Omnicompetent Modernists

An innovative exploration of early twentieth-century avant-garde poetry’s relationship to the public sphere   “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there,” as the poet William Carlos Williams memorably declared. In Omnicompetent Modernists: Poetry, Politics, and the Public Sphere , Matthew Hofer examines, through a multilayered literary critique of interwar modernist poetry, what it might mean to get the news, and more,