Modernist Figures

Peter Nicholls is probably best known as one of the best readers of Ezra Pound’s Cantos—especially the difficult late Cantos. But as this retrospective collection shows, Nicholls’ interests are much broader than Modernism. Pound is a center of gravity around which orbit many other poets and writers: Swinburne, Mina Loy, George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, post-modern poets like Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe. On the prose side, Nicholls reads Stein and Hemingway, and, unexpectedly, Toni Morrison. Nicholls is a meticulous and exciting scholar and himself an important modernist and post-modernist figure as one of our best readers. To have these rich and influential essays under one cover and in one place is a treat for scholarship and remarkable testimony to a lifetime of bravura reading and insightful, brilliant writing.

—Alec Marsh, Muhlenberg College, Pennsylvania

Modernist Figures: Essays on Poetry and Poetics is a welcome, fascinating, and valuable culmination of Nicholls’s longstanding critical erudition. Organized chronologically, these two volumes cover innovative and pertinent literary ground from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Readers are treated to a range of reference that moves fluidly from the literary canon to major complex thinkers—Heidegger, Derrida, Badiou—and on to modernists some of whom, like Mina Loy, are still up-and-coming figures. Nicholls was early in spotting Loy’s value, and his prescient essays on her work raise canny questions about her oeuvre, association, influence, and aesthetics. Nicholls has an always-astonishing, enviable capacity to write lean yet lyrical criticism that retains a firm hand on clear, broad-brush strokes whilst detailing finer, cogent points of poetic syntax and diction. The breadth of his reading dazzles in its unassuming, timely asides that reach for unexpected reference whilst fittingly subtending the argument to hand. As added readerly pleasure, Nicholls’s wry humor shrewdly grounds modernist excess and contradiction. Few critics have as clear-eyed a view of the distinctiveness of modernist movements and their associated intellectual trajectories, and for this reason alone I turn my students to Nicholls’s seminal Modernisms year on year. Modernist Figures offers a fantastic, agile diagnostics of modernist and late modernist culture that will, no doubt, similarly endure.
—Sara Crangle, University of Sussex, UK

The joy of reading these essays is not only to see modernist figures with a new clarity and intensity, but to get to spend time with one of the great modernist critics of our generation, whose erudition, attentiveness, and deep knowledge lights up every page.
—Prof. Rebecca Beasley, University of Oxford

Without constructing a system or a genealogy, Modernist Figures expands our current view of modernism by redefining its ambitions and aligning them on contemporary reading practices. Here, one catches a fierce intelligence combining libraries in several languages, moving between comparative literature, literary theory, and cultural history, to produce new connections and original close readings. This expansive survey shows us a modernism that is still alive as it bridges the gap between predecessors like Giacomo Leopardi, Herman Melville, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Emily Dickison, and those who haunt our horizons like Paul Celan, Maurice Blanchot, Susan Howe and Kenneth Goldsmith.

— Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Peter Nicholls is an amazing critic who has exceeded his very high standards in this two-volume collection. His prose is elegantly spare and his critical claims have a scope and depth that I think even exceeds the scope and depth of Hugh Kenner, the only Modernist critic I know good enough to compare to Nicholls. Nicholls can close read with the best of us. But the best of us cannot match the scope and depth of his situating those readings. The first chapter makes a surprising case for Melville as in effect the first modernist for turning to the essay rather than the tract in fiction so that he could have room for a continual skeptical turning over ideas to explore them rather than identify with or against them. Then the second essay on Swinburne, of all topics, may be the best essay I have read from a critic. The essay makes a completely convincing description of two versions of the modern--one historically bound to express its society by turning to distrust of any positive language anchored in ideals, and the second alternative which we know as the Modernism inspired by Pound and Eliot that returns to semantic precision in the service of a greater psychologicual complexity interpreting such skepticism and often justifying it.

— Charles Altieri, University of California at Berkeley

How does poetry engage with philosophy? Peter Nicholls’s stunning essays unfold a panorama of writers, many of them poets, who are thinkers, and whose thinking has changed literature for ever. At their center is a sustained and nuanced engagement with Ezra Pound, especially The Cantos, balancing respect with critical insight through scalpel-sharp analysis. Nicholls’s studies of the enduring and transformative legacy of modernist poetics give lasting lessons in lucidity and intelligence to a world that still has a lot to learn from the experience of such as Toni Morrison, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, George Oppen, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, or Ernest Hemingway.
—Prof. Hélène Aji, École Normale Supérieure, Paris

What is compelling about these essays when read through is the deftness and eloquence with which Nicholls explores such a comprehensive range of poetries, ideas and literatures. These volumes of Nicholls’ writings amount to the most thoroughgoing and impressive enquiry into the cultural origins and expanses of the modern and the modernist that I have encountered. Spanning America, Britain, and the languages, literatures and philosophies of Europe, these essays all create arresting insights that challenge us to see writers both familiar and unfamiliar anew.

— Prof. Steven Matthews, University of Reading