Chapter 3 - Poetic Avant-Garde: Modernism and Little Magazines

Summary

Critical accounts of the modes in which modernist poetry responds to the First World War continue to place an emphasis on men’s responses to war, either non-combatants such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, or those who served, among them Richard Aldington and Wyndham Lewis. This chapter does consider the men of the poetic avant-garde but also focuses on women of the avant-garde – H.D., Marianne Moore, Mina Loy and Juliette Roche – to unearth the generative impact of the First World War on their poetry. As this chapter explores, the war features as subject matter and stimulus for the poetries of modernism and in the pages of modernist magazines, generating new forms and perspectives alongside the vivid expressions of anger, trauma, loss, and disillusionment. However, as this chapter also argues, women poets wrote the conflict differently; in confronting both patriarchal and military violence, the First World War became a key impetus for their feminist avant-garde poetic.