Chaos and the Clean Line

Stephen Romer's essays range from the key figures of French and English Modernism to the contemporary practice of poetry, and its translation. At the heart of Chaos and the Clean Line is an enquiry into the talismanic power that a source of order can possess for the poet who lives in a disordered world. It is what drives Mallarme's 'fury against the formless'. Sometimes it may be found in a longed-for sense of psychological detachment, as when Laforgue invents the figure of Pierrot. Or it may be the craft and genius of a former age, safely removed from the alienating cities of today, such as Eliot finds in Dante, or in Gautier's chiseled verse. For Pierre Reverdy, the clean line of order may come from a Cubist painting; for Ezra Pound, it may be an epiphany of angled sunlight fallen on stone in Provence; for Apollinaire, the shockingly original analogies he draws between physical eroticism and trench warfare.

Stephen Romer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Tours, and Lecturer in French at Brasenose College, Oxford.