Abstract

Apocalypse and After examines the development of Modernism into Postmodernism through the works of three major American poets. Modernism's struggle to develop a new global strategy was to a great extent a response to the catastrophe of World War I, while the Postmodern resort to fragmentary tactics stems from Modernist strategy's implications in World War II and the atomic bomb. The final chapter adumbrates the emergence of a paramodernism characteristic of our own time. The book is innovative in its many readings of specific poems and in its larger assessments of the poets' careers, while the method of analysis it develops is particularly noteworthy for its ability to relate nuances of formal innovation to the writers' diverse political contexts and programs.