Robert Duncan’s “Introduction” was the final piece that he composed for his 1968 collection of poetry Bending the Bow. The effort preoccupied him throughout much of 1967, a year in which Duncan, alongside many other creative practitioners, recognized that his art was undergoing a formal crisis that stemmed from an increasing awareness of US atrocities in Vietnam. Duncan’s effort to reckon with this crisis of practice yielded a startling manifesto that, despite being positioned as the “Introduction” to the collection he had already composed, in fact theorizes an aesthetic orientation that appears only occasionally and nascently in the collection itself. The piece, written in a dense, vertiginous, and original prose, comes in five short sections. In this article, I focus in particular on the first section, titled THE WAR, which Duncan recited at readings as a prose-poetic work that seeks to exemplify on the spot the practice it theorizes (Quartermain, “Notes,” 797–798). For Duncan, it is the term “collage” that enables him to think of problems of artistic form as problems existing “on the same level” as larger social forms amidst historical crisis and to renovate a dynamic relation wherein the old power of high, idealizing forms of Poetry might be made to cathect pressing political contexts with new force. To those familiar with Duncan, a “sister arts” study that raises the importance of collage will not seem surprising, given Duncan’s close personal relationships with collage and assemblage artists such as Jess (his husband), Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, and George Herms. Yet, my claims in this article might run counter to expectations raised by this context. Often, such collage practice has been understood as a means of undercutting the authority of its component materials, which are made to no longer speak in the might and right of their traditional site of origin, so that they might constitute a new significance in ironic relation to the other components with which they are collaged. Collage juxtapositions may perform the work of a subcultural, synthetic self-styling, and/or they may work to elicit a cultural criticism, but, in either case, a disillusioning image of what has been received as culturally authentic seems characteristic. The collagist, for example, may like a religious image that they choose to bring into their composition—but in a way that secularizes that image by treating it as “material.” The culturally constructed problematic of such a figure, rather than the expressive raising up of its underpinning religious impulse, seems more what is at stake. Critics thus tend to recruit such practices to a paradigm of the “post-,” such as postmodernism. But Duncan, due to his extreme identification with a vaunted sense of Poetry as his vocation, does not land in this postmodernist version of collage. Duncan’s collage logic proves surprising because it does not deflate the high thing that is brought in but rather sustains its “high-expressive” character.

© 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press Briony Tallis, the irksome thirteen-year-old writer in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001), ruins the lives of her sister, Cecilia, and, to an even greater degree, Robbie Turner, by telling a lie. Because of Briony’s untruthfulness, Robbie goes to prison, then to France at the start of the Second World War, where he dies of septicaemia on the beach at Dunkirk. During her decades-long writing career, Briony creates several stories about what happened between...

The Military Service Acts of 1916–18, passed under the more general Defense of the Realm Act (1914), implemented conscription throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. Opposition to conscription led to the imprisonment and abuse of thousands of conscientious objectors, who were in an ambiguous legal position, subject to punishment from both military and civil law, but protected by neither. While the combat poetry of writers such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen first brought the...

How should modernists think about the current invasion of Ukraine, and the underlying crisis of liberal order, if at all, and what does that have to do with the crisis in historical thinking and legitimation in literary studies more generally? My initial claim in the following is that what we already teach and write, in this centenary of the modernist Wunderjahr 1922, has everything to do with the sudden re-entry of geopolitics into view in 2022. The modernist masterpieces of 1919–1922 were formed and contested one hundred years ago in the matrix of a crisis of liberal order, a crisis that has now returned with only slightly different names, faces, and justifications. That we cannot quite recall this is not only a gap in our understanding of modernist geopolitics, but also a more fundamental failure of historicist reason and legitimation. If we are in fact living through the repetition of certain cyclical patterns of history, ideology, and liberal-imperial order that modernists themselves diagnosed, do we still have the commitment to historicist understanding required to read those problems accurately?

A first centenary, like 2018’s of the Armistice, is a kind of hinge in time. It marks the point at which a commemorative scale of years and decades begins to swing outward toward a longer scale of centuries and even millennia. Such a moment is like the edge of a continental shelf where, with our feet still in the shallows of calendrical time, we peer over that rim into the undersea canyon of deep time. This is to begin thinking about the deep future of the First World War—to imagine the...

It will surprise no one to see wartime treated as an especially narrative problem. Indeed, given the long and apparently necessary relation between war and narrative, a relation that goes back at least to the Iliad and the in medias rage of Achilles, it is probably harder to think of them apart, harder to resist the urge to see both old and new wars in the ready and comfortable terms of already available narrative models: war as an epic or a revenge plot or a rescue mission or a buddy film or an echo of a previous war.

Birds and certain varieties of birds have long been potent symbols related to war and conflict. But as airplane technologies developed in rapid tandem with the coming and arrival of the Second World War, the connection between avian and aviation reached new heights in the cultural imagination. The symbolism of doves, for instance, takes on unsettling connotations in T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” (1942), where a descending dove breaks through the air with flames of incandescent terror, controversially representing the Holy Spirit in the form of a German dive-bomber. The painter Paul Nash, much of whose oeuvre relates to his fascination with flying or downed aircraft, compared different “species” of planes to birds, calling the Whitley bomber “a queer bird-like creature . . . A dove of death.” Swallows, meanwhile, feature in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941), their historical flight trajectory connecting continents as well as epochs. The subsequent intrusion by modern aircraft, by “[t]welve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck,” in turn anticipates Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) (fig. 1), a film whose famous jump-cuts splice the image of a soaring falcon in medieval England with that of a Spitfire during the Second World War present. With birds like planes and planes like ducks, much cultural production surrounding the Second World War chimes the military with the ornithological. Their visual resemblance, of course, was much remarked upon beyond the realm of art, causing no shortage of anxiety even during the interwar years (fig. 2). Notorious cases in which one was confused for the other are recounted in aerial warfare “prophet” Giulio Douhet’s influential book The Command of the Air (1921), including a panicked moment at Brescia when mourners at the funeral services for victims of an earlier bombing mistook a bird for an enemy plane. Later, the first British fighter pilot casualty of the Second World War occurred when a flock of geese was misidentified by ground observers as a formation of high-altitude enemy aircraft; two squadrons of fighters were scrambled as a result and attacked each other in a case of friendly fire.

Interviewed by the BBC a half-century after his service in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Robert Graves recalled the impossibility of relating his World War I experience to family in England: Graves: [T]he idea of being and staying at home was awful because you were with people who didn’t understand what this was all about.

In her article on Japan’s interwar visual culture, Gennifer Weisenfeld has documented and critically discussed a wealth of interwar images, many of them photographic, that involve gas masks. [1] Among them stands out Masao Horino’s 1936 Gas Mask Parade, a photograph showing a formation of girls marching in school uniforms, with gas masks on their faces. While her material offers a fascinating angle on a local visual culture, Weisenfeld reminds us in a footnote that gas-mask imagery was actually...