Mary Barnard American Imagist

Perhaps best known for her outstanding translation of Sappho, poet Mary Barnard (1909–2001) has until recently received little attention for her own work. In this book, Sarah Barnsley examines Barnard's poetry and poetics in the light of her plentiful correspondence with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and others. Presenting Barnard as a "late Imagist," Barnsley links Barnard's search for a poetry grounded in native speech to efforts within American modernism for new forms in the American grain. Barnsley finds that where Pound and Williams began the campaign for a modern poetry liberated from the "heave" of the iambic pentameter, Barnard completed it through a "spare but musical" aesthetic derived from her studies of Greek metric and American speech rhythms, channeled through materials drawn direct from the American local. The first book on Barnard, and the first to draw on the Barnard archives at Yale's Beinecke Library, Mary Barnard, American Imagist unearths a fascinating and previously untold chapter of twentieth-century American poetry.

Fragmentary Modernism begins from a simple observation: what has been called the 'apotheosis of the fragment' in the art and writing of modernism emerged hand in hand with a series of paradigm-shifting developments in classical scholarship, which brought an unprecedented number of fragmentary texts and objects from classical antiquity to light in modernity. Focusing primarily on the writers who came to define the Anglophone modernist canon — Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), and Richard Aldington, and the artists like Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska with whom they were associated — the book plots the multiple networks of interaction between modernist practices of the fragment and the disciplines of classical scholarship. Some of the most radical writers and artists of the period can be shown to have engaged intensively with the fragments of Greek and Roman antiquity and their mediations by classical scholars. But the direction of influence also worked the other way: the modernist aesthetic of gaps, absence, and fracture came to shape how classical scholars and museum curators themselves interpreted and presented the fragments of the past to audiences in the present. From papyrology to philology, from epigraphy to archaeology, the 'classical fragment', as we still often see it today, emerged as the joint cultural production of classical scholarship and the literary and visual cultures of modernism.