“Kinked Up Like It Wants to Bark”: Contemporary British Poetry at the Tomb of the Poète Maudit

Abstract

As the title of this book is Legacies of Modernism, and the etymology of “legacy” takes us to Old French, it seems appropriate to the renewed interest in late nineteenth-century French literary culture in British poets writing in the 1990s and the first decade of the noughties—a different fin de siècle, but one that has sought the more famous literary period as some kind of grounding for poetic endeavor, or at least as a way of re-contextualizing their own social and aesthetic moment(s). The figure of the poète maudit in particular channels a whole series of ideas and preoccupations concerning the poet’s relationship to society under Capitalist modernity and offers an opportunity to establish what kind of a legacy these foundational ideas have had upon contemporary vanguard poetry.