Modernist Criticism

This chapter is devoted to the prose writings of the leading modernist critics. First, it characterizes the larger purposes and projects of modernist poetry criticism. Next, the chapter examines its principles, practice, and consequences in the contexts of other ways of addressing poetry – especially the academic discourses with which modernist criticism maintains an ambiguous rivalry. Much modernist criticism of poetry takes the form of metacriticism, that is to say, criticism of criticism. The chapter highlights the significant role played by Pound and Eliot in modernist criticism. Eliot's impersonal theory of poetry is a theory of the poet's transmutation of his or her materials into something new and surprising. Eliot's and Pound's views found sympathizers in the universities, at a time when the still‐uncertain direction of literary studies allowed an opening for the new challenges of criticism, as distinct from philology or literary history.