SOURCE: "The Difficulties of Modernism and the Modernism of Difficulty," in Images and Ideas in American Culture: The Functions of Criticism, edited by Arthur Edelstein, Brandeis University Press, 1979, pp. 124-40.

In the following essay, Poirier confronts the problematic nature of Modernism as it has been variously designated by literary critics and historians.

On every side, these days, there is talk of modernism—what was it? what is it? when did it happen?—and partly because these questions have been voluminously but not satisfactorily answered, the modernist period threatens to stretch into a century, or, for some people, into two. Literary history has never allowed such longevity, and the prospect raises a number of embarrassing questions. During this whole time, has there been so little change in the cultural and social conditions which supposedly begat modernism that there has been no occasion for a radical change in literary consciousness...