This new edition of "Contemporaries and Snobs," a landmark
collection of essays by Laura Riding, offers a counter-history of
high modernist poetics.
Laura Riding's "Contemporaries and Snobs" (1928) was the first
volume of essays to engage critically with high modernist poetics
from the position of the outsider. For readers today, it offers a
compelling account--by turns personal, by turns historical--of how
the institutionalization of modernism denuded experimental poetry.
Most importantly, "Contemporaries and Snobs" offers a
counter-history of the idiosyncratic, of what the institution of
modernism left (and leaves) behind. With Gertrude Stein as its
figurehead, the book champions the noncanonical, the "barbaric,"
and the undertheorized.
Riding's nuanced defense of a poetics of the person in
"Contemporaries and Snobs" represents a forgotten but essential
first attempt to identify and foster what is now a well-defined
poetic lineage that leads from Stein to the contemporary
experimental avant-garde. In these essays, Riding takes her readers
on a remarkably thorough tour through the critical scene of the
1920s. Among other influential treatises, she considers T. S.
Eliot's "The Sacred Wood" and his editorial essays in "The
Criterion," Allen Tate's "Poetry and the Absolute," John Crowe
Ransom's essays on the modernist poet, Edgell Rickword's essays in
"The Calendar of Modern Letters," and Herbert Read's posthumous
publication of T. E. Hulme's essays. All of this criticism, Riding
notes, gave modern poets a sheen of seriousness and
professionalism, but was it good for poetry? Her decisive answer is
"no." This new edition includes an introduction by Laura Heffernan
and Jane Malcolm that makes legible the many connections between
"Contemporaries and Snobs" and the critical debates and poetic
experiments of the 1920s, as well as explanatory notes, a
chronological bibliography of Riding's work, and an index of proper
names.
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