The exact chronological and geographical boundaries of modernism and modernity are matters of long-standing critical dispute. This chapter makes no pretense to retheorize them, but rather, works within a widely accepted framework for what constitutes the modernist period, from mid-nineteenth-century France to the beginning of the Second World War. The scope is limited to French, German, and English poetry written in Western Europe and the United States. The chapter deals with German modernism by focusing on Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke. It considers Hart Crane's reaction to the high modernist aesthetic and Amy Lowell's fraught interaction with it. The chapter examines the American avatars of what has come to be known as "international" or "high" modernism, by exploring HD Ezra Pound, and TS Eliot. It looks at the Harlem Renaissance poetry of Richard Bruce Nugent, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. Finally, the chapter discusses the British modernism of DH Lawrence and WH Auden.

Heidegger's post-war concern with poetry addresses a diverse assemblage of poets and poetic styles. Heidegger proceeds to think with the poets (Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl and Stefan George) toward an understanding of being and language. His concern throughout is with relationality, the relation between the things of the world and the words of language. The Rilke interpretation concerns the objectification of the things of the world. Human consciousness, aided by technology, objectifies these things into objects that stand opposed to a subject. Heidegger's readings of Trakl detail the transformations of the human underway in the world. In Heidegger's two interpretations of Stefan George, the 1957/58 lecture triad "The Essence of Language" and the 1958 lecture "The Word", the issue of relationality comes explicitly to the fore, motivating an understanding of language as the relational medium for the emergence of things.