Flint on a bright stone
Subtitle: a revolution of precision and restraint in American, Russian, and German modernism
By: Kirsten Blythe Painter.
Series: Verbal art
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 306
Subjects: Poetry -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Modernism (Literature); Symbolism (Literary movement); Poetry -- Russian; Poetry -- American
First sentence: This book is about the precise, the subtle, and the subdued. It tells the story of poems that find beauty in the ordinary and the quiet. It proposes a new way of understanding these poems by shedding light on the neglected international context from which they sprang. The small poems that comprise this small piece of literary history are no less significant for being simple and austere.
Description: Flint on a Bright Stone closes a significant gap in the history of Modernist poetry by identifying the existence of “Tempered Modernism,” which blossomed in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and was exemplified by the early works of Akhmatova, Rilke, H. D., and Williams. While the international nature of Radical Modernism, such as Futurism, Expressionism, and Dadaism, has been well documented, the connections among Tempered Modernists have been ignored. This is the first book to delineate thoroughly the international nature of this phenomenon—an evolutionary alternative to the revolutionary Futurist techniques of shock and rupture. Tempered Modernists sought newness through precision, palpability, equilibrium, and restraint, crafting small poems that found beauty in the subdued, ordinary, and everyday.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.