‘[P]oets unhoused’: Modernism, homelessness and precarity

Abstract

In the past 2 or 3 decades, modernist scholarship has largely moved beyond and certainly challenged the mythologised trope of the alienated, exiled modernist writer. Such figures were generally exiled by choice and ‘homeless’ only metaphorically, but their experiences have long been lauded as the ideal conditions for modernist formal innovations. This essay explores the ways in which issues of homelessness and precarity have been considered thus far in modernist scholarship, arguing that more work is needed to account for the particular experiences of writers I here call the ‘homeless modernists’ and the impact of unstable housing upon modernist aesthetics and themes.