TY - BOOK ID - 118225243 TI - Modernist war poetry : combat gnosticism and the sympathetic imagination, 1914-19 PY - 2023 SN - 1474497748 9781474497749 9781474497763 1474497764 1474497772 PB - Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, DB - UniCat KW - War poetry, English KW - War poetry, American KW - World War, 1914-1918 KW - History and criticism KW - Literature and the war KW - American war poetry KW - American poetry KW - English war poetry KW - English poetry KW - History and criticism. KW - Literature and the war. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:118225243 AB - This study examines the work of the principle architects of Anglo-American modernist poetics - T.S. Eliot, H.D., Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Edward Thomas and Wallace Stevens - and their response to the challenge of combatant war poetries. It argues that these civilian poets sought to negotiate directly with the combatant's gnosticism, specifically with the combatant's assertion that only those present at a catastrophe could properly represent its horrors. The modernists rightly identified that gnosticism was a threat to their own representational claims on an increasingly traumatic modernity. How was the imagination to be salvaged in order that it could still feel into the wounded experience of others? In response to this challenge, the modernists drafted their own imagined war poems, developing in the process several different and contradictory poetic systems. ER -