Project Gutenberg 2025-06-27 Public domain in the USA. 277 Riding, Laura 1901 1991 Jackson, Laura (Riding) Graves, Robert 1895 1985 Ranke-Graves, Robert von Doyle, John Graves, Robert von Ranke 28014310 A survey of modernist poetry $aLondon :$bWilliam Heinemann Ltd., $c1927. Hannah Wilson, Laura Natal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) "A survey of modernist poetry" by Laura Riding and Robert Graves is a work of literary criticism written in the early 20th century. It explores why modernist poems look and read the way they do, how they challenge the “plain reader,” and what new techniques—of form, diction, punctuation, and layout—aim to achieve. The authors argue that experiment serves clarity of experience, not obscurity for its own sake, and that readers must meet the poems with more active, precise attention. The opening of the book sets up the debate between modernist innovation and the plain reader’s expectations, using E. E. Cummings as a test case. It closely reads his short “Sunset” piece to show how spacing, sound-patterns, and omission create a concentrated experience, then reconstructs a conventional version to prove how banality and cliché return when the innovations are removed. From there it weighs French Symbolist influences (Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Valéry), Japanese suggestiveness, and the problem of form versus subject-matter, arguing for organic design over fixed molds; it illustrates flexible structure with Hart Crane and biblical parallelism, and contrasts Eliot’s The Waste Land, whose transitions bind a unified whole, with Tennyson’s In Memoriam, whose uniform stanza masks digression. A chapter on punctuation shows how Cummings’ typography encodes meaning and guards against misreading, then compares that editorial vulnerability to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, demonstrating how modernized punctuation and spelling can flatten Shakespeare’s dense, interwoven sense. Finally, the start of the next chapter frames modernism’s “unpopularity,” and analyzes another Cummings piece (a jolting train scene) to show how unorthodox layout precisely transmits movement and perception. (This is an automatically generated summary.) https://archive.org/details/surveyofmodernis0000ridi 20240528130119riding 1927 gb Reading ease score: 52.6 (10th to 12th grade). Somewhat difficult to read. en Modernism (Literature) Poetry, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism Free verse PN Text Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches Category: Journalism/Media/Writing 504121 2025-07-30T08:01:12.056216 text/html 472632 2025-06-27T12:39:30 text/html 340279 2025-07-30T08:01:20.176667 application/epub+zip 340554 2025-07-30T08:01:13.584722 application/epub+zip 268583 2025-07-30T08:01:12.769239 application/epub+zip 449456 2025-07-30T08:01:24.572708 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 405594 2025-07-30T08:01:19.461738 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 395912 2025-07-30T08:01:10.708280 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 375977 2025-06-27T12:39:30 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 14958 2025-07-30T08:01:24.771656 application/rdf+xml 9003 2025-07-30T08:01:12.984219 image/jpeg 1659 2025-07-30T08:01:12.898210 image/jpeg 317980 2025-07-30T08:01:12.101245 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog en.wikipedia en.wikipedia