Flint on a Bright Stone: A Revolution of Precision and Restraint in American, Russian, and German Modernism. By Kirsten Blythe Painter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 2006. xxii + 306 pp. $60. ISBN 978-0-8047-5075-2.
The focus of this book is a comparative study of Anglo-American Imagism, Russian Acmeism, and the poetry of Rilke's middle period. These are seen as representing what Kirsten Blythe Painter calls 'tempered modernism', an international poetic tendency which emphasized 'restraint, concision and "hardness"' (p. 3) in contrast both to the mystical obscurity of symbolism and to the iconoclastic energy of the radical avant-garde. Parallels between Imagism and Acmeism have been made before, but this is the first attempt to set them firmly in an international context and to document them in detail. Taking a rigorously literary-historical approach, Painter is concerned with the work actually produced during the period of 'tempered modernism' (roughly 1906-17) and not with the development outside this time-frame of individual writers. Moreover, she emphasizes poetic practice over theory, and accordingly gives rather more attention to the poetry of the American H. D. and the Russian Anna Akhmatova than to the manifesto-writers Ezra Pound and Nikolai Gumilev.
Painter covers a great deal of ground, moving easily between primary and secondary sources in English, French, German, and Russian. To set the scene she provides a useful concise overview of international symbolism from Baudelaire onwards, focusing on the three characteristics which she sees as at the centre of the post-symbolist revolt: namely 'imprecision, mysticism and subjectivity' (p. 20). She then gives her attention to the emergence of tempered modernism as a phenomenon, seeing its origins partly in such long-forgotten movements in French literature as Romanism and Naturism, and partly in the tendency of late symbolists such as Albert Samain and Henri de Regnier to diminish the role of the poetic self and prefer the concrete to the abstract. Why tempered modernism should have apparently produced so little lasting impact in French literature, however, is, strangely, a question that is not addressed, any more than why Acmeism and Imagism should have emerged more or less simultaneously but without any tangible contact between the two movements.
Painter's analysis of the phenomenon of tempered modernism itself begins with an examination of the cultural antecedents its practitioners chose as models: a particular view of the classical past which saw antiquity as an extension of the present rather than as an abstract ideal; an affinity for architectural imagery; an attraction to the perceived concision and incisiveness of Chinese and particularly Japanese poetic forms. Chapters follow on each of the salient stylistic and ontological areas where tempered modernist practice differs from symbolist: the emphasis on clarity and precision, on simple diction rather than hieratic obscurity; the focus on this world rather than mystical other worlds; the reduction in prominence of the poetic self. Painter then studies these attributes in combination through a detailed treatment of the tempered modernist love lyric. Throughout, she situates the tempered modernists firmly within the context of writing by their symbolist and radical modernist predecessors and contemporaries, showing that both forms of modernism represent both a continuation and a rejection of the symbolist past, while remaining in many ways diametrically opposed to each other. Her broad arguments are supported by numerous close readings: those of H. D. and Akhmatova are particularly valuable.
Painter's argument about tempered modernism as a phenomenon substantially defining the period between the end of symbolism and the First World War clearly holds good for literature in Russian and English, though the cases for German, represented solely by Rilke, and for French, barely discussed, are less clear. Nevertheless, this book, elegantly constructed in the manner of the tempered modernism which it admires, makes an important contribution to the discipline of comparative literature and provides numerous insights into the work of individual poets.
Curtin University of Technology David N. Wells