Is Modernism a few ground-breaking works by a handful of writers-Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Wyndham Lewis? Other writers loomed large at the time; their work points in untaken directions. Andrew Crozier assembles the first definitive text of the poems and important fiction of John Rodker, whose work was set in the balance with Eliot's and Joyce's by Pound and Lewis and was not found wanting.

Rodker's East End Jewish background - the world of Resenberg, Mark Gertler and his friend David Bomberg (who designed the cover of his first book) - and his fascination with radical theatre at the time, define an open, questing imagination. Verlaine was to him what Laforgue was to Eliot. His interest in psychoanalysis, in the sensual self, his romantic temperament, propose a Modernism that has much in common with Joyce's. No masks, no self-erasure, no ironic distancing: this writing is more than a curiosity. It challenges the Modernist canon and restores a crucial context.