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Fantasies of Belonging, Fears of Precarity

Melissa Bradshaw

in Women Making Modernism

“Fantasies of Belonging, Fears of Precarity” considers the politics of late twentieth-century feminist reclamation work in modernist literary studies. Many prolific women artists were doubly left ... More

“Fantasies of Belonging, Fears of Precarity” considers the politics of late twentieth-century feminist reclamation work in modernist literary studies. Many prolific women artists were doubly left behind, first by the New Critics, and then, several generations later, by feminist scholars who, in their work recovering women artists lost to New Criticism’s masculinist narrative did not find a place for them in what quickly became a narrow, and predictable, feminist canon. This chapter focuses on Amy Lowell and Edith Sitwell, women whose multiple roles as poets, editors, and critics allowed them significant access to power and with it, the opportunity to mentor and support other women. And yet, as the chapter demonstrates, they did not. Despite rich personal relationships with women, neither Sitwell nor Lowell had significant or lasting professional relationships with other women. Their subsequent exclusion from feminist modernist literary criticism perhaps tells us as much about the identifications and interests that drove late twentieth-century feminist recovery work as it does about the inclusion of more now-canonical figures.Less

China in Whitechapel, Japan in Shepherd's Bush: Aldington, Ford, Pound, Fletcher, and Lowell

Rupert Richard Arrowsmith

in Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African, and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde

This chapter examines the wave of interest in Japanese visual culture that spread out from Ezra Pound profoundly to affect the work of the other literary figures associated with Imagism, and ... More

This chapter examines the wave of interest in Japanese visual culture that spread out from Ezra Pound profoundly to affect the work of the other literary figures associated with Imagism, and considers the circumstances under which Pound's attention turned away towards China. New evidence is presented to show that Richard Aldington began writing Japan-influenced poetry in the British Museum Print Room at the same time as Pound's visits, while John Gould Fletcher and Amy Lowell looked at similar exhibits at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The cultural effects of the 1910 Japan–British exhibition in London —attended by eight million people —are also considered. Pound's interest in China is shown to have developed during 1913 —not 1910 as has been alleged by certain other critics —as a result of two important exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery and the V&A.Less

Positioning Genre: The Dramatic Monologue in Cultures of Recitation

Carrie J. Preston

in Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance

This chapter situates Charlotte Mew, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Amy Lowell in relation to the cultures of recitation that ushered in modernism, including the Chautauqua Circuit and Poetry Bookshop. ... More

This chapter situates Charlotte Mew, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Amy Lowell in relation to the cultures of recitation that ushered in modernism, including the Chautauqua Circuit and Poetry Bookshop. Central modernist aesthetic principles were responses to popular recitations: Modernist impersonality rejected the Delsartean cultivation of personality but incorporated many of its interpretive techniques. The practice Eliot famously called the mythical method is a modernist revision of typological hermeneutics, yet another mythic pose.Less

Reception

Jason Stacy

in Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town

The book version of Spoon River Anthology (1915) proved to be a best seller that has never been out of print. Chapter 5 follows the reception of the book, starting with its acclaim by modernist ... More

The book version of Spoon River Anthology (1915) proved to be a best seller that has never been out of print. Chapter 5 follows the reception of the book, starting with its acclaim by modernist critics like Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound for presenting the Midwestern small town as a microcosm for the contradictions and amorality of modern life. On the other hand, popular reviewers in venues as varied as the New York Times and the Topeka Daily Capital found a latent populism in Spoon River Anthology that sympathized with the laboring classes and lambasted immoral elites. These rival interpretations ignited debates that fueled sales of the book, which inspired imitators and parodies in the year after the book was published.Less

Constructing Walt Whitman: Literary History and Histories of Rhythm

Erin Kappeler

in Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form

This chapter argues that Walt Whitman’s position in literary history as the father of American free verse was not secured until after the 1920s, significantly later than has been recognized. It ... More

This chapter argues that Walt Whitman’s position in literary history as the father of American free verse was not secured until after the 1920s, significantly later than has been recognized. It traces contentious debates about Whitman’s prosody in the American academy in the 1910s and 1920s to show that arguments about Whitman’s rhythm were motivated by concerns about an imagined American race. Recovering these early critical arguments about Whitman’s metrical forms helps to illuminate just how imbricated rhythmic and nationalistic discourses have been in American poetics. This chapter thus suggests how prosodies, as systems of belief, help to create and uphold the imagined continuities and lineages that make up our literary histories, thereby highlighting the importance of attending to the politics as well as the aesthetics of prosody.Less

Words: The ‘Sensuous Realist’1

in Knowledge is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai

As a translator of Chinese poetry, Ayscough first received attention because of her collaboration with her close friend Amy Lowell, American modernist poet. The two produced a collection of poetry in ... More

As a translator of Chinese poetry, Ayscough first received attention because of her collaboration with her close friend Amy Lowell, American modernist poet. The two produced a collection of poetry in 1921 entitled Fir Flower Tablets that brought much critical acclaim. Their work brought them directly into the sphere of influence of Modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, Arthur Waley and Witter Bynner.Less

War Games, 1914–1915

Glenn Watkins

in Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War

Romain Rolland believed that music could signal profound social changes prior to their appearance, and similarly, when the Great War erupted the composer Alexander Skriabin welcomed it as a ... More

Romain Rolland believed that music could signal profound social changes prior to their appearance, and similarly, when the Great War erupted the composer Alexander Skriabin welcomed it as a manifestation of his own apocalyptic views. Others contended that the explosive language of Igor Stravinsky's Le sacre due printemps, originally titled “The Great Sacrifice” and given its premiere little more than a year before the outbreak of World War I, had also virtually prophesied the price of nationhood in the conflict to come. Stravinsky's denial of any and all programmatic associations began immediately following Le sacre du printemps with his Three Pieces for String Quartet. Following this work's premiere in New York in November 1915, the future Pulitzer Prize winner Amy Lowell wrote a set of poems in which she claimed to have attempted to “reproduce the sound and movement of the music as far as is possible in another medium.” The opening “March” of Stravinsky's Trois pièces faciles for piano duet, written in December 1914, offers a specific opportunity to test the appeal of miniature musical war games.Less

Love & Art: Being Phantoms Together

Susan McCabe

in H. D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism

Hilda became H.D. when Pound named her poems “Imagist,” using her trim initials to prove the movement’s aesthetic restraint. She fell in love with Richard Aldington, who joined her and Amy Lowell in ... More

Hilda became H.D. when Pound named her poems “Imagist,” using her trim initials to prove the movement’s aesthetic restraint. She fell in love with Richard Aldington, who joined her and Amy Lowell in writing Imagist poems. The Great War broke into their writing. Aldington enlisted. During the war, H.D. suffered his adultery and fled to Cornwall with a lover, while Bryher found a pen pal in Lowell, who introduced her to H.D.’s poems and the 1916 Sea Garden, with its raw, haunted landscape. Bryher met H.D., just then in Bryher’s favored topography of Druidic Cornwall. Encouraged by H.D., Aldington and Bryher exchanged letters; he enjoyed her autobiographical Development.Less

Practitioner Criticism: Poetry

Holly A. Laird

in The Edinburgh Companion to D. H. Lawrence and the Arts

This chapter places Lawrence’s poetics, as developed in his poetry, in relation to his responses to other poets and poetic tendencies or movements, such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Symbolism and ... More

This chapter places Lawrence’s poetics, as developed in his poetry, in relation to his responses to other poets and poetic tendencies or movements, such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Symbolism and Aestheticism as well as contemporary free verse, Realism and Imagism. Lawrence knew and corresponded with many poets throughout his career, from Yeats and Pound to Amy Lowell and H. D. The extent to which he assimilated or resisted such diverse influences is the focus of this re-evaluation of Lawrence’s paradoxical status as an outsider inside. His poetics elude simple definition. So dissimilar are the kinds of verse to which Lawrence responded that his general openness to old and new voices, alike, helps account not only for this maverick status, but for the sheer variety of verse forms practiced in his poetry. Through the poetry of Whitman, Lawrence recovered the sense of ‘wonder’ that he had felt as a child hearing the Bible and listening to church hymns. Poetry also became a form of play. He soon discovered, too, how much work, or ‘groping’, was entailed in writing and resisted falsifying perfection. Double-edged, the ‘jagged’ edges perceived by Conrad Aiken became a signature trait. Dialectical and conflictual relationalism inflects his Whitmanesque style.Less

Spirit and Society: Blake’s Early American Appeal

Linda Freedman

in William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture

Blake’s religious dissent made him a natural ally for reformers whose works were driven by personal religious quest. This chapter looks at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist reading of Blake, ... More

Blake’s religious dissent made him a natural ally for reformers whose works were driven by personal religious quest. This chapter looks at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist reading of Blake, Lydia Maria Child’s reprinting of ‘The Little Black Boy’ in the context of Abolitionism, the appearance of several of the Poetical Sketches, and a commentary on The Little Vagabond in the context of social utopianism. It exposes the irony as well as the importance of the kinship liberal Americans felt with Blake. By the end of the century, Blake was becoming known in literary circles. Thomas Wentworth Higginson drew a comparison between Blake and Emily Dickinson in his introduction to the 1890 edition of the latter’s Poems and Amy Lowell turned to Blake as a master of poetic form, with a brilliant pictorial imagination and a sensitive ear, but most importantly, a great mind.Less

Starting with a Bang

James Dempsey

in The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer

The first issue of The Dial under Thayer and Watson came out in January 1920. It was an almost immediate sensation, thanks to its offering works both avant-garde and approachable. Thayer championed ... More

The first issue of The Dial under Thayer and Watson came out in January 1920. It was an almost immediate sensation, thanks to its offering works both avant-garde and approachable. Thayer championed the verse of Cummings in particular, but not everyone agreed with him: Amy Lowell and Thayer made a wager as to whether or not Cummings would come to be recognized within the American literary canon. Pound also published his prose and verse in the magazine, including “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” The magazine steered a careful course, trying to provide adult writing while avoiding the forces of censorship, including the infamous New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and its director John Sumner.Less