Revisiting Henry James: High Modernists and Objectivists

Abstract

This article addresses the manner in which two generations of American modernists read and responded to Henry James. It identifies readings by the first-generation modernist poets Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams and the second-generation modernist poets Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen as significant and then goes on to suggest that the approach towards James of the second-generation modernists also implies a complex and revealing relation to their modernist forebears