SOURCE: McGann, Jerome. “Language Writing.” London Review of Books 9, no. 18 (15 October 1987): 6-8.

In the following review of two anthologies of Language Poetry, McGann sketches the characteristics of the Language Poets' style and philosophy.

In 1918, the intensity of Yeats's fascination with the young American phenomenon Ezra Pound had cooled enough for Jack Butler Yeats to supply his son with some smouldering paternal wisdom:

The poets loved of Ezra Pound are tired of Beauty, since they have met it so often … I am tired of Beauty my wife, says the poet, but here is that enchanting mistress Ugliness. With her I will live and what a riot we shall have. Not a day shall pass without a fresh horror. Prometheus leaves his rock to cohabit with the Furies.

Jack Yeats's judgments are better-worded than most attacks on the innovative experiments of early Modernist poetry, but they make the same charges...