'R. F. LANGLEY: SEEING THINGS'

Though R. F. Langley was committed - in his own words - to the 'observation of fact', his poetry and prose journals more often stage a variety of epistemological dilemma. More particularly, Langley's writing frequently discovers a torque between (in Bertrand Russell's terms) knowledge by 'acquaintance' and knowledge by 'description'. This essay approaches Langley's negotiation of these positions via his response to earlier modernisms, especially those of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and the art critic Adrian Stokes. Langley's work, it is suggested, furthered and refined a modernist concern with perception and knowledge even as later modernist poetics departed from questions of epistemology towards those of semiotics and linguistics.