Movement and modernism

the long version

In this compelling critical study, Terri Mester puts forth the intriguing thesis that dance in the first quarter of the century contributed greatly to the shape of literary modernism by influencing four of its major practitioners. She makes solid biographic, thematic, technical, and figurative cases that W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and William Carlos Williams turned to dance and dancers - actual and mythic - to reinvigorate their literary practices. In Movement and Modernism, Mester contributes to our notions about the movement of modernism, for despite the extraordinarily varied aesthetic styles and subject matters of Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, and Williams, their shared fascination with early twentieth-century dance imposes a further unity upon their collective works.