/lit/ - Literature

>>13027154
I agree with you on Poe's influence... I've read the various essays about Poe's influence on the French symbolist poets who in turn influenced the Anglo-American modernists as I'm sure you have. Ironically though many of the Americans and Britons influenced by Poe rejected him as vulgar and commonplace (unlike the French who saw him as a master aesthete). You are probably already familiar with this if you know about Poe's influence.

Nonetheless, the rest of us, in hindsight, can clearly see Poe's influence on them even if they were unwilling to acknowledge it or failed to recognize it. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," for example, sounds more Poe to me more than any other poet Eliot may have attributed influence to for the composition of that poem. Who can possibly take him seriously when he says he was influenced by Laforgue or some such name?

Why you dismiss Henry James' influence is beyond me. If you want me to compare passages side-by-side and do commentary as "proof," that is well beyond the scope of this board. The remarks I quoted above do give testimony however that many of these writers we are discussing acknowledged Henry James as a profoundly influential figure. Just because they chose not to write direct imitations of him does not in anyway dismiss the fact that he influenced their methods of composition.

You are quite right that "the biggest stylistic signs of modernism were the emergence of symbolism and the movement of mental depiction from mere description to direct displays." However the use of free indirect speech in prose is also a sign of movement towards this; two authors, deeply influential on modernists, who utilized such speech were James and Conrad. Joyce was working within a tradition i.e. his stream-of-consciousness was not born out of his head fully-formed like Athena.

Anglo-American modernism was a synthesis of several elements that were pioneered by earlier writers. You can't have it without certain precursors such as Poe, James, Browning, etc. I would find it hard-pressed to be convinced that Poe was responsible for all of modernism. I would be curious to see you propose a canon of influence for modernism that did not include James.