Apocalypse, Auschwitz, the Bomb and After

Abstract

This chapter begins on the brink of world war, with ominous warnings on gender, race and war, in Woolf’s “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940), and Richard Wright’s preface to his ground-breaking novel of the same year, Native Son (1940), invoking the horror of Poe. It looks at the more hopeful apocalyptic visions of the surrealist-influenced writers associated with, and at the fringes of, the British Apocalypse movement, Dylan Thomas, W. S. Graham, David Gascoyne. The horrific realisation of the inferno in Hitler’s death factories is addressed through the Holocaust writing of Paul Celan, Rudolf Vrba and Cynthia Ozick. And a different sort of poetics of hell is glimpsed in the fascist collaborator Pound’s Pisan Cantos, written from his post-war internment by the Americans for treason. Also explored is the optimism of William Carlos Williams’s apocalyptic vision in The Wedge and Paterson. The chapter, and the book’s final part, close with readings of the poetics of Gertrude Stein, Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters in the mid-1940s. Their words serve as this book’s conclusion, marking a post-war place of Apocalypse from which modernism’s and the avant-garde’s new ladders start. Transitions continue.