In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle salutes the lost modernist, David Jones
Which poem is being described here? Published in 1952, this long modernist poem might be described as a modern ‘epic’ poem. It is highly allusive, drawing on, among others, Arthurian legend, Jessie Weston’s 1920 book From Ritual to Romance, and the opening words of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘A Postcard from the Volcano’ is one of Wallace Stevens’s most famous poems. It is also one of his more accessible. The poem was published in Stevens’s 1936 collection Ideas of Order. You can read ‘A Postcard from the Volcano’ here before proceeding to our analysis below, which homes in on the poem’s form, language, imagery, and themes. Although it is more straightforward than many of Stevens’s other poems, there is still much to discuss and unpick.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘This Is Just to Say’, a 1934 poem written by the American modernist poet William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), offers itself to the reader as a note left by the poet to his wife. Is this all ‘This Is Just to Say’ is: a note of apology Williams penned to his spouse for eating the plums out of the icebox? Or is there more to this poem, which helps to explain its status as one of the most famous, most quoted, and most parodied poems of the twentieth century?
You can read ‘This Is Just to Say’ here before proceeding to our analysis below.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ appeared in Harmonium (1923), the first poetry collection of the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens, although it had originally been published in an American magazine, Others, in 1917.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock’ is one of Wallace Stevens’s most assured, and popular, short poems. It belongs to his early period: it was first published in 1915 before being collected in his first book-length collection, Harmonium, in 1923. You can read ‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock’ here before proceeding to our analysis below.