Poetry May 1913

The May issue of Poetry's poetry is a poem--one poem, "The Death of Aggripina" by John Neihardt.  It seems like warmed-over Gibbon in verse to me (I'm reading too much New Age, I'm getting snarky). 

The essays are far more interesting.  A digest:

Harriet Monroe's essay "Tradition" seems to really capture the ambivalent stance of Poetry.  She rejects form as a basis for poetry, but locates it in "spiritual motive."  It's capital-arr Romanticism.  There's something almost Italian Futurist about it, tempered with a drop of Thoreau: "If he must inherit also forms and rules--better the free foot in the wilderness, better the upward flight of danger in a monoplane!"

Then, and this blows my mind, she pits the traditionalists against the modernists, which sort of blows up my thesis of her conciliatory approach: "It is in no desire to appease our critics, but to open a free road to one of our strongest poets, that we present this month Mr. Neihardt's essay in poetic tragedy on the old Roman theme.  There may be value in contrast; between April and May the issue is sharply drawn."

She follows this by declaring that John Masefield is in danger of losing himself to his popularity, pointing out that she's published both rave reviews and scathing attacks (Alice Corbin Henderson's attack is later in the issue). 

Speaking of Alice Corbin Henderson, she contributes a short piece about poetic rhythm, which is nice.  I can see it being teachable as a counterpoint to the normative iamb...

Last but not least, Uncle Ez.  He begins his review of Frost's A Boy's Will (his first book!) with the grand proclamation: "There is another personality in the realm of verse, another American..."  I'm writing a poem that quotes part of this review, but more on that in the "realm of verse."

 Not the most interesting issue, but it's following up on some really epic ones.  I like, though, the small note that says Poetry would like to buy back some of its first issues, at 25 cents each.  That's a sign of success, right?

The New Age, May 26 1913

Oh, New Age, bottomless well.  As usual, there's so much in this issue that I can hardly begin to catalog it all. I'll just be looking at a pair of columns from this one, "Present Day Criticism" and "Views and Reviews," back to back and by the same author [update: "PDC" was by Hastings all along. RTB 5/20/15].  Check it out:

“The recent judgment given against the woefully fallen Theosophical Society will in all probability paralyse the tentacles of this particular octopus, though its dying spasms may be even more malignantly directed than those of the suffragettes. But in our opinion the influence over the feeble-minded of quacks like Messrs. Yeats, Carpenter, and Tagore, is scarcely less pernicious than the more audacious and despotic humbug of Mrs. Besant and Mr. Leadbeater” (88).

This selection, from the column “Present-Day Criticism,” is a microcosm of the larger article.  The first half is a scathing attack on occult mysticism, particularly what we might now refer to as “New Age” mysticism, and in fact The New Age started more as that sort of New Age than the guild socialist New Age of 1913 (or so I recall from my research last quarter, I don’t have the books on hand but would be happy to find specifics for any interested party).  Orage used to be a young light of the theosophical movement, which he does not mention here (he writes under a pseudonym, “R. H. C.”).  His thesis is simple: all the books being published on Eastern mysticism miss the point of the actual texts.  We readers are advised to “go to the source” where there will be “nothing… mysterious,” simple messages like “Know Thyself.” 

Paired across the page, as if to prove the point, is one of Hastings’ translations of the Mahabharata.  The title is, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”  Point proven?  Naturally I think that the quick abstraction from poem to paraphrase is too violent, and also misses “the point.”  The Mahabharata passage is relevant in 2013, for one: it is a meditation on capital punishment. 

Some of the people he attacks are old friends, old enemies—but the anger directed at Yeats and Tagore pricks my 21^st century ears. 

Tagore and Yeats are both being touted over in Poetry, as reported earlier.  I wonder if Orage is aware of that part of their publicity: he doesn’t name Poetry, and probably didn’t need it (part of the story is about receiving an invitation to a Tagore reading), but I am still curious. 

On that reading Orage declined to attend:  I was thinking about this article last night at a poetry reading here in Seattle, a reading that left me mostly cold (with significant exceptions).  Here’s why Orage didn’t go to the Tagore reading:

“I myself received an invitation, but my ears, among other things, would not permit me to accept it. They told me, truly enough, that they were not yet to be trusted to judge in matters of literature. Without a good deal more training than mere education provides, our ears are much less reliable as critics of style than our eyes. Abracadabra may be made to sound well… I have heard Mr. Yeats chant a “poem” in the voice of an oracle delivering the Sibylline … and when I came afterwards to read the lines myself, the imposition on my ears was exposed. Until, then,

I can read with my ears as well as with my eyes they shall mew their inexperience in private practice.”

Well folks, there you have it.  I am curious whether readings were in fact as much a new phenomenon as R.H.C. seems to consider them.  Still, it’s fascinating how Yeats and Tagore, poets who rank among the most eminent of the 20^th century, are so cursorily deflated as performance pieces, even linked to advertising techniques.  My teacher, the late Herb Blau, told us that Yeats was the finest poet of the century.  Orage says Yeats is a charlatan.

Which, as an H.D. scholar, is something I have to constantly confront.  What is the value of personal lyrical mysticism in a modern age?  I’ll let that question shade my future posts.

Also of note in the issue: Pound continues his suggestions for improving graduate education with a two-pronged approach.  Grad students should be sure to be making positive contributions to knowledge, and their expertise should be collected in databases that the media can access whenever experts on particular poets are needed.  That’s the problem!  We need the media to do its part… ha.

Plenty of other good stuff, but I should stop. Will someone please pay me to recreate Richard Aldington’s “Letters from Italy” column?

hough:

The New Age, May 15 1913

Missing a few issues of The New Age has clearly had its price.  Trying to catch up with the 100-year-old contemporary issues after a few months hiatus faces me with serial articles by Aldington and Pound, of which I've missed large sections.  Alas.  Perhaps I'll squeeze in some retrospection soon. 

This week, The New Age is against the vote for women to the extent that its "Notes of the Week" are pretty painful this week.  The kinds of logic deployed are not unfamiliar. 

Pound has an essay in this issue raising familiar anxieties about graduate education, the third in a series titled "America, Chances and Remedies."  There was an especially weird moment when he castigates professors who are "passionately devoted, let us say, to literature, or more likely, each one of them devoted to some period, about which he knows more definite facts than any artist who lived in it!" (58).  A 100-year-old magazine article just called me out for studying it!  Perhaps that is overdramatic.  Really, what he seems to be saying is that artists should be invited into the academy to provide context for scholarly work.  I think that's happened to some extent, with the flowering of institutional creative writing.  Personally, I've studied under many artists and poet-scholars in my time in school, always to my great benefit, and often because of the conversations they were having with their all-scholarly peers.  Pound's a step ahead of an easy answer, though: "If fee were given, it would provide for the serious artist some means of support, other than that of overproduction and hurried production."  Sounds familiar to me.  Any of my friends pursuing MFAs want to comment on that?  And how about this issue coming fast on the heels of Contemporania in Poetry? 

Good gutting of The Blue Review, I'd wager it's by Hastings.  Interestingly, she includes John Middleton Murry in her scorn, but exempts Katherine Mansfield. 

There's also an article about Italy by Aldington, part of a series and a couple short stories by Beatrice Hastings under other names.  The story under the pseudonym "Alice Morning" would have been perfect for a paper that I have, alas, already turned in, on fashion and modernism.  The one under "T.K.L." is a great bash at scandalmongers. 

Poetry, April 1913

This is another epic issue of Poetry, with poems from Pound, Harriet Monroe herself, and Yeats.

 Pound’s Contemporania are the stars here.  I mistyped “starts,” a meaningful slip?  I’ll just note a few observations that might be useful.  First, I think that I learned something about the publication history of these poems from Cyrena Pondrom’s awesome essay “H.D. and the Origins of Imagism” from a 1985 issue of Paideuma, a journal currently run by dear friends (I worked there for a year).  If I remember correctly, Pound had sent poems to Poetry but demanded them held back so that Aldington and H.D. would be published first, before sending new poems in a more Imagiste style.  What strikes me most about this sequence, on reading it again, is perhaps how the poems define themselves.  They define their audience and their reception, and are out to provoke as well as enshrine themselves.  This isn’t exactly unprecedented, (“So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”) but what might be novel is that some of these poems aren’t about much else than their own quality.  This reminds me of a moment in Barrett Watten’s Plasma: “If it’s a good idea, it results in a permanent change.”  That whole stanza from Plasma could be about the Imagists…

I want to zoom in on two particular lines from the first poems: “I beg you, my friendly critics/ Do not set about to procure me an audience” (1).  Could this be referring to the apologia from March’s issue of Poetry?  I have a feeling that this poem is in dialog with Poetry itself—and The New Age as well, with its preoccupation with procurers.  Procurers show up again in “Pax Saturni,” and I wonder whether or not Pound is positioning himself against Beatrice Hastings and her denial of forced prostitution here.  Maybe?

Which leads me to make a note about how this project has developed: it is more of a public notebook than anything else.  I’m not really reviewing the little reviews in any sense beyond re-viewing.  I may hold back some things I’m thinking, or I might type them up, but I’m sure my thoughts are not complete.   

Yeats’ poem is thrown into biographical relief by the comment in the “Notes” section of the issue: “Mr. Yeats' poem is especially significant because of its rare autobiographical mood. It is seldom that this poet speaks of his attitude toward his art, or the world's attitude toward him.”  That seems like a good gloss to me—the poem is a combination of Yeats meditating on his dead acquaintances (and Maude Gonne, of course) and an ancient Irish legend.  I’m struck by how this poem is a foreshadowing of “Easter, 1916,” published three years earlier.  All changed, all changed utterly.  A terrible presentiment… I’m not enough of a Yeatsian to know exactly what’s going on here, I might try to figure it out. 

Lastly, Harriet Monroe puts her money on modernism in the essay at the end of the issue, “The New Beauty.”  She cuts her ties with Victorian and Elizabethan verse styles, in favor of a new beauty that that goes beyond questions of “subject, nor yet of form.”  Modernism is instead located in the power of vision—odd to juxtapose that next to Contemporania.  Yeats and H.D. might agree, though.  Monroe also pretty much admits to printing subpar poetry in order to encourage young authors.  See the apologia for Pound, in the previous issue.  Lastly, on a postcolonial note, she ends with fulsome praise for Rabindranath Tagore: “But this Hindoo shows us how provincial we are; England and America are little recently annexed corners of the ancient earth, and their poets should peer out over sea-walls and race-walls and pride-walls, and learn their own littleness and the bigness of the world.”  This follows on the reviews by Pound.  I’m not sure what to do with that, but I do think it is cool.

Poetry March 1913

Poetry March 1913

 

This issue didn’t have any poems that stood out to me as especially excellent, though it is famous for its essays on imagism.  I will admit that for a minute I thought I was readings early Yeats when I ran into Fannie Stearns Davis's “Two Songs of Conn the Fool.”  Very much Yeatsian in their subject matter and style. I might look into the connection. Perhaps they are imitations?  Davis, I’ve learned, was from Ohio, and would seem at first to have no reason to be so Irish…

Imagisme gets further defined with the publication of Flint’s famous essay, and Pound’s incredibly famous essay, on that subject.

The news, for me, is the editorial footnote:

“Editor's Note—In response to many requests for information regarding Imagism and the Imagistes, we publish this note by Mr. Flint, supplementing it with further exemplification by Mr. Pound. It will be seen from these that Imagism is not necessarily associated with Hellenic subjects, or with vers libre as a prescribed form” (198). 

It’s delightful, isn’t it?  The implication is that the public was more curious about the Greek content and the form than the underpinning idea, and Poetry is quick to make the distinction.  On the one hand, the footnote placates the “poems about aeroplanes” modernists, and on the other it heads off the anti-free-verse traditionalists.  Monroe attempts to determine the grounds of the debate to a place where it won't alienate key constituencies. 

Flint and Pound together are too much for this blog post, though I might refer back to it when they begin to fight over the definition of imagism later. 

Also, Harriet Monroe contributed an essay on the “Servian Epic,” really more of a report on a lecture by Madame Slavko Grouitch.  I’m intrigued because the First Balkan War appears often in The New Age, but I hadn’t exactly expected it to appear in Poetry.  The thesis: that the heroic spirit of Serbia has been preserved by their poetry, and it has inspired the war.  Weaponized poetics, not an uncommon theme, nor an irrelevant one—I think Poetry, in this pre-WWI moment, relishes the thought.  A line from a long-forgotten Latin class is hovering around my mind, I can’t quite catch it, but I think somewhere Juvenal says something to the effect that everyone would like to be able to hurt people, even if they don't want to actually hurt anyone...

Poetry February 1913

 

It’s been a very long time since I managed to get on the blog.  In keeping with the theme of the blog, that I’m following along simultaneously with the magazines 100 years later, I’m going to pretend that I’ve turned to the large pile of back-issues on my 1913 coffee table and give a catch-up of the most important details from each issue, at least for Poetry.  Perhaps I will then scramble over the many missed issues of The New Age and salvage what I can, hopefully then settling into a more regular rhythm (pun intended). 

February, 1913

Two things caught my eye in this issue.

First, at the end of the issue the editors take it upon themselves to issue a sort of apologia for Pound’s first poems in the first issue of Poetry (before I started this project).  At issue is the negative response to “To Whistler, American,” in which Pound calls Americans a “mass of dolts.”  I am intrigued by the tone of the editorial, which tries to excuse Pound on the grounds that he had been ignored in America, and is probably right to have left, and probably does have a quarrel:  “Mr. Pound is not the first American poet who has stood with his back to the wall, and struck out blindly with clenched fists in a fierce impulse to fight. Nor is he the first whom we, by this same stolid and indifferent rejection, have forced into exile and rebellion” (169).  A whiff of prophecy clings to that, right? Naturally, by including him in the magazine, they remedy this.  The editors of Poetry are always conscious of the power of their magazine as magazine, as a medium with real power.  This issue shies away from what has come to be known as modernist poetry, perhaps to retrench the magazine’s more serious and respectable side.  The magazine always strives to be moderate, which lends yet more weight to Ann Ardis’ thesis that there are few (if any) strictly modernist periodicals. 

Second, and perhaps less importantly, it published poems by Witter Bynner.  I first heard about Bynner in a backyard party in Fredericksburg, Virginia, from Diane Bachman, who studies him.  She got me interested in him by positioning him as the organizing force behind a now-mostly-forgotten center of modernism in Santa Fe, sort of in tension with Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Taos colony.  I may not be remembering that exactly right.  I’m most interested personally in his co-authored collection Spectra, a brutally funny satire of imagism.  His poems in this issue are earlier than that, and certainly earlier than his Santa Fe period.  None of them stand out to me as particularly excellent, as they are following the (apparently) dead-end version of modernism that tried to make-it-new through increased versification and incorporation of urban themes. 

Edith Wyatt’s rave review of John Masefield’s Dauber uses very familiar rhetoric to advance traditional poetry.  More on this soon, when in a later issue Alice Corbin will rip Masefield hard.  Again, it’s how Poetry (Harriet Monroe?) positions itself in controversy that interests me most.