David James’s understanding of metamodernism as ‘continuity and adaptation’ in relation to early twentieth-century texts complements Ahren Warner’s interlacing of references to modernist authors in his work. His uncompromising engagement with French literature in particular has irked many critics. These criticisms might indicate an ‘innovative’ poet aspiring to the enigmatical poetry that I discuss throughout this book. Yet these suppositions would be inaccurate: allusions to modernist writers, iconoclasm and implacacbility are not coterminous with the enigma. Whereas Warner’s ‘Nervometer’ sequence forms an exemplary creative translation of Antonin Artaud’s elusive LE PÈSE-NERFS (1925), other poems – such as ‘Mètro’ – form neo-modernist, rather than metamodernist, responses to early twentieth-century writing. In contrast, James Byrne’s tentative poetic explorations ‘never end in discovery, only in willingness to rest content with an unsure glimpse’, as Byrne phrases it in ‘Apprentice Work’. His collections are open to the formal capacities of the enigma, even in a ‘committed’ poem such as ‘Cox’s Bazar’, that engages with the traumatised survivors of the Myanmar massacres.

Any engagement with David James’s sense of the ‘recrudescence’ of modernism in contemporary literature as a whole must confront the legacies of the so-called ‘poetry wars’ in the 1970s. In this chapter I turn to the repercussions of the ‘poetry wars’ more widely, and their impact on the concept of enigmatical poetry. Sustaining a wariness towards what David Caplan terms these ‘simple oppositions’, I nevertheless register their critical efficacy in distinguishing between enigmatical ‘clowning’ and Don Paterson’s refutation of lyrical indulgence. Rather than vying to register the obsoleteness of these terms, I argue that the persistence of allusive and ellusive poetry in both ‘camps’ indicates that the poetry wars are continuing in a modulated form. The terms require recalibration: Geoffrey Hill’s poetry, like Carol Ann Duffy’s, would normally be described as ‘mainstream’, yet Hill rails against the latter’s version of democratic poetry in his fourth lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry. Whereas Paterson’s default position is of aesthetic conciliation, Hill’s enigmatical poetry allows our understanding to be challenged and, sometimes, to be defeated.