Old English poetry could be something of a touchstone for modernists of the early twentieth century such as Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden. They found themselves drawn to its concrete vocabulary and quasi-imagist use of juxtaposition and irony as alternatives to their own late-Victorian inheritance.
In 2015, when for over a century the rhetoric of heroism has been press-ganged into the service of powers and principalities whose ideologies and values the Beowulf-poet would have violently scorned, a brief recapitulation of his nuanced exploration of the Anglo-Saxon heroic ethos, its glories as well as it horrors, might serve as a welcome bit of balance (with apologies to Fox News—yeah, right).
![Beowulf and the Modern Hero](https://assets-global.website-files.com/5f841fcaa3dd5feb535cba81/60458c556f3e9c3c35a4db1e_MFUNov2015Beowolf.jpeg)