Poems ; & Adolphe 1920

Is Modernism a few ground-breaking works by a handful of writers - Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Wyndham Lewis? Other writers loomed large at the time; their work points in untaken directions. This text contains the poems and fiction of John Rodker, whose work was set in the balance with Eliot's and Joyce's by Pound and Lewis. Rodker's East End background - the world of Rosenberg, Mark Gertler and David Bomberg - and his fascination with radical theatre at the time, define an opening, questing imagination. Rodker's interest in psychoanalysis, in the sensual self, and his romantic temperament, propose a Modernism that has much in common with Joyce. No masks, no self-erasure, no ironic distancing, this writing challenges the Modernist canon.