A Riding, Laura 1901-1991 creator Graves, Robert 1895-1985 text utu 2025 monographic en 1 online resource : multiple file formats "A survey of modernist poetry" by Laura Riding and Robert Graves is a work of literary criticism written in the early 20th century. It explores why modernist poems look and read the way they do, how they challenge the “plain reader,” and what new techniques—of form, diction, punctuation, and layout—aim to achieve. The authors argue that experiment serves clarity of experience, not obscurity for its own sake, and that readers must meet the poems with more active, precise attention. The opening of the book sets up the debate between modernist innovation and the plain reader’s expectations, using E. E. Cummings as a test case. It closely reads his short “Sunset” piece to show how spacing, sound-patterns, and omission create a concentrated experience, then reconstructs a conventional version to prove how banality and cliché return when the innovations are removed. From there it weighs French Symbolist influences (Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Valéry), Japanese suggestiveness, and the problem of form versus subject-matter, arguing for organic design over fixed molds; it illustrates flexible structure with Hart Crane and biblical parallelism, and contrasts Eliot’s The Waste Land, whose transitions bind a unified whole, with Tennyson’s In Memoriam, whose uniform stanza masks digression. A chapter on punctuation shows how Cummings’ typography encodes meaning and guards against misreading, then compares that editorial vulnerability to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, demonstrating how modernized punctuation and spelling can flatten Shakespeare’s dense, interwoven sense. Finally, the start of the next chapter frames modernism’s “unpopularity,” and analyzes another Cummings piece (a jolting train scene) to show how unorthodox layout precisely transmits movement and perception. (This is an automatically generated summary.) Release date is 2025-06-27 Hannah Wilson, Laura Natal and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Originally published: London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1927 Modernism (Literature) Poetry, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism Free verse PN London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1927 28014310 https://archive.org/details/surveyofmodernis0000ridi https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76401 https://archive.org/details/surveyofmodernis0000ridi https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76401 UtSlPG 260607 20260610134752.0 76401