Why would a literary scholar say that he would ‘take it as a reproach’ if his work was called essayism? There is a good chance that we may understand this comment too easily, or not at all. The polemical postures of modernism (and the critical fashions of the academy) often seem remote from, or even opposed to, the essay in its casual, elegant, personal, speculative modes. This chapter traces not a reconciliation between the two stances but various forms of entanglement. Looking at work by Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, H.D., and Ezra Pound, this chapter asks what happens when modernist rigour needs the conceptual flexibility of the essay; when poetry cannot do without prose; when the imaginary is seen as the fiercest form of the real; when the objective correlative, without becoming subjective, encounters more shades of meaning than anyone thought it could manage.

Critical accounts of the modes in which modernist poetry responds to the First World War continue to place an emphasis on men’s responses to war, either non-combatants such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, or those who served, among them Richard Aldington and Wyndham Lewis. This chapter does consider the men of the poetic avant-garde but also focuses on women of the avant-garde – H.D., Marianne Moore, Mina Loy and Juliette Roche – to unearth the generative impact of the First World War on their poetry. As this chapter explores, the war features as subject matter and stimulus for the poetries of modernism and in the pages of modernist magazines, generating new forms and perspectives alongside the vivid expressions of anger, trauma, loss, and disillusionment. However, as this chapter also argues, women poets wrote the conflict differently; in confronting both patriarchal and military violence, the First World War became a key impetus for their feminist avant-garde poetic.

Chapter 4 examines three instances where the juxtaposition of a man’s and a woman’s textual contributions aims to satisfy the modernist desire for androgyny. W. B. Yeats’s interest in androgyny is expressed through iconography that the artist Althea Gyles employed in her designs for the covers of his books The Secret Rose (1897) and Poems (1899), but it is also embodied by the material texts of those books themselves, which bring together a man’s words with a woman’s images. A similar collaborative dynamic is apparent in Marianne Moore’s 1936 volume The Pangolin and Other Verse, where poems that explore seemingly impossible meetings of difference work together with illustrations by the male artist George Plank to convey an androgynous vision. The chapter concludes by turning to the modernist writer most closely associated with androgyny, Virginia Woolf. Drawing on the famous image from A Room of One’s Own of a man and woman stepping into a taxi that spurs Woolf to write of the androgynous mind, I argue that Woolf’s dialogic “meeting” with her husband Leonard in their 1917 Hogarth Press volume Two Stories reflects her desire to achieve androgyny through cross-sex collaboration.

Chapter 3 examines the discord aesthetic in three cross-sex collaborations that sought to critique, invigorate, or reconfigure marriage. Violet Hunt and Ford Madox Ford in their 1913 travel book The Desirable Alien model an innovative conjugal dynamic that privileges articulations of disagreement and destabilizes fixed gender roles by placing the writers’ distinct textual contributions in unresolved dialogue. I then read a similar attempt to re-conceptualize marriage as a shared quest to negotiate conflict without eradicating it as central to W. B. Yeats and George Yeats’s practice of automatic writing in the early years of their marriage. Finally, I turn from these heterosexual couples to consider the collaboration between Marianne Moore, a celibate unmarried woman, and her gay male friend Monroe Wheeler on the publication of her poem “Marriage” as the third and final chapbook in Wheeler’s Manikin series in 1923. Far from reinforcing traditional gender roles and hierarchies, these examples show how cross-sex collaboration might serve as the basis for truly innovative marriages based on a couple’s shared commitment to mutual empowerment and gender flexibility.

A study of Elliott Carter’s song cycles and other text settings from the period 1998-2011, with close readings of both poetry and music. Included are individual analytical essays on Tempo e tempi (poetry by Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Giuseppe Ungaretti), Of Rewaking (poems by William Carlos Williams), In the Distances of Sleep (poems by Wallace Stevens), Mad Regales (poems by John Ashbery), “La Musique” (poem by Charles Baudelaire), On Conversing with Paradise (texts from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos), Poems of Louis Zukofsky, What Are Years (poems by Marianne Moore), A Sunbeam’s Architecture (poems by e e cummings), Three Explorations (poems by T. S. Eliot), The American Sublime (poems by Wallace Stevens).

Bishop’s Florida, Brazil, and Nova Scotia poems have, over the years, accrued significant scholarly attention. This chapter turns to a less clearly delineated set of New York poems and argues that from her early years in the city as a recent graduate (1934–5) into the late 1960s and beyond, New York’s culture and environment exerted a pull on Bishop’s imagination and an influence on her aesthetic. We see this from early poems and drafts such as “Love Lies Sleeping” (1937) and “Varick Street” (1947) to much later ones including “Five Flights Up” (c.1973) which, although not necessarily written in or even explicitly about New York, is nevertheless inflected by her experience and memories of it.

Bishop’s Florida, Brazil, and Nova Scotia poems have, over the years, accrued significant scholarly attention. This chapter turns to a less clearly delineated set of New York poems and argues that from her early years in the city as a recent graduate (1934–5) into the late 1960s and beyond, New York’s culture and environment exerted a pull on Bishop’s imagination and an influence on her aesthetic. We see this from early poems and drafts such as “Love Lies Sleeping” (1937) and “Varick Street” (1947) to much later ones including “Five Flights Up” (c.1973) which, although not necessarily written in or even explicitly about New York, is nevertheless inflected by her experience and memories of it.