W. S. Graham's poetics of place is closely bound up with his intense preoccupation with language, its possibilities and limitations in the event of the poem. Born and raised in the shipbuilding port town of Greenock, twenty miles west of Glasgow on the banks of the Clyde, Graham spent most of his writing life living at the other end of the archipelago, in South-west Cornwall. Across a career of nearly four decades, memories of Greenock and its hinterlands infuse many of the poems written in Cornwall, so that displacement becomes a recurrent theme of Graham's poems as well as one of its existential conditions. Moreover, a distinctive feature of his poetry is the way in which it moves imaginatively between places, collapsing spatial and temporal distances in the condensed geographies of the word. Especially in his later work, Graham finds suggestive correspondences between the landscapes, seascapes, and industrial histories of Clydeside and Cornwall, without eliding their differences and distinctive characters. His poetry also moves fluently between representations of real places that are known and familiar, and imagined or constructed spaces in which his poetry stages encounters with the unknown. These include the ice-bound landscapes of polar explorers and the equally white and silent space of the page on which his poems leave their marks. Characteristically, the kinds of places and landscapes to which his poems obsessively return are those in which land and sea, terrestrial and maritime worlds interact.

One of the most flexible spatial tropes in Graham's poetry is that of the journey or voyage, which Tony Lopez characterises as chiefly ‘a voyage of self-discovery’. For Matthew Francis, however, Graham's recurrent theme of journeying or voyaging is more persuasively understood as a figure for the ‘movement from writer to reader’ in the poem's fraught and uncertain act of communication. Graham's handling of the trope of voyaging – from land to sea, present to past, self to other, writer to reader – is supple enough to accommodate a variety of critical interpretations, and I want simply to note its importance as one manifestation of his distinctive geographical imagination. Geographical terms and concepts such as ‘place’, ‘space’, ‘journey’, ‘map’, ‘distance’, and ‘land’ are remarkably common in Graham's poetry; but because they are often closely connected to his apparently primary concerns with language and communication, the significance of material places for his work has been undervalued.

During the mid-1940s, the poet Gwendolyn Brooks lived with her husband and young son in a one-room kitchenette apartment at 623 East 63rd Street, on the southern edge of Bronzeville, Chicago. Situated at an intersection and overlooking a stretch of the L-train line, Brooks's flat was also, for a short time, one of the meeting places of African American late modernism, a venue for parties attended by many of the writers, artists, musicians, and photographers associated with the Chicago Black Renaissance. When Brooks threw a party for her friend Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance poet, perhaps 100 people squeezed into her tiny kitchenette. Moreover, the apartment was also a ‘scene of writing’ for Brooks, the place where ‘the everyday practices, encounters, and networks’ of her social life were worked into poetry. Brooks remarks in her autobiography, Report from Part One (1972): ‘If you wanted a poem, you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing’. That is, Brooks's apartment window offered a panorama of the everyday lives of her fellow Bronzeville citizens, whose activities provide the raw ‘material’ from which her poems are fashioned or ‘distilled’.

In this chapter, I examine the centrality of Bronzeville and its people to Brooks's late modernist poetry in detail, with particular attention to her representations of living spaces and the public spaces of the city's streets. I also argue that Brooks's work, when considered as a whole, reveals Bronzeville to be a mutable and transient phenomenon, a place-in-process that is shaped and reshaped by Chicago's histories of migration, racial segregation, and urban redevelopment in the period from the end of the First World War until the 1960s. Brooks was born at the beginning of this period, in 1917, began to publish her poetry during the 1930s, when Bronzeville acquired its name, and underwent a profound aesthetic and political realignment in the late 1960s, when Bronzeville's identity as a black urban community and cultural hub had dwindled to little more than a memory. Thereafter, her geographical imagination is largely decoupled from the streets and kitchenette buildings of Bronzeville, turning instead to the allegorical landscapes of the American Warpland in the post-Civil Rights era and to the wider solidarities of the African diaspora.

Basil Bunting's poetic representations of place are shaped by a geographical imagination that thrives on contradictions. His regional modernism is characterised both by the imaginative centrality of northern landscapes and cultural paradigms to his writing, and by the refraction of such local and regional attachments through a self-consciously international modernist poetics. Bunting's major work, Briggflatts (1966), explores its twin themes of dislocation and homecoming through an intense imaginative engagement with the history, geography, and linguistic textures of the North-east of England. However, Bunting's poem is also a deliberately eccentric poetic autobiography that both enacts the expression of a securely ‘northern’ regional identity and suspends any such existential anchoring through its formal disjunctions and dense collage of incommensurable spaces and times. If the poem can be regarded as celebrating locality and belonging in a cherished regional landscape, it also attests to experiences of displacement and encounters with otherness, foregrounding vagrancy as a characteristically modern mode of being-in-the-world. In part, this world-view derives from Bunting's own personal experiences, for his idiosyncratic career as a poet, journalist, interpreter, diplomat, and MI6 agent entailed temporary residences in France, Italy, the United States, the Canary Islands, and Iran, before his return to his home place, Northumberland, in 1952, more than thirty years after his first departure in 1919. However, Bunting's emphasis upon mobility, journeying, and transience in his later poems is also integral to his reflections on modernity, echoing György Lukács's claim that ‘transcendental homelessness’ is characteristic of the modern condition. My purpose in this chapter is to demonstrate the extent to which regional, national, and international horizons are articulated together in his poetics of place, with particular reference to Briggflatts as a paradigmatic example of regional modernism.

Region and Nation

At first sight, the phrase ‘regional modernism’ appears oxymoronic, its two terms – adjective and noun – pulling in opposite directions. A well-rehearsed and widely accepted narrative about literary modernism defines it as an essentially metropolitan phenomenon with an emphatically internationalist character. Most of the major Anglophone modernist writers – including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein – were exiles or émigrés whose texts are conspicuously polyglot, multi-form, and composed of diverse cultural materials.

One of the core arguments of this book is that late modernism in Anglophone poetry is best understood not as a phase of decline or obsolescence, nor of assimilation to mainstream cultural values, but as the stubborn living on of modernist aesthetic energies in the post-war period and well into the second half of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, as Peter Howarth remarks, the term ‘late modernism’ seems to imply a condition of ‘belatedness – as if living and breathing poets were just survivals from another age, rather than ahead of their time’. As the foregoing chapters make clear, my view of such ‘survivals’ in the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, Basil Bunting, W. S. Graham, David Jones, Lorine Niedecker, and Charles Olson is that they are more often heroic than pathetic, and always interesting. In this conclusion I want to consider the significance of such survivals, particularly the role that late modern-ist poets play as mediating figures, key influences for a range of younger poets from Britain, the United States, and the Caribbean for whom, in Marjorie Perloff's words, the ‘modernist challenge […] remains open’. In doing so, I also hazard some answers to the question of what comes after late modernism.

Lines of influence from the first generation of modernist writers run through the work of late modernist poets in a variety of ways. The examples of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams are especially important for Bunting and Olson, who each met and corresponded with the elder poets for many years. For Niedecker, aspects of Pound's and Williams's poetics were crucial for the development of her own style, though their influence was largely indirect, mediated by her friend Louis Zukofsky. More important for the poetry of Jones and Graham were the linguistic and formal experiments of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, particularly The Waste Land and Finnegans Wake. Brooks also acknowledged the powerful influence of Eliot on her own work, though her formative encounters with modernist poetics came via the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, especially Langston Hughes. There are some important differences between modernist and late modernist poets, however, not least in terms of their political alignments.

Edges are paradoxically central to the poetry of Lorine Niedecker. The defining condition for her geographical imagination is the fact that she spent most of her life by water, and her poems are strongly drawn to the meeting places between terrestrial and aquatic worlds. Aside from a few short periods in New York during the 1930s and in Milwaukee during the 1960s, Niedecker lived and died in the place where she was born (in 1903): Blackhawk Island, a low-lying, flood-prone strip of land on the banks of the Rock River where it enters Lake Koshkonong, in South-east Wisconsin. Her poems attest to a profound, bodily ‘implacement’ in both the social and the natural communities of her home place, registering its sights and sounds, the change of seasons, and the behaviour of her neighbours – both human and non-human – with a mixture of sympathy and subtle irony.

Niedecker's attachments to people and place are deep but never narrow or exclusive; her poems register the local effects of global political and economic forces, particularly the Depression years, the Atomic age, and the Cold War, bringing world-historical events into focus through her situated perspectives in the Midwest. Her politics were consistently left-wing, and she sympathised with people on the margins of American society; though she became wary of combining poetry and politics in later years. The only daughter of a fisherman, Niedecker was college-educated and her family owned several properties on Blackhawk Island; but she identified with the rural working class, worked as a librarian and hospital cleaner, and lived most of her life in some poverty. Her chosen life as a poet was kept hidden from most of her neighbours, so that she occupied the dual position of long-term inhabitant and artful observer of her native place; at once insider and outsider. This tension between social embeddedness and emotional (or political) distance is crystallised in an untitled poem of 1950, where she writes of working in a print shop ‘right down among em / the folk from whom all poetry flows / and dreadfully much else’. Although she claims that poetry ‘flows’ from its source ‘down among’ the ‘folk’, her poems are often situated at the edges of the community she claims, somewhat ambivalently, as her own.

History and geography, place and memory, territory and myth are intricately intermeshed in the poetry of David Jones. Jones's distinctive historical sense – his perception ‘not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’ – is grounded in and given expression by a geographical imagination in which the concepts of place, site, and locality are of central importance. He explicitly characterises the poet's role as that of a ‘rememberer’ whose business is ‘to keep open the lines of communication’ with the past, and describes poetry itself as an act of ‘recalling’ or ‘anamnesis’. This act of anamnesis by which history is both recalled and represented is predicated upon an engagement with the material and symbolic qualities of particular places. Hence Jones's conception of the poet as a kind of archaeologist and bricoleur, whose synthesising creative imagination draws upon the cultural materials that ‘happen to be lying about the place or site or lying within the orbit of [his or her] “tradition” ’. The particular places and cultural traditions with which Jones's poetry is most deeply concerned are those of Britain, and especially Wales; although his aesthetic sensibility is broadly congruent with that of European modernism. Neil Corcoran argues persuasively that Jones's major literary achievement derives from his success in ‘localising, or domesticating, in a specifically British context, a modernist sense of the relation between a poet and his “tribal” history’. However, it is important to note that his imagination is also temporally and spatially expansive, taking in the whole of Western Europe from the time of the Roman Empire to the middle of the twentieth century, and ranging from the Eastern Mediterranean to the continent's North Atlantic archipelago. Indeed, Jones's most ambitious long poem, The Anathémata, reaches far back into prehistory and geological time in its exploration of the fundamental links between art and religion, culture and place.

Although he claimed to be a poor scholar, Jones's formidably erudite and allusive long poems are informed by wide-ranging and eclectic research, including a keen amateur interest in the disciplines of geography, oceanography, and geology. His library, now held at the National Library of Wales, includes volumes such as John Gorton's Topographical Dictionary of Great Britain and Ireland (1833), Halford Mackinder's Britain and the British Seas (1902), L. Dudley Stamp's The World: A General Geography (1940), and A. E. Trueman's Geology and Scenery in England and Wales (1961), among many others.

This book undertakes a detailed literary geography of late modernist poetry in the three decades following the end of the Second World War. Its focus is upon the work of a diverse group of mostly second-generation modernists who were active on both sides of the Atlantic during the second half of the twentieth century, long after the death of modernism had been proclaimed. Part of my purpose is to contribute to a wider critical reappraisal of the literary history of Anglophone mod¬ernism, with particular attention to its later manifestations. A familiar and much-rehearsed literary-historical narrative traces the origins of Anglophone modernism to 1890 or 1900, identifies its zenith in the golden age of the 1920s, and chronicles its terminal decline during the Depression years of the 1930s. According to this account, modernism came to an end with the twin disasters of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939) and the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany on 1 September 1939. One problem with this tale of literary modernism's rise and fall is that it ignores the tenacious survivals of late modernism well into the post-war period. In particular, the three decades from 1945 to 1975 marked a major new phase of experiment and achievement in Anglophone modernist poetry, an aspect of late modernism that has received little serious critical attention to date. This period saw the publication of such important (though often neglected) late modern¬ist texts as William Carlos Williams's Paterson (1946–1958), Wallace Stevens's The Auroras of Autumn (1950), Lynette Roberts's Gods with Stainless Ears (1951), David Jones's The Anathémata (1952), Melvin Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953), W. S. Graham's The Nightfishing (1955), Hugh MacDiarmid's In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), Louis Zukofsky's “A” 1–12 (1959), Marianne Moore's O to Be a Dragon (1959), Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems (1960), H. D.'s Helen in Egypt (1961), Charles Reznikoff's Testimony: The United States (1885–1900) (1965–1968), Basil Bunting's Briggflatts (1966), George Oppen's Of Being Numerous (1968), Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca (1968), Lorine Niedecker's North Central (1968), and Brian Coffey's Advent (1975). Furthermore, New Directions published the first nearly complete edition of Ezra Pound's The Cantos in 1970, though the poem was begun more than half a century earlier.

If the poetic method of Charles Olson's sprawling late modernist epic, The Maximus Poems, is fundamentally historical in character, then it is also informed by a profound, but less-remarked preoccupation with geography. Famously, Olson derives his conception of history from Herodotus, translating ‘istorin as a verb rather than a noun; history means ‘“finding out for oneself,” instead of depending on hearsay’. It is significant, however, that much of what Olson seeks to find out for himself in the more than 600 pages of The Maximus Poems concerns a particular place – the port city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the neighbouring peninsula of Cape Ann. Of course, the scope of Olson's omnivorous imagination is such that his text is about many other things besides – from pre-Homeric cultures and Jungian psychology to theories of continental drift. Nonetheless, most of these interests are loosely connected to the poem's core geographical themes of westward voyages and migrations, which tend to converge on the North Atlantic coast of New England. The deep history of place that Olson undertakes in the first volume of The Maximus Poems (1960), focusing upon the origins of Gloucester as a colonial settlement in the early seventeenth century, is a necessary prelude to the much more expansive and fragmentary mytho-historical parallels that he draws between places in the Eastern Mediterranean and the North Atlantic in Maximus IV, V, VI (1968), and The Maximus Poems: Volume Three (1975). Moreover, among the multifarious documents and sources that Olson's epic plunders for material or inspiration, the maps drawn by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century navigators have an important, even central place. In this chapter, I argue that Olson's recurrent fascination with these (and other) maps of Gloucester, New England, and the wider Atlantic world has far-reaching effects not only on the content of The Maximus Poems but also on its form. For, one of the ways in which the poet encourages us to read his text is as a map of the world – a late modernist mappamundi – that has been made and remade by the ‘restless’ wanderings of ‘Western man’.

Given the monumental scale and ‘textual depth’ of The Maximus Poems, which evolved over the course of twenty years and remained unfinished at the time of Olson's death in 1970, it is no surprise that the text's poetics of place is complex and at times deeply contradictory.

This chapter rounds off Section 2. In it, one of the authors, Jonathan Montgomery, begins by highlighting his view of the recurrent themes that arise from all eight chapters in this section.

Then, one of the editors, Alex Haslam, responds by substantially agreeing with Jonathan Montgomery. However, Haslam takes the opportunity to clarify one of the points that Montgomery makes with the intention of drawing attention to a key issue that runs like an artery through the body of this book. This concerns the nature of personalised healthcare and how this should best be understood and delivered. Haslam cautions that, in the process of developing personalised care, we should avoid the temptation to reduce peoples’ maladies to their individual conditions.