TY - JOUR
AU - Pryor, Sean
AB - This article considers F. T. Prince's first book of poetry, Poems, in relation to issues of decision-making in late 1930s British culture, and, in particular, to the Munich Crisis of September 1938, during which the volume was published. The article demonstrates that Poems bears a more significant relation to its historical moment than was recognized at the time or has been since. It does this by placing the book in the context of a contemporary crisis of decision, a crisis that is traced in the writings of major 1930s poets such as Auden and MacNeice, of historians and philosophers such as Spengler and Huxley, and of mainstream and literary journalists. In this way, Poems can be read as an unusually sophisticated product of the decade's escalating anxiety over the language and practice of decision. Appearing at the very moment that anxiety reached its climax, Prince's poems can also be read as an uncanny form of prophecy, able to critique the predominant rhetoric of decision by speaking obliquely. Through close analyses of Prince's syntax, in particular, the article then argues that the structure of language in Poems is especially sensitive to the difficulties of decision, and that the volume offers a valuable complement to the familiar poetic history of the time. Finally, the article concludes by pressing the methodological implications of such a reading and by asking to what extent the mere accident of publication may affect the meanings of an historical moment and its literary works.
TI - Poetry and Decision: F. T. Prince in September 1938
JF - The Review of English Studies
DO - 10.1093/res/hgs001
DA - 2012-11-04
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/poetry-and-decision-f-t-prince-in-september-1938-Id2Ng5U4gQ
SP - 818
EP - 840
VL - 63
IS - 262
DP - DeepDyve
ER -