Poetry April 1914

Just a quick post on Poetry to end the month of Little Review Reviews:

Amy Lowell headlines this issue--following some essays, she's contributing poems here. I like a lot of them, but one enriched by context is "The Foreigner," a goofy Noyes-ian swashbuckler poem about a swordfight between the speaker-foreigner and a bunch of callow treacherous locals. I think it's an allegory of Lowell's trip to England, and sheds some light on her confident encounter with the London avant-garde. Lowell figuring herself as a deft swordsman outfencing the locals seems a little ludicrous now...

More interesting formally is "The Forsaken," a prose dramatic monologue of a Swiss woman who is pregnant, and whose lover just died in an avalanche. Interesting formally as a prose poem in Poetry.

Joyce Kilmer writes so sweetly: his poem "Easter" is printed in this issue. John Reed also contributes a poem, though I tend to prefer his journalistic work in The Masses to his poetry. 

Arthur Johnson contributes a poem "Lyra Vernalis," which is now the second pre-"Waste Land" wasteland poem in Poetry after Cawein's (see above). 

Last quick note: there's a definite Orientalist strain in this issue as the vogue for Eastern art hits Poetry--in particular, several references to Japanese art and a sequence of poems by A. J. Russell titled "The House of Takumi: Poem-Sequence from the Japanese." Unfortunately these are as "from" as the "Sonnets from the Portuguese": a note in the authors section points out that "Mr. Russell's poem is not a translation."

Lastly, and related: this is the first ad in Poetry for something other than books and publishing-related stuff. Looks pretty cool, too:

The New Age, April 23 1914

As usual, I'll open with the pieces that are most interesting to me (and perhaps to you, dear readers, both of you) before adding quick notes about the rest.

One of my rediscoveries during this project has been the impact of Allen Upward's writing and poetry on Ezra Pound. This issue contains an essay by Pound titled "Allen Upward Serious.". Period in the title in the original. It's a passionate defense of Upward as a thinker and writer, along familiar Poundian lines. Apparently Upward's recent books, "The Divine Mystery" and "The New Word" are being panned in the press because Upward also writes popular fiction--there's a snobby reaction against his ability to write "serious.". Pound also makes his defense of Upward's etymology of "glaux" as derived from the Greek for owl, later used in Canto XXI (see Liebregts 2004, 183, I edited an essay of Liebregts' for Paideuma when I worked there, so it's nice to find this connection). This essay on Upward also contains some insight into Pound's political development, as he credits Upward for claiming that "a nation is civilized in so far as it recognizes the special faculties of the individual, and makes use therof" (780). This makes a nice self-referential double-knot: by making this Upward's point, Pound lets his praise of Upward be that recognition while also calling attention to his own lack of cultural support. It's also Pound's concern, of course, and he was great at "making use of" special individuals. It's also clear that this is an elitist anti-democratic standpoint, the next sentence: "You do not weigh coals with the assayer's balance."  Reference to Pound pere, the assayer?

Quick notes (because it is the end of the month and I have a backlog):

Arthur Penty contributes an article titled "Medievalism vs. Modernism" which only obliquely deals with art: for him, the terms refer to political philosophies. On the one side, the guild system, Luddite anti-machinery craftsmanship, and nonalienated labor. For the modernist side, mechanization, alienation, Sidney Webb.

Peter Selver contributes a poem lampooning modern poets: "A Few Words with a Modern Poet," almost certainly targeting the Imagistes (794).

There's a huge controversy brewing between proto-fascist racialist Anthony Ludovici and others, including Annanda Coomarswami. Fascinating, disturbing stuff--Ludovici claiming that aesthetics are racial: "Ugly is simply a word denoting 'not our race' or 'not a good, healthy example of our race.'" (799). This was public discourse 100 years ago, albeit provocative discourse. At least one "R. Cox" protests that Ludovici in particular and The New Age in general is "too aristocratic." Must medievalism and aristocracy go hand-in-hand?

The New Age, April 16 1914

This issue of The New Age is uncommonly packed with content that caught my eye, so this post might ramble a little.

As a student of modernism, I'll look first at A.E.R.'s (Alfred E. Randall) review of Horace B. Samuel's book Modernities. Samuel's book apparently followed \ thinkers and writers that he considered modern, with one figure per chapter. It's the review, though, that interests me more (having not read the book this is only natural). A.E.R. enters into ongoing debates about the nature of modernity. Vide:

"Exactly  what  the word  “Modernities”  means,  I  do  not know and Mr. Samuel does not say; to call them “Newnesses” would be to risk a fearful pun on the name of one of our wholesale providers of reading matter. What is a “Modernity”?" (755).

The pun, I think, is on the eponymous publishing company founded by George Newnes. Haha, I guess, but to continue: what is a "modernity?" A.E.R. expresses displeasure with Samuel's definition, which I'll quote:

"If, however, an attempt were to be made to pronounce of what the spirit of modernity really consists, one might suggest that it is a spirit of energy, of fearlessness in anaylsis, whose sole raison d'etre and whose sole ideal is actual life itself." (Samuel)

A.E.R.'s objection to this definition is that these are not unique characteristics of a single moment or movement, historically speaking. This is a version of the many-modernisms theory. The last chapter of Samuel's book is titled "The Future of Futurism," in which he restates the thesis that energy defines modernism, and futurism is special because the form exceeds the content. A.E.R.'s response to it is worth quoting.

"[Samuel claims that] the function of form is to extract the whole emotional quality of its content, or, in other words, form exists for the purpose of emptying itself. It is not a container, but an extractor, of its content; it is Life plucking out its own entrails, if I may use so violent a personification; in other words, it is not form. There is one word that describes such a conception; it is phantasmagoria; and that is what Mr. Samuel really means by modernity" (756).

To give this a little context and analysis: lately Orage, A.E.R., and therefore TNA at large have been pleading for a common-sense English nationalist aesthetic based on wisdom (see his comments on Greek sculpture on page 755, for example). It's that strange paradox where TNA promotes some modernisms (particularly visual modernism) but not others. The bloggable quick answer might be that they feel the pressure that contentless form places on political organization, pre-flecting the debate between postmodernism and identity literature (I'm not qualified to speak on that debate, but my ear picks up a resonance). The excellent modernist artwork that Orage prints, like Roberts' image in this issue (see below), usually have a recognizable non-abstract content-contained in them.

Orage also makes a vicious attack on Harold Monro and his Poetry and Drama, but I'll be better equipped to talk about it tomorrow when I pick up the bound editions of P and D from my library.

Going back to the beginning of this week's TNA, the issue begins with a discussion of Edward Carson and the Ulster resistance to Home Rule. I had no idea that he was also the prosecutor of Oscar Wilde's libel case. By this time, he's helping to organize the illegally-armed Ulster militia that will ultimately keep Northern Ireland part of the UK. The New Age, though, thinks he is just bluffing and that the northern counties will use their armed wing as leverage in negotiations, before inevitably joining the rest of Ireland. Alas.

A. H. Hannay contributes a review and critique of Benedetto Croce's "The Theory of Art." Croce, according to Hannay, believes that imagination precedes perception. Artistic vision becomes everyday vision: "The visual perception of ordinary people, for instance, is not the  datum  of  the  painter,  it is itself derived from some painter’s vision: it  is a repetition of a previous  original vision. And that vision was imaginative: it created a possible experience" (749). Croce-via-Hannay might provide a lens for modernist art as carving out new possible visions, and has the benefit of being part of the contemporary conversation.

Quick notes:

Arthur Thorn includes a short piece titled "The Starving Man: A True Story," about a magician-type who has fasted for many weeks.

There's a translation of a Checkov play, "Popping the Question," a silly farce about property and propriety.

Ananda Coomarswami, who has appeared before in connection with both The Egoist and TNA, contributes a piece on art history.

The correspondence pages include R.B. Kerr (a contributor elsewhere) making a Marxist rebuttal of Beatrice Hastings' antifeminism, explaining that her vision of femininity as separate from the sphere of work is class-based and, therefore, baseless when broadly applied.

There's also an angry dust-up with T.E. Hulme over cubism, penned by one Harold B. Harrison. Could he be real?

At one point Wilde gets taken to task for writing prose in poetic rhythm.

This is by William Roberts, with a caption by Hulme in the magazine which I'll quote here because of its relevance to Orage's piece on Futurist form:

"This drawing contains four figures. I could point out the position of these  figures  in. more detail,  but I think such detailed indication misleading. No artist can create abstract  form  spontaneously ; it  is always generated, or, at  least, suggested, by the  consideration of some  outside concrete shapes. But such shapes are only interesting if you want to  explain the psychology of the  process of composition in the artist's mind. The interest of the drawing itself depends on the forms it contains. The fact that such forms were  suggested by human  figures is of no importance" (753).

The Egoist, April 15 1914

Leigh Henry begins (I think--I half-remember something like this before) a series called "Liberations: Studies of Individuality in Contemporary Music" with a piece on the music of Francesco Balila Pratella. Henry's essay begins, suitably enough, as a manifesto, delineating the different conditions of life that call for a new kind of artist: "With the discoveries of science and the invention and perfection of new types of mechanism, the external aspect of life has undergone a complete change, and this has naturally caused a corresponding alteration in the mental standpoint of the artist" (147). Perhaps in rebuke to some of the other authors in The Egoist, Henry joins the Futurist camp by also explicitly stating that ancient wisdom no longer applies in this new world. "Liberations" isn't the first time that Futurism has cropped up in my readings in these periodicals, but it is the first time that the genre of Futurist manifesto has been ported so perfectly (though ironically also a review). There's a focus on the value of materials over the human values, of science over emotion, of provisional intellectual constructions over monumental constructions--the last being my favorite characterization of Futurist art from the piece: "not the erection of useless monuments destined to obstruct the progress of the future, but the construction of light and effective edifices which, serving a material purpose, shall remain standing only until some superior form be discovered." Henry praises Pratella for his virile exuberance, unflinching individualism, etc. etc., and it all fits as a nice parallel theme to the general arc of The Egoist. 

From the correspondence pages:

The feud with Stephen Byington continues, as the former contributor keeps talking past-and-through his former editors. There's a neat formulation of anti-Platonic egoism in the editors' response: "The influence of the Platonic Idea has increased and is increasing : and we consider it our business and pleasure as far as we are able to resist it" (157). This in the context of The Egoist's dislike of abstract terms that define reality, and as counter to Byington's point that Descartes' idea of "idea" has supplanted Plato's in modern usage.

Aldington gets called out by Amliea Dorothy Defries, who seems to be quite formidable. You may recall that she wrote to him about the "Divine Origin" of art three issues ago. Aldington was nasty and imagist in his response. While her efforts to cut him down to size have mixed, though eloquent, results, I will include her analysis of imagism for its value as a contemporary critique:

He must know, too, that great poets are not the only people who are exact. Every scientist, great and small ; all architects, even builders ; and all engineers—even plumbers, are exact. Every mathematician, all financiers, every decently successful man of business, even shopkeepers are exact... These may all be great poets, but if they are it is not because of their exactness. Nor can the giving of " emotions, experiences, observations in exact phraseology " make them into artists: Technique ALONE is not art, an obvious truth that our eager people of the younger generation so nearly forget: and Mr. Aldington too truly bares their thin soul for us when he gives them, and himself, away, saying " The difficulty—the real problem for the artist—is to present the exact emotion, the exact vision, the exact Image." This is all very well, if I may take it for granted that he is allowing for the emotion, the vision, the image being greatly conceived, in the first place.

You may, reader, see where she's going to take this: the greatly conceived art work must come from somewhere, something she considers divine and Mother Natural. She defends the Victorians scorned by Aldington, pointing out (correctly) that both she and Aldington are in part Victorian. I found it difficult to learn anything about her, but Devries went on to write some kind of biography of Patrick Geddes, and Tagore wrote the preface. Further, she became an art historian, traveler, architectural critic, and, intriguingly, author of a handbook on the cultivation of mushrooms. I'll look forward to Aldington's reply, if he deigns to do so. The knot of Pratella, Aldington, and Defries is just beautiful.

Quick Notes:

The weekly "Views and Comments" is all about politics today. Perhaps most interestingly, the author (Marsden or Weaver, I assume) predicts, though satirically, that politics as creative entertainment will become increasingly important.

Portrait of the Artist continues with the passage in which Stephen tells on the vicious prefect.

I didn't comment on the first installment of "Memoirs of a Charming Person" by one "M. de V-M" from the last issue, but this was too cool to miss. A mysterious count, an occult sage, explains that each of the four elements has its corresponding kind of spirit. With natural processes (nothing satanic), one can come to know these creatures, the gnomes, sylphs, nymphs, and salamanders. Once you can see them and talk to them, you'll be mobbed by potential suitors from the spirit world because they attain immortality by mating with a human.

The New Age, April 9 1914

It often happens that the journals I read lead me to other texts. Their combination of curation and criticism, combined with their dialogic nature, means the art happening out of the journal is often as important as the art within it. This week's The New Age is an example of this. Orage's (I believe)  "Present Day Criticism" is a fascinating, socially engaged close reading of a poem by J.C. Squire. It in turn is a pretty amazing poem. I had to find it after beginning Orage's column. Here's the link to it on Project Gutenberg, click on this link to open Squire's poems and search "in a restaurant." The poem's title is "Ode: In a Restaurant," and it has Orage up in arms, performing one of the closest readings that I have found of a poem of length in any periodical so far. Quick synopsis: a poet drinking whiskey at the restaurant muses over his transcendental powers, but moves from scorn to empathy with the proprietors and servers, muses over the globalization of food that the restaurant represents, and finally surrenders to mundane reality. Orage opens by explaining that the poem is a satirical soliloquy of a modern poet, "carried out even to  realistic extreme in reproduction of the alternating metrical order and disorder which betrays the nerves scorified..." (720). Squire's poem is on the psychology of modernism, then, reproduced down to form from an observer. This is part of the satirical tradition of modernism that is so vibrant in The New Age, and its importance might be hinted at by the fact that Orage almost never likes a poem outside of TNA: the poem was published in The New Statesman, a journal not stocked by the MJP, but maybe I'll try to find it. It's a kind of proto-Prufrock, down to the music from the farther room:

The weak unsatisfied strain
        Of a band in another room;
        Through this dull complex din
        Comes winding thin and sharp!
        The gnat-like mourning of the violin,
        The faint stings of the harp.
        The sounds pierce in and die again,
Like keen-drawn threads of ink dropped into a glass
Of water, which curl and relax and soften and pass.
Briefly the music hovers in unstable poise,
Then melts away, drowned in the heavy sea of noise.
        And I, I am now emasculate.
        All my forces dissipate;
        Conquered by matter utterly,
        Moving not, willing not, I lie,
        Like a man whom timbers pin
        When the roof of a mine falls in.

I think that's excellent. I think one of the reasons Orage writes so much about this poem is that it is a moving target, a serious satire, a dramatic monologue, a psychological romantic poem that is about material goods. Here's what I mean: "This piece, as a satire, is terrible. The author spares never. We are made to hear the last words of the damned man, word of cynicism against self, and everything else. The poet knows that henceforth he is tied henceforth to his inexorable ame-damnee: 'Fool! Exert your will/ Finish your whiskey up, and pay your bill" (720). That's just a taste of the essay. Hopefully it is sufficient to give a quick taste, and anyone who wants more can go find it. One last note: Orage interprets this poem through his politics. It's very much a socialist reading, what we'd now call Marxist criticism, as the depicted consciousness's relationship to material culture is the whole point. 

I'm going to write more about that poem in this journal, but not here or now. Moving on to the issue as a whole, I noticed that this is another of those special New Age-s that has a loosely defined, central concern. This time it is about the relationship between the producer and the produced. I'll do my usual quick notes with that in mind.

"Notes of the Week" continues discussion of the Curragh incident, in which British troops made it known that they would not attack Ulster (more complicated than that, sorry for abbreviating). The New Age suggests that this fracture between what the army wants and what the troops will do marks the time for a general revolution. Amazing. This kind of instability, right before WWI breaks out.

A. J. Penty writes on economic reform, revolution, and Fabianism vs. Medievalism. Thesis: value in life is from a positive relationship to work, which will require a guild system.

Orage jokes about Henry James as biographer in "Readers and Writers," claiming that James would be his  choice to write the life of Orage. Jokes aside, there is a fascinating passage just past that explains TNA's view of contemporary literature:

Readers occasionally find fault with THE NEW AGE for apparently having no literary policy-as if you had only to sit down and imagine a policy and then proceed to expound it. But a policy is not arrived at in that way. That way lies idiosyncrasy. To formulate a  true policy, two things  are required-first, a good standard, and, secondly,  a perceptible drift and tendency in one’s age. While aiming to possess good standards, I affirm that our age is for the present too distracted and puzzled to have any particular tendency. Our writers are revolving very busily on their axes, and some, even, set off for somewhere; but who can say that so much as a  school are  going in the  same direction? (722).

As a so-called scholar of "modernism," this is interesting because it shows that even the most well-read critics of the time did not see any unifying features of modernism. His chosen example is "energetics," apparently suggested by Gosse as a common feature of modernism. Sounds right: modernism is about energy, which would gather Futurism, nascent Vorticism, etc. underneath a single umbrella. Orage, though, points out that there are anti-energetic poets (his example: Tagore). Whether or not Orage really thinks this, it highlights the murkiness of being contemporary.

Anthony Ludovici contributes an essay critiquing the arts and crafts movement directly, especially the furniture of Romney Green. He finds it clunky and impractical, and using this failure to call for more and better craft.

Walter Sickert eulogizes Spencer Frederick Gore as a "Perfect Modern." Another definition.

Much more, as always, remains in the issue. I've neglected these student essays, though, for too long. Until next time--

The Egoist, April 1 1914

This issue didn't pack quite the punch of some: here's what I noticed.

Portrait continues and continues to fit like a hand-in-a-glove in The Egoist. This issue's piece continues the critique of the Catholic church begun earlier. It's actually far more apparent than I'd remembered from my last (non-serialized) read-through. The context makes it pop, context like:

Richard Aldington's piece on mystical Latin poetry in the March 16 issue excites a correspondent (one Amelia Defries)  to write in positing that God is behind all great art, opposed to Aldington's contention that art has no divine origin. Aldington counter-attacks this position with classic Imagist rhetoric, applied:

"This much can be said. A work of art is so precisely because it is not divine or inspired or supernatural in any way. In the case of literature a work of art is the record of an experience, an emotion, an observation; its value as art depends upon the method of presentation. If the method is untrained, amateurish, not precise, the result is a collection of vague generalities which only torment the reader by seem­ ing to mean something they do not mean; if the method is trained, precise, hard, the result is an exact impression which is satisfactory to the reader and stimulating to his imagination." (139).

Intriguingly, the letter was from a theosophical type (the other sort of New Age), very crank-y, looking for the messiah. I quote for color:

"And, in the awakening of this New Era of ours, there is every possibility that such a man may once again appear among us. A poet, "a man whose eyes are those of a leader of men," "red-haired," "Godlike with great brows," "with passionate lips, of gigantic will and indomi­ table energy, a born fighter and overthrower, young also and enthusiastic . . ." and he will lead, as Jesus led 2000 years before; and all the normal men and women will be "divinely inspired" and will sing of him and with him in words, and paint, and marble, and stone, in colour and in music, and every word of his and of theirs will be of "Divine origin"—as indeed are every word and every line created by His forerunners to-day." (ibid).

Aldington takes a moment to specifically reject Besant, and also makes fun of the writer for the "red-haired" bit (I wonder if on some level a swipe at Pound, as well?).

Another cool thing in the issue may involve Aldington, too: Auceps continues his feud with Pound and Gaudier-Brzeska. Auceps specifically claims that he has never met Pound or Gaudier, which would take Aldington out of the question, but his concerns are so Aldingtonian! Eliot-fan moment: check out how Auceps (Latin for fowler), while making fun of Gaudier-B and EP by personifying them as birds, uses a certain cry for Pound:

"Popopopopopou io io!" wails the other tunefully. "Nay, dear Gaudier, sweet Gaudier, chuck-chuck chuck-a-darling, he has too much feeling, he is a sentimentalist. Tititititina Tereu-tereu !" (137).

I'm able to think it's possible that Possum might be reading this? Pound as Philomela?

Quick notes:

D.H. Lawrence prints a set of love poems that are very closely linked by key words, making me think they are a series or sequence rather than just a selection.

Pound continues to print "the notes of a practical and technical Chinaman" called "The Causes and Remedies of Poverty in China." Shades of later Poundian economics, as the unnamed author advises distributing the wealth currently concentrated in the hands of the dictatorial monarchy.

The first piece in the issue is on the music of Schoenburg, might be interesting to get a music-expert opinion on it.

The Masses, March 1914

The Masses deserves better, but this is going to be a quick summary of the most useful-to-me things I saw in it when I read it last night.

--Many of the articles were written int he form of a dialog.

--The review of the new journal "Revolutionary" is the first time I've seen The Masses participating in cross-journal squabbling: usually they are very positive.

--"Confessions of a Feminist Man" is awesome, an account of a man's realization that his marriage has limited his wife as much as it has limited him. Found himself transformed by breakfast conversation.

--"The Library Table" is an attack against what we now call coffee tables, calling out these objects as fashionable stashing-places for unread periodicals! Encourages readers to take their magazines out into the world and actually read them. Very cool.

And, this: