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Modernist poetry in English

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Poetry & Opera

   T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land is one of the key texts of modernist
   poetry in English.
   Enlarge
   T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land is one of the key texts of modernist
   poetry in English.

   Modernist poetry is a mode of writing that is characterised by two main
   features. The first is technical innovation in the writing through the
   extensive use of free verse. The second is a move away from the
   Romantic idea of an unproblematic poetic 'self' directly addressing an
   equally unproblematic ideal reader or audience.

   Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in
   the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagist
   poets. In common with many other modernists, these poets were writing
   in reaction to what they saw as the excesses of Victorian poetry, with
   its emphasis on traditional formalism and overly flowery poetic
   diction. In many respects, their criticism of contemporary poetry
   echoes what William Wordsworth wrote in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads
   to instigate the Romantic movement in British poetry over a century
   earlier.

   In general, the modernists saw themselves as looking back to the best
   practices of poets in earlier periods and other cultures. Their models
   included ancient Greek literature, Chinese and Japanese poetry, the
   troubadours, Dante and the medieval Italian philosophical poets (such
   as Guido Cavalcanti), and the English Metaphysical poets.

   Much of the early poetry produced by these writers took the form of
   short, compact lyrics. However, as modernist poetry in English
   developed, longer poems came to the fore. These long poems represent
   the main contribution of the modernist movement to the 20th century
   English poetic canon.

Modernist poetry

   The questioning of the self and the exploration of technical
   innovations in modernist poetry are intimately interconnected. The
   dislocation of the authorial presence is achieved through the
   application of such techniques as collage, found poetry, visual poetry,
   the juxtaposition of apparently unconnected materials, and combinations
   of these. These techniques are used not for their own sake but to open
   up questions in the mind of the reader regarding the nature of the
   poetic experience. These developments parallel changes in the other
   arts, especially painting and music, that were taking place
   concurrently.

   Additionally, Modernist poetry disavowed the traditional aesthetic
   claims of Romantic poetry's later phase and no longer sought "beauty"
   as the highest achievement of verse. With this abandonment of the
   sublime came a turn away from pastoral poetry and an attempt to focus
   poetry on urban, mechanical, and industrial settings. The new heroes
   would not be swains laboring in the fields, but office workers
   struggling across London Bridge, and the new settings would not be
   "romantic chasms deep and wide," but vacant lots, smoked-over cities,
   and subways.

   Another important feature of much modernist poetry in English is a
   clear focus on the surface of the poem. Much of this work focuses on
   the literal meaning of the words on the page rather than any
   metaphorical or symbolic meanings that might be imputed to them. This
   approach to writing is reflected in Ezra Pound's advice to young
   writers (in his 1937 book The ABC of Reading) to 'buy a dictionary and
   learn the meanings of words' and T.S. Eliot's response when asked the
   meaning of the line 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper
   tree in the cool of the day...' from Ash Wednesday (1927); he said "It
   means 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree in the cool
   of the day...'". Also pertinent is William Carlos Williams' 1944
   statement that 'A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of
   words'.

The emergence of English-language modernism

   The Imagist poet H.D. in the mid 1910s
   Enlarge
   The Imagist poet H.D. in the mid 1910s

   The roots of English-language poetic modernism can be traced back to
   the works of a number of earlier writers, including Walt Whitman, whose
   long lines approached a type of free verse, the prose poetry of Oscar
   Wilde, Robert Browning's subversion of the poetic self, Emily
   Dickinson's compression and the writings of the early English
   Symbolists, especially Arthur Symons. However, these poets essentially
   remained true to the basic tenets of the Romantic movement and the
   appearance of the Imagists marked the first emergence of a distinctly
   modernist poetic in the language. One anomalous figure of the early
   period of modernism also deserves mention: Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote
   in a radically experimental prosody about radically conservative ideals
   (not unlike a later Ezra Pound), and he believed that sound could drive
   poetry. Specifically, poetic sonic effects (selected for verbal and
   aural felicity, not just images selected for their visual
   evocativeness) would also, therefore, become an influential poetic
   device of modernism.

Imagism

   The origins of Imagism are to be found in two poems by T. E. Hulme that
   were published in 1909 by the Poets' Club in London. Hulme was a
   student of mathematics and philosophy who had established the Poets'
   Club to discuss his theories of poetry. The poet and critic F. S.
   Flint, who was a champion of free verse and modern French poetry, was
   highly critical of the club and its publications. From the ensuing
   debate, Hulme and Flint became close friends. They started meeting with
   other poets at the Eiffel Tower restaurant in Soho to discuss reform of
   contemporary poetry through free verse and the tanka and haiku and the
   removal of all unnecessary verbiage from poems.
   Ezra Pound in 1913
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   Ezra Pound in 1913

   The American poet Ezra Pound was introduced to this group and they
   found that their ideas resembled his. In 1911, Pound introduced two
   other poets, H.D. and Richard Aldington, to the Eiffel Tower group.
   Both of these poets were students of the early Greek lyric poetry,
   especially the works of Sappho. In October 1912, he submitted three
   poems each by H.D. and Aldington under the rubric Imagiste to Poetry
   magazine. That month Pound's book Ripostes was published with an
   appendix called The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme, which
   carried a note that saw the first appearance of the word Imagiste in
   print. Aldington's poems were in the November issue of Poetry and
   H.D.'s in January 1913 and Imagism as a movement was launched. The
   March issue contained Pound's A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste and Flint's
   Imagisme. The latter contained this succinct statement of the group's
   position:
    1. Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective.
    2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the
       presentation.
    3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase,
       not in sequence of the metronome.

   In setting these criteria for poetry, the Imagists saw themselves as
   looking backward to the best practices of pre- Romantic writing.
   Imagists poets used sharp language and embrace imagery. Their work,
   however, was to have a revolutionary impact on English-language writing
   for the rest of the 20th century.

   Between 1914 and 1917, four anthologies of Imagist poetry were
   published. In addition to Pound, Flint, H.D. and Aldington, these
   included work by Skipwith Cannell, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams,
   James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Upward, John Cournos, D. H.
   Lawrence and Marianne Moore. With a few exceptions, this represents a
   roll-call of English-language modernist poets of the time. After the
   1914 volume, Pound distanced himself from the group and the remaining
   anthologies appeared under the editorial control of Amy Lowell.

World War I and after

   The outbreak of World War I represented a setback for the budding
   modernist movement for a number of reasons. Firstly, writers like
   Aldington ended up on active service. Secondly, paper shortages and
   other factors meant that publication of new work became increasingly
   difficult. Thirdly, public sentiment in time of war meant that war
   poets like Wilfred Owen, who wrote formally more conventional verse,
   became increasingly popular. One poet who served in the war, the visual
   artist David Jones, would later resist this trend in his long
   experimental war poem In Parenthesis, which was written directly out of
   his experiences in the trenches but was not published until 1937.

   The war also tended to undermine the optimism of the Imagists, and this
   fact was reflected in a number of major poems written in its aftermath.
   For instance, Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) uses loose
   translations and transformations of the Latin poet Propertius to
   ridicule war propaganda and the idea of empire. His Hugh Selwyn
   Mauberley (1921) represents his farewell to Imagism and lyric poetry in
   general. The writing of these poems coincided with Pound's decision to
   abandon London permanently.

   The most famous English-language modernist work arising out of this
   post-war disillusionment is T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922).
   Eliot was an American poet who had been living in London for some time.
   Although never formally associated with the Imagist group, Eliot's work
   was admired by Pound, who, in 1915, helped him to publish a poem, The
   Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which brought him to prominence. When
   Eliot completed his original draft of a long poem based on both the
   disintegration of his personal life and mental stability and of the
   culture around him, provisionally titled He Do the Police in Different
   Voices, he gave the manuscript to Pound for comment. After some heavy
   editing, The Waste Land in the form we now know it was published and
   Eliot came to be seen as the voice of a generation. The addition of
   notes to the published poem served to highlight the use of collage as a
   literary technique, paralleling similar practice by the cubists and
   other visual artists. From this point on, modernism in English tended
   towards a poetry of the fragment that rejected the idea that the poet
   could present a comfortingly coherent view of life.

Paris

   Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso, 1906
   Enlarge
   Portrait of Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso, 1906

   Although many of the Imagists were Americans, they were essentially a
   London-based group. By the end of World War I, they had effectively
   ceased to exist as a movement and a number of them had more or less
   stopped writing poetry altogether. By 1920, Pound and Joyce were both
   living in Paris and participating in the vibrant expatriate writing
   scene. This scene centred around the salons hosted by Gertrude Stein
   and Natalie Barney, both of whom wrote poetry; Stein was to go on to
   become one of the most formally and linguistically innovative of
   modernist novelists. Many modernist poets and writers, including Pound,
   Joyce, Williams (on a trip to Paris) Mina Loy, Robert McAlmon, Djuna
   Barnes, E. E. Cummings, Hart Crane, and Ernest Hemingway attended these
   salons. Both Stein and Barney were openly lesbian and Barney, in
   particular, actively encouraged women writers.

   One of the most active of these women, Mina Loy, was born in Britain,
   where she studied art, and first moved to Paris in 1902 to continue her
   studies. She soon became a regular at Stein's salon and exhibited her
   paintings both in Paris and London. In 1905, she moved to Florence
   where she mixed with the expatriate community and the Futurists, and
   had a relationship with their leader Filippo Marinetti. Her first
   poems, published in 1914, showed her familiarity with the work of other
   modernists and an advanced sense of formal experimentation. Her work
   was greatly admired by both Pound and Williams, amongst others. In a
   1917 review of her work, Pound coined the term logopoeia, which he
   defined as 'a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas' to
   describe her poetry.

   These writers found themselves exposed to a general culture of artistic
   ferment in their adopted city, particularly in the visual arts and
   music. Artists like Picasso, Georges Braque and Constantine Brancusi
   and musicians including Igor Stravinsky and George Antheil were part of
   their same social and artistic circles, and a high level of cross
   pollination between these arts and artists urged the poets towards ever
   greater levels of experimentation.

   The Parisian expatriate community provided an environment in which
   literary experiment was encouraged and served as a major source of
   modernist writing in all genres, including poetry. This concentration
   of activity in one city also helped support a thriving small press
   publishing industry, with presses like McAlmon's Contact Editions and
   William Bird's Three Mountains Press publishing many of the key
   modernist texts of the period.

Others

   Although London and Paris were key centres of activity for
   English-language modernists, much important activity took place
   elsewhere. When Mina Loy moved to New York in 1916, she became part of
   a circle of writers involved with Others: A Magazine of the New Verse
   which included William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, among
   others. This magazine, which ran from 1915 to 1919, was edited by
   Alfred Kreymborg. Contributors also included Pound, Eliot, H.D., Djuna
   Barnes, Amy Lowell, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg and Wallace Stevens.

   The U.S. modernist poets were concerned to create work in a
   distinctively American idiom. Williams, a doctor who worked in general
   practice in a working-class area of Rutherford, New Jersey, explained
   this approach by saying that he made his poems from 'the speech of
   Polish mothers'. In this, they were placing themselves in a tradition
   stretching back to Whitman.

   After her initial association with the Imagists, Marianne Moore carved
   out a unique niche for herself among 20th century poets. Much of her
   poetry is written in syllabic verse, repeating the number of syllables
   rather than stresses or beats, per line. She also experimented with
   stanza forms borrowed from troubadour poetry.

   Wallace Stevens' work falls somewhat outside this mainstream of
   modernism. Indeed, he deprecated the work of both Eliot and Pound as
   "mannered." His poetry is a complex exploration of the relationship
   between imagination and reality. Unlike many other modernists, but like
   the English Romantics, by whom he was influenced, Stevens thought that
   poetry was what all humans did; the poet was merely self-conscious
   about the activity.

   In Scotland, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid formed something of a one-man
   modernist movement. An admirer of Joyce and Pound, MacDiarmid wrote
   much of his early poetry in anglicised Lowland Scots, a literary
   dialect which had also been used by Robert Burns. He served in the
   Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I and was invalided out in
   1918. After the war, he set up a literary magazine, a literary
   magazine, Scottish Chapbook, with 'Not traditions - Precedents!' as its
   motto. His later work reflected an increasing interest in found poetry
   and other formal innovations.

Wallace Stevens' Of Modern Poetry

   Wallace Stevens' essential modernist poem, Of Modern Poetry sounds as
   if the verbs are left out. The verb 'to be' is omitted from the first
   and final lines. The poem itself opens and closes with the act of
   finding. The poem and the mind become synonymous: a collapse between
   the poem, the act, and the mind. During the poem the dyad becomes
   further collapsed into one: a spatial and a temporal collapse between
   the subject and the object; form and content equal each other; form
   becomes not simply expressive of, but constitutive of. The poem goes
   from being a static object to being an action. The poem of the mind has
   to be alternative and listening; it is experimental. The poem resists
   and refuses transcendentalism, but remains within the conceptual limits
   of the mind and the poem.

The Waste Land as example of a Modernist Text

   T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land was a foundational text of Modernism. It
   represented the moment in which imagism moved in to Modernism proper.
   It is a text in which broken, fragmented, and seemingly unrelated
   images come together. It is an anti-narrative and is disjunctive. The
   metaphor of seeing and vision is central to the poem. This was central
   to Modernism. We, as readers, are in confusion, we have an inability to
   see anything except a heap of broken images. However, the narrator (in
   The Waste Land as well as other texts) promised to show the reader a
   different meaning; to show the reader how to make meaning from
   dislocation and from fragments. This construction of an exclusive
   meaning was essential to Modernism.

Maturity

   With the publication of The Waste Land, modernist poetry appeared to
   have made a breakthrough into wider critical discourse and a broader
   readership. However, the economic collapse of the late 1920s and early
   1930s had a serious negative impact on the new writing. For American
   writers, living in Europe became more difficult as their incomes lost a
   great deal of their relative value. While Stein, Barney and Joyce
   remained in the French city, much of the scene they had presided over
   scattered. Pound was in Italy, Eliot in London, H.D. moved between that
   city and Switzerland, and many of the other writers associated with the
   movement were now living in the States.

   The economic depression, combined with the impact of the Spanish Civil
   War, also saw the emergence, in the Britain of the 1930s, of a more
   overtly political poetry, as represented by such writers as W.H. Auden
   and Stephen Spender. Although nominally admirers of Eliot, these poets
   tended towards a poetry of radical content but formal conservativeness.
   For example, they rarely wrote free verse, preferring rhyme and regular
   stanza patterns in much of their work.

1930s modernism

   Consequently, modernism in English remained in the role of an avant
   garde movement, depending on little presses and magazines and a small
   but dedicated readership. The key group to emerge during this time were
   the Objectivist poets, consisting of Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen,
   Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, Basil Bunting and Lorine Niedecker. The
   Objectiveists were admirers of Stein, Pound and Williams and Pound
   actively promoted their work. Thanks to his influence, Zukofsky was
   asked to edit a special Objectivist issue of the Chicago-based journal
   Poetry in 1931 to launch the group. The basic tenets of Objectivist
   poetics were to treat the poem as an object and to emphasise sincerity,
   intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world, and
   in this they can be viewed as direct descendants of the Imagists.
   Continuing a tradition established in Paris, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, and
   Oppen went on to form the Objectivist Press to publish books by
   themselves and by Williams. In his later work, Zukofsky developed his
   view of the poem as object to include experimenting with mathematical
   models for creating poems, producing effects similar to the creation of
   a Bach fugue or a piece of serial music.

   A number of Irish poets and writers moved to Paris in the early 1930s
   to join the circle around James Joyce. These included Samuel Beckett,
   Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey and Denis Devlin. These writers were
   aware of Pound and Eliot, but they were also francophone and took an
   interest in contemporary French poetry, especially the surrealists.
   Indeed, Coffey and Devlin were amongst the first to translate the works
   of Paul Eluard into English. Around the same time, a number of British
   surrealist poets were beginning to emerge, among them David Gascoyne,
   George Barker and Hugh Sykes Davies. Like the Objectivists, these poets
   were relatively neglected by their native literary cultures and had to
   wait for a revival of interest in British and Irish modernism in the
   1960s before their contributions to the development of this alternative
   tradition were properly assessed.

Long poems

   Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and
   Eliot's The Waste Land marked a transition from the short imagistic
   poems that were typical of earlier modernist writing towards the
   writing of longer poems or poem-sequences. A number of long poems were
   also written during the 1920s, including Mina Loy's 'auto-mythology',
   Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose and Hugh MacDiarmid's satire on Scottish
   society, A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle. MacDiarmid wrote a number of
   long poems, including On a Raised Beach, Three Hymns to Lenin and In
   Memoriam James Joyce, in which he incorporated materials from science,
   linguistics, history and even found poems based on texts from the Times
   Literary Supplement. David Jones' war poem In Parenthesis was a
   book-length work that drew on the matter of Britain to illuminate his
   experiences in the trenches, and his later epic The Anathemata, itself
   hewn from a much longer manuscript, is a meditation on empire and
   resistance, the local and the global, which uses materials from
   Christian, Roman and Celtic history and mythology.

   One of the most influential of all the modernist long poems was Pound's
   The Cantos, a 'poem containing history' that he started in 1915 and
   continued to work on for the rest of his writing life. From a starting
   point that combines Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Divine Comedy to create
   a personal epic of 20th century life, the poem uses materials from
   history, politics, literature, art, music, economics, philosophy,
   mythology, ecology and the poet's personal experiences and ranges
   across European, American, African and Asian cultures. Pound coined the
   term 'ideogrammatic method' to describe his technique of placing these
   materials in relation to each other so as to open up new and unexpected
   relationships. This can be seen as paralleling techniques used by
   modernist artists and composers to similar ends.

   Other Imagist-associated poets also went on to write long poems.
   William Carlos Williams' Paterson applied the techniques developed by
   Pound to a specific location and in a specific, American, dialect. H.D.
   wrote Trilogy out of her experiences in London during World War II and
   Helen in Egypt, a reworking of the Helen of Troy story from the
   perspective of the female protagonist, as a kind of feminist response
   to the masculine mind-set behind Pound's epic. Eliot's experiences of
   war-torn London also underpinned his Four Quartets. A number of
   Objectivists also wrote long poems, including Zukofsky's A, Charles
   Reznikoff's Testimony, and Basil Bunting's Briggflatts. Brian Coffey's
   Advent is the key long poem by an Irish modernist. All these poems, to
   one extent or another, use a range of techniques to blend personal
   experience with materials from a wide range of cultural and
   intellectual activities to create collage-like texts on an epic scale.

Politics

   Poetic modernism was an overtly revolutionary literary movement, a
   'revolution of the word', and, for a number of its practitioners, this
   interest in radical change spilled over into politics. A number of the
   leading early modernists became known for their right-wing views; these
   included Eliot, who once described himself as a Royalist, Stein, who
   supported the Vichy government for a time at least, and, most
   notoriously, Pound, who, after moving to Italy in the early 1930s,
   openly admired Mussolini and began to include anti-Semitic sentiments
   in his writings. He was arrested towards the end of World War II on
   charges of treason arising out of broadcasts he made on Italian radio
   during the war but never faced trial because of his mental health. Both
   Stein and Pound traced their political beliefs back to the American
   Republican tradition.

   A number of leading modernists took a more left-wing political view.
   Hugh MacDiarmid helped found the National Party of Scotland and was
   also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. During the
   1930s, he was expelled from the former for being a communist and from
   the latter for being a nationalist although he rejoined the Communist
   Party in 1956. The Objectivists Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Carl
   Rakosi were all, at one time or another, committed Marxists and Oppen
   spent a number of years in Mexico to escape the attention of Joseph
   McCarthy's Senate committee. A number of the British surrealists,
   especially David Gascoyne, also supported Communism.

   Other modernists took up political positions that did not fit neatly
   into the left/right model. H.D., Mina Loy and Nathalie Barney, for
   instance, are now seen as proto-feminists and their openness about
   their various sexualities can be read as foreshadowing the 1970s view
   that the personal is political. H.D., especially after World War I,
   came to view the goal of modernism as being the bringing about of world
   peace. However, she also displayed anti-Semitic views in the notebooks
   for her book Tribute to Freud. Basil Bunting, who came from a Quaker
   background, was a conscientious objector during World War I, but
   because of his opposition to Fascism, served in British Military
   Intelligence in Persia (Iran) during World War II. William Carlos
   Williams' political views arose from his daily contact with the poor
   who attended his surgery. He was another for whom the personal and
   political blended, an approach best summed up in his statement that 'A
   new world is only a new mind'.

   As can be seen from this brief survey, although many modernist poets
   were politically engaged, there is no single political position that
   can be said to be closely allied to the modernist movement in
   English-language poetry. These poets came from a wide range of
   backgrounds and had a wide range of personal experiences and their
   political stances reflect these facts.

Legacy

   The modernist 'revolution of the word' was not universally welcomed,
   either by readers or writers. Certainly by the 1930s, a new generation
   of poets had emerged who looked to more formally conservative poets
   like Thomas Hardy and W.B. Yeats as models and these writers struck a
   chord with a readership who were uncomfortable with the experimentation
   and uncertainty preferred by the modernists.

   However, the 1950s saw the emergence, particularly in the United
   States, of a new generation of poets who looked to the modernists for
   inspiration. The influence of modernism can be seen in these poetic
   groups and movements, especially those associated with the San
   Francisco Renaissance, such as the Beat generation, the Black Mountain
   poets, the deep image group. Charles Olson, the theorist of the Black
   Mountain group, wrote in his 1950 essay, Projectivist Verse 'ONE
   PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION',
   a statement that links back directly to the Imagists. Robert Duncan,
   another Black Mountain poet admired H.D. while a third member of the
   group, Robert Creeley did much to help revive interest in Zukofsky and
   other Objectivists.

   Among the Beats, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg studied Pound closely
   and were heavily influenced by his interest in Chinese and Japanese
   poetry and the ecological concerns evident in the later Cantos. William
   Carlos Williams was another who had a strong impact on the Beat poets,
   encouraging poets like Lew Welch and writing an introduction for the
   book publication of Ginsberg's seminal poem, Howl. Many of these
   writers found a major platform for their work in Cid Corman's Origin
   magazine and press. Origin also published work by Louis Zukofsky,
   Lorine Niedecker and Wallace Stevens, helping to revive interest in
   these early modernist writers. The Objectivists, especially the strict
   formal experimentation of Zukofsky's later works, were also formative
   for the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.

   As the Beats and other American poets began to find readers in the UK
   and Ireland, a new generation of British poets with an interest in
   modernist experimentation began to appear. These poets, who included
   Roy Fisher, Tom Raworth, Bob Cobbing, Gael Fisher and others formed the
   nucleus of the British Poetry Revival. This new generation helped bring
   about a renewed interest in the writings of Bunting, MacDiarmid, David
   Jones and David Gascoyne.

   Contemporary poets associated with Irish modernism include those
   associated with New Writers Press and The Beau magazine; these include
   Trevor Joyce, Michael Smith, Geoffrey Squires, Randolph Healy, and
   Maurice Scully. New Writers Press also published work by Thomas
   MacGreevy, Brian Coffey and Denis Devlin, introducing them to a new
   audience, and, in Coffey's case, facilitating a late flowering of new
   work.

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