Ministry of higher and secondary special education denau institute of entrepreneurship and pedagogy

CONCLUSION
‘Now you understand what we feel when we are studying The Waste Land.’ The speaker is a student at a day school seminar on modern poetry where I have been teaching a sequence of poems by the contemporary poet Wendy Mulford, and several students have picked me up for missing allusions to lyrics and song titles from punk rock music and therefore misinterpreting lines in the poem. I have just admitted to a momentary and uneasily public disorientation. Here I thought that I had come to the class well prepared and now it turns out I may have been deceiving myself. The result is a defining moment for me, not just because it reminds me that poetic difficulty is no respecter of age and experience; it also helps me start thinking about the issues raised by the contributors to this volume, issues that cluster around the uncertain relations between early and late modernist poetry, and especially the many ways that poems both elicit and resist interpretation. Juxtaposing a classic of high modernism with a contemporary poet and punk rock is a reminder of the potential extent of modernist poetry. Our contributors range across a history of poetry that spans more than a century, and now comes with sometimes contradictory labels whose proliferation can be confusing both as chronology and as theory: modernism, high modernism, avant-garde, late modernism, second-wave modernism, postmodernism, experimental, and innovative. At the centre of these categorisations is the historical divide marked by the Second World War and the actual waste lands it brought to the world. Talking about poetry and music is a reminder that modernist poetry often bridges different media. Several contributors talk about how important it can be to discuss poetic sound, performance, and graphics in modernist poetry, and the challenges to pedagogy these material features of the text create. In this concluding 179 P. Middleton et al. (eds.), Teaching Modernist Poetry Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2010 180 Teaching Modernist Poetry chapter I want to explore further why these two issues are so important for the teaching of modernist poetry. My argument will be that these two seemingly distinct issues, the divided history of modernist poetry, and the meaningfulness of material textual strategies, are closely intertwined, and that understanding this can help us formulate methods of teaching modernist poetry to meet the sort of problems encountered in my opening anecdote. Some of these problems arise from the ingenuity of the poets themselves; some from the difficulties of demonstrating them in a classroom space alien to the poems; some from this split history of modernist poetry that has at least two acts; and some from the resistances that derive from the concepts of language and subjectivity that dominate our current literary theories. My examples are drawn from American poetry, but similar examples can be found in British poetry too. Two modernisms The history of modern poetry now extends for considerably more than a hundred years, reaching back at least a couple of decades into the nineteenth century and extending for nearly a decade into the twenty-first, a span of literary history that is beginning to be too long to teach or research as one continuous endeavour. Not surprisingly communities of literary scholars and university syllabuses increasingly coalesce around either the period 1880–1940 or a less calendrically well-defined postwar era, treating the Second World War as an inevitable division. The Second World War not only suspended literary activity to a considerable degree, though less in North America than in Europe, Asia, and Australia, it also changed social, political, and economic landscapes so utterly that new aesthetic and literary movements emerged and many older forms disappeared, and yet the widespread sense that modernism was an unfinished project inspired new generations of poets. The 1950s were as a result as fertile for new modes of writing as were the 1920s, possibly more so, although we rarely talk in these terms. Our resistance to such terms may have something to do with the contrast between the earlier decade of manifestos and literary shocks, and a postwar decade of chastened pragmatic innovation.