Writing of W. B. Yeats at the end of the 1930s, T. S. Eliot described him as “born into a world in which the doctrine of 'Art for Art's sake' was generally accepted, and living on into one in which art has been asked to be instrumental to social purposes.” Eliot and his contemporaries experienced this transition as well. Like Yeats and Ruskin before him, they had somehow to reconcile the competing claims of aestheticism and social commitment. The early poetry of Ezra Pound registers this tension vividly, as it oscillates between the worship of beauty and the reform of culture. Through many changes of style, from the fin-de-siècle romanticism of A Lume Spento (1908) to the hard-edged satire of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), Pound's writing served this double imperative.

From the age of fifteen, Pound says in a memoir entitled "How I Began" (1913), he knew that he was to be a poet. Moreover, he was to be a national epic poet, on the model of Homer, Dante and Whitman. His mother encouraged him to write an epic of the American West, and the early poem entitled "Scriptor Ignotus" speaks prophetically of "that great forty-year epic/That you know of, yet unwrit" (CEP, 24-5). The young man from Hailey, Idaho, and Wyncote, Pennsylvania, embraced as his destiny a high romantic ideal of the poet as bard, prophet, sage, and visionary seer. In this paradigm, the service of art and the service of society are one.

Introduction

The final phase of The Cantos began when Pound started planning the poem's paradisal conclusion. In 1944 he explained that “for forty years I have schooled myself... to write an epic poem which begins 'In the Dark Forest[,]' crosses the projected Purgatory of human error, and ends in the light, and 'fra i maestri color che sanno.'” Seven years before, he had assumed the middle part of that progress was concluded: in 1937 he published The Fifth Decad of Cantos [XLI-LI] and wrote in Canto XLVI that “This case, and with it / the first part, draws to a conclusion, / of the first phase of this opus” (XLVI/233-234). The crisis of impending war, however, caused him to insert an extra section on economics and politics - the China and Adams Cantos published in Cantos LII-LXXI (1940). It looked then like there would be one more push - one section in which, as he wrote to T. S. Eliot in January 1940, he had “29 canters to write” to match Dante's Commedia? At that point, the coils of Pound's own political and ideological misapprehension combined with the contingencies of history to produce a more complicated and extended outcome than the one he had foreseen. Having asked the world in general and T. S. Eliot in particular whether you "think you will / get through hell in a hurry" (XLVI/231), Pound discovered for himself how difficult it was to get to the other side of "human error," rage and hardened judgment. Whether he ever reached the light is a question that different readers will answer in different ways.

Charles Dickens, rising to his feet, stood at the table and surveyed the vast hall in which the leading citizens of Birmingham had gathered in early 1853 to pay him homage at a banquet. It was his duty to thank them now, and he proceeded to offer his tribute.

“The people, ” Dickens concluded triumphantly, “have set Literature free. ” And in return for that gift of liberty, he opined, “Literature cannot be too faithful to the people.”

“It is after all a grrrreat litttttterary period,” wrote Ezra Pound to T. S. Eliot with typical exuberance at the end of a famous 1921 letter accompanying major suggestions for revising Eliot's masterpiece The Waste Land (SL, 170). That mixture of showmanship, judgement, and genuine enthusiasm typifies Pound's contribution to the making of the great period of modernism, particularly when we remember its context of the brilliant reshaping of Eliot's original chaotic manuscript into the poem we now think of as one of the modernist monuments. Pound's remark also displays a canny awareness of literary politics, not least the potential of periodicity itself.

Besides the example of his own work, Pound helped to make modernism by supporting and encouraging other modernists and by helping to produce, distribute, and institutionalize modernist works. He presented the spectacle of “Pound the major poet devoting, say, one fifth of his time to poetry,” wrote Ernest Hemingway appreciatively in 1925. "With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends . . . he defends them when they are attacked, he gets them into magazines and out of jail... sells their pictures . . . arranges concerts for them .. . writes articles about them . . . introduces them to wealthy women [patrons] . . . gets publishers to take their books." Those friends were the people whose work Pound admired.

Since its inception as a category of literary study during the 1930s, Modernism has been notoriously inhospitable to definition. Nowhere is this inhospitability more pronounced than in the fraught issue of the relations of art to politics. How does aesthetic activity categorized as modernist stand in relation to forms of power? And how to the experiential realities that constitute the charged political dimensions of social life? With respect to these questions, Anglo-American Modernism has been both celebrated and derided; it has been praised for its richness in negotiating historically new forms of experience, and it has equally been censured for a defensive fear and loathing of precisely those forms. To complicate matters even more, we find the makers of Modernism spread all over the political map of twentieth-century Western Europe, England, and America: running with Reds; making political broadcasts for Mussolini; militating against the Ku Klux Klan; arguing for free speech and free love as well as free verse. How are we, then, as latter-day readers, to evaluate the political meaning of Modernism, especially when we are taught that its most notable - indeed, perhaps only - unifying feature was the attempt to transcend the political altogether?

To write about the modernist novel, as opposed to the Victorian novel, say, or the Edwardian novel, is to write not only about the possibilities of the genre, but about its perceived impossibility. The possibilities were evident enough. From about 1890 to about 1930, the novel was as popular as it had been during the Victorian period, and newly diverse. According to Henry James, in 1899, it was a universally valid form, “the book par excellence”; according to Ford Madox Ford, in 1930, it was indispensable, “the only source to which you can turn to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire lives.” And yet there was also a feeling, more prevalent among writers than among critics, that the novel as traditionally conceived was no longer up to the job: that its imaginary worlds did not, in fact, correspond to the way one's fellows spent their entire lives. The feeling was most fully and influentially articulated by T.S. Eliot, when he argued, in “Ulysses, Order and Myth” (1923), that the novel had effectively “ended” with Flaubert and James: that the very formlessness which had once made it the adequate “expression” of a previous age, an age not yet formless enough to require “something stricter,” now prevented it from expressing a modernity characterized above all by the loss of form.

Still we call it Modernism, and this despite the anomaly of holding to such a name for an epoch fast receding into the cultural past. Not long after this volume is published, “Modernism” will be the name of a period in the beginning of a previous century, too distant even to serve as a figure for the grandparent. Uneasily but inevitably, we have reached a time when many feel the obsolescence of a movement still absurdly wearing such a brazen title. The temptation, much indulged in recent years, has been to dance beyond the reach of the aging, dying giant, to prove that one can live past the epoch marked by such names as Joyce and Woolf, Pound and Eliot, Eisenstein and Brecht, Freud and Marx. Certainly, many forces have joined to change the vectors of late twentieth-century culture. But our contemporary imperative to declare a new period and to declare ourselves citizens of a liberated postmodernism has badly distorted and sadly simplified the moment it means to surpass.

At first sight it might seem contradictory to include drama in a discussion of Modernism. As a movement, “Modernism” has been defined in artistic terms through the sculptures of Jacob Epstein or Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky or Wyndham Lewis, while in literary terms its usage has been restricted to the work of poets and novelists: preeminently T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. Indeed, in the various critical studies of the movement published over the last half-century, drama has been conspicuous by its absence; and where mentioned at all, it is generally dismissed as following a different - even anti-modernist - agenda. This may be partly due to the specifically English and American focus of studies that site the defining moment of literary Modernism in the Pound-Eliot nexus. By contrast, drama in the twentieth century has been highly international, with English-speaking playwrights and directors responding to innovations from Europe, and having their experiments picked up in turn.

Not long ago, modern poetry - Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens - seemed to occupy an enormous territory on the literary-historical map. But as the twentieth century comes to an end, the Modernism that once loomed so large now seems startlingly diminished. Beginning in the late 1950s, critics began to see through the smoke screen of New Critical antiromanticism, uncovering the important affiliations between romantic, Victorian, and modern poetics. Today, in the wake of pioneering work by Frank Kermode, Robert Langbaum, and especially Harold Bloom, Eliot not only seems indebted to Tennyson; his Modernism makes most sense when we understand it as part of a continuum beginning with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads.

And if the historical integrity of Modernism has been encroached on by romanticism, an increasingly powerful postmodernism has exerted equal pressure from the opposite side. Certain modern poets - for Marjorie Perloff, Pound but not Stevens - are claimed as proto-postmodernists, leaving the impression that the remaining Modernists are a hapless, ineffectual lot.

The ancient parallel between literature and the visual arts - i.e. painting, sculpture, and architecture - becomes newly relevant in the twentieth century. Painters were the first to explore the revolutionary possibilities of Modernism, so that painting became the leading art form. Modernist writers often patterned their literary experiments on parallels drawn from the visual arts. It is impossible to understand fully the development of literary Modernism, therefore, without at least a rudimentary knowledge of modern art. This chapter is intended to provide a brief history of modern art for those whose primary interest is modern British and American literature. It follows the version of Modernism that was endorsed by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and that has served as the standard for most of this century. Literary parallels will be drawn primarily from poetry, since there the influence of the visual arts is deepest and most direct.

When people speak of Pound's antisemitism, they are thinking primarily of the antisemitic tirades included in the speeches that he broadcast over Rome Radio between 1941 and 1943. Although, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II, Pound stopped his broadcasts for two months, he resumed them on January 29, 1942. Since the United States was now at war with Italy, Pound's radio attacks on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and praise of Benito Mussolini seemed, to the United States government, to be the acts of a traitor and, on July 26, 1943, Pound was indicted for treason in Washington. On May 3, 1945, he was taken into custody by the American forces in Rapallo and was interned, from May 24 to November 16, at the US Army “Disciplinary Training Center ” north of Pisa, a prison and rehabilitation camp for US military offenders. From there he was flown to Washington where the court found him “of unsound mind” and so unable to stand trial for treason. On December 21 he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital, a federal psychiatric institution, where he would remain for twelve and a half years until, on April 18, 1958, the indictment against him was dismissed. Although the legal issue raised by the Rome Radio broadcasts was the charge of treason, in the over fifty years since Pound's indictment the antisemitism of the broadcasts has been the primary focus of the widespread outrage and outcry against him.

In Germany, the emergence of both civil society and political democracy followed the same trajectory of modernisation. Like democracy, civil society had a troubled start in a country where state policies continued to emulate authoritarian traditions and restrict rights of social participation. Democracy and civil society took a firmer shape after 1945 when anti-democratic forces had lost their commanding influence while unprecedented economic growth reduced inequalities.

This chapter traces the emergence of civil society with reference to non-German labour migrants and to women. Both groups were largely excluded from rights of social participation at the beginning of the twentieth century and constituted a focal point of the National Socialist agenda. In the post-war era, the East German model decreed women's equality through employment and excluded non-Germans from civil society. The West German model extended social citizenship to non-German minorities and women without overcoming all legacies of exclusion that had gone before.

Labour migration and non-German minorities in German civil society

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when German rulers tried to develop the economy of their region and boost tax yield, foreigners played a key role as financiers, engineers or specially hired technicians. Non-German minorities who sought refuge from religious persecution - the Huguenots or Jews for instance - also benefited from the interest in importing modern business practices. Including such minorities into German society invariably took the form of special privileges. Although permitted to pursue their trades, these minorities remained excluded from civil society and their special status could be withdrawn at will by the ruler.

In a modern-day society, the means by which its members communicate with each other are a constitutive element of its make-up. The central place of communication and mass communication applies to the world of work but has also become an integral part of leisure activities. In contemporary Germany, leisure and the media of mass communication have become inseparable facets of everyday culture: 'according to recent leisure research... reading books... occupies only the tenth place of the most frequent leisure activities, after watching television (80 per cent), reading newspapers or magazines (62 per cent), listening to the radio (59 per cent), talking on the telephone (44 per cent), having a cup of coffee or a glass of beer (42 per cent), socialising with friends (37 per cent), gardening (36 per cent), sleeping late (36 per cent) and listening to records or audio cassettes (33 per cent)' Thus, much of the leisure time of Germans is taken up by interacting with and through media. Media of mass communication such as newspapers, the telephone, television and radio rank highly in contemporary society and culture.

The stylistic debate, 1830-1900

In the first half of the nineteenth century German architects and theorists were engaged in a vigorous debate over which architectural style was most appropriate to the age and the location. Initially only two models were admitted, the Classical style of Greece and the Gothic style of Northern Europe. While the structural premises of these two styles - based, respectively, on the beam and the vault - were quite different, there was a strong belief in the possibility of fusing them in a new style that would combine the best attributes of both. Karl Friedrich Schinkel succeeded in doing exactly this in his design for the Bauakademie in Berlin (1831-6) in which the structural principles of the Gothic vault were combined with the formal and decorative elements of Neo-Classicism. An alternative to Schinkel's brilliant reconciliation of the Greek and the Gothic was the invention of a third, alternative style, and this was achieved with Friedrich von Gärtner's Staatsbibliothek in Munich (1831-42), in the Neo-Romanesque 'Rundbogenstil'. Between 1830 and 1840 the respective virtues of the three styles now on offer were the subject of lively discussion, as was the most likely means of resolving the conflict. The most promising development came from the realm of materials, with the emergence of iron as a building material.

The novel in the belated nation

There is a widespread view of German culture generally which says that it is, in all kinds of ways, thoughtful, sophisticated and profound; but that it is curiously bereft of any sustained relationship to the familiar, empirically knowable facts of daily living. Instead of concerning themselves at all vigorously with outward things, the Germans, so the argument runs, attend to such pursuits as music (that supremely nonreferential art), speculative philosophy, and theology (particularly when it assumes the guise of radical inwardness). This problematic condition of inwardness reveals its shortcomings nowhere more clearly than in the bulk of narrative prose works that issued from the German-speaking lands in the great age of European realism (that is, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards): whatever distinction may inhere in that body of prose writing, it cannot be claimed to be the distinction of common-orgarden realism.

However overstated such a view of German culture may be, there are elements of truth to it. Certainly its prose literature from Goethe on does pose an acute evaluative problem. The dilemma is felt by both non-German and German critics alike. Wolfgang Preisendanz speaks for many commentators when he writes:

The 'German Question', however one phrases it, always involves, at least by implication, German Jewry. In its classical formulation - on national development and territorial unity - the query raises issues of citizenship, political participation and social change with immediate bearing on the Jewish communities in Germany. More recently, the German Question asks how the country could have embarked on the terrible course that led to the Third Reich, the Second World War and the Holocaust, which very nearly realised its goal of eliminating the Jewish presence in German society. In short, the story of German-Jewish relations reflects at once the hope and the horror of German history.

Jews and Germans have lived together for nearly 2000 years, and different but related tensions characterise this association - variously described as a symbiosis, a dialogue, a long quarrel and an alliance based on deception - before and after Auschwitz. The Holocaust marks a singular historical moment that has everything to do with German-Jewish relations today. But one damages the past by conflating all of German-Jewish experience with the Holocaust, or by reading events of the last centuries as simply a prelude to National Socialist atrocities. For an adequate understanding of the meaning and direction of the German-Jewish history, one must consider the longer record of Jews in Germany.