Oppen, George. The New Collected Poems. Ed. Michael Davison. New York: New Directions, 2002. Print.
• ---. The Selected Letters of George Oppen. Ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1990. Print.
• Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Faber, 1987. Print.
• ---. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1968. Print.
• ---. Poems and Translations. Ed. Richard Sieburth. New York: Library of America, 2003. Print.
• Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Vol. 1: 1909-1939. Ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1986. Print.
• Zukofsky, Louis. “A.” Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. Print.
• ---. Autobiography. New York: Grossman, 1970. Print.