Flint on a Bright Stone: A Revolution of Precision and Restraint in American, Russian, and German Modernism

Flint on a Bright Stone closes a significant gap in the history of Modernist poetry by identifying the existence of Tempered Modernism, which blossomed in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and was exemplified by the early works of Akhmatova, Rilke, H.D., and Williams. While the international nature of Radical Modernism, such as Futurism, Expressionism, and Dadaism, has been well documented, the connections among Tempered Modernists have been ignored. This is the first book to delineate thoroughly the international nature of this phenomenon - an evolutionary alternative to the revolutionary Futurist techniques of shock and rupture. Tempered Modernists sought newness through precision, palpability, equilibrium, and restraint, crafting small poems that found beauty in the subdued, ordinary, and everyday. This book is also the first to juxtapose the two female practitioners, Akhmatova and H.D., whose poems best embodied the theories created by their male counterparts, Gumilev and Pound. In this book, Painter shows that understanding the existence of Tempered Modernism and its relation to Radical Modernism is essential for understanding the history and nature of Modernism.