Signifying Substance: A Cultural Analysis of Early Modernist Language Practice

There is a striking paradox in early modernist theory and practice concerning the nature of poetic discourse. Whereas some of its major representatives argued for "natural speech " and "prose effects" in poetry, above all in reaction to what was seen as the debased and hollow post-Romantic poetic diction of their most immediate predecessors, these arguments did not signal the openness towards everyday usage that could be read into them. Rather than adopting patterns of common discourse, poets evince a harshly critical stance to it, and especially to the language of the popular mass media. In a narrative of degeneration that was typical for its time, T. E. Hulme, the eminence grise of the pre-World War I London intelligentsia, claimed that "One might say that images are born in poetry. They are used in prose, and finally die a long, lingering death in journalists ' English. Now this process is very rapid, so that the poet must continually be creating new images, and his sincerity may be measured by the number of his images"(Hulme 1955: 75). The critical attitude to mass culture that is to be noted in remarks like these is expressive of the "contamination anxiety " that Andreas Huyssen has identified as intrinsic to the polarization of high and popular culture in the early twentieth century. Yet, in spite of the implicit "contamination anxiety " and elitism evinced by the early modernists, poets of the period were unable to escape, whether they wanted to or not, modern mass culture in its various material manifestations. "The expressive forms of mass culture", Thomas Strychacz observes, "leave their traces in all modernist texts, if only in the work their authors must perform to exclude them"(Strychac