Chapter 6 studies the work of the Polish dramatist Jerzy Grotowski, whose theater profoundly shaped the American stage. Grotowski’s Apocalypsis cum Figuris (1968) probes the boundary between theater and ritual practice. While most critics have attended to its embodied elements, I find it is entangled with the histories of literary drama, especially the writings of T. S. Eliot. Across Apocalypsis, a shift from representing to enacting religious ritual mirrors Grotowski’s own intensifying pursuit of ritual efficacy in his art and actor training. This pivot seems to be a reaction against language but actually develops through it. My analysis shows how Apocalypsis realizes a process of demystification through which ritual performance was reconstituted as a European export. This work seems to secularize ritual acts and to destabilize the hierarchical models that distinguish white Christian traditions from other forms of world performance. In fact, it extends Christianity’s universalizing model of the world.

Bishop – like Tennyson before her – was professedly ambivalent about, and sometimes antipathetic to, critics who sought ‘literary references’ in her poems. Tom Paulin takes Bishop’s lead when he writes that she ‘avoids recondite allusion’, and many recent critics have followed him. In this chapter, Bishop’s poetry is shown to be profoundly and variedly allusive. This chapter examines Bishop’s relation to the burgeoning knowledge industry of the 1960s and ’70s, and showcases the wide range of authors – including Luis de Camoes, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Robert Frost – to whom she alludes. This chapter considers in particular Bishop’s relationship to T. S. Eliot, as both an alluded-to source text and as a model of allusive practice. The chapter uses and then complicates Eliot’s distinction between allusions that confirm their sources’ effects, and those which are used in contexts that are ‘pointedly diverse’. John Hollander’s distinction between quotation, allusion and echo also frames the discussion of Bishop’s allusions in relation to loneliness, identity, posterity, and artifice.

This chapter tackles relationships between Allen Ginsberg and the New York School poets as more than biographical. It considers how Ginsberg and the New York School poets reinterpreted qualities of heightened emotion and supple linguistic powers that are featured and valued in T. S. Eliot’s poetry and criticism. Ironically, this influence counters the impersonal poetic qualities for which Eliot’s influence is more commonly known and which helped to impersonalize much post-World War II poetry to which New York School, Beat, and Confessional Poetry mutinied. However, Ginsberg and the New York School poets led this vanguard earlier and to more effect than Robert Lowell and others described in or influenced by M. L. Rosenthal’s 1959 Nation article, “Poetry as Confession.” Like Eliot, Ginsberg and the New York School poets emphasize the role of the second person addressee, particularly in the works of Frank O’Hara and his “Personism.”

This chapter surveys Pater’s ‘widely diffused’ contributions to early twentieth-century modernist poetry, prose, and aesthetic discourse. It provides insights into Pater’s influence on modernist writers including W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot, addressing the unevenness of his reception among Anglo-American modernists and the source of the ambivalence that often defined this. Its first section concentrates on how Pater’s literary impressionism anticipated modernist interiority and so can be seen reflected in works including Joyce’s Ulysses, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Orlando. Its second section turns to the rejection of Pater by T. S. Eliot – and how Pater nevertheless haunts his works.

Chapter 3 considers T. S. Eliot and Lynette Roberts together as authors who develop major long poems in response to the violence and mechanization of World War II. While Eliot and Roberts carried on significant correspondence during this period, almost nothing has been written about the relationship between their poetry. In the face of wartime desolation, both offer fragmentary images of a submerged national past: the spiritual sanctuary of Little Gidding for Eliot; the buried dragon of the Welsh nation for Roberts. Alongside these images of potential national revival, both consider the possibility of transcendence, while still identifying with the political disarray of their chosen nations.

Amid economic crises, rising totalitarianisms, and escalating technological warfare of the 1930s and 1940s, Bloomsbury’s thinkers and artists entered a new phase. They had never thought alike, nor considered themselves a “group,” but, beyond their colorful private sociability, these public-spirited “civilized individuals” carried the banner of their liberal intellectual formation – their critical hope and utopian idealism – into collective arenas. Drawing upon the late art, thought, letters, and conversation of Sigmund Freud, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, and Vita Sackville-West, this chapter explores late Bloomsbury’s dialectic of enlightenment, as darkening skies tested the hope that European civilization, smashed by the Great War, might be rebuilt on firmer and more lasting ground. As domestic and international crises bore a shrinking world toward an unknowable future, Bloomsbury’s civilized individualism – which, Raymond Williams thought, offered no vision of a whole society – springs into high relief against the existential threat of totalitarian systems on right and left that emerged from radically different national histories. In late Bloomsbury, we glimpse the threats of authoritarianism, racialized imperialism, genocidal violence, all-consuming capitalism, and earth-ravaging technological modernity.

This chapter sets Michael Field’s work in the context of the twentieth century and modernism. The first part of the chapter concentrates on Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s complex and ambivalent responses to modernity. The chapter then focuses on Michael Field’s reception and republication in the 1920s and 1930s through the efforts of Thomas Sturge Moore, Mary C. Sturgeon, and Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop. Finally, the chapter compares Michael Field’s poetry to the imagist works of Ezra Pound and H.D., and the historical verse dramas of T. S. Eliot, demonstrating that Michael Field’s work has as much in common with modernist writers as with their late-Victorian contemporaries.

This chapter discusses the reception of Hopkins in the 1920s and 1930s and his influence on modernism and twentieth-century criticism. It proposes Hopkins’s importance to the emphasis on difficulty and ambiguity in modernist critcism, as well as on relations between sound and sense. It also observes Hopkins’s significance for theories of rhythm, metre, and diction in modernist poetry.

T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land participates in the historical process of finance capital by developing a semiotics for a new form of value: affective intensity. This chapter argues that The Waste Land is mimetic of affect insofar as the effect of reading The Waste Land is a constantly shifting landscape of affective intensities that refuse narrative containment and prevent the emotional complacency that was the source of social stability in the world of industrial capital and the value form of character. The poem thereby functions as a kind of training ground for an emerging corporate capitalism that orients consumers around the affective intensities of constant novelty through branding and rebranding campaigns as well as the volatile ups and downs of a financialized economy whose health is measured by corporate stock indexes rather than the productivity of labor.

This chapter claims that Pound’s reconfiguration of Sophocles’s Trachiniai as a Noh play works towards the realization of the dream of the long Imagist poem that coheres (first articulated in 1916), enabling Pound to return to the writing of the Cantos – much as H.D.’s translation of Ion in the 1930s had allowed her to return to writing and led to Trilogy. Pound’s Women of Trachis offers a condensed image not only of the play which it translates, but also of Pound’s own body of work up to that time. Yet the translation also undercuts the triumphant narrative it seems to present, an undercutting that the soon-to-be-composed late Cantos will seek to refute. Section: Rock-Drill and Thrones recruit first other tragedies to balance and further clarify the relation between poetics and politics that remain ambivalent in the Sophocles translations, and then pre- and post-Athenian Greek texts that, in Pound’s excerpting, seem to harness the Greek language towards a monosemic vision dictated by Pound’s politics. The Trachinian Herakles himself has to be further translated into other mythical figures in the Cantos in order for the promise he represents to be fulfilled.

The Introduction outlines the intellectual and literary context of Modernist Hellenism, situating the book in relation to other scholarship in modernist and reception studies and classical receptions. It discusses the discourses both of modernism and of hellenism current in the first half of the twentieth century, and begins to sketch out the ways in which Pound and H.D.’s poetic and translational practice differs from those, expanding on each poet’s theories of poetic composition as translation.

This chapter explores the relationship between the Four Quartets (1936–42) and Eliot’s roughly contemporaneous Greek-inspired verse plays, The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party (1949). The author traces the development of Eliot’s programmatic use of increasingly distant reading, and of his implicit argument for not translating Greek. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale reveal that Eliot deliberately thought about the use of Greek prototypes in the late 1930s, assessing both his own earlier effort with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and other Greek-inspired plays. The author examines the theoretical questions that prompt and frame Eliot’s approach and that tie the plays together with his last great poetic work. She thus outlines major aspects of his late poetics which surprisingly depend on his treatment of Greek materials, showing how they bring to a close his first foray into such materials in the late 1910s/early 1920s. Finally, she suggests that Eliot’s own Herakles character in The Cocktail Party is indebted to H.D.’s portrayal of Freud in Tribute to Freud.

This chapter examines H.D.’s Helen in Egypt (1961). While H.D. reviews her own life’s (Greek) work in her long poem in ways that recall Pound’s gathered currents in Women of Trachis, the challenge she sets herself is the opposite of that discernible in Pound’s late cantos: not coherence, but the embrace of proliferating images. The whole poem is an extended “hatching” of the Greek word eidolon ‘image, phantom, idol.’ The importance of the eidolon for H.D. has been previously recognized; the argument here differs in the specificity with which the author traces its lexical and conceptual translation throughout the poem. She reads the first part of Helen in Egypt both as a faithful and programmatic translation of Euripides’s Helen and as a revision of H.D.’s own previous writings on Helen. As with H.D.’s earlier translations, this one too catalyzes new writing: Helen in Egypt’s next two parts in subsequent years, where the Euripidean play’s import and relevance, as well as its unresolved tensions, are teased out. Helen in Egypt thus both performs and argues for the kind of approach to Greek here termed modernist hellenism: balancing freedom and constraint, “philology” and poetry.

This chapter discusses the relationship of the imagination to Christian eschatology. It gives an account of the function of eschatological imagery in the Bible, discusses the changing ways in which art and literature have engaged Christian eschatology, and concludes with an account of a distinctly eschatological imagination.

This chapter moves from the macro-level of social and narrative imagination to the micro-level of speaking and seeing. It continues to consider the interplay of inheritance and originality in these practices: the constitutive underdetermination or equivocity of what we see and say. The chapter illuminates the ways in which even at the smallest levels, we construct the world imaginatively. It then begins to discuss how art and poetry loosen the grasp of automated perception and do not impose an alternative vision but rather grant a double vision of our lives, allowing us to see it from new perspectives or in new ways. The chapter concludes with a consideration of liturgical and biblical renewals of perception.

This chapter approaches the problem of the poem's audience vis-à-vis the relational process of reading whereby one poem opens windows onto another, either through intertextual references and allusions or through the reader's own cognitive connections. The chapter expands on this relational ontology of poems to argue that in the act of reading there is no single poem; instead, a universal named “poetry” is extracted from the particularity of the so-called “single” poem. The chapter focuses on the poet-reader as a specific category of audience and, in order to read the transnational travel of poems, it considers the reception of T. S. Eliot in the works of Rabindranath Tagore and of the generation of Bengali poets who, after Tagore, both translate Eliot and echo him in their own poems. If Tagore is dissident in his use of Eliot's poetry as a counter-frame, the younger Samar Sen records a supportive intertextual presence of Eliot, while Bishnu Dey's translation of Eliot foregrounds a self-reflexivity of the poem that he imports into Eliot's text. These close readings affirm the chapter's central critique of the autonomous single poem in the pluralistic reading process.

This chapter focuses on some specific features of the historical classic, offering a series of reflections to expand a debate on this complex topic. Based on some examples of the Western historiographical tradition, I discuss to what extent historians should engage the concept of the classic, as has been done for literary and artworks. I will argue that it is possible to identify a category of the classic text in historical writing. Because of their narrative condition, historical texts share some of the features assigned to literary texts such as durability, timelessness, universal meaningfulness, resistance to historical criticism, susceptibility to multiple interpretations, and ability to function as models. Yet, since historical texts do not construct imaginary worlds but try to achieve some realities external to the text, they also have to attain some specific features according to this referential content, such as the surplus of meaning, historical use of metaphors, effect of contemporaneity, and a certain appropriation of ‘literariness’.

Economic Consequences enjoyed an outright favourable reception in Turkey. This chapter illuminates the circumstances that made this possible. Of the Carthaginian peace-imposing treaties of the Paris Conference (1919), only the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) concerning the Ottoman Empire was annulled after a battleground victory (1922), and replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). An officer and a diplomat, Ali Fethi (Okyar), soon to become prime minister of Turkey, was a prisoner of war in Malta when he heard of Keynes’s book, acquired a copy, and translated it in 1920. Because the national leaders were anxious to know what awaited them in the peace talks, given the huge Ottoman debt they inherited, impending war reparations, and the discriminatory treatment they suspected, upon Ali Fethi’s release and return, the translation was published in 1922 by the official press in Ankara. It helped prepare the Turkish delegation to the Lausanne conference. This case provides us with an early example of Economic Consequences as a policy instrument in favour of a new international integration serviceable to peace and reconstruction in the face of an international conflict.