Search Results

Harriet Monroe’s role as one of the principal editors and promoters of literary modernism in Poetry, A Magazine of Verse was profoundly influenced by her experience of the American West. Sick with pneumonia, Monroe travelled from Chicago to Arizona in 1899 to recuperate. The West made her well and she became a firm believer in the eugenic properties of American nature. Monroe’s early nature essays display her desire to read American nature through the tropes of British Romanticism as a divinely infused space. As she became more familiar with the region, however, she became more intrigued by the notion of how the American imagination might prove itself more fit than the European imagination by mastering nature rather than bowing before it. Echoing Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick Jackson Turner, Monroe urged American poets to test themselves against the subject of American nature as a means of staving off racial decay. She concluded that the poet must be like a pioneer and conquer nature by creating something big, powerful, and new out of the waste. Monroe’s belief that American nature was key to avoiding European degeneracy influenced her editing of Poetry and her relationship with her foreign correspondent, Ezra Pound.

This chapter examines how the New Verse movement achieved spectacular success by focusing on the role played by Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, particularly in creating a space for contemporary American verse where none had been. Poetry, founded by Harriet Monroe in Chicago in 1912, exemplifies the productive intersection between twentieth-century artistic avant-gardes and the forces of modern disciplinary specialization. This chapter looks at how Monroe and others forged Poetry's identity through antagonistic opposition to such “standpatters” as the “quality magazines,” transforming it into a pioneering endeavor in the rhetorical self-fashioning of a twentieth-century American avant-gardism. It also considers Poetry's feud with The Dial, which still saw poetry as an instrument of moral uplift that was now menaced by what it called “Futurism.” Finally, it discusses Poetry's advocacy of institutional support for contemporary poets, and especially how it reformulated central concepts of literary value—genius, masterpiece, tradition, form, audience—into a forceful poetics of avant-garde progressivism. The chapter argues that Poetry's avant-garde experiments have a transformative impact upon American poetry, and literary culture more generally.

This chapter discusses the history of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, one of the best known of ‘little magazines’ of literary modernism, perhaps the one that encapsulates the centrality of small magazines in modernism's formation and dissemination. Founded in Chicago in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, and acquiring for its first six years the dynamic if combustible services of Ezra Pound as foreign correspondent, it devoted itself to promoting what Monroe described as the ‘new poetry’. During its early years it published a range of young, experimental, and often soon to be well-known poets from both sides of the Atlantic, including all the major modernist poets, frequently playing an invaluable role in their emergence and success as writers.

Chapter 3 considers the significance of the 1893 World’s Fair on contemporary notions of the Midwest as representative of the nation’s future. We follow Masters to Chicago, where he worked as a lawyer with Clarence Darrow, campaigned for the perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, and failed to find an audience for his reform-focused literature. After struggling to find a venue for his writing, Masters tried to appeal to nascent modernist sensibilities exemplified by Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine. In Spoon River Anthology, first published in Reedy’s Mirror in 1914, Masters synthesized his memories of Petersburg and Lewistown in poetry that emulated the modernist style of younger poets like Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle and he found acceptance among readers of early modernist verse.

The move back to a health-giving nature did not preclude or contradict a move forward into modernity. The move back ensured that Americans would maintain the racial, physical, and mental strength to move into a future where the ever more complete control of nature was the goal. The retreat was a key component of the advance. The conception of American nature as America’s best defense against bodily, mental, and cultural decay is still very much with us, a product, in part, of those writers like Monroe, Pound, and Moore, who transmuted the myth into art and made nature modern.

This chapter examines how modern American poetry dealt with skyscrapers as a theme during the 1910s. The most potent icons of modernity in the early twentieth-century city were great buildings, structures of unprecedented scale and grandeur that punctuated the skyline and symbolized the metropolitan ethos. Carrying a wide range of symbolic meanings, skyscrapers and other great buildings, such as Manhattan's Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, drew strong interest from anyone seeking to represent urban modernity, from painters and sculptors to photographers, commercial artists, and the many Americans who began writing city poems in the early 1910s, including Sara Teasdale, Harriet Monroe, and Carl Sandburg. This chapter discusses the American poet's fascination with the skyscraper, which commands attention not only for its enormous degree of visual prominence but also for its tremendous, if profoundly paradoxical, signifying power.

The events that would shape Lao She's emergence as one of China's most important new novelists happened in London, some 15 years before he arrived there, ‘on or around 1910’, the date to which Virginia Woolf would famously attribute the birth of modernism. This chapter outlines a trajectory of the ways in which the cultural landscape of the capital, until this point ‘extraordinarily provincial and chauvinistic’, was broadened by modernist interaction with China, taking Ezra Pound as the lynchpin of a global aesthetic exchange that, in its turn, would determine Hu Shi's prescriptions for Chinese writing after May Fourth. While China's own literary revolution would result from specific experiences of modernity that were indissoluble from the exigencies of colonialism, it was imperial expansion that gave rise to formations of artistic modernism in the West, prompted by the concentration of wealth and power in imperial capitals and a simultaneous access to subordinate ‘other’ cultures.

Unlike the new development at Carmel and the recently revitalized fishing village of Provincetown, the old frontier trading post of Taos, New Mexico, was experiencing slow, steady growth at the turn of the twentieth century. The rapid, regional expansion of a modern, automobile-based tourism into Taos and a broadly-articulated modernist fascination with experiencing the ways of the primitive ‘other’ attracted a distinctively modernist coterie to the region and shifted the local power structures from the Native Puebloans and established Hispanic residents toward the relative newcomers: Anglo business and land owners. This chapter considers the development of the local tourism and real estate industry alongside a vogue for witnessing, appreciating, and representing Native American ceremonial dance ceremonials. Through analysis of literary representations of these dances by Marsden Hartley, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Harriet Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Mary Austin, this chapter identifies a fascination with Native dance as a distinctively modernist practice: ones that served, for each other and the larger world, as ‘a sign of modernism in us.’ Further, these dances were integral to the creation of the ineffable ‘Taos mystique’ that undergirded the local tourism and real estate industry.

The aim of this chapter is to ‘showcase’ two stellar (in more than one sense) modernist texts which met with relish the challenge presented by the pace of technological and literary change, and which remain to this day essentially uncategorizable: Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Enemy of the Stars’ (1914) and Mina Loy’s ‘Songs to Joannes’ (1915). These texts put a cosmological understanding of the universe as medium in dialectical tension with the generation of exclusive closed circuits and loops (an exclusiveness that might be thought to amount to madness). Lewis and Loy aimed not simply to represent, but to reproduce, the idea of communication as an adjustment of signal-to-noise ratio. The chapter concludes with a discussion of cryptographic modernism, and of the poems of Harriet Monroe.