Mass Illuminations: Jennings, Madge, Rimbaud and the 'Popular' Prose Poem

Noel-Tod, Jeremy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0772-1770 (2015) Mass Illuminations: Jennings, Madge, Rimbaud and the 'Popular' Prose Poem. Critical Quarterly, 57 (3). pp. 51-65. ISSN 0011-1562

Preview

PDF (JNT MASS ILLUMINATIONS FOR OPEN ACCESS) - Accepted Version Download (553kB) | Preview

Abstract

The importance of the Mass-Observation social research project to post-war British literature can be traced to the founding involvement of two poets, Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge. Their experimentation with the possibility of a prose-based poetry in the mid-Thirties has already been linked to the example of Surrealism. Here, it is argued that they were also strongly influenced by Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer (1873) and Illuminations (1872-74). Madge’s prose poem ‘Bourgeois News’ uses textual collage to create a Rimbaldian vision of the ‘parade sauvage’ of late imperial Britain, which strikingly anticipates the work of more recent British prose poets such as Rod Mengham and Tony Lopez. In conclusion, archival evidence is used to support the hypothesis that Madge composed an anoymous news article, influenced by his reading of Rimbaud, as an illustration of his belief that newspapers contained the potential for a revolutionary new form of ‘popular poetry’.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	prose poetry,mass observation,arthur rimbaud,humphrey jennings, charles madge, t.s. eliot,modernism
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Modern and Contemporary Writing Research Group
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	22 Oct 2015 09:02
Last Modified:	21 Oct 2022 01:08
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/54744
DOI:	10.1111/criq.12209

Downloads

Actions (login required)

View Item