The war dominates this issue of The New Age, as it often does. The Battle of Gallipoli is lost, and it's not clear how Britain is going to extract its armies there. Bulgaria has joined the war on the side of the Central Powers, though The New Age underestimates Bulgaria. Bechhofer writes that the Russians are willing to make a separate peace to preserve the tottering czardom.
"War Notes" by pseudonym "North Staffs" is pretty interesting. Here's a chunk of text that caught my eye in an argument generally refuting Liberal tendencies to see everything in terms of progress toward democracy:
"In the first place, evolution in our sense of the word-that is, evolution towards democracy-is not only not inevitable, but it is the most precarious, difficult and exigent task political man has ever conceived. And, in the second place, far from it being the predestined path of every nation and race, only one or two nations have attempted to pursue it, while the rest deliberately and even, we might say, intelligently, pursue another path altogether as if that were progress, and are thus sincerely hostile to our own." (29).
Then we must turn to Beatrice Hastings, here reporting as Alice Morning. This is the way the world ends: with a brilliantly original thinker utterly discrediting half of humanity (a half that includes her) as being incapable of original thought. This has been a side of Hastings for years at this point. I'm going to be analyzing the trend in more depth in a paper I'm presenting at a conference next weekend, but the upshot is that Hastings is an original artist whose ideas went utterly unrecognized. Her turn against women in general is in part out of frustration with her lack of recognition, paired with her disillusion with the suffrage movement. At least there's a letter in the correspondence refuting her position.
I noticed that the ongoing Stendhal translations are now appearing with the translator identified as Paul V. Cohn, who (according to Google) also translated Nietzche. I'm curious whether the translations have been by him all along, when it seemed like it was Hastings doing that work for some time.
Monday, November 16, 2015
Monday, October 26, 2015
Electric Beauty
I was just reading The New Age when a new glitch occurred--it's happened a few times, so this time I was ready and caught it in a screenshot. I'm posting it because it's lovely. Real posts again soon!
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
The Egoist, October 1915
The Egoist is replete with interesting material, as usual. I'm currently working on a paper on Dora Marsden, and I really should be spending all my time on it... but here goes.
Speaking of Marsden, she continues her anti-government reading of contemporary politics. The upshot of the month's "Views and Comments" is that the media is misrepresenting the people--that the controversy over conscription is unnecessary because the people support the war, and are willing to do what they need to do to win it.
M. Montagu-Nathan continues a series on problems with the translation of Russian literature into English. He wants more Gogol.
Edward Storer contributes many translations of Sappho, giving his own take on the sort of Greek lyric poets that Aldington has been publishing lately. He cited the Wharton edition as his source, and translated both whole poems and fragments, but corrects Wharton's more prudish reading of the poems with this: "That her poems were chiefly love-poems, and love-poems written to women, is clear even from the mutilated fragments which remain. Any other explanation destroys at once their art and their reality. Yet sedulous hypocrites are to be found to-day who will wilfully mistranslate and misconstrue in order to envelope the manners of antiquity in a retrospective and most absurd respectability." Cool. So are the poems. I have read many translations of Sappho, but in these, the aphoristic epigrams stand out:
The indefatigable Huntly Carter reviews A.J. Eddy's book, "Cubists and Post-Impressionism," an early critical work on those movements. Carter, having been on the scene since Manet and the Post-Impressionists in winter 1910, weighs in quickly and decisively. He accuses Eddy of jumbling up which artist belongs in which school ("Picasso is not a Cubist, but an essentialist." [!!!]) Carter does point out that writing about avant-garde art should be investigated with caution, especially when "painted theories of a school do not agree with the written ones." Intriguingly for me, Carter boils Eddy's theory down to a paraphrase of imagist doctrine (without citing imagism): "the painter is seeking to make an abstraction of the individualising features of a movement experienced by him in a moment of time. In this trifle resides the only possible theory and practice of art." Here Carter is condensing Eddy's reading of Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," and this is the first time I've seen Duchamp referenced. Carter has nice things to say about Kandinsky.
Someone signing as "E. H. W." translates Peter Altenberg's story "Une Femme est un Etat de Notre Ame." It's very interesting, a portrait of the emptiness of a young woman's bourgeois life, written in an experimental fashion. It's ambiguous to me on a first reading whether Altenberg is using the relationship with the young man to redeem and transform this life, or whether the relationship and its poetry is also ironized as empty. I lean to the latter. I wonder who "E. H. W." is.
John Gould Fletcher continues Ghosts of an Old House, his southern Gothic serial poem. I'm not into it, but he prophesies my (and your!) reading his poem after his death in this one:
Perhaps the perfect answer to this comes on the same page, facing: Marianne Moore's "Diligence is to Magic as Progress is to Flight," a poem in part about how a poem can escape becoming ephemeral. The other Moore poem is "To a Steam Roller," and both are amazing, but here I'll post just "Diligence" because of my (contrived) attempt to make it a response to Fletcher's anxiety:
I should wrap up this post, and I'll do so with Richard Aldington: he writes about Laurent Tailhade, praising him for his obscene satire. What does this suggest? Yes! Aldington's own attempt at poetic satire follows it. To continue the theme established by Fletcher and Moore: Aldington's satire ends with another accurate prophesy:
And here he is, by Raoul Kristian, who I can't locate online, and that's all for now:
Speaking of Marsden, she continues her anti-government reading of contemporary politics. The upshot of the month's "Views and Comments" is that the media is misrepresenting the people--that the controversy over conscription is unnecessary because the people support the war, and are willing to do what they need to do to win it.
M. Montagu-Nathan continues a series on problems with the translation of Russian literature into English. He wants more Gogol.
Edward Storer contributes many translations of Sappho, giving his own take on the sort of Greek lyric poets that Aldington has been publishing lately. He cited the Wharton edition as his source, and translated both whole poems and fragments, but corrects Wharton's more prudish reading of the poems with this: "That her poems were chiefly love-poems, and love-poems written to women, is clear even from the mutilated fragments which remain. Any other explanation destroys at once their art and their reality. Yet sedulous hypocrites are to be found to-day who will wilfully mistranslate and misconstrue in order to envelope the manners of antiquity in a retrospective and most absurd respectability." Cool. So are the poems. I have read many translations of Sappho, but in these, the aphoristic epigrams stand out:
The indefatigable Huntly Carter reviews A.J. Eddy's book, "Cubists and Post-Impressionism," an early critical work on those movements. Carter, having been on the scene since Manet and the Post-Impressionists in winter 1910, weighs in quickly and decisively. He accuses Eddy of jumbling up which artist belongs in which school ("Picasso is not a Cubist, but an essentialist." [!!!]) Carter does point out that writing about avant-garde art should be investigated with caution, especially when "painted theories of a school do not agree with the written ones." Intriguingly for me, Carter boils Eddy's theory down to a paraphrase of imagist doctrine (without citing imagism): "the painter is seeking to make an abstraction of the individualising features of a movement experienced by him in a moment of time. In this trifle resides the only possible theory and practice of art." Here Carter is condensing Eddy's reading of Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase," and this is the first time I've seen Duchamp referenced. Carter has nice things to say about Kandinsky.
Someone signing as "E. H. W." translates Peter Altenberg's story "Une Femme est un Etat de Notre Ame." It's very interesting, a portrait of the emptiness of a young woman's bourgeois life, written in an experimental fashion. It's ambiguous to me on a first reading whether Altenberg is using the relationship with the young man to redeem and transform this life, or whether the relationship and its poetry is also ironized as empty. I lean to the latter. I wonder who "E. H. W." is.
John Gould Fletcher continues Ghosts of an Old House, his southern Gothic serial poem. I'm not into it, but he prophesies my (and your!) reading his poem after his death in this one:
I should wrap up this post, and I'll do so with Richard Aldington: he writes about Laurent Tailhade, praising him for his obscene satire. What does this suggest? Yes! Aldington's own attempt at poetic satire follows it. To continue the theme established by Fletcher and Moore: Aldington's satire ends with another accurate prophesy:
And here he is, by Raoul Kristian, who I can't locate online, and that's all for now:
Monday, October 12, 2015
The Masses, October-November 1915
I love this issue: the Women's Citizenship Number.
There's a lot to cover, but I'll start with a general observation: The Masses devoting a special issue to women's citizenship would seem to imply a shift of focus to a single topic, but despite the cover, the issue discusses the vote, labor relations, and race relations--all common topics in its pages. Probably less than half of the text is explicitly in reference to suffrage. It doesn't feel strange, though: the cover is an act of solidarity. Here's the kind of solidarity attempted by The Masses: a short piece apologizing to the suffrage movement for the conflation of its activities with those of The Masses, they print this:
The Masses positions itself as a supporter and acknowledges that this support requires nothing from the suffragists. It's about human rights, not about The Masses. The article continues, and things begin to run together: the piece is about Leo Frank's lynching and the cover of The Masses that foreshadowed this lynching by depicting Frank on a cross. Apparently the suffragists were blamed for The Masses "blasphemy" when an anti-suffragist used it to implicate that suffrage and The Masses were one and the same. It all holds together--the fact that Frank tried for the murder of a child laborer in the South comes back to have implications for women's suffrage. The whole issue feels like this.
Floyd Dell and Max Eastman contribute pieces directly on women's suffrage. One interesting component of Eastman's argument is that women are already in the workforce--the bourgeois preoccupation with women remaining in the domestic sphere is a hypocrisy in that these pinnacles of traditional gender roles hire women to run their homes, as maids, cooks, etc.
Amos Pinchot explains that labor is reaching a crossroads: the oversupply of labor means that strikes can never really be effective again, and the state-industry monopoly of violence means that strikes will be fatal as well as futile. The only avenue left to reach an equitable society is political, as the wealth of the elites must be countered by creating self-sustaining labor-led alternatives to the mainstream society.
While this issue has bigger issues on its mind, B. Boysen writes a piece titled "What the Universities Need," protesting the dismissal of a professor from U. Penn for his political views, like our current situation with Steven Salaita. Boysen points to the capitalist takeover of the university system as the root problem, and proposes a national instructor's union with heavy student input as a counterweight to the power of the wealthy trustees. Awesome stuff.
Mary White Ovington, cofounder of the NAACP, contributes a short story about a black couple undergoing horrific crimes in the American South, illustrating the cycles of violence that can extend for decades. It links closely, though not overtly, with the coverage of the Frank case elsewhere in the issue.
Jeanette Eaton castigates the women's magazine for its pernicious influence on women, driving them deeper into the domestic sphere instead of focusing their energies on real living, moving into a general critique of men for encouraging this kind of thought:
There's more, but that's all for now...
There's a lot to cover, but I'll start with a general observation: The Masses devoting a special issue to women's citizenship would seem to imply a shift of focus to a single topic, but despite the cover, the issue discusses the vote, labor relations, and race relations--all common topics in its pages. Probably less than half of the text is explicitly in reference to suffrage. It doesn't feel strange, though: the cover is an act of solidarity. Here's the kind of solidarity attempted by The Masses: a short piece apologizing to the suffrage movement for the conflation of its activities with those of The Masses, they print this:
The Masses positions itself as a supporter and acknowledges that this support requires nothing from the suffragists. It's about human rights, not about The Masses. The article continues, and things begin to run together: the piece is about Leo Frank's lynching and the cover of The Masses that foreshadowed this lynching by depicting Frank on a cross. Apparently the suffragists were blamed for The Masses "blasphemy" when an anti-suffragist used it to implicate that suffrage and The Masses were one and the same. It all holds together--the fact that Frank tried for the murder of a child laborer in the South comes back to have implications for women's suffrage. The whole issue feels like this.
Floyd Dell and Max Eastman contribute pieces directly on women's suffrage. One interesting component of Eastman's argument is that women are already in the workforce--the bourgeois preoccupation with women remaining in the domestic sphere is a hypocrisy in that these pinnacles of traditional gender roles hire women to run their homes, as maids, cooks, etc.
Amos Pinchot explains that labor is reaching a crossroads: the oversupply of labor means that strikes can never really be effective again, and the state-industry monopoly of violence means that strikes will be fatal as well as futile. The only avenue left to reach an equitable society is political, as the wealth of the elites must be countered by creating self-sustaining labor-led alternatives to the mainstream society.
While this issue has bigger issues on its mind, B. Boysen writes a piece titled "What the Universities Need," protesting the dismissal of a professor from U. Penn for his political views, like our current situation with Steven Salaita. Boysen points to the capitalist takeover of the university system as the root problem, and proposes a national instructor's union with heavy student input as a counterweight to the power of the wealthy trustees. Awesome stuff.
Mary White Ovington, cofounder of the NAACP, contributes a short story about a black couple undergoing horrific crimes in the American South, illustrating the cycles of violence that can extend for decades. It links closely, though not overtly, with the coverage of the Frank case elsewhere in the issue.
Jeanette Eaton castigates the women's magazine for its pernicious influence on women, driving them deeper into the domestic sphere instead of focusing their energies on real living, moving into a general critique of men for encouraging this kind of thought:
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
The Egoist, September 1915
Sweet-sadness of the end of many a month's serial story:
I'll be teaching it in a few weeks, for the first time--so it's not like I'm parting ways with The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for long. A note on serialization: this book is poetic enough, and the chapters self-contained enough, that I never felt like I was utterly lost in regard to plot, etc. But on thinking back over the last two years of it, I have trouble remembering what happened--I can recall the plot via the time I read the book-as-book, but as serial, strangely, it seems like a whole different novel.
Quick Notes:
John Cournos eulogizes Gaudier-Brzeska, drawing a strong contrast between Gaudier-Brzeska's artistic power and motives and that of the Futurists, saying that the Futurists represent things, while G-B interpreted them.
Richard Aldington contributes a series of short translations from Anyte of Tegea, "one of the great women-poets of Greece."
There's more--Marsden's anti-democratic philosophy, for one--but no more time today.
Friday, September 25, 2015
Others 1, 2, 3
It's the beginning of a new quarter here in Seattle, which means chaotic wrappings-up of summer projects and chaotic scramblings to get new projects going. But I have to do a quick post on Others.
The first three issues are absolutely epic.
The first issue (July) contains poetry by Mina Loy, and is the first time I've seen her on the MJP. Her Love Songs are racy and provocative, right away.
The August issue contains poems by this august crew (deep breath): Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. It also has a couple mostly-forgotten poets that I'm interested in: Skipwith Cannell and Robert Carlton Brown. The real treat, though, is Wallace Stevens. I think this is the first time I've seen Stevens in the archive, and like Loy, his first contributions are amazing: "Peter Quince at the Clavier" as debut!
Lastly, to get me up to date, the gem of the September issue is T.S. Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady." John Gould Fletcher appears too, but his appropriative Native American themed poem is a mess.
I have to go to work!
The first three issues are absolutely epic.
The first issue (July) contains poetry by Mina Loy, and is the first time I've seen her on the MJP. Her Love Songs are racy and provocative, right away.
The August issue contains poems by this august crew (deep breath): Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. It also has a couple mostly-forgotten poets that I'm interested in: Skipwith Cannell and Robert Carlton Brown. The real treat, though, is Wallace Stevens. I think this is the first time I've seen Stevens in the archive, and like Loy, his first contributions are amazing: "Peter Quince at the Clavier" as debut!
Lastly, to get me up to date, the gem of the September issue is T.S. Eliot's "Portrait of a Lady." John Gould Fletcher appears too, but his appropriative Native American themed poem is a mess.
I have to go to work!
Saturday, August 22, 2015
The Egoist, August 1915
A quick post on The Egoist of this month--
For me, the one of the more exciting things in this issue is Marsden's editorial, which appears to be a fusion of Imagism and her philosophy in a discussion of novelty and the new:
"The directing lures in life then are Images : Feelings in prospect : which can magnetize the vital power, first to Attention and thereafter to Action. Prospective Sensations hook into the Imagination. The prospect of growing into a sensation more and more definitely constitutes the paramount "Urge," and action in life is governed by this attitude towards a progressive definiteness in Sensation. The vital instinct is to follow such sensations as offer promise of developing themselves into something new : which said differently, means that life is in its highest condition of well-being when it is enlarging its world to include something new."
I'll have to think on this, but that discussion will probably end up landing in my dissertation, not on this blog.
In a hilariously-titled section, "Periodicals Not Received," The Egoist takes some measured at Wyndham Lewis' second issue of Blast, which I personally found to be fantastic. The Egoist is less convinced, mixing praise and blame (I suspect Aldington is behind this piece). Here's a sample: "Mr. Lewis writes brilliantly and in some cases with truth on his side; but it makes one weep to see a very talented man like Mr. Pound putting his name to such rubbish, even for a joke—the joke is stale" (131). Awesome: The Egoist is already accusing modernism's foremost practitioners of being derivative, facile, and late (a thesis I remember from Rod Rosenquist's Modernism, the Market, and the Institution of the New). The picture muddies again, and delightfully. No comments on Eliot's debut.
Quick Notes:
This issue includes a small set of Imagist poems by Aldington, Fletcher, and Moore. I recognized Moore by feel before reaching her name--even this early, her sound is unique, excellent. One of her poems is to Browning, another to Bernard Shaw, continuing her trend of writing poems dedicated to artistic men.
John Cournos eulogizes Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
James Whitall contributes English translations of Judith Gautier's French translations of Chinese poetry. Some are very charming.
Muriel Ciolkowska's "Passing Paris" of the month includes an essay on Guy-Charles Cros, and three of his poems.
Richard Aldington praises Eugene Demolder's La Route d'Emeraude, calling Demolder an imagist.
A.W.G. Randall writes about Rilke at length as the most popular poet in modern Germany--I think this might be the first time I've spotted Rilke during this project. He's praised, though Randall thinks his mystical works aren't his best. He includes a translation of a poem, "Pont du Carrousel," which seems like (another) proto-mini-Waste Land with its underworldly bridge and blind but sublime protagonist. Very cool (page 127).
The same page contains the launch of the Poets' Translation Series, chapbooks of classics, one of which I'm fortunate enough to own in real life. Maybe I'll do a post on it, later...
For me, the one of the more exciting things in this issue is Marsden's editorial, which appears to be a fusion of Imagism and her philosophy in a discussion of novelty and the new:
"The directing lures in life then are Images : Feelings in prospect : which can magnetize the vital power, first to Attention and thereafter to Action. Prospective Sensations hook into the Imagination. The prospect of growing into a sensation more and more definitely constitutes the paramount "Urge," and action in life is governed by this attitude towards a progressive definiteness in Sensation. The vital instinct is to follow such sensations as offer promise of developing themselves into something new : which said differently, means that life is in its highest condition of well-being when it is enlarging its world to include something new."
I'll have to think on this, but that discussion will probably end up landing in my dissertation, not on this blog.
In a hilariously-titled section, "Periodicals Not Received," The Egoist takes some measured at Wyndham Lewis' second issue of Blast, which I personally found to be fantastic. The Egoist is less convinced, mixing praise and blame (I suspect Aldington is behind this piece). Here's a sample: "Mr. Lewis writes brilliantly and in some cases with truth on his side; but it makes one weep to see a very talented man like Mr. Pound putting his name to such rubbish, even for a joke—the joke is stale" (131). Awesome: The Egoist is already accusing modernism's foremost practitioners of being derivative, facile, and late (a thesis I remember from Rod Rosenquist's Modernism, the Market, and the Institution of the New). The picture muddies again, and delightfully. No comments on Eliot's debut.
Quick Notes:
This issue includes a small set of Imagist poems by Aldington, Fletcher, and Moore. I recognized Moore by feel before reaching her name--even this early, her sound is unique, excellent. One of her poems is to Browning, another to Bernard Shaw, continuing her trend of writing poems dedicated to artistic men.
John Cournos eulogizes Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
James Whitall contributes English translations of Judith Gautier's French translations of Chinese poetry. Some are very charming.
Muriel Ciolkowska's "Passing Paris" of the month includes an essay on Guy-Charles Cros, and three of his poems.
Richard Aldington praises Eugene Demolder's La Route d'Emeraude, calling Demolder an imagist.
A.W.G. Randall writes about Rilke at length as the most popular poet in modern Germany--I think this might be the first time I've spotted Rilke during this project. He's praised, though Randall thinks his mystical works aren't his best. He includes a translation of a poem, "Pont du Carrousel," which seems like (another) proto-mini-Waste Land with its underworldly bridge and blind but sublime protagonist. Very cool (page 127).
The same page contains the launch of the Poets' Translation Series, chapbooks of classics, one of which I'm fortunate enough to own in real life. Maybe I'll do a post on it, later...
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Blast War Number, July 1915
The second and final issue of Blast was published this month in 1915--and it is amazing. I'd read Blast in facsimile and on the MJP before, but hadn't looked at the second issue before. First, I should mention that the MJP reminds visitors that this issue is still under copyright in the UK, so I feel a little weird about posting images even though I'm in the USA. You'd best check it out at the MJP anyway.
My thoughts:
First, the thing is mostly Wyndham Lewis, with a sprinkling of others. But what others! T.S. Eliot makes his first appearance, as far as I've noticed, at least, publishing "Preludes" and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." As Eliot was one of my first favorite poets, it's very surreal to see him appearing in my parallel existence, especially in this venue--Eliot breaking on to the scene as a Vorticist!? The poems take on the texture of the context of the Lewisian vortex. Even that vortex doesn't look like the one in Blast. Gone are the long catalogs of blessings and blasts (each gets one page in this issue). In their place are darkly humorous essays on the war and aesthetics by Lewis, with Pound and Jessie Dismorr making sizable contributions, too. Here, Eliot's poems fit the general air of wry social comment. They are also themselves, and excellent.
Here are some nuggets from Lewis on the war:
"No wise aristocratic politician would ever encourage the people f his country to be conservative, in the sense of "old-fashioned” and over-sentimental about the things of the Past. The only real crime, on the contrary, would be to dream or harbour memories. To be active and unconscious, to live in the moment, would be the ideal set before the average man." (10).
My thoughts:
First, the thing is mostly Wyndham Lewis, with a sprinkling of others. But what others! T.S. Eliot makes his first appearance, as far as I've noticed, at least, publishing "Preludes" and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." As Eliot was one of my first favorite poets, it's very surreal to see him appearing in my parallel existence, especially in this venue--Eliot breaking on to the scene as a Vorticist!? The poems take on the texture of the context of the Lewisian vortex. Even that vortex doesn't look like the one in Blast. Gone are the long catalogs of blessings and blasts (each gets one page in this issue). In their place are darkly humorous essays on the war and aesthetics by Lewis, with Pound and Jessie Dismorr making sizable contributions, too. Here, Eliot's poems fit the general air of wry social comment. They are also themselves, and excellent.
Here are some nuggets from Lewis on the war:
"No wise aristocratic politician would ever encourage the people f his country to be conservative, in the sense of "old-fashioned” and over-sentimental about the things of the Past. The only real crime, on the contrary, would be to dream or harbour memories. To be active and unconscious, to live in the moment, would be the ideal set before the average man." (10).
"Super-Krupp is the best hope for the glorious future of War. Could Krupp only combine business ability with a Napoleonic competence in the field, the problem would be solved! We might eventually arrive at such a point of excellence that two-thirds of the population of the world could be exterminated with mathematical precision in a fortnight. War might be treated on the same basis as agriculture." (14)
Beyond these political prognostications, I found Lewis' "A Review of Contemporary Art" revealing, useful, probably teachable. The contrast of realism and naturalism, on page 39, will find its way into my dissertation...
There is far too much in this issue for me to address it comprehensively here, so, Quick Notes:
Gaudier-Brzeska contributes a short poem-essay, which appears with the news of his death.
SO MUCH awesome Vorticist visual art!
Jessie Dismorr is fantastic. Someone should make more of a stink about her work--it deserves a look, and seems pretty unheralded (google says someone is writing her biography, so maybe soon?).
Monday, July 27, 2015
The New Age, July 22, 1915
First, I want to welcome Katelyn Kenderish, who has written the first guest post for Poetry of July, 1915. She'll be covering Poetry for Little Review Reviews, giving us a poet's perspective of that journal.
Turning to The New Age: it's been a while since I last posted on this journal. For those of my readers who have been following my progress since the beginning (probably only Katelyn!), you know how interested I've been in Beatrice Hastings' career at The New Age. This career is drawing to a close: Hastings, as Alice Morning, is caught in her own sexism, as her traditionalist and old-fashioned view of femininity is not compatible with the demands of World War One in The New Age. Asked whether she supports the war, she retreats into her gender role: "War is a man’s affair, and I don’t come in at all in the matter of believing in it or not. My part is to nurse or sew or cheer or shut up. If I break out into an opinion it must be blamed on to a false education, or the double-edged licence of the modern woman, or, at its best, the contact with men on service" (276). That's just a sampling. Hastings/Morning's tone is another fault: her emotional and light style can appear flighty and flippant, and incompatible with the demands of the moment (in the eyes of the moment). Her staunch opposition to war-as-such, which she sees as essentially feminine, is an offensive defense, labeling her female critics as unwomanly. But it's not going to work.
While I think Hastings is a brilliant stylist, it is difficult to read these arguments, and they are difficult to categorize. The relationship of femininity to war changes, in an ebb and flow--last night Katelyn wondered if the that women should oppose war categorically would seem so sexist during the Vietnam era. We decided that it was an interesting lens, but also the wrong perspective. Reading Hastings as ahead of or behind her times decontexualizes her in a way that might be worth a moment's provocative thought, but it is more important to try to understand the context in the ways it is available to us now.
After discussing the war, Hastings cites a review of her "Impressions of Paris" that appeared in The Atheneaum. This passage caught my eye as prophetic: "I like the “Athenaeum,” which will not mind a bit about my bypaths fifty years hence, will even, perhaps, raise an eyebrow at the indiscretion of some publisher’s editor who may suppress them. Not that I would bother to go down all of them twice myself! But then, one doesn’t write Impressions with an eye on Immortality" (277). This is a foreshadowing of the occlusion of Hastings from the literary record, remarkably presciently, unless she was already suspecting that Orage was going to throw her out and keep her down. In fifty years it won't be a publisher's editor who suppresses Hastings, but a scholar: Wallace Martin rarely mentions her in his histories of The New Age.
Quick Notes:
Paul Selver contributes a poem satirizing, I think, how Rupert Brooke and perhaps Gaudier-Brzeska have been eulogized and praised as heroes for dying in the war, which will ensure their lasting fame. He's right of course. The satire calls out Aldington and Pound by name. Page 268.
R.H.C./Orage reviews some interesting texts in "Readers and Writers": Pound's Noh has appeared in The Drama, a periodical that should probably (with Poetry and Drama) be added to The Modernist Journals Project some day. Orage praises Noh for all but the translations themselves, and theorizes that they are remnants of an ancient mystery cult. He accuses Pound of "eating peas with his knife," which is a funny way to say that he is too slangy. Then, he turns to review an essay in The Yale Review by J.C. Ransom, who I wasn't expecting to see in the MJP. I usually associate him with later modernisms.
Turning to The New Age: it's been a while since I last posted on this journal. For those of my readers who have been following my progress since the beginning (probably only Katelyn!), you know how interested I've been in Beatrice Hastings' career at The New Age. This career is drawing to a close: Hastings, as Alice Morning, is caught in her own sexism, as her traditionalist and old-fashioned view of femininity is not compatible with the demands of World War One in The New Age. Asked whether she supports the war, she retreats into her gender role: "War is a man’s affair, and I don’t come in at all in the matter of believing in it or not. My part is to nurse or sew or cheer or shut up. If I break out into an opinion it must be blamed on to a false education, or the double-edged licence of the modern woman, or, at its best, the contact with men on service" (276). That's just a sampling. Hastings/Morning's tone is another fault: her emotional and light style can appear flighty and flippant, and incompatible with the demands of the moment (in the eyes of the moment). Her staunch opposition to war-as-such, which she sees as essentially feminine, is an offensive defense, labeling her female critics as unwomanly. But it's not going to work.
While I think Hastings is a brilliant stylist, it is difficult to read these arguments, and they are difficult to categorize. The relationship of femininity to war changes, in an ebb and flow--last night Katelyn wondered if the that women should oppose war categorically would seem so sexist during the Vietnam era. We decided that it was an interesting lens, but also the wrong perspective. Reading Hastings as ahead of or behind her times decontexualizes her in a way that might be worth a moment's provocative thought, but it is more important to try to understand the context in the ways it is available to us now.
After discussing the war, Hastings cites a review of her "Impressions of Paris" that appeared in The Atheneaum. This passage caught my eye as prophetic: "I like the “Athenaeum,” which will not mind a bit about my bypaths fifty years hence, will even, perhaps, raise an eyebrow at the indiscretion of some publisher’s editor who may suppress them. Not that I would bother to go down all of them twice myself! But then, one doesn’t write Impressions with an eye on Immortality" (277). This is a foreshadowing of the occlusion of Hastings from the literary record, remarkably presciently, unless she was already suspecting that Orage was going to throw her out and keep her down. In fifty years it won't be a publisher's editor who suppresses Hastings, but a scholar: Wallace Martin rarely mentions her in his histories of The New Age.
Quick Notes:
Paul Selver contributes a poem satirizing, I think, how Rupert Brooke and perhaps Gaudier-Brzeska have been eulogized and praised as heroes for dying in the war, which will ensure their lasting fame. He's right of course. The satire calls out Aldington and Pound by name. Page 268.
R.H.C./Orage reviews some interesting texts in "Readers and Writers": Pound's Noh has appeared in The Drama, a periodical that should probably (with Poetry and Drama) be added to The Modernist Journals Project some day. Orage praises Noh for all but the translations themselves, and theorizes that they are remnants of an ancient mystery cult. He accuses Pound of "eating peas with his knife," which is a funny way to say that he is too slangy. Then, he turns to review an essay in The Yale Review by J.C. Ransom, who I wasn't expecting to see in the MJP. I usually associate him with later modernisms.
Friday, July 24, 2015
Poetry, July 1915
A line of trees runs through the July 1915 issue of Poetry, kind of like a windbreak in a pasture. This might be true of every Poetry a century ago, and perhaps the current ones as well. But since this is my first review of an issue, it’s enough of a motif to organize around.
In “Polonius and the Ballad Singers,” Padraic Colum gives us one folk ballad and a few folkish songs he made up (he acknowledges this in a postscript). It’s a little confusing what Polonius is doing in Connacht. Perhaps a knock at treacherous counselors depriving Ireland of independence even as they consume the island’s old culture? Or just a whim written because Colum really likes Hamlet?
One of the balladeers explains his song:
‘Tis nearly native; something blown here
And since made racy—like yon tree, I might say,
Native by influence if not by species,
Shaped by our winds. You understand, I think?
Maybe. But a racy tree? A little OEDing reveals that racy once had a meaning more like terroir, a wine that revealed its origins by the strong, characteristic taste of the soil it was grown in. By the early twentieth century, racy as mildly scandalous was gaining ground, giving Colum a double meaning here, referring both to the transmutation of a song by its Irish context and the ballad’s piquant content.
Frances Shaw has a series of poems in this issue. She doesn’t appear anywhere else in the MJP except in Poetry before 1918, but her poem “Who Loves the Rain” is pretty widely anthologized. Her poems in this issue seem to me careful and pretty, affection-inspiring. They remind me so much of the poetry I attempted to write as a young teenager. To keep with the theme, and redoubling my affection, there’s this stanza in the voice of a tree from “Three Voices” (the others of which are the wind and some lovelorn feminine soul):
The Tree:
A wind of pain and longing
Strips my boughs of their spring-time.
I bow, and rock, and sweep the ground ;
Then, in the silence, hold me listening.
Is this the after-calm in life,
Or is it death ?
Max Michelson’s “O Brother Tree” very ardently wonders about what it’s like to be a tree, which is a very necessary and good thing to do. But that’s certainly the most interesting aspect of the poem.
Leyland Huckfield’s gothic poems follow and are gruesomely concerned with demon women in church and a son’s temptation to kill his father with a sickle, presumably because he’s been hauled out of bed to reap for hours before sunrise. Not a forest in sight of those.
The gothic continues with the “The Old South” by John Gould Fletcher. It is dedicated to H.D. and it’s unredeemably stuffed with contradictory descriptions and stereotypes. See the trees that are “dumb-stricken ghosts in flight.” However, there is a paragraph in which every sentence begins with “let us go.” Given the presence of Polonius and also Harriet Monroe’s review of Visions and Revisions by John Cowper Powys, concerned with the Grand Style, I’m having a really good time imagining Eliot reading this issue of poetry and conjuring Prufrock’s voice.
There follows an article about how kids write great poetry until adults ruin it. Alice Oliver Henderson’s poems seem to bear it out relatively well. “And how pretty the trees are growing” she observes.
Shortly afterwards, Monroe takes a similar tack, decrying dramatists more interested in wearing ribbons and imparting tones than in pushing at the edges of art’s capabilities. In a review of Earth Deities and Other Rhythmic Masques by Bliss Carman and Mary Perry King, after complaining about having to judge amateur plays intended to be staged by genteel urban outdoors clubs in the summer while members traipse through wooded parks, H.M. implores, “Is there no one who can put some life into this kind of thing? Can we not have a vital and beautiful response to a vital and beautiful demand?” One wonders how vital and if anyone leaps to action who hears Monroe’s call for something more substantial than a reworking of vegetable myths in archaic diction. (In a review concerned largely with William Cullen Bryant, H.M. writes, “Let us be careful whom we honor with monuments. Build one to Poe, who was true to his art whether drunk or sober ; to Whitman, who never sold out even to pay his debts; to Whistler, whom neither wrath nor ridicule could swerve from his purpose ; to any starveling who keeps faith with the muse and scorns a respectable old age : but not to the deserter, the wearer of ribbons, the tone-imparter." I keep wondering what she would think of the blog named after her.)
The issue ends with correspondence that makes no mention of trees. Two letters respond with dignified indignity to anti-German culture propaganda run in the previous issue of Poetry. Perhaps those two letters, both adamant that “the dreadnoughts of England, and the howitzers of Germany have nothing to do with poetry,” indicate some chagrin on the part of the editorial staff for including Wilenski’s article in the first place.
Finally, there are notable backpage adverts for Ezra Pound’s Cathay, Sonnets and Ballate, and two volumes of his own poems, the “War Number” of BLAST, and a note in The Drama’s advertisement that its current issue includes Fenollosa’s (and Pound’s) “Noh”, which happily enough includes a discussion of the Noh’s emblematic pine tree.
Monday, June 29, 2015
The Egoist, June 1915
I've mentioned my summer fellowship on here before: I'm working on it a lot, and it's sucking up some of my blogging time. So a short post on The Egoist:
Marsden opens the issue with these lines, which make one think that one isn't going to like what else she's going to say: "Anglo-Saxon intelligence must arrive at an accurate apprehension of the nature of cultures if Anglo-Saxon supremacy is not to be finally and definitely relinquished." This sounds pretty bad taken with the other five sixths of the twentieth century to come. Her overall point is that England has allowed itself to be fooled into believing that morality has a bearing on international affairs, while morality is really just a means to keep the lower classes oppressed. This international morality leads in turn to the rise of Germany. Oddly, this argument is also one for socialism, and the suppression of individuality to the state for the duration of the war. At this point, Marsden seems a shadow of her former self: still arch, still provocative, but I have a feeling that her philosophy can't handle the war.
May Sinclair, famous for inventing the term "stream of consciousness" in The Egoist in 1918, contributes a passionate refutation to Harold Monro's reading of H.D. in the May issue of The Egoist. I love this passage on H.D.'s "Hermes of the Ways":
"If you are sworn to admire nothing but Swinburne, or Rossetti, or Mrs. Browning or Robert Browning and their imitators for ever and ever, you may reject the " Hermes " because there is no " passion " in it.
But why, in Heaven's name, should there be passion in it ? Haven't we had enough of passion and of the sentiment that passed for passion all through the nineteenth century ? We can't hope to escape the inevitable reaction. And isn't it almost time to remind us that there is a beauty of restraint and stillness and flawless clarity?"
My own reading of the poem finds plenty of passion in it, but Sinclair's point is to draw a contrast between it and "sentiment that passed for passion." We agree, though, that "to me, H.D. is the most significant of the Imagists" (88).
Awesome, awesome stuff.
Quick Notes:
This issue contains a handful of poems, one by Aldington, one by Frances Gregg, one by Helen Hoyt, and one by Anna Wickham. Gregg's is a cool Gothic one about seeing (and maybe more) a ghost at sea. Helen Hoyt's is intense: "The Bullet Speaks to the Poet," a poem written from the perspective of, well, a bullet--but a bullet who resembles a poet in its effects.
Joyces Portrait continues, and seems very much at home here in The Egoist, as usual. It is dazzling.
Aldington reviews a periodical released by Edward Storer, one of the original pre-Poundian imagists, Loose Leaves. It is two pages long! Sounds lovely.
Allen Upward sends a poem to the correspondence pages! I love this. It is his own version of the history of Imagism in Upwardian verse. Some of it is silly, but the upshot is that he claims independence from the movement and that his inspiration was Chinese poetry, not Storer, Flint, and company.
Lastly, the final set of letters: one from Huntly (whose first name I fear I've misspelled for the entire duration of this project) Carter, and a response from Aldington. Carter responds to the Imagists in his usual vitalist Romantic fashion, saying that they see poetry as "an Art" instead of "as Art," and are more interested in form than expression. Aldington's response is materialist, in its way: people need training to become better at art, and studying forms is the equivalent of an athlete's training in poetry. Nice counterpoints that really capture an important contrast in how to read poetry.
Actually lastly: there's a lovely advertisement at the end, a place I'd like to visit:
That's all for now.
Marsden opens the issue with these lines, which make one think that one isn't going to like what else she's going to say: "Anglo-Saxon intelligence must arrive at an accurate apprehension of the nature of cultures if Anglo-Saxon supremacy is not to be finally and definitely relinquished." This sounds pretty bad taken with the other five sixths of the twentieth century to come. Her overall point is that England has allowed itself to be fooled into believing that morality has a bearing on international affairs, while morality is really just a means to keep the lower classes oppressed. This international morality leads in turn to the rise of Germany. Oddly, this argument is also one for socialism, and the suppression of individuality to the state for the duration of the war. At this point, Marsden seems a shadow of her former self: still arch, still provocative, but I have a feeling that her philosophy can't handle the war.
May Sinclair, famous for inventing the term "stream of consciousness" in The Egoist in 1918, contributes a passionate refutation to Harold Monro's reading of H.D. in the May issue of The Egoist. I love this passage on H.D.'s "Hermes of the Ways":
"If you are sworn to admire nothing but Swinburne, or Rossetti, or Mrs. Browning or Robert Browning and their imitators for ever and ever, you may reject the " Hermes " because there is no " passion " in it.
But why, in Heaven's name, should there be passion in it ? Haven't we had enough of passion and of the sentiment that passed for passion all through the nineteenth century ? We can't hope to escape the inevitable reaction. And isn't it almost time to remind us that there is a beauty of restraint and stillness and flawless clarity?"
My own reading of the poem finds plenty of passion in it, but Sinclair's point is to draw a contrast between it and "sentiment that passed for passion." We agree, though, that "to me, H.D. is the most significant of the Imagists" (88).
Awesome, awesome stuff.
Quick Notes:
This issue contains a handful of poems, one by Aldington, one by Frances Gregg, one by Helen Hoyt, and one by Anna Wickham. Gregg's is a cool Gothic one about seeing (and maybe more) a ghost at sea. Helen Hoyt's is intense: "The Bullet Speaks to the Poet," a poem written from the perspective of, well, a bullet--but a bullet who resembles a poet in its effects.
Joyces Portrait continues, and seems very much at home here in The Egoist, as usual. It is dazzling.
Aldington reviews a periodical released by Edward Storer, one of the original pre-Poundian imagists, Loose Leaves. It is two pages long! Sounds lovely.
Allen Upward sends a poem to the correspondence pages! I love this. It is his own version of the history of Imagism in Upwardian verse. Some of it is silly, but the upshot is that he claims independence from the movement and that his inspiration was Chinese poetry, not Storer, Flint, and company.
Lastly, the final set of letters: one from Huntly (whose first name I fear I've misspelled for the entire duration of this project) Carter, and a response from Aldington. Carter responds to the Imagists in his usual vitalist Romantic fashion, saying that they see poetry as "an Art" instead of "as Art," and are more interested in form than expression. Aldington's response is materialist, in its way: people need training to become better at art, and studying forms is the equivalent of an athlete's training in poetry. Nice counterpoints that really capture an important contrast in how to read poetry.
Actually lastly: there's a lovely advertisement at the end, a place I'd like to visit:
That's all for now.
Friday, June 26, 2015
New Age Art Show
Wow, this is cool! Someone's gathered all the visual art reproduced in The New Age and made an Omeka project linking them together. I'll be playing with this...
The New Age, June 17 1915
Ivor Brown's "Aspects of the Guild Idea" of the week is the perfect explanation of why the Guild Socialists are antifeminist (150-151). First, the classic-in-the-internet-age move of agreeing with your foes in principle: "In so far as the Woman’s Movement demanded the right of every one, male or Female, to live his or her own life it was asking for something extremely right and extremely vague." But of course, it's not the principles that are in question here, it's execution: "First of all it ceased to be a philosophy of woman and became a fight for the suffrage." Here's half of the problem. By fighting for suffrage, women were fighting for the wrong thing, because democracy had proven completely hollow: "At the very moment when man, after seventy years of political freedom, had laboriously discovered it to be barren, woman found fruit and virtue in the vote." The second half of the problem is that labor agitation is only as powerful as its ability to constrict the supply of labor, and women entering the workforce would flood the labor market. Brown wants women to wait until after the revolution to demand freedom, because when everyone is embedded in a broken system, moving up one rung will not ultimately be satisfying. Brown makes the case as clearly as anyone has in The New Age. That he is making this case in the middle of the war makes it seem belated.
Alice Morning/Beatrice Hastings continues "Impressions of Paris." I'm most interested in her ongoing skirmish with Arthur Hood. In the last issue Hood had attacked Hastings over her history of the French Revolution. First, BH/AM self-deprecates: "What can it matter what such a scribbler [herself] says about the French Revolution? Yet Mr. Hood attacks me in person as though my words were of importance" (153). Then, she counters with a more detailed rendering of her understanding of the Revolution, and a claim that "nothing is served by comparisons of atrocities."
R.H.C./Orage reviews Stendhal's L'Amour, recommended by Alice Morning in a prior issue. This passage feels to me like a covert love letter to Hastings, who is with Modigliani in Paris at this point. That's speculation--but since there are signs of the ultimate break between TNA and Hastings, perhaps this was a last shot at reconciliation? Especially with its texture of inside jokes: "I am trying to get it translated, possibly to run as a serial in THE NEW AGE--with the editor’s permission!" (150) He is the editor! But could this be a nod to Hastings' former position as secret literary editor, and maybe even a suggestion that she might be the translator? I hope so.
S. Verdad's "Foreign Affairs" contains sharp criticism of the English administration in India, accusing them of unfairness and inflexibility in their dealings with the Indian people (148-9). While that's not a surprise, he divides his palpable frustration on the behalf of the empire, on the one hand, but also on the side of competent Indians who are being shut out from influence by the administration.
The "National Guildsmen" print this critique of "Marxian dogma": "In reply to several correspondents we may say that we accept an economic interpretation of history, but not the economic interpretation, as if there were none other. Reality being infinite in its aspects, and history being the record of reality, it follows that there are as many interpretations or readings of history as of reality ; and the attempt to reduce them all to the economic is equivalent to the old fallacy of the economists who conceived an 'economic man'" (149). It seems like the angle the Guilds are taking, lately, is that other theories are too narrow, while the Guild theory can embrace many readings of history.
The "Notes of the Week" that begin every issue of The New Age contain a very interesting shift in political allegiance. They call for a general election, and support Lloyd George in the eventuality that it would occur. There are many nice things said about Asquith, as well, even though he'd be the loser in the hypothetical election. Odd--in the past TNA has hated these guys. On research, this will actually happen in 1916.
The "Notes of the Week" that begin every issue of The New Age contain a very interesting shift in political allegiance. They call for a general election, and support Lloyd George in the eventuality that it would occur. There are many nice things said about Asquith, as well, even though he'd be the loser in the hypothetical election. Odd--in the past TNA has hated these guys. On research, this will actually happen in 1916.
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
The New Age, June 10 1915
Normally I don't go back in time to pick up issues that escape me, but I've got a little extra time today, so this will be an extended edition of--
Quick Notes:
Beatrice Hastings' "Impressions of Paris" contains reflections on people she calls "calmatives," the people who suppress panic in cities and in the military. More dramatically, she excoriates airplanes as weapons of war, and prophesies that they will end cites because people will want to spread out to avoid gas bombings!
R.H.C. (Orage) launches an attack on a new literary journal, The Gypsy. I imagine it will be short-lived because I can't find much about it online right now.
This issue also contains an allegorically/satirical story, "The Placard" by Arthur F. Thorn (Beatrice Hastings?). It is an attack on The New Age's arch-nemesis, The Daily Mail. In it, the author accuses Lord Northcliffe of conspiring with the Germans to end the war--at the end of the essay, "Organgrind" (Northcliffe) comes up with his antiwar slogan, "Peace with Honour." Whoa. (134).
In the correspondence section, there's a letter by Ramiro de Maetzu debating luxury with Beatrice Hastings. It has some cool moments: "an article of luxury, like a Louis XV chair, is a kind of myth." I would dwell on this debate more--perhaps in the next post. Which I ought to go write.
Quick Notes:
Beatrice Hastings' "Impressions of Paris" contains reflections on people she calls "calmatives," the people who suppress panic in cities and in the military. More dramatically, she excoriates airplanes as weapons of war, and prophesies that they will end cites because people will want to spread out to avoid gas bombings!
R.H.C. (Orage) launches an attack on a new literary journal, The Gypsy. I imagine it will be short-lived because I can't find much about it online right now.
This issue also contains an allegorically/satirical story, "The Placard" by Arthur F. Thorn (Beatrice Hastings?). It is an attack on The New Age's arch-nemesis, The Daily Mail. In it, the author accuses Lord Northcliffe of conspiring with the Germans to end the war--at the end of the essay, "Organgrind" (Northcliffe) comes up with his antiwar slogan, "Peace with Honour." Whoa. (134).
In the correspondence section, there's a letter by Ramiro de Maetzu debating luxury with Beatrice Hastings. It has some cool moments: "an article of luxury, like a Louis XV chair, is a kind of myth." I would dwell on this debate more--perhaps in the next post. Which I ought to go write.
The Crisis, June 1915
Current events continue to convince me of The Crisis's importance as an object of study. I will teach it for the first time this fall, and hope that it will spark some strong discussion of what has changed, and what hasn't, in race politics over the last century.
The issue contains a powerful open letter by Moorfield Storey, in the editorial section, page 78. While it should be read in full, here's the last paragraph:
"We appeal to every warm-hearted, high-minded man or woman in this country, and urge them to organize a new anti-slavery movement. We beg them by voice, vote and example to rouse their neighbors and to make our public men feel that their political careers are not to be advanced by yielding to the advocates of discrimination. We must organize our political, our religious, our educational, nay all our forces to the end that our country may be relieved from the influence of all who believe that they help themselves up by keeping others down. Our motto is "All men up" and that spirit must conquer, or terrible disaster awaits the country which we all love."
This issue has another beautiful cover photograph, this time of a young woman. Again, the subject of the photograph isn't a particular person--this is an art photo, by C.M. Battey, who deserves a Wikipedia page. Read about him here, page 71.
The first thing inside is a full-page advertisement for "A new Book by Dr. Du Bois, The Negro." The link is to the Project Gutenberg edition: I haven't cracked it yet, but hope to look at it soon. Check out the description:
Reminds me of Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," down to the figure of the Negro as one man across space and time.
Then, the monthly "Along the Color Line," which as usual is an incredible parataxis of events from a range of categories. I count 98 mini-articles! In ten headings! Each is only a paragraph, maybe two, and they contain records of concerts, student strikes, the firing of black postal workers, and the monthly compilation of lynchings and murders. It it always a rush to read: I don't know enough about the history of newspapers to know how unique this paratactic arrangement is, but I am certain that du Bois is a master of letting the record of facts speak for itself.
Quick Notes:
"Men of the Month" follows, with its usual portraits of successful black men and women, and of allies. Many are obituaries. One is for a white woman who works at Hull House. Others, for a social worker, for a famous New York City caterer, a police sergeant, etc.
On page 81, there is a response to the sinking of the Lusitania: "European civilization has failed. Its failure did not come with this war but with this war it has been made manifest... This [European superiority, justifying imperialism] was a lie and we know it was a lie. The Great War is the lie unveiled... It is a great privilege in the midst of this frightful catastrophe to belong to a race that can stand before Heaven with clean hands..." See also the section in "Opinions" titled "The Great War," which summarizes recent articles by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, the first about the myth of racial superiority, the second about the imperialist roots of the war.
The issue contains a long poem by Leslie Pinckney Hill, titled "The Zeitgeist," a blank verse mini-epic about blackness in the context of World War One (I'm oversimplifying here). I think it's pretty cool, much better than many mini-blank-verse-epics that show up in these journals. The opening is almost Yeatsian:
"Before the whirlwind and the thundershock,
The agony of nations, and this wild
Eruption of the passionate will of man,
These tottering bastions of mighty states,
This guillotine of culture, and this new
Unspeakable Golgotha of the Christ,
My heart declares her faith, and, undismayed,
I write her prompting—write it in that poise
Of judgment undisturbed to which our Head
Admonishes the nation..."
There's so much more in this issue, but that's all for now...
"Before the whirlwind and the thundershock,
The agony of nations, and this wild
Eruption of the passionate will of man,
These tottering bastions of mighty states,
This guillotine of culture, and this new
Unspeakable Golgotha of the Christ,
My heart declares her faith, and, undismayed,
I write her prompting—write it in that poise
Of judgment undisturbed to which our Head
Admonishes the nation..."
There's so much more in this issue, but that's all for now...
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
The New Age, June 3 1915
Notes and highlights from this issue:
From "Notes of the Week," an explanation of why England needs to avoid conscription. I think I've written about this before: they've been arguing against conscription for some time now. The reason: if capitalism won't end soon, England's going to need to be able to kick butt on land, because submarines are ruining its naval advantage:
"If, indeed, we could assure ourselves that the present war would end war, something might conceivably be said for adopting a temporary measure of desperation in the certainty that no precedent would be created by it. But unfortunately this is not likely to be the case. On the contrary, as far as we can see, and in the continued postponement of the destruction of Capitalism, the need for military efficiency in England will be greater in the future than ever before." (97-98)
Note that The New Age has no illusions about a "war to end all wars." Their objection to conscription is that it will play into the hands of big business, the real enemy. If you can conscript in wartime, why not in peace? Etc.
One theme of the week's "Notes" that gets taken up again in the later column "Towards National Guilds" is that the capitalists have formed what is essentially a super-coherent blackleg-proof union of the owners of production (102).
Alice Morning/BH continues her "Impressions of Paris," this time describing wounded soldiers in Paris and continuing her campaign against war photography. Then she pivots into a critique of de Maetzu's own critique of luxuries--she argues that luxury is culturally and individually relative, so that a beer is not a luxury in a land rich in beers, and might be a need to someone who relies on alcohol (Beethoven is her example).
More importantly for her story: dark clouds gathering in the correspondence pages. I know from my research that "Impressions" are going to get her in trouble because of their flippant treatment of the war. I feel bad for missing a few issues that contained the beginnings of this, and will go back to catch them in my own reading. Arthur Hood writes that Hastings has besmirched the reputation of French Revolution revolutionary Danton, and hits her hard with this: "We can endure the meanderings of Miss Alice Morning when she writes of ants, influenza, and midinettes, although these subjects are not extraordinarily interesting; it is a different matter to pass a careless judgment on mighty occurences in a nations’ history; to attempt this, without willfully insulting the dead, a wide outlook and a more spiritual insight are required" (119). I can't imagine Morning/Hastings off The New Age and, for all her considerable faults, I'm not looking forward to it.
Quick Notes:
Marmaduke Pickthall returns, this time explaining the systems of local government in Turkey, especially the system of election by acclaim rather than by, well, election. Prominent men are cheered into office and shouted out of it. Unfortunately, Turkey has been tricked out of this system by its attempt to apply English law and democracy to its own internal government, creating all kinds of problems. I have no idea if this is true, but contemporary examples of Western powers trying to impose democracy around the world resonate. (103)
Ivor Brown contributes a piece on socialism, but his first novel gets an awful review. I had a student write a paper on Jane Austen, and it turns out that Brown became an Austen scholar (among other things I'm sure).
"Pastiche" contains an interesting, if nasty, satirical story by pseudonym "X." titled "Whit-Monday," in which sentences rigorously constructed in linear fashion describe a kind of Virginia Woolvian London park scene, meant to be grotesque, but coming out ugly.
From "Notes of the Week," an explanation of why England needs to avoid conscription. I think I've written about this before: they've been arguing against conscription for some time now. The reason: if capitalism won't end soon, England's going to need to be able to kick butt on land, because submarines are ruining its naval advantage:
"If, indeed, we could assure ourselves that the present war would end war, something might conceivably be said for adopting a temporary measure of desperation in the certainty that no precedent would be created by it. But unfortunately this is not likely to be the case. On the contrary, as far as we can see, and in the continued postponement of the destruction of Capitalism, the need for military efficiency in England will be greater in the future than ever before." (97-98)
Note that The New Age has no illusions about a "war to end all wars." Their objection to conscription is that it will play into the hands of big business, the real enemy. If you can conscript in wartime, why not in peace? Etc.
One theme of the week's "Notes" that gets taken up again in the later column "Towards National Guilds" is that the capitalists have formed what is essentially a super-coherent blackleg-proof union of the owners of production (102).
Alice Morning/BH continues her "Impressions of Paris," this time describing wounded soldiers in Paris and continuing her campaign against war photography. Then she pivots into a critique of de Maetzu's own critique of luxuries--she argues that luxury is culturally and individually relative, so that a beer is not a luxury in a land rich in beers, and might be a need to someone who relies on alcohol (Beethoven is her example).
More importantly for her story: dark clouds gathering in the correspondence pages. I know from my research that "Impressions" are going to get her in trouble because of their flippant treatment of the war. I feel bad for missing a few issues that contained the beginnings of this, and will go back to catch them in my own reading. Arthur Hood writes that Hastings has besmirched the reputation of French Revolution revolutionary Danton, and hits her hard with this: "We can endure the meanderings of Miss Alice Morning when she writes of ants, influenza, and midinettes, although these subjects are not extraordinarily interesting; it is a different matter to pass a careless judgment on mighty occurences in a nations’ history; to attempt this, without willfully insulting the dead, a wide outlook and a more spiritual insight are required" (119). I can't imagine Morning/Hastings off The New Age and, for all her considerable faults, I'm not looking forward to it.
Quick Notes:
Marmaduke Pickthall returns, this time explaining the systems of local government in Turkey, especially the system of election by acclaim rather than by, well, election. Prominent men are cheered into office and shouted out of it. Unfortunately, Turkey has been tricked out of this system by its attempt to apply English law and democracy to its own internal government, creating all kinds of problems. I have no idea if this is true, but contemporary examples of Western powers trying to impose democracy around the world resonate. (103)
Ivor Brown contributes a piece on socialism, but his first novel gets an awful review. I had a student write a paper on Jane Austen, and it turns out that Brown became an Austen scholar (among other things I'm sure).
"Pastiche" contains an interesting, if nasty, satirical story by pseudonym "X." titled "Whit-Monday," in which sentences rigorously constructed in linear fashion describe a kind of Virginia Woolvian London park scene, meant to be grotesque, but coming out ugly.
Saturday, June 6, 2015
Gaudier-Brzeska
"And if the accursed Germans succeed in damaging Gaudier-Brzeska they will have done more harm to art than they have by the destruction of Rheims Cathedral, for a building once made and recorded can, with some care, be remade, but the uncreated forms of a man of genius cannot be set forth by another." (Ezra Pound, Feb 4 1915, The New Age)
4 October 1891- 5 June 1915
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
The Egoist, May 1915
In May, The Egoist hosted a special issue on Imagism, now without the terminal -e of Imagisme. It is epic. It contains articles on F.S. Flint, Ezra Pound, H.D., John Gould Fletcher, D.H. Lawrence, and Amy Lowell. It has an essay on the history of Imagism by F.S. Flint, and criticism of Imagism by Harold Monro. As an act of canon formation, it is notable for how it downplays Pound's position in the movement. Critics went a long time before rediscovering that Pound was not as single-handedly responsible for the movement as he can sometimes appear.
It upends completely the standard narrative of imagism, and clearly sets out this intent with an epigraph from Tacitus' Agricola, which translates to:
"And so matters, which as being still not accurately known my predecessors embellished with their eloquence, shall now be related on the evidence of facts."
The second epigraph is harder to track: "Chi compra Manfredi?" or, "Who will buy Manfred?" John Addington Symonds wrote about this in Renaissance in Italy, which I take as Flint's source. Here's an excerpt:
"Our knowledge of the earliest Italo-Provencal poetry is vague, owing to the lack of genuine Sicilian monuments. We can only trace faint indications of a progress toward greater freedom and more spontaneous inspiration, as the 'courtly makers' yielded to the singers of the people. The battle of Benevento extinguished at one blow both the hopes of the Suabian dynasty and the development of Sicilian poetry. When Manfred's body had been borne naked on a donkey form the battle-field to his nameless grave, amid the cries of "Chi compra Manfredi? a foreign troubador, Amerigo di Peguilhan, composed his lament..." (27)
The context in Symonds explains why Flint places this here: the death of Manfred ended a developing poetic that was transplanted to northern Italy, which became famous for its innovations, while the true innovators were forgotten. Clever, Flint.
Flint gives the credit to Hulme, who is currently "in the trenches of Ypres," claiming that they founded a "Poet's Club" in 1908, to impress women. Pound didn't show up until 1909 (by a printer's error, it is 7909 in the text!). Flint is clearly upset by Pound's conquest of the term. I wonder how the poetic justice of Amy Lowell's theft of the movement felt for Flint. Intriguingly, Flint implies that he did not write the contribution to the March 1913 Poetry text published under his name and which contained the three rules of Imagism. After a few more barbs at Pound, Flint stops.
I wanted to write a post on this issue, but it is too much. Check out the table of contents:
This is must-read material for scholars, fans, and enemies of Imagism. Apologies for not being quite up to the task of posting on eight or so essays, and a set of poems. I'll be teaching this in the fall and into the future, no doubt.
Before realizing that there was just too much to cover in a blog post, I finished my section on F.S. Flint's first essay, "The History of Imagism." I'll post it because I managed to ferret out one of his obscure epigraphs.
"And so matters, which as being still not accurately known my predecessors embellished with their eloquence, shall now be related on the evidence of facts."
The second epigraph is harder to track: "Chi compra Manfredi?" or, "Who will buy Manfred?" John Addington Symonds wrote about this in Renaissance in Italy, which I take as Flint's source. Here's an excerpt:
"Our knowledge of the earliest Italo-Provencal poetry is vague, owing to the lack of genuine Sicilian monuments. We can only trace faint indications of a progress toward greater freedom and more spontaneous inspiration, as the 'courtly makers' yielded to the singers of the people. The battle of Benevento extinguished at one blow both the hopes of the Suabian dynasty and the development of Sicilian poetry. When Manfred's body had been borne naked on a donkey form the battle-field to his nameless grave, amid the cries of "Chi compra Manfredi? a foreign troubador, Amerigo di Peguilhan, composed his lament..." (27)
The context in Symonds explains why Flint places this here: the death of Manfred ended a developing poetic that was transplanted to northern Italy, which became famous for its innovations, while the true innovators were forgotten. Clever, Flint.
Flint gives the credit to Hulme, who is currently "in the trenches of Ypres," claiming that they founded a "Poet's Club" in 1908, to impress women. Pound didn't show up until 1909 (by a printer's error, it is 7909 in the text!). Flint is clearly upset by Pound's conquest of the term. I wonder how the poetic justice of Amy Lowell's theft of the movement felt for Flint. Intriguingly, Flint implies that he did not write the contribution to the March 1913 Poetry text published under his name and which contained the three rules of Imagism. After a few more barbs at Pound, Flint stops.
Monday, June 1, 2015
The Masses, May 1915
This post is just an apologetic placeholder: I am close to the end of my academic quarter and really need to be working on this dissertation chapter and grading papers.
This month's Egoist is the epic Imagist special. Once school is over I'll go pick it up again. It deserves some careful attention.
As does this issue of The Masses, alas. I'm just going to post this awesome image of Isadora Duncan, dancing at age 37, from the back cover:
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
The New Age, May 20 1915
My laptop's screen has died, which has in turn made it much more difficult for me to keep up with this blog: when I'm at home, I work on my dissertation. When I'm out, now, I read books instead of catching up on blogging. This is probably very good for me in many ways, but is bad for the continuity of my blog work.
The journal that suffers most, naturally, is The New Age, because I have trouble keeping up with the weekly pace. This week, though, is special: this week, I won't be reading the journal on the Modernists Journals Project I love so well. This week, I have the issue in paper. I bought it from a George Gurdjieff bookstore for thirty bucks. Originally sixpence. What price appreciation. Here Penelope and I take a look--though she may be more interested in how the paper would taste than the taste of the paper.
I imagine it would have a good texture in one's beak, though I haven't let Penelope put that to the test. The paper is thick, textured, soft, and has held up incredibly well over the past hundred years. The binding consists of two worn and rusty staples, punched in at an angle that keeps them from being exposed on the spine. It is a simple, clever design.
The most amazing thing, though, is the type. The thick textured paper has clearly been pressed quite hard during printing, as each letter exists in a little hole of itself. The type on each side of a sheet is visible through the paper, both in the shadows of ink and (more dramatically) the negative contours of the letterpress.
There's a big black thumbprint on the back of the journal--presumably left when the ink was still drying. That's just fantastic to see and feel.
Moving to the contents of the journal: reading a weekly for many weeks that have turned into years, I find that it does not become easier to read the entire journal. Instead, it becomes more difficult, as I skip around to my favorite authors and skip others. Having the physical copy, though, settled me down and made me pay close attention to everything that it contained.
First, "Notes of the Week" continues its hard criticism of England's response to the war. It is harshly critical of the business interests that continue to profit off of the war. Apparently, some workers negotiated a profit-sharing initiative with Lord Kitchener, which was then rescinded when the government (weakly) claimed that it had no authority to enforce such demands. The author also attacks the "Northcliffe Press" of the London Times for stoking antagonisms between the English and resident Germans, and for sacrificing humanitarian goals and national interests for selling papers.
Ivor Brown continues his series "Aspects of the Guild Idea." This passage resonated with me:
"The old Socialism brought up its machinery and bade mankind adapt itself; we must adapt our machinery to mankind. Let me take yet another instance, the disre to serve. I belive that the desire to serve the community in a useful way and in an honourable staus is as common as the desire to eat, drink, and marry a wife. The capitalist system has utterly alienated the ideas of service and of industry. The phrase "national servce" has been monopolized by our impudent conscriptionists... [it] has taken on the contagion of the thing it hides. It stinks." Brown suggests that industrial service be made available as an honorable alternative to joining the army under conscription (which hasn't begun just yet).
The sinking of the Lusitania set off riots around England, but The New Age, as represented by C.H. Norman's "Advocatus Diaboli," believes that the tragedy was largely of England's making. His debunking of propaganda is the longest article in the issue. In it he explains that England ordered its ships to fly under false neutral flags and to ram any submarines that they encounter. This meant that the Germans had to respond by attacking neutral vessels, as they warned they would before they did so. Prior to these orders, according to TNA, the Germans would allow merchant vessels to disembark into lifeboats before sinking them. The culpability for the tragedy belongs at least in part to English violations of the conventions of neutrality. He also demonstrates that England was not somehow caught unawares and unprepared for war, by pointing out that England's combined expenditures on the military equaled or exceeded that of Germany. He reminds the audience that England invented poison gas, and fired gas shells at the Boers. This is an interesting reading, but I'm even more impressed by his citations from the British rules of war that effectively prove that England is prepared to commit war crimes as official doctrine. He ends his essay thus: "[t]he ruling classes of Britain and Europe are the real criminal classes; and it is because of the criminal doctrines that they set out in their military and naval hand-books that the world is witnessing the degradation of humanity at a rate which months ago would have seemed impossible."
Quick Notes:
Dr. H.J. Poutsma writes "The South African Situation," a touchy subject because South Africa's recently-subjugated Boers have pro-German sympathies.
Beatrice Hastings continues her "Impressions of Paris," which, as usual, moves from brilliance to offensiveness with great speed.
"Readers and Writers" seems paltry by comparison. R.H.C. attacks H.G. Wells for writing Boon under pseudonym, which is rich, considering that R.H.C. is also a pseudonym.
Aldington's old "Letters from Italy" has been revived by a pseudonymous "L." who reports on a speech by D'Annunzio, calling him "more of a demigod than ever" as he speaks beautiful inspirational beatitudes to the crowds of irredentists. He's also called a "gasbag," though, so take that demigod with the appropriate dash of salt and vinegar.
There are a set of translations of the "Odes of Anacreon" by one Andre B., in English. Could this be THE Andre B., Breton? Probably not--but note that Hastings has been translating Max Jacob, and was later an advocate of automatic writing, and all of a sudden it doesn't seem too strange. [Update: The New Age's Andre B. goes on to write firsthand accounts of trench warfare. It must be another Andre B.]
The journal that suffers most, naturally, is The New Age, because I have trouble keeping up with the weekly pace. This week, though, is special: this week, I won't be reading the journal on the Modernists Journals Project I love so well. This week, I have the issue in paper. I bought it from a George Gurdjieff bookstore for thirty bucks. Originally sixpence. What price appreciation. Here Penelope and I take a look--though she may be more interested in how the paper would taste than the taste of the paper.
The most amazing thing, though, is the type. The thick textured paper has clearly been pressed quite hard during printing, as each letter exists in a little hole of itself. The type on each side of a sheet is visible through the paper, both in the shadows of ink and (more dramatically) the negative contours of the letterpress.
There's a big black thumbprint on the back of the journal--presumably left when the ink was still drying. That's just fantastic to see and feel.
 |
| Check out the fingerprint! And the raised texture of the text on the opposite side of the page. |
Moving to the contents of the journal: reading a weekly for many weeks that have turned into years, I find that it does not become easier to read the entire journal. Instead, it becomes more difficult, as I skip around to my favorite authors and skip others. Having the physical copy, though, settled me down and made me pay close attention to everything that it contained.
First, "Notes of the Week" continues its hard criticism of England's response to the war. It is harshly critical of the business interests that continue to profit off of the war. Apparently, some workers negotiated a profit-sharing initiative with Lord Kitchener, which was then rescinded when the government (weakly) claimed that it had no authority to enforce such demands. The author also attacks the "Northcliffe Press" of the London Times for stoking antagonisms between the English and resident Germans, and for sacrificing humanitarian goals and national interests for selling papers.
Ivor Brown continues his series "Aspects of the Guild Idea." This passage resonated with me:
"The old Socialism brought up its machinery and bade mankind adapt itself; we must adapt our machinery to mankind. Let me take yet another instance, the disre to serve. I belive that the desire to serve the community in a useful way and in an honourable staus is as common as the desire to eat, drink, and marry a wife. The capitalist system has utterly alienated the ideas of service and of industry. The phrase "national servce" has been monopolized by our impudent conscriptionists... [it] has taken on the contagion of the thing it hides. It stinks." Brown suggests that industrial service be made available as an honorable alternative to joining the army under conscription (which hasn't begun just yet).
The sinking of the Lusitania set off riots around England, but The New Age, as represented by C.H. Norman's "Advocatus Diaboli," believes that the tragedy was largely of England's making. His debunking of propaganda is the longest article in the issue. In it he explains that England ordered its ships to fly under false neutral flags and to ram any submarines that they encounter. This meant that the Germans had to respond by attacking neutral vessels, as they warned they would before they did so. Prior to these orders, according to TNA, the Germans would allow merchant vessels to disembark into lifeboats before sinking them. The culpability for the tragedy belongs at least in part to English violations of the conventions of neutrality. He also demonstrates that England was not somehow caught unawares and unprepared for war, by pointing out that England's combined expenditures on the military equaled or exceeded that of Germany. He reminds the audience that England invented poison gas, and fired gas shells at the Boers. This is an interesting reading, but I'm even more impressed by his citations from the British rules of war that effectively prove that England is prepared to commit war crimes as official doctrine. He ends his essay thus: "[t]he ruling classes of Britain and Europe are the real criminal classes; and it is because of the criminal doctrines that they set out in their military and naval hand-books that the world is witnessing the degradation of humanity at a rate which months ago would have seemed impossible."
Quick Notes:
Dr. H.J. Poutsma writes "The South African Situation," a touchy subject because South Africa's recently-subjugated Boers have pro-German sympathies.
Beatrice Hastings continues her "Impressions of Paris," which, as usual, moves from brilliance to offensiveness with great speed.
"Readers and Writers" seems paltry by comparison. R.H.C. attacks H.G. Wells for writing Boon under pseudonym, which is rich, considering that R.H.C. is also a pseudonym.
Aldington's old "Letters from Italy" has been revived by a pseudonymous "L." who reports on a speech by D'Annunzio, calling him "more of a demigod than ever" as he speaks beautiful inspirational beatitudes to the crowds of irredentists. He's also called a "gasbag," though, so take that demigod with the appropriate dash of salt and vinegar.
There are a set of translations of the "Odes of Anacreon" by one Andre B., in English. Could this be THE Andre B., Breton? Probably not--but note that Hastings has been translating Max Jacob, and was later an advocate of automatic writing, and all of a sudden it doesn't seem too strange. [Update: The New Age's Andre B. goes on to write firsthand accounts of trench warfare. It must be another Andre B.]
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
The Crisis, May 1915
In this issue of The Crisis, I came across this double-column piece on page 45. It is quoted from a Bristol, Tennessee paper, and presented without commentary:
It is an example of TC's deft use of secondary materials. Much of TC each month takes place in long lists of events of interest to the readership of the journal, naturally inclining to people of color. The Crisis is powerful in part because it is a voracious record. It is also indelible.
Because of my rudimentary skills, I've had trouble getting the text of each block to be the same size: my apologies.
The biggest piece of news in this issue is the release of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, and is also, to my memory, the first time I've encountered criticism of a specific film in the Modernist Journals Project. The NAACP uses this moment as a chance to display their effective organization, as "Fighting Race Calumny" provides a day-by-day account of the NAACP's actions against the film. The editorial also contains a response to The Clansman, as the film is referred to in the journal. Du Bois, the editor, fulminates against the film, noting that "a number of marvelously good war pictures" precede "the second part... the real 'Clansman.'" This gives credit to Griffith's first half, and Du Bois calls not for the the total suppression of the film, but of its second half. That's a side note, though, to the strong and consistent criticism of the film and the concerted campaign to protest against it.
This issue also contains TC's response to Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo." It is characteristically terse:
"Colored readers may be repelled at first at Lindsay's great poem but it is, in its spirit, a splendid tribute with all its imperfections of spiritual insight. In a private letter Lindsay says:" (18)
There follows a long and rambling letter from Lindsay, making clear his good intentions, which TC at this point, at least, seems to tolerate without accepting them. Notably, he talks about the poem as if it was a painting, and perhaps an impressionist or post-impressionist painting at that. Also notably, he claims it was inspired by Joseph Conrad.
There's much, much more here. But that's all for now--
This issue also contains TC's response to Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo." It is characteristically terse:
"Colored readers may be repelled at first at Lindsay's great poem but it is, in its spirit, a splendid tribute with all its imperfections of spiritual insight. In a private letter Lindsay says:" (18)
There follows a long and rambling letter from Lindsay, making clear his good intentions, which TC at this point, at least, seems to tolerate without accepting them. Notably, he talks about the poem as if it was a painting, and perhaps an impressionist or post-impressionist painting at that. Also notably, he claims it was inspired by Joseph Conrad.
There's much, much more here. But that's all for now--
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
The Little Review, May 1915
Sometimes I can feel a post devolving into either a table of contents or a diaphanous simulacrum of the issue, and I feel like a parrotfish of the archive: taking in rich, life-filled coral, and turning it to critical sand that sifts into the abyss. The nature of this project makes some of that inevitable, I guess--the real payoff isn't the blog post, after all, but the immersion itself. They are reflections of reflections of reviews. This is going to be a long one, one of the longest yet.
One thing that helps give things a shape is if I can sense the editors of a particular journal giving the whole issue a certain spin (perhaps an English, in the sense of shooting pool?). This issue of The Little Review has more of an English than the last--it is caught up in the spirit of revolution, and it sees this revolution as a distinctly American phenomenon. It is also a revolution centered on the individual (Anderson is reading The Egoist, after all).
First stop, editor Margaret C. Anderson's editorial, "What Are We Fighting For?" It opens with a response to her article preferring Scriabin to Gabrilowitsch from last issue (which alas I did not comment on in my post, not having enough knowledge of the musical context). This moves into a programmatic moment I've fetched for you here:
I am certain that other scholars of The Little Review and Anderson have commented on this passage before, because it is so perfect. Anderson places herself on the absolute cusp of the new, and a step beyond it.
Here are other important lines to consider:
"There's nothing pompous in saying that the thoughts of only a few people matter. This has always been so and always will be. Every new valuation has come about just that way—championed by a group and then endorsed by a majority long after it has ceased to matter much."
"In each of the future issues of THE LITTLE REVIEW, beginning with June if possible, we shall have a special article attacking current fallacies in the arts or in life—getting down to the foundations. Each one will be written by a person who knows thoroughly what he is talking about, and each will be 'true and memorable,' to use Will Comfort's good phrase."
Finally, if one would like to join in, Anderson solicits articles from expert readers:
"The conditions of acceptance are these : You must know English prose; you must write it as though you are talking instead of writing; you must say quite frankly and in detail the things you would not be allowed to say in the prostituted, subsidized, or uninteresting magazines; and you must be true. This begins our warfare."
While these speak for themselves, I'll make some observations. First, there's an awful lot of talk about true and false here, which makes me think Anderson likes Marsden's work quite a lot but doesn't apply its lessons on the emptiness of truth as a concept and criterion. Note that Anderson expects sweeping changes to emerge from her magazine, but embraces the condition of being an elite avant garde that creates a "new valuation" that will not be immediate accepted. The call for writing "as though you are talking instead of writing" is very cool, and resonates with both Pound's position as "village talker" and Beatrice Hastings' embraced insult when she was called a talker, not a writer (see The Old New Age pamphlet, must-read stuff for Hastings fans). It also distinguishes TLR from The Egoist in that TE doesn't use the language of speech. Also, the title and the final line carry unusual weight in a time of war.
So that's the mission--now I'll look at how this issue attempts to achieve this. As usual, editorial vision cannot (and should not) bring contributors into total coherence. This issue is full of notable, diverse writing.
Will Levington Comfort contributes "America's Ignition," an excited and exciting manifesto about the reconstruction of the world after the war, in which America and the new generation will take a leading part. Comfort believes that the secret to life is avoiding selfishness, and that the current generation will be unselfish because of the vision of the war. This will lead to a renaissance of intuitive thought. He claims that nationalism will end when people realize that the differences among nations are merely part of the great international whole--alas. He claims that the world seeks balance, and that Germany's aggression is an attempt to balance the oversized power of the British Empire. The below paragraph on intuition vs. intellect is worth taking as a whole:
We will cease to "believe in intellect," and instead intuition will provide a more valid way to know.
Anderson reviews lectures by Mother Jones and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and is surprised to prefer Flynn. While appreciating Jones, she writes of Flynn: "I like these I. W. W. people a lot. They are not only offering an efficient program of labor ; they are getting close to a workable philosophy of life. They are even capable of a virtue no working-class organization is supposed to be overburdened with: hardness of thought. As Miss Flynn said : 'Don't pamper yourselves. It's not a sacrifice to fight for your own freedom !'" (18).
Amy Lowell, who appears to be well on her way to capturing Imagism, writes an encomium on Harold Monro and his Poetry Bookshop. It is a little self-aggrandizing, as she relishes in describing herself as the enlightened intellectual causing a stir by being so into books. On the other hand--she models the practices of a reader of poetry and fuses that with the joy of shopping. This may be more of a throwback to the 19th century's obsession with beautiful books of poetry than something new, but it can only help the poets she mentions.
Helen Hoyt contributes a cool memento mori poem in free verse, "Words out of Waking."
Richard Aldington provides an overview of the career of Remy de Gourmont. It feels familiar: I wonder if it is a version of something that appeared in The Egoist. Possibly, or possibly just on a similar topic. I love this: "under his pen mysticism itself appears almost as exact as science" (11).
Nestled within the self conscious avant garde is--a hoax. Sade Iverson, who contributes a long poem, "Who Wants Blue Silk Roses," is really Elia W. Peattie, who is hoaxing Anderson and modern poetry in general (according to the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature). Triangulating modernism via hoaxes is pretty fun: this one seems to think a bohemian lifestyle in the context of the war, rendered in unrhymed verse, can be passable modernism.
John Gould Fletcher contributes an intense post-Whitman prose poem, "America, 1915," in his usual elaborate style.
George Lane pens an extended review of Some Imagist Poets. It's notable for being very harsh on Pound, who is accused of "jejune maledictions," which the movement has gotten beyond (27). I'll be writing about this at length later, so I'll leave it for now.
Last, an epitaph for Rupert Brooke:
Saturday, May 2, 2015
The Little Review, April 1915
Just a quick post on The Little Review. I need to get down a few observations on a few April journals before turning to May...
The strangest and most fun thing, poetically speaking, is John Gould Fletcher's "Vers Libre and Advertisements." In it, Fletcher claims that the ad men of America have been writing the finest free verse around for some time, and includes entertaining examples like this one:
Fletcher's piece is certainly satirical, but I wonder if its flippancy and fun hides real bitterness: an early Imagist, Fletcher's mode of vers libre never quite fit in with the others. He was florid while they were spare, and the critique may not be as self-deprecatory as it seems at first.
Also in poetics: one William Saphier (what a name!) opens the issue with "Etchings (Not to be Read Aloud)," which is pretty cool and unusual, pieces making a claim for their visual value in direct contradiction to their sound value. Unfortunately the move is cooler than the poems.
Quick Notes:
Margaret Anderson's editorial continues her defense of Margaret Sanger, the outlaw advocate for contraception. She attacks Anthony Comstock head-on--no wonder TLR is going to have so much trouble with the law. Her editorial mentions as an aside "the stunning things in The Egoist."
I noticed how delighted The Little Review is with itself--many pieces are self-referential to the awesomeness of TLR. Among these, "The Critics' Catastrophe," a play about what happens when a London music critic shows up in Chicago to write for TLR.
Richard Aldington contributes an essay on the poetry of Paul Fort.
George Franklin contributes a strange prose poem, "Hunger."
William S. Braithwaite's anthology of magazine verse gets negatively reviewed--he contributes poetry to The Crisis.
The strangest and most fun thing, poetically speaking, is John Gould Fletcher's "Vers Libre and Advertisements." In it, Fletcher claims that the ad men of America have been writing the finest free verse around for some time, and includes entertaining examples like this one:
Fletcher's piece is certainly satirical, but I wonder if its flippancy and fun hides real bitterness: an early Imagist, Fletcher's mode of vers libre never quite fit in with the others. He was florid while they were spare, and the critique may not be as self-deprecatory as it seems at first.
Also in poetics: one William Saphier (what a name!) opens the issue with "Etchings (Not to be Read Aloud)," which is pretty cool and unusual, pieces making a claim for their visual value in direct contradiction to their sound value. Unfortunately the move is cooler than the poems.
Quick Notes:
Margaret Anderson's editorial continues her defense of Margaret Sanger, the outlaw advocate for contraception. She attacks Anthony Comstock head-on--no wonder TLR is going to have so much trouble with the law. Her editorial mentions as an aside "the stunning things in The Egoist."
I noticed how delighted The Little Review is with itself--many pieces are self-referential to the awesomeness of TLR. Among these, "The Critics' Catastrophe," a play about what happens when a London music critic shows up in Chicago to write for TLR.
Richard Aldington contributes an essay on the poetry of Paul Fort.
George Franklin contributes a strange prose poem, "Hunger."
William S. Braithwaite's anthology of magazine verse gets negatively reviewed--he contributes poetry to The Crisis.
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
The Egoist, April 1915
The Egoist in April, 1915:
Marianne Moore makes her Egoist debut, with her poems appearing just after those of a forgotten modernist, Richard Butler Glaenzer--who has the tragic fate of not yet having a wikipedia page. His poems are cool, though. More on that in a second, after more on Moore's two short poems.
The first is dedicated to Gordon Craig, modernist director:
I can almost see the last line as the very very first draft of her much-drafted poem "Poetry." Note the careful rhymes, the way that meaning enjambs from line to line, the very-slant rhymes of "wake" and "retrospect." It's very interesting that the dedication is part of the first line. This poem makes me think of my late teacher, Herb Blau, who I wish I could show this to--I have a feeling he would have identified with Moore's portrait of Craig.
The second poem, "To the Soul of 'Progress,'" doesn't fit neatly on to a page and would look kind of weird on the blog here, but it is certainly worth a look in the pdf of the journal. On the level of content (or discontent), the poem is about how war can emerge from the desire for progress. It fits perfectly with the Egoist's skepticism. It also has an extremely tight and unusual rhyme scheme, a prevision of "The Fish." She seems to be channeling Yeats in a certain stanza that contains clapping wings and a tumult...
Returning to Glaenzer: his poems are about his hatred of cities, contrasted Imagistically with his love of Bermuda--and then, there's also a poem about an Antoinette. His poems are powered more by raw Whitmano-Futurist energy than intricacies, but I noticed that they are attempting to fuse that kind of dynamism with imagist technique, which feels odd in the context of how imagism is understood retrospect-ively, but actually makes a lot of sense in following the journals.
Richard Aldington contributes an essay on "Decadence and Dynamism" which in turn continues his own literary researches. He finds that most new art can be considered either decadent or dynamic, and that investigating the decadent, one finds that dynamism is merely intensified decadence. He reads Huysmans' A Rebors to make most of his points, and is probably one of few people who read enough obscure Latin to pronounce judgment on Des Esseintes' classical criticism (Aldington thinks it is brilliant).
Marianne Moore makes her Egoist debut, with her poems appearing just after those of a forgotten modernist, Richard Butler Glaenzer--who has the tragic fate of not yet having a wikipedia page. His poems are cool, though. More on that in a second, after more on Moore's two short poems.
The first is dedicated to Gordon Craig, modernist director:
I can almost see the last line as the very very first draft of her much-drafted poem "Poetry." Note the careful rhymes, the way that meaning enjambs from line to line, the very-slant rhymes of "wake" and "retrospect." It's very interesting that the dedication is part of the first line. This poem makes me think of my late teacher, Herb Blau, who I wish I could show this to--I have a feeling he would have identified with Moore's portrait of Craig.
The second poem, "To the Soul of 'Progress,'" doesn't fit neatly on to a page and would look kind of weird on the blog here, but it is certainly worth a look in the pdf of the journal. On the level of content (or discontent), the poem is about how war can emerge from the desire for progress. It fits perfectly with the Egoist's skepticism. It also has an extremely tight and unusual rhyme scheme, a prevision of "The Fish." She seems to be channeling Yeats in a certain stanza that contains clapping wings and a tumult...
Returning to Glaenzer: his poems are about his hatred of cities, contrasted Imagistically with his love of Bermuda--and then, there's also a poem about an Antoinette. His poems are powered more by raw Whitmano-Futurist energy than intricacies, but I noticed that they are attempting to fuse that kind of dynamism with imagist technique, which feels odd in the context of how imagism is understood retrospect-ively, but actually makes a lot of sense in following the journals.
Huntley Carter contributes a piece that has a few interesting points--titled "The Curve of Individualism," it contains several points that are made stridently, then hedged back, so take this summary with its own hedging. First, he claims that Futurist art predicted the war. Then he explains that their art reveals the fundamental inequality of humans, and Carter postulates that one could create a chart in which "the height of the curve above the base line will represent the varying value of human beings" (59). He jumps from this to review Theodore A. Cook's The Curves of Life, which finds that the perfect spiral is that basis for biology and art, a claim Carter appreciates but qualifies with Cook's own "nothing which is alive is ever simply mathematical." This might mitigate the brutality of charting human worth somewhat? Maybe? Because he comes to a philosophy of difference:
"Advance (progress we call it) resides in differences freely expressed. If human beings are to move significantly in any direction they must not be tied up in inseparable bundles, called groups, guilds, and communities. Each must belong wholly to himself or herself. Each must be free to feel, act and choose a path of his or her own. The social or artificial restraint of differences in human beings is slowly but inevitably making for the destruction of the human soul" (60).
Note the pointed critique of The New Age's Guild Socialism.
So much more to do, but I will stop here for today after my customary
Quick Notes:
Marsden continues "Truth and Reality," and it is amazing. Too much to review on a blog, I will hopefully be devoting a chapter of my dissertation to Marsden. For now, this nugget: "The two terms 'real' and 'Reality' are very near to being the expression of opposites: real—the sign attached to a thing whose potentialities have been proved to be like to another's, and Reality—the name of a nominal " something " which has never yet existed and which, should '"it " ever achieve existence, would become degraded into Appearance and thereby cease to be part of Reality" (51).
"Advance (progress we call it) resides in differences freely expressed. If human beings are to move significantly in any direction they must not be tied up in inseparable bundles, called groups, guilds, and communities. Each must belong wholly to himself or herself. Each must be free to feel, act and choose a path of his or her own. The social or artificial restraint of differences in human beings is slowly but inevitably making for the destruction of the human soul" (60).
Note the pointed critique of The New Age's Guild Socialism.
So much more to do, but I will stop here for today after my customary
Quick Notes:
Marsden continues "Truth and Reality," and it is amazing. Too much to review on a blog, I will hopefully be devoting a chapter of my dissertation to Marsden. For now, this nugget: "The two terms 'real' and 'Reality' are very near to being the expression of opposites: real—the sign attached to a thing whose potentialities have been proved to be like to another's, and Reality—the name of a nominal " something " which has never yet existed and which, should '"it " ever achieve existence, would become degraded into Appearance and thereby cease to be part of Reality" (51).
Richard Aldington contributes an essay on "Decadence and Dynamism" which in turn continues his own literary researches. He finds that most new art can be considered either decadent or dynamic, and that investigating the decadent, one finds that dynamism is merely intensified decadence. He reads Huysmans' A Rebors to make most of his points, and is probably one of few people who read enough obscure Latin to pronounce judgment on Des Esseintes' classical criticism (Aldington thinks it is brilliant).
Portrait continues...
Frank Denver reviews a modernist art show, praises Epstein, and declares that there isn't much good art around in those days.
"Fighting Paris" declares that it will return to its old title, "Passing Paris," as things are back to normal in the capital. I wonder if that will stick.
That's all for now...
Frank Denver reviews a modernist art show, praises Epstein, and declares that there isn't much good art around in those days.
"Fighting Paris" declares that it will return to its old title, "Passing Paris," as things are back to normal in the capital. I wonder if that will stick.
That's all for now...
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