It was right to call this excellent study A Genealogy of Modernism, since one could trace the ancestry of modernist doctrines almost indefinitely into the past. It was wrong to refer to “modernism” and not “a modernism,” since the book ignores the many modernist or avant-garde movements all over the Western literary scene from South America to Russia. Actually the subtitle “A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1902-1922,” describes the book’s contents accurately, though not exhaustively. Only a few authors are discussed in any detail: T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Eliot, all within the strict time limits of 1908-22.

The term “modernism” was never used by this group to designate itself. It was imposed much later by hindsight. Robert Graves (in the Times Literary Supplement, October 1, 1954) could write “Pound-Eliot modernism of the twenties is already as dated as a stream-lined pogo-stick with decorative motifs from Tutankhamen’s tomb.” And in 1960 Harry Levin published a lecture entitled “What was Modernism?” (reprinted in Refractions, 1968). Even the variant “modernist” was not used by these writers at that time. There was a short-lived magazine called The Modernist: A Monthly Magazine of Modern Arts and Letters in 1919, which reprinted articles by G. B. Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, Hart Crane, and Georges Duhamel in the first issue, but it mainly propagated the Russian Revolution. In 1927 Robert Graves and Laura Riding published A Survey of Modernist Poetry, which