By Dr Oliver Tearle Modernist poetry in English never had an official manifesto, but there are several documents which conceivably have a claim to the de facto title: T. E. Hulme’s ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ (1908), for instance, or T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919).
A summary of a key modernist essay There are numerous documents which might be described as ‘manifestos’ for modernist poetry in English – Ezra Pound’s ‘A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste’ springs to mind – but T. E. Hulme’s ‘A Lecture on Modern Poetry’ was almost certainly the earliest. It’s […]