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).
