Late Modernism and 'The English Intelligencer': On the Poetics of Community

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Despite the brevity of its run and the diminutive size of its audience, The English Intelligencer is a key publication in the history of literary modernism in the British Isles. Emerging in the mid-1960s from a dissatisfaction with the prevailing norms of Betjemans England, the young writers associated with it were catalysed by the example of Donald Allens The New American Poetry as they sought to establish a revitalised modernist poetics. Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer gives the first full account of the extraordinary history of this publication, bringing to light extensive new archival material to establish an authoritative contextualisation of its operation and its relationship with post-war British poetry. This material provides compelling new insights into the work of the Intelligencer poets themselves and, more broadly, the continued presence of an international poetic modernism as a vital force in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century.

Reviews

[An] impressive and valuable first scholarly book ... [An] elegant study. * Literary Review *
Alex Latters study is exemplary in its management of a problematic material archive, in the precision of its historical narrative, and in the intelligence of its organization and analysis. * Critical Inquiry *
[A] valuable and necessary study ... [and] an important archival achievement ... [Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer] is also a vital bridge that connects the first generation of High Modernists (principally Ezra Pound) with the transatlantic exchange between British and American poets in the 1960s. * Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry *
The subject of Alex Latter's impressive and valuable first scholarly book, Late Modernism and the English Intelligencer: On the Poetics of Community, is one of the founding documents of the post-war poetic avant-garde, The English Intelligencer, a publication that ran from early 1966 to mid-1968 ... Latter's excellent treatment of the 'breakdown' of late modernism, richly supported by original archival scholarship, shows how quickly the moment of the late 1960s cultural optimism was dissipated. * The Year's Work in English Studies *

Author Bio

Alex Latter completed his PhD at the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.