The focus of British Poetry in the Age of Modernism is on poetry published between 1912 and 1922, when T. S. Eliot's and Ezra Pound's work signaled the beginnings of modernism in British poetry. Its main concern, however, is not with modernism itself but with the poetry of Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Walter de la Mare, W. H. Davies, and Thomas Hardy, all of whom wrote in the context of the modernist revolution but were not directly a part of it. His stated aim is “to show how vividly the work of these particular poets demonstrates the vicissitudes of the battle that would come to be fought in their name—through its literary impact, in the case of Thomas, Hardy and Owen, and/or the way it exemplifies the twists and turns of the debate over the values of modern poetry, in the case of Davies and de la Mare” (4). At the center of those “wars” Howarth argues was the modernist claim to a poetry that distinguished itself from its predecessors by being free from exterior determination by such things as formal poetic patterns or from the contingencies of personality and history, and a corresponding assumption that poetic form should be an organic outgrowth of poetic substance. Such poets as Thomas, de la Mare, Owen, Davies, and Hardy did not produce a poetry that reflected such modernist assumptions, and their forms may seem to be actively and awkwardly directing their poetic substance.

In his first chapter, titled “Inside and Outside Modernism,” Howarth traces this conflict back to a difference Coleridge had with Wordsworth over the need for an organic unity in poetry that he found lacking in such poems as Wordsworth's “Simon Lee.” In a brilliant survey of the “poetry wars” that followed, Howarth closely examines the concept of autonomous poetic form and points out that in the inevitable tension between form and content can be found the modernists’ difficulties in defending their claims. There is, he notes, a dynamic between form and content that is somewhere between autonomous and compulsory. Howarth argues, “In a sense, it is these complications and negotiations between self-presence and the force of the other that also stand for Thomas, Hardy or Owen's relationship with modernism as a whole, as poets neither inside its boundaries nor wholly alien to its aims and, as such, tacit indicators of modernism's difficulties with its own autonomous literary status” (62).

In each of the following chapters he focuses on some general topic reflected in the chapter titles—“Edward Thomas in Ecstasy,” “Walter de la Mare's Ideal Reader,” “The Simplicity of W. H. Davies,” “Hardy's Indifference,” and “Going Over the Top: The Passions of Wilfred Owen”—and uses that focus to organize his examination of that poet's relationship to the poetic context of his day. The results are remarkably illuminating and by no means limited to considering the relationships of those five poets to the modernists or the Georgians. In the chapter on Thomas, for example, Howarth makes frequent reference to Thomas's unpublished essay titled “The History of Men Is the History of Ecstasy,” and, with frequent reference to it, ranges over Thomas's connections not only with poets published in Georgian Poetry, such as D. H. Lawrence, but, with authors such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Pound, Hulme, Pater, de la Mare, Richard Jefferies, Arthur Symons, Ralph Hodgson, and Robert Frost, with extensive discussion of the Pater and Frost interconnections with Thomas's poetry. Thomas, of course, is scarcely a poet one would associate with ecstasy—in, say, Pater's sense—but Howarth not only calls attention to Thomas's animadversions on Pater's ideas but uses Thomas's words to define his peculiar definition of the term: “My chief ground and qualification for making this choice [to write on ecstasy] was my intimate acquaintance with the opposite. I knew so well the grief without a pang, described by Coleridge with some flattery, in ‘Dejection: An Ode' [quoted] ‘where lack of ecstasy seems to become an ecstasy in itself.' Poetry in despair is still a kind of ecstasy, because in both rapture and melancholy, there is a sense of being carried out of one's proper self. Ecstasy is ‘the condition of being out of place … the term for alienation or distraction of mind’” (70). Howarth then proceeds to exemplify, by a series of minute examinations of Thomas's poems, how self-distraction and alienation are exemplified in such poems as Thomas's “Rain,” of how Thomas's idea of ecstasy was opposed to Pater’s, and of how self-aware pursuit of ecstasy was what Thomas objected to in both the Imagists and the Georgians.

In the process, for example, he considers Thomas's view that Lawrence's verse fails because it “sacrifices everything to intensity” without providing the “distraction” which a common grounding of regular verse provides (78). What follows is a remarkably astute analysis of the both fixed and free rhyme and metrics of such poems as Thomas's “Words,” “Over the Hills,” “The Wasp Trap,” “Home,” “The Wind's Song,” “The Penny Whistle,” and a host of others. Howarth's analyses of Thomas's handling of rhyme and meter are subtle and sure, and, in the process, he manages to “place” Thomas with great precision in relationship to some major ideas on art and poetry in the “modernist” period.

And what Howarth does for Thomas he does equally well for the other poets he treats. For example, his complex and remarkably incisive discussion of the relationship between Thomas Hardy's verse forms and rhythms on the one hand and on the other the blind chance that plays so great a part in the ideas behind his poems is a model of rigorous analytic tact. British Poetry in the Age of Modernism is, in short, in every respect a valuable study, and it has the additional advantage of having been written with remarkable lucidity.