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A Cambridge Companion: Modernist Poetry Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xviii + 259 pp. Cloth $85.00 Paper $29.99
THIS COMPANION is a companion for The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (1999), The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism (2005), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (2007), The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel (2007), not to mention The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (2007) and much else. With so much companionship available, the student of modernism is unlikely to succumb to the intimations of isolation which the modernists themselves inherited from the Romantic poets before them. And yet the self-reflexivity of many modernist texts meant from the start that they would be their own first exegete, while their frequent opacity ensured they would always be the cause of exegesis in others. Criticism has been a constant companion to modernist poetry, and modernist poetry has had a lot to do with the development of both critical theory and practice in modern times. The introduction to this volume observes, further, that even those modernist productions which seemed most transparent, such as William Carlos Williams's "democratic model of modernist poetry," now seem to require as much exegesis for the twenty-first-century reader as the learned and elitist The Waste Land.
The structure of Cambridge Companions may vary but the brief is the same: some essays providing historical and intellectual context, several concentrating on the principal works or groups of works, and an account of the reception and developing reputation of the subject. This example of the species performs all these functions reliably and is a book that can be recommended warmly to scholars and students alike. The latter, in particular, will be introduced in its pages to a distinctly twenty-first-century story about modernism, while at the same time understanding how that story has evolved, and continues to evolve, over the decades. Jason Harding, in the final essay here, "Modernist poetry and the canon," deals directly with a question that haunts the volume, and its subject. What counts as...