David James’s understanding of metamodernism as ‘continuity and adaptation’ in relation to early twentieth-century texts complements Ahren Warner’s interlacing of references to modernist authors in his work. His uncompromising engagement with French literature in particular has irked many critics. These criticisms might indicate an ‘innovative’ poet aspiring to the enigmatical poetry that I discuss throughout this book. Yet these suppositions would be inaccurate: allusions to modernist writers, iconoclasm and implacacbility are not coterminous with the enigma. Whereas Warner’s ‘Nervometer’ sequence forms an exemplary creative translation of Antonin Artaud’s elusive LE PÈSE-NERFS (1925), other poems – such as ‘Mètro’ – form neo-modernist, rather than metamodernist, responses to early twentieth-century writing. In contrast, James Byrne’s tentative poetic explorations ‘never end in discovery, only in willingness to rest content with an unsure glimpse’, as Byrne phrases it in ‘Apprentice Work’. His collections are open to the formal capacities of the enigma, even in a ‘committed’ poem such as ‘Cox’s Bazar’, that engages with the traumatised survivors of the Myanmar massacres.

James Joyce and T. S. Eliot advanced a ‘double consciousness’ in their approach to myth that pervades Tony Harrison’s Metamorpheus(2000) and Sandeep Parmar’s Eidolon(2015). This double consciousness is not unique to modernism, but it intensifies in early twentieth-century literature, inscribing modernists’ desire to explore what Michael Bell describes as ‘the problematics of history under the sign of myth’. The mythic counterpointing that underpins Harrison’s work indicates that his modernist influences have been neglected by critics and poets such as Simon Armitage, eager to position his poetry as eschewing unnecessary complexity. However, whereas Metamorpheus and Eidolon would both be symptomatic of metamodernist literature in Andre Furlani’s understanding of the term, it is only in Eidolon that the legacies of ‘fractured’ writing allow for an enigmatical account of Helen, one of the most elusive figures in Greek myth.