Early Modernist British Poetry and the Avant-garde: From Theory to Practice

This book examines early British modernist poetry in dialogue with international avant-garde movements, exploring its responses to the cultural and political upheavals of the early twentieth century. By focusing on overlooked and marginalised works, it broadens the modernist canon and highlights the formal and thematic diversity of British verse. Central to the study is the relationship between British modernism and avant-garde movements such as French Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. It traces how poets absorbed and reinterpreted transnational aesthetic strategies while navigating tensions between tradition and innovation. Combining historical contextualisation with close textual analysis, the book reads selected poems as both aesthetic forms and cultural interventions. Through readings of poems’ engagement with avant-garde practices, it offers a nuanced and expansive understanding of British modernist poetics within interdisciplinary global frameworks.