A Survey of Modernist Poetry

Published in 1927, when modernist poetry was still scandalizing readers, this passionate defense argues that experimental form serves clarity of experience rather than mere obscurity. Laura Riding and Robert Graves, themselves major poets, reject the false choice between accessibility and significance. They demonstrate their argument through meticulous close reading: dissecting an E.E. Cummings poem to reveal how spacing, sound, and deliberate omission create concentrated meaning, then reconstructing a conventional version to show how banality returns when the innovations are stripped away. The book traces modernist techniques to their sources in French Symbolism and Japanese suggestiveness, weighs the relationship between form and subject, and offers a brilliant meditation on punctuation as meaning-maker, using Cummings alongside Shakespeare to prove how editorial choices can flatten or preserve density. This is not detached scholarship but polemic from within the fight, urgent and exacting. For anyone who ever felt modernist poetry was impenetrable, Riding and Graves insist the fault lies in lazy reading, not ambitious writing.