When Unitarianism and Transcendentalism were no longer understood as brash rejections of institutional orthodoxy, but as the exact opposite…a young and rebellious T. S. Eliot would cast a pox on both their houses with four poems written in the spring of 1915.

Jayme Stayer on Liberal Protestantism in T. S. Eliot’s early poems

Is not reversion to the faith of one’s childhood just as religiously and sociologically significant as a conversion?

Jayme Stayer on modernist conversions and reversions

“I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.”

Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib on the modern subject’s self-theft

On his journey home, Merrill adapts to the conventions of the upper-class in hopes of carving his own place within it.

Ayman Hareez Muhammad Adib on an eight-mile journey through backyard swimming pools

On Virginia Woolf’s thirty-third birthday, she and Leonard Woolf made three significant decisions over tea: they would purchase a house in Richmond, acquire a bulldog named John, and buy a printing press.

Reanna Brooks on The Hogarth Press

Like many of her contemporaries, Marianne Moore became fascinated by all things Chinese as a young adult and sought to incorporate Chinese imagery, ideals, and philosophy into her own work.

Xiamara Hohman on Mei Lanfang’s effect on Marianne Moore

[Frost’s] theories of “sentence sounds” and “sound-posture” insisted that tone and spoken vocal inflection­–how words sound when we say them–should be the material of poetry, a poetic paradigm which was perfectly suited to performance.

Isabelle Stuart on the history of modern poetry recordings

There have been drastic changes in how poetry sounds to readers over the last hundred and fifty years, troubling the illusion that reading silently can offer us access to the poem as it sounded to the writer.

Isabelle Stuart on the history of modern poetry recordings

At the heart of the modernist controversies was the question of how human subjects are able to experience the transcendent God.

Elizabeth Huddleston on the perplexity of modernism

What ‘The Steerage’ pictures are the complexities that the myth of American immigration ignores. The truth is, it has never been a one-way trip to the promised land.

Arthur Aghajanian reflects on an Alfred Stieglitz photograph

The Faulknerian gaze, turning as much to Greece and Jerusalem as to the big woods of the Mississippi Delta, calls in the grandest distillation of the modern tongue for the restoration of our memory.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on reading Faulkner's “The Bear”

For T.S. Eliot, Modernist literature was novel in form, not concept.

Nayeli Riano considers the possibility of a modern society with a living tradition.