Chaos and the Clean Line
Writings on Franco-British Modernism

Stephen Romer

Transcript 28

Legenda

  19 February 2024  •  384pp

ISBN: 978-1-839541-51-3 (hardback)  •  RRP £95, $120, €120

ISBN: 978-1-839541-52-0 (paperback, forthcoming)

ISBN: 978-1-839541-53-7 (JSTOR ebook)

FrenchEnglishPoetryLettersTranslation


Stephen Romer’s essays range from the key figures of French and English Modernism to the contemporary practice of poetry, and its translation. At the heart of Chaos and the Clean Line is an enquiry into the talismanic power that a source of order can possess for the poet who lives in a disordered world. It is what drives Mallarmé’s ‘fury against the formless’. Sometimes it may be found in a longed-for sense of psychological detachment, as when Laforgue invents the figure of Pierrot. Or it may be the craft and genius of a former age, safely removed from the alienating cities of today, such as Eliot finds in Dante, or in Gautier’s chiseled verse. For Pierre Reverdy, the clean line of order may come from a Cubist painting; for Ezra Pound, it may be an epiphany of angled sunlight fallen on stone in Provence; for Apollinaire, the shockingly original analogies he draws between physical eroticism and trench warfare.

Stephen Romer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tours, and Lecturer in French at Brasenose College, Oxford.

Reviews:

  • ‘The heroes of Modernism may be exemplary in their achievements rather than their political choices but I would happily lose the entire works of the relatively blameless Tennyson to conserve the much briefer poetic corpus of the ‘unpleasant’ Mr Eliot. Bunting’s declaration rings in our ears: ‘There are the Alps, fools!’ And Romer is their spry mountaineer, offering considerable pleasure in his own right.’ — Chris Miller, The Fortnightly Review August 2024

Bibliography entry:

Romer, Stephen, Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism, Transcript, 28 (Legenda, 2024)

First footnote reference: 35 Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism, stephen Romer, Transcript, 28 (Legenda, 2024), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Romer, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

Romer, Stephen. 2024. Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism, Transcript, 28 (Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Romer 2024: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Romer 2024: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)


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