Modernists and new critics

pp. 207-269

in: Patrick Parrinder, Authors and authority, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1991

Abstract

"We are at the beginning of a new epoch, fresh to it, the first babes of a new, and certainly a better, day", wrote Wyndham Lewis in launching The Tyro (1921), a little magazine to which T. S. Eliot was among the most prominent contributors. The "new state of human life", according to Lewis, was "as different from Nineteenth Century England, say, as the Renaissance was from the Middle Ages".¹ In 1921 Lewis was already a veteran of newness. It was mainly his use of Great War imagery (the gap between past and future being figured as a "No Man's Land", for example) which distinguished his 1921 pronouncements from those issued in the magazine Blast, the "Review of the Great English Vortex", in 1914. By any standards, Blast was a major event in literary modernism, but when it appeared the Tradition of the New already had a considerable history. Virginia Woolf was to claim that human character had changed in December 1910; the (somewhat parochial) events she seems to have had in mind were the death of King Edward VII and the London Post-Impressionist Exhibition. Three years earlier A. R. Orage had founded his influential weekly the New Age, and the concepts of the "New Woman" and the "new journalism" (the latter referring to the sensationalist popular press) were already well-established at the death of Queen Victoria. A good case has been made for the Decadence of the English 1890s as an inherently modernistic artistic movement,² and the Nineties resound with such phrases as Hardy's "the ache of modernism" and Symons' "the restlessness of modern life". Havelock Ellis, the friend of Yeats and Symons, had published his essays on Nietzsche, Tolstoy and Whitman as The New Spirit (1890). What we now call literary modernism, with its major monuments such as The Waste Land, Ulysses and the Cantos, was preceded by three decades of fitful avant-garde initiatives and a growing appetite for the "new".