T. .

H l nd d rn b lv rT rl (r v
Christos Hadjiyiannis

Modernism/modernity, Volume 21, Number 2, April 2014, pp. 575-577

(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/mod.2014.0046

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mod/summary/v021/21.2.hadjiyiannis.html

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 book reviews
a target of Ficke and Bynners famed Spectra Hoax, in which their outrageous parodies were 575
taken seriously and received as the latest wave of avant-garde experimentation.
Pound again emerges as the principal innovator of the second strand of modernist poetic
portraiture, which expanded the subject from a single individual to encompass a multiplicity
of intersecting figures. Beginning with Les Millwins (1913) and culminating in Hugh Selwyn
Mauberly (1920), Pounds multifigure portraits showcase an impressive array of avant-garde art
forms and techniques, including vorticist painting and design, Diaghilevs Ballets Russes, novels
by Henry James and James Joyce, and moving panorama. In a standout reading of Mauberly,
Dickey applies the metaphor of a museum to account for the poems dual nature as both a sus-
tained portrait of a single individual and as a sequence, or gallery, of cameos.
The Modern Portrait Poem puts literary and art history in conversation to revise the standard
narrative of transatlantic modernist experimentation. What results is a tour-de-force analysis
of numerous modernist masterpieces that is as rich in historical detail as it is expansive in its
engagement with the visual and performing arts.

T. E. Hulme and Modernism. Oliver Tearle. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Pp.

159. $110.00 (cloth).

Reviewed by Christos Hadjiyiannis, Wolfson College, Oxford

Hulmes poetic output is notoriously slim: in his lifetime, he published only six short poems,
five of which appeared as The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme in 1912. In it, Eliot
found some of the most beautiful short poems in the language.1 Yet, despite the approval of a
modernist trendsetter such as Eliot (who considered Hulme a really great poet),2 Hulmes poetry
has been consistently overshadowed by his critical writings. In T. E. Hulme and Modernism, Oliver
Tearle returns attention to Hulmes poetic experiments in order to bring them more fully into a
discussion of his overall oeuvre (6). Patiently, attentively, and lucidly, he engages with Hulmes
poetry (including his posthumously published satellite poems), making a convincing case for
the revaluation of Hulme as a significant modernist poet. Through imaginative close readings,
and by drawing on Hulmes notebooks, lectures and essays, Tearle reveals the poets work to be
richer than often assumed and, furthermore, complementary to his critical and philosophical
thought. The book does have its problems; but in its poetic analysis, T. E. Hulme and Modernism
is a refined and well-negotiated exercise in literary criticism. As the first book-length analysis of
Hulmes poetry, it is also an important addition to the field.
Among Hulmes key contributions to modernist poetics was his insistence that modern poetry
should strive to offer new and unexpected images (presented in juxtaposition); he also wanted
the modern poet to acknowledge the finite and limited nature of humanity, according to his
famous classical doctrine. Both these preoccupations (the second one of which was only clearly
set out in Romanticism and Classicism in 191112) are at play in the poems Hulme composed
in 19089. Take for instance Autumn, which associates the moon with the earthly red-faced
farmer; or Above the Dock, which likens the moon to a childs balloon:
Above the quiet dock in mid night,
Tangled in the tall masts corded height,
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a childs balloon, forgotten after play.
The juxtaposition of moon and balloon is surprising and yet not devoid of association: the
moon is ball-shaped when it is full; the moon as a balloon works by rhyme-association (the internal
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

576 chiming of moon with balloon); and the loon that balloon contains reminds us of the lunar
(53). Unpacking Hulmes interpretation of Henri Bergsons intuitive metaphysics, Tearle shows
how Hulmes poems alert us to an image, only to then invite us to detect a deeper intratextual
association. Hulmes short poems can thus be seen to work in the manner of puzzles, where the
reader is engaged in the task . . . of ascertaining how the two images in the metaphor or simile
are working together (and, just as importantly, why they work together) (72).
In the sunset poems, the unexpected analogy between sunset and scarlet sre shares
something with Eliots comparison of the evening sunset to a patient etherized upon a table
in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Eliots association is Hulmean in that it offers a fresh
analogy, and simultaneously resists the infinite and transcendent. Here Tearle insightfully ob-
serves that, though the sunset may be vast, boundless and quasi-mystical in poetry, for Hulme
and Eliot alike it must be pulled back to within our reach (1516). Hulmes poetry is also pre-
occupied with the finite or the definite: it is firmly down-to-earth (16). As Tearle playfully puts
it, it may not have gravitas but it has gravity (23). In Mana Aboda, for example, the singing
poets are not tall enough; they cannot reach the Polynesian deity Mana Aboda (who acts as
a divine muse here) not only, Tearle finds, because they are slaves to a worn-out poetic style,
but because they are not divine (21). Similarly, in Susan Ann and Immortality, Susan Ann
(likened to a rabbit) summons immortality by flinging her head down between her legs (Till the
earth was sky), and yet she remains resolutely and fixedly limited (22). Such manifestations
of classicism also underpin A City Sunset (20), The Poet (28), Town Sky-line (31), The
Man in the Crows Nest (56), and Conversion (79).
Tearle perceptively identifies various inconsistencies in Hulmes literary criticism. For in-
stance, he recognizes that the poet sometimes rallies against transcendence in verse, only to
acknowledge elsewhere that poetic composition involves something mysterious (as in German
Chronicle, an overlooked article brought to light in this book). Hulme also misread the work
of several thinkers, including Coleridge and Bergson. Indeed, as recognized by many Hulme
scholars over the years, his classical model of poetic composition, based on Bergsons intuitive
method, turns out to be quite close to Coleridges romantic notion of the Imagination (48). Tearle
finds something creative in Hulmes misappropriations and misreadings. Earlier in the book, he
alerts us to Hulmes misquoting of Shakespeares lines from Cymbeline in Romanticism and
Classicism. The original reads: Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers come
to dust; Hulme substitutes as with like, which emphasizes the inactivity of the chimney
sweepers, characterized as passive objects whose only fate is to decay like everything else
(60). Moreover, Hulme recontextualizes, and thereby transforms, the rhetorical function of the
couplet, which otherwise serves as a funeral lament in the original text (62). The poets disregard
for context, and his penchant for borrowing from others casually or without acknowledgement,
is not dissimilar to Eliots modernist patchworks. However, as Tearle rightly notes, unlike Eliot
Hulme is interested in questioning and reinventing. . .stock images. . .rather than engaging in
specific instances of allusion and quotation (72). By scrutinizing the inventiveness of Hulmes
literary misappropriations, Tearle offers a new way of thinking about the poets debts to other
writers in both his artistic and his critical writings.
Tearle brings into his analysis canonical modernists such as Eliot (8389), Joyce (82), Woolf
(91), Pound and the imagists (7482), as well as a few unexpected names: Browning (61), Raleigh
(62), Arnold (73), and Emerson (27). He is careful, however, not to draw any direct lines of
influence between Hulme and other poets or thinkers. Instead, he is interested in links (86),
interesting crossovers (87), and local similarities (88). In Chapter 3, he suggests we approach
Hulmes brand of modernism through the idea of parafluence, which rejects the idea that
influence can always be corroborated to a satisfactory degree (98). It instead acknowledges
the similar circles in which . . . thinkers moved, the similarities in the reading they did and the
crossovers in their attitudes towards the trends and ideas of the time (99). This is rightly de-
scribed as an accurate and useful metaphor (99) for reading Hulmes modernism. It also nicely
 book reviews
ties together the numerous works that have stressed the multifarious nature of influence3 and 577
allows us to discuss Hulmes relationship to, say, New Criticism (107) or Saussure (108). However,
it is very difficult to see how, as a loose idea hurriedly developed over nine pages, it might be a
riposte to, but also an extension of, Harold Blooms concept of the anxiety of influence (99).
Tearle concludes his study with a discussion of Hulmes afterlife, specifically Hulmes influ-
ence on literary criticism, which is still to come (106) and which can be viewed as a touchstone
for critical-creative writing (116). Again, Tearle is correct to note the complementarity between
Hulmes poetry and theory. The problem is that he never adequately explains what he means
by critical-creative writing. Nor is it clear (or necessarily true) that a fragmentary critical
response gets closer to the truth of what some experimental modernists are actually seeking to
convey by comparison with what traditional literary criticism (118) can do. Tearle is also not
explicit about what he means by traditional criticism. In the afterword, he showcases how a
critical-creative response to Hulmes writing might work (135) by adopting Hulmes rhetoric
from Cinders and Notes on Language and Style. This is refreshing, but it borders on self-
indulgence. Worse, it adds little to the meticulous analysis carried out in the rest of the book.
Although he does very well to refine and expand upon Hulmes definition of classicism,
Tearle mistakes the poets ideological preference for a classical, anti-humanist attitude with
the use of classical ancient Greek symbols in poetry (e.g. on page 88). He admits that there is
a strong continuity in Hulmes work, only to simultaneously claim that his subjects career was
divided into distinct phases. He accepts the plurality of modernisms (99), but, when it suits his
point, he uses modernism as a monolithic term (85). And even though he is a careful reader of
the notebooks, he erroneously takes Hulmes distinction between poetry (direct language) and
prose (indirect language) as too literal (122).
These confusions and inaccuracies are distracting but do not take much away from the books
overall success. Tearles analysis, specifically when it incorporates close readings, is interesting,
important, and merits a substantial readership.

Notes
1. T. S. Eliot, A Commentary, The Criterion 2.7 (1924): 231.
2. Valerie Eliot, ed., The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 18981922 (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), 311.
3. Examples listed by Tearle include Trillings The Liberal Imagination (1951), Kenners The
Invisible Poet (1965), and Harmers Victory in Limbo (1975).

The Novel after Theory. Judith Ryan. New York: Columbia University Press,
2012. Pp. x + 260. $29.50 (cloth).

Reviewed by Michael Lackey, University of Minnesota

In 2009, Beverley Southgate published History Meets Fiction, a first-rate study that examines
the role historians play as characters within novels to question, challenge, and reconstruct the
discipline of history as well as the historical record. Such novels, Southgate astutely argues, came
into being because of a major transformation in the field of historyspecifically the growing
recognition that history is fiction. As an historian, Southgate welcomes this development, and he
does a masterful job of clarifying how that approach has enabled the novel to contribute to the
remaking of history. Ryans The Novel after Theory is in the same tradition as Southgates book,
but her focus is on the role that theorists and theories (rather than historians and history) play
within novels. Her goal is not to theorize upon particular novels but to show how novelists them-