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Singing the Chaos: Madness and Wisdom in Modern Poetry combines both a historical and a critical approach toward the works of major British, American, French, German, and Russian poets. Comprehensive in scope and arranged chronologically to survey a century of high poetic achievement, the study is unified by Pratt's overriding argument that "modern poets have endowed a disintegrating civilization with humane wisdom by 'singing the chaos' that surrounds them, making ours a great age in spite of itself." In developing this central theme, Pratt brings alive the energy, the freshness, and the originality of technique that made Baudelaire, Pound, Yeats, Rilke, Eliot, and others the initiators of the revolution in poetry. He brings a more complete, clearer perspective to other major themes: modernism as an age of irony; poets as both madmen and geniuses; the modern poet as tragic hero; the dominance of religious or visionary truths over social or political issues; and the combination of radical experiments in poetic form with an apocalyptic view of Western civilization. His detailed treatment of the Fugitive poets and his recognition of their prominent role in twentieth-century literature constitute an important historical revision.
The age of irony and the beginning of modernism -- French symbolism and the origin of modern poetry -- Hopkins's "Inscape" and Rilke's "Weltinnenraum" -- Two pre-imagists: Emily Dickenson and Stephen Crane -- An Irish symbolist: William Butler Yeats -- Three English ironists: Hardy, Housman, and Owen -- Three American ironists: Robinson, Frost, and Jeffers -- The original imagist: D.H. Lawrence -- Further imagists: H.D., Williams, Moore, Cummings, and MacLeish -- Two American symbolists: Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane -- A transatlantic ironist: T.S. Eliot -- The fugitives: Southern poets and the theme of alienation -- John Crowe Ransom, elusive ironist -- Donald Davidson's Tennessee and Allen Tate's Kentucky -- Robert Penn Warren: portraits of the artist as a young and an old man -- Laura Riding: fugitive, witch, or goddess? -- W.H. Auden's secondary worlds
A Welsh symbolist: Dylan Thomas -- Prophetic and demonic voices in Robert Lowell's poetry -- The poet as tragic hero: Pasternak's "Dr. Zhivago" and the end of modernism.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 323-328) and index.