The Graphics of Verse: Modernist Poetry and the Ephemerality of Print

12 February 2025, 4.00 PM - 12 February 2025, 5.30 PM

Daniel Matore (York)

LT2, Arts Complex

Department of English Research Seminar Series

12 February, 4-5.30pm

Daniel Matore (York)

The Graphics of Verse: Modernist Poetry and the Ephemerality of Print

LT2, Arts Complex

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Abstract


The most ephemeral aspect of literary style seems to be typography. Typography has often not been considered a proper part of poetry because of this precariousness. The visual layout of a poem is prey to the oversight of a typesetter, the stubbornness of a publisher, or the carelessness of an editor. Spacing and indentation, whose audacity or eccentricity might wholly reshape a given poem, can appear in one edition and then vanish in another, like some inky phantasm. Ezra Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ is dilated and warped by unorthdox lacunae in its appearance in the journal Poetry in 1913, but these spaces disappear in subsequent book editions. Charles Olson despaired that the precisely-plotted graphics of his modernist verse epic The Maximus Poems couldn’t be preserved in its early editions, a work that often impresses dates on its individual lyrics, as if to sign and fix the character of the day they were composed. Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem (1920) typifies the ephemerality of modernism not only in its span of a single day and preoccupation with the city’s ghosts, but also through the shimmers and ripples of its typography. This paper will argue that even though the experimental typography which features in so much modernist poetry seems to be its most ephemeral quality, poets struggled and schemed to make the shape of their words durable and lasting. Through examinations of unpublished drafts and proofs, it will show how modernist poets solidified the transient stuff of print.

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Biography


Daniel Matore is Lecturer in Modern, American and Comparative Literature at the University of York. He read for a BA and MPhil at the University of Cambridge, and a DPhil at the University of Oxford. Has has previously been Joan Nordell Fellow at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. His first book The Graphics of Verse: Experimental Typography in Twentieth-Century Poetry (2023) is out now with OUP.

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