Modernism in the Second World War: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Basil Bunting and Hugh MacDiarmid

After a consideration of the best lyric poetry of the Second World War the writer examines those poems which responded more fully to the challenge of the war. These are the long poems of Eliot, Pound, Bunting and MacDiarmid. Through a close reading of the poems the writer demonstrates that what these radically different poets have in common in their war poems is their use of modernist techniques to transcend the particulars of the war and to assert the resilience of the human spirit and civilisation when confronted with such an unprecedented threat.