This Introduction explores what it means to encounter a poem. What is involved when we read a poem in a book, hear a poem at a poetry slam, or translate a poem for readers of another language? What ideas about “the poem” inform such encounters, shaping what readers and audiences want from poems and what they do with them? This chapter examines the conceptual relation between the terms “poem” and “poetry,” as well as the shifting relations between “poem,” “song,” “hymn,” and other related terms. The Introduction considers how ideas about the poem have changed over history and how they differ between cultures. It then addresses several influential ideas about the poem, especially the notion of the individual poem as a unified whole and the notion of the poem as singular, as valuable in its difference from other poems. This chapter concludes that to encounter a poem is necessarily to encounter a work which, whether as object or experience, is always already entangled with other poems and with ideas of the poem as such.

This chapter examines the concept of style in terms of language and of representation. The style of a poem may first be understood as a problem of language at the level of the sentence. The analysis of style is then concerned with diction, syntax, meter, and other such linguistic features, and analysis can approach style as either a conscious choice or an unconscious reflex. But style is therefore also a problem of representation. For example, style may index the poet's character, gender, class, or any other aspect of their identity, and in this way, style is entangled in the specificities of social and historical life. Through detailed readings of poems by Margaret Cavendish and Harryette Mullen, the chapter then argues that the concept of style, both as language and representation, mediates between the one poem and the many. On the one hand, style customarily links one poem to other poems and indeed to other discourses and artforms. On the other, precisely because styles are shared and repeated a given poem may allude to or incorporate styles as part of its material and may, through this very process, affirm its own difference or even singularity.

WHAT COULD BE further from modernism than the hymn? A congregation’s song of praise, the sincere expression of shared values and beliefs, the hymn has little of modernism’s irony or shock. The collectivity of the hymn and its broad popularity seem to oppose, say, the individualism of The Egoist and limited or deluxe editions published by small presses. The ongoing life of old hymns in public memory and public practice, their authors and their original contexts often forgotten, appears to differ radically from modernist investments in making it new and in the distinctive style of each individual talent. To be popular, the hymn must be accessible, deploying a common language and familiar concepts, but modernism famously spurns simplicity for difficulty, for rebarbative forms and the critique of modernity. Most of all, the hymn seems an instrumental genre, framed by institutions, tethered to particular occasions and didactic purposes, while modernism promises the autonomy of art.

But that is a caricature, both of the hymn and of modernism. Some modernist works also offered sincere expressions of shared values and beliefs, some were very popular and some were occasional or didactic. Modernism’s novelties and experiments emerged out of and in relation to traditions and conventions. Modernism’s autonomy was always partial or compromised. And modernism engaged actively with the hymn, variously adopting and adapting its history and its forms. The hymn itself was, in the early part of the twentieth century, a diverse genre, or set of related genres. In this chapter, I first sketch the situation of the hymn at this time, and then explore what the hymn meant to modernist poetry. My focus is not on broad spiritual and intellectual narratives, whether the rise of secularism or the shifting relation between religion and art. Instead, I focus on specific negotiations with generic conventions and connotations, and I argue that modernism turned to the hymn to work through two central problems: the difficulty of collective thinking and feeling, and the difficulty of finding someone or something worthy of praise or responsive to appeal.

One traditional solution to the problem of how modernist poetry began is to tell the story of a transition between Yeats’s early masterpieces and Eliot’s The Waste Land. This is a story which usually centres upon the rise of free verse and a growing urgency to represent the modern world. More recently, critics have looked to tell stories about neglected poets, in which less obviously experimental works are found nevertheless to represent that same modern world. Both approaches involve tracing continuities and ruptures, often with reference to the unprecedented ruptures and rapid developments which characterised life in Britain in the first two decades of the century. This chapter shifts the emphasis from deciding how poetry somehow made a miraculous leap from the fin de siècle to high modernism, to exploring how the poetic forms of diverse poets working at this time refract the very conception and experience of transition, and especially the experience of transition when no certain beginning or end is in sight. The aim here is thus to resist the logic of literary history’s usual narratives, and to show that the poems of this period do so too at the level of poetic technique.

By the time Louis Armstrong recorded ‘Body and Soul’ in Los Angeles on 9 October 1930, thereby establishing Johnny Green's sinuous tune as a jazz standard, it was already a hit. But the words for the tune kept changing. ‘My days have grown so lonely, / For I have lost my one and only’, Armstrong pines. ‘My life is sad and lonely; / I wait and sigh for you dear only’, croons Pat O'Malley in the song's first recording, made in London in February with Jack Hylton and his Orchestra. Partly this is because three or four lyricists were involved in composing and recomposing the song over the course of that year, and partly it is because different versions were published in Britain and in America. What's more, in rehearsing amorous banalities the particular words seem not to matter very much. ‘My pride has been humbled’, Armstrong continues, ‘For I'm hers, body and soul’. That final phrase, the song's title, never changed. When Edward Heyman first proposed the title to Robert Sour and Frank Eyton, the three lyricists spent days deciding whether to use ‘body and soul’ at the beginning or the end of a line. The result might have resembled the lyrics Frank Loesser wrote for Hoagy Carmichael's 1938 tune, ‘Heart and Soul’: ‘Heart and soul, I fell in love with you, / Heart and soul, the way a fool would do’. Instead, each refrain of ‘Body and Soul’ returns inexorably to that culminating title phrase: ‘I was a mere sensation; / My house of cards had no foundation; / Although it has tumbled, / I still am hers, body and soul’. Each refrain begins with its own rhyming couplet (‘lonely’-‘only’, ‘sensation’-‘foundation’) and a third rhyme then binds successive refrains (‘humbled’-‘tumbled’). None of these rhymes has the spark of those by a Cole Porter or an Ira Gershwin at his best. The lover's loneliness ironically matches the matchlessness of his one true love; only a common suffix sets the lover's past success against the substance which that success had lacked; and past participles determine both formulations of the lover's fall. But at last, as Green's melody finally resolves on the tonic, nothing rhymes with soul except for soul. No attempt at wit or charm, no sentimental rhetoric or romantic design affects the sense of this word with likeness or contrast.