The Modernist Long Poem: Looking Back from the 21st Century 

Friday 24th October 2025 

Northeastern University, London 

  

Just over a century after the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), the modernist long poem continues to be the focus of critical response and varied definitions. The conference will consider a wide range of texts both in English and in translation and ranging in time of publication from 1920 through to the twenty-first century. There will be eight panels of speakers run in four parallel sessions. The keynote lecture will be given by Professor Steven Matthews of Reading University. Renard Press’s centenary edition of Richard Aldington’s A Fool i’ the Forest, with introduction and notes by Aldington scholars Michael Copp and Elizabeth Vandiver, will be launched during the course of the day.

CONFERENCE DETAILS

 

Venue: Devon House, 58 St Katharine’s Way, E1W 1LP (nearest stations Tower Hill Tube Station on the Circle and District Lines and Tower Gateway on the Docklands Light Railway)

 

Conference fee: £75. This will cover the cost of venue hire, coffee, tea and lunch and a free copy of the new edition of Richard Aldington’s A Fool i’ the Forest.

 

Accommodation: Conference attendees wishing to book an overnight stay on 23 or 24 October (or both nights) can access a discount code at either the Tower Hotel, St Katharine’s Way, London E1W 1LD or the Citizen M Tower of London Hotel, 40 Trinity Square, London EC3N 4DJ:

https://www.citizenm.com/ (Discount code: cu-nul)

www.clermonthotel.group/neunildn Tower Hotel

 

Registration: The link for registration is https://www.trybooking.com/uk/FDTG

 

CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

 

 

09.00-09.30 Registration

 

09.30-09.40:  Welcome: Catherine Brown

 

9.40-10.40: Keynote lecture: Steven Matthews: ‘Logics of the Imagination: Structure in Eliot, Aldington, and H.D.’

 

10.40-11.10 Coffee Break

 

11.10-12.00

 

Panel 1A: Sequences chaired by Steven Matthews

Ioanna Ragoussi: ‘Djuna Barnes from A to Z: Fragmentation and Continuity in Creatures in an Alphabet’

Serafina Lee: ‘Contemporary Engagements with the Modernist Long Poem: Rachel Blau Du Plessis’ Drafts’

Panel 1B: Intertextuality chaired by Andrew Frayn

Luke Seaber: ‘“Say, here’s the lousy peace they talk about!”: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Opus 7 (1931) as Poetic Response to Poetic Responses to the Great War’

Michaela Giesenkerchen Sawyer: ‘Gertrude Stein’s Remaking of Wordsworth’s “Long Dull Poem”’

 

12.00-12.10 Break

 

12.10-13.20

 

Panel 2: Richard Aldington chaired by Elizabeth Vandiver

Dan Kempton: ‘Ending a Story of “Romantick” Love: “And what happen[s] next?”’

Richard Aldersley: ‘Mocking the Muse: Satire, Genre, and a Theory of Lyric Discontent in Richard Aldington’s Long Poems’

Natina Gilbert: ‘Richard Aldington and Muriel Rukeyser’s “obituary news”: Allusion and Personae in A Fool i’ the Forest and The Book of the Dead’

 

 

 

13.20- 14.20 Launch of A Fool i’ the Forest and Lunch

 

14.20-15.10

 

Panel 3A: Talk and Type chaired by Catherine Brown

Elise Brault-Dreux : ‘D.H. Lawrence’s “Whether or not” – foregrounding the material of speech’

Eliza Browning: ‘”Tricks of Type”: Hogarth Press and the Materiality of Typographic Experimentation in Hope Mirrlees’s Paris and Nancy Cunard’s Parallax.’

 

Panel 3B: Nation-building chaired by Elizabeth Vandiver

Graham Borland: ‘”Endless candles to an Unkent God”: ineffability, determinism, and the persistence of theology in Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’

Philip Chester: ‘”A Beauty of Dissonance”: A.J. M. Smith and the Birth of Modernist Canadian Poetry’

 

15.10-15.40 Tea Break

 

15.40-16.50

 

Panel 4A: American Modernisms chaired by Andrew Frayn

Lamia Tewfik: ‘”Too close to life for poesies”: William Ellery Leonard’s Two Lives (1925) Revisited as an Early Confessional Poem’

Fabian Aruquipa: ‘A Man Is a City: Paterson and the Democratic Form of the Modernist Long Poem’

Peter Maber: ‘”Additional and new”: Delmore Schwartz’s Late Modernism in Coriolanus and His Mother’

 

Panel 4B: In Translation chaired by Catherine Brown

Louise Kane: ‘A Delayed Long Poem: José de Almada Negreiros’ The Scene of Hate, Orpheu magazine, and Portuguese Modernism

Gabor Bednanics: ‘The Semi-peripherical version of Long Poem: Lajos Kassák’s The Horse Dies the Birds Fly Awayand its Contemporaries’

Rizwan Akhtar: Reimagining the modern and contemporary world through alternative stances of allegory in Arun Kolatkar’s Sapra Satra (Snake Sacrifice)

16.50 Closing remarks
BIOGRAPHIES

 

Rizwan Akhtar is Professor of English at the University of the Punjab, Lahore. He completed his PhD in Postcolonial Literature at Essex University in 2013. His research expertise lies in South Asian literature in English, with a particular focus on Indian and Pakistani writers. His debut poetry collection, Lahore, I Am Coming (2017), was published by the Punjab University Press.

 

Richard Aldersley is a PhD candidate in the English Department at New York University and assistant editor at French Politics, Culture & Society. His research and teaching at NYU, the Sorbonne, and the École Normale Supérieure focus on genre theory and literary history, with particular attention paid to the transatlantic literary and cultural networks of international modernism.

 

Fabián Aruquipa is a Bolivian professional translator, interpreter, and editor with experience in legal, diplomatic, literary, and academic contexts. His work blends linguistic precision with cultural fluency, spanning technical and creative fields. He also teaches advanced English and leads bilingual poetry and literature workshops.

 

Gábor Bednanics is a professor at Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Eger, Hungary. He is interested in turn-of-the-century poetry, modernism, and connections between literature and philosophy. He has authored four books on Modernism, most recently Modern Myths and the Possibilities of Rewriting (2016).

 

Graham Borland is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, where his doctoral project concerns modernism, apophasis, and secularity in the works of Hugh MacDiarmid, D. H. Lawrence, H.D., and Virginia Woolf. He has written for Reading Religion and Notes and Queries, with essays forthcoming in two edited collections – concerning, respectively, epic and apocalyptic form in H.D.’s late poetry, and occultism and rationalism in Lawrence, Spencer, and Blavatsky.

 

Elise Brault-Dreux is a senior lecturer at Valenciennes Université (Hauts-de-France). She has published a book on the poetry of D.H. Lawrence (Le Je et ses masques, Septentrion, 2014) and articles on modernist poetry. She is co-editor of No Dialect Please, You’re a Poet (Routledge, 2019), and the editor of L’air du temps de 1922 – Royaume-Uni et Etats Unis aux rythmes d’une année (SUP 2022).

 

Catherine Brown is Associate Professor of English and Assistant Dean of Humanities at Northeastern University London. Her research is mainly in the fields of modernism, D. H. Lawrence, Anglo-Russian relations and vegan literary studies. She is a Vice-President of the Lawrence Society and co-edited The Edinburgh Companion to D.H. Lawrence and the Arts (2020). She wrote the chapter on ‘Modernism’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies(2022)

 

Eliza Browning is a first year English PhD student at Princeton University. Her research focuses on modernist print culture, literary networks, and collaborative writing and editing practices.

Philip Chester is a retired teacher, poet and independent scholar resident in Deep River, Ontario, Canada. His fields of interest are Canadian wilderness literature and the art of Tom Thomson and the Canadian ‘Group of Seven’ painters. His previous conference papers discussed D.H. Lawrence’s poem ‘Whales Weep Not’ (Taos, New Mexico 2022) and Richard Aldington’s poem “Compensation” (London, 2023).

 

Michael Copp has an MSt in Modernist Studies. He has presented conference papers on Aldington, Imagism, Pound, Sassoon, and F S Flint. Among his books are: An Imagist at War: The Complete War Poems of Richard Aldington(Fairleigh Dickinson 2002); The Fourth Imagist: Selected Poems of F. S. Flint (Fairleigh Dickinson 2007); and Imagist Dialogues: Letters between Aldington, Flint and Others (James Clarke 2009). He has translated the war poems of Apollinaire and Cocteau and the war novels of Léon Werth.

 

Andrew Frayn is Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University and past Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies. He is author of Writing Disenchantment: British First World War Prose, 1914-30 (Manchester University Press 2014) and has written a number of chapters and articles on related authors including Richard Aldington, Ford Madox Ford, and C. E. Montague.

 

Natina Gilbert is a PhD candidate at the University of Rochester. Her research interests focus on American poetry and poetics, and the intersections of law and literature. Her dissertation examines the role that Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism plays in the writing of poets and jurists.

 

Louise Kane is Associate Professor of Global Modernisms at the University of Central Florida. She has published on modernism and world literary cultures, especially in relation to little magazines and periodicals. She is general editor of the Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Global Modernist Magazines series and editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement and Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies.

 

Daniel Kempton is retired from the English Department at SUNY New Paltz, where he taught from 1990-2020. He co-directed seven biennial conferences devoted to Richard Aldington and his circle (2002-2014), and, though his publications are on other authors, he has delivered nine conference papers on Aldington.

 

Serafina Lee is a PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her PhD assesses the drafting process in relation to American avant-garde poetry from 1970 to 2020. Focusing on Lyn Hejinian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Susan Howe, the project maps drafting as a prominent source of poetic practice and theory.

 

Peter Maber is Associate Professor and Head of English, Creative and Academic Writing at Northeastern University London. He is an Americanist and a Postcolonialist and researches nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry and drama. He has published in particular on the Middle Generation of American poets and modernist legacy.

 

Steven Matthews is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Reading. His primary interests are Modernism and its aftermath and modern and contemporary British, Irish and American poetries. His publications include T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature (OUP 2013) and the edited volume The Waste Land After One Hundred Years (D.S. Brewer 2022). He is also a poet, his most recent collection being Some Other Where (Two Rivers Press 2023).

 

Ioanna Ragoussi (MLitt, PhD) is an independent scholar in American literature and culture and Associate Member of the Centre de Recherches Anglophones, Her research focuses on transatlantic modernism and experimental narrative forms. She has written on Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, and William Carlos Williams, and is contributing a chapter to the forthcoming volume At War: The Avant-Garde and Modernism in Times of Conflict (De Gruyter, in association with EAM).

Michaela Giesenkirchen Sawyer is an associate professor of Humanities at Utah Valley University. Her field of speciality is American Modernist Literature and Philosophy; she has published on Gertrude Stein, Herman Melville, and Ezra Pound. She is interested in the intersections of literature, film, music, and the visual arts with science and philosophy.

 

Luke Seaber is Senior Teaching Fellow in Modern European Culture at University College London. He is author of G.K. Chesterton’s Literary Influence on George Orwell: A Surprising Irony (Edwin Mellen Press 2012) and Incognito Social Investigation in British Literature: Certainties in Degradation (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). He is co-editor of Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and of the volume on the 1930s in the Bloomsbury Decades of Fiction series (2021). He is Co-President of the Space Between Society.

 

Lamia Tewfik is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Sadat Academy, Cairo. She is a member of the refereeing committee at the Supreme Council of Egyptian Universities in the field of English literature. Her research interests include manifestations of power relations in texts, ecopoetics and oral literature.

 

Elizabeth Vandiver was, until her retirement, Clement Biddle Penrose Professor of Latin and Classics at Whitman College. She is the author of Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War (OUP 2010). She has published numerous articles on classical reception in early 20th-century English poetry. She is co-author of Greek and Roman Antiquity in First World War Poetry (OUP 2024). Her book Richard Aldington’s Modernist Antiquity: Classics, Imagism and the Great War (Oxford University Press) will appear in February 2026.