The Little Review, March 1915

March 1915 was a big month for H.D. After publishing a set of poems in Poetry (see post above), she got a long review in The Little Review, penned by her husband Richard Aldington (though he does not mention the fact of their relationship). Some of his points are more about himself and his tormented relationship to Imagism: "Yesterday it was all Nietzsche ; then Bergson ; now there is a wild fight between a dozen "isms," combats between traditional imbeciles and revolutionary imbeciles. So that one spends half one's time becoming an "ist" and the rest of the time in getting rid of the title" (22). The review continues Aldington's belief that H.D. was far ahead of her time, a belief he held throughout his life, as he tended to give credit to her and not to Pound (Cyrena Pondrom has written about this). Aldington describes her poetry as "a paradox--an accurate mystery," emphasizing the way that details emerge to startle the reader, and comparing this effect with Sir Patrick Spens. Aldington presages Williams' and Pound's more famous statements about poetry and news with an antithesis: "we expect poetry to tell us some piece of news, and indeed poetry has no news to tell anyone." This is a core point in a discussion of how H.D. must be closely and slowly read to be understood. Defending H.D. against a French critic who complained that her work isn't modern in that it doesn't discuss technology, Aldington praises her "outbursts" of sincerity. There's more to mull over here, but that's a quick summary.

Quick Notes:

A book of poems by John Cowper Powys is reviewed by the editor, presumably Margaret Anderson, a book titled (brace yourself) Visions and Revisions. Old Possum strikes again! 

Huntley Carter contributes a Bergsonian reading of modern art (without citing Bergson), which intriguingly mentions an artist named Charles E. King as exemplary, but who I can't find on the internet at all. 

There's an interesting point-counterpoint about "Mrs. Havelock Ellis," with one contributor feeling that her lectures on sexuality were excellent, but Anderson feeling that they were inadequate. See in particular her argument from the bottom of page 17-18, where Anderson explains that Ellis did not do nearly enough to discuss and further the cause of "homosexualists," a remarkably current passage, for 1915. Anderson rocks. 

The issue opens with an essay against Teddy Roosevelt, and therefore American involvement in the war. 

All for now...

Poetry, March 1915

Somehow this month is slipping away, and I have so many posts to catch up on before the end of it! So this will be a very, very cursory glance over the contents of the months' Poetry. 

The best part for this H.D. fan is her set of five poems. They end up split between Sea Garden and The God in the collected poems--something I'd like to investigate sometime. I am not sure I've read an account of her own editorial practices.

Pound's poetry gets an obligatory mention: "Provincia Deserta" is a poem about his trip to Provence, and is a poem containing history, including personal history--as does "The Gypsy." The most interesting is the openly vorticist "Dogmatic Statement Concerning the Game of Chess: Theme for a Series of Pictures," which isn't included (at least I don't remember seeing it) in the Sieburth/Library of America Pound, Poems and Translations that is usually my go-to collected works. Pound also translates Rihaku/Li Po's "Exile's Letter."

EP also contributes part two of his "Renaissance," this time focusing on what is necessary for an American renaissance: patronage, centralization.

Harriet Monroe has a short piece on a meeting of Chicago literary magazines. It's pretty good as a barometric reading of modernism in Chicago--there's an account of The Little Review, Poetry, Drama and The Dial as being condescended to as "uplift magazines," and a rebellion against this label.

Ellen FitzGerald reviews Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts, and Alice Corbin Henderson reviews Vachel Lindsay's The Congo and Other Poems. This review is interesting because Henderson follows up on the Linday-Marinetti connection that Pound made earlier.

A column labeled "Our Contemporaries" declares that "Boston is discovering Imagism!" It explains that Amy Lowell's new anthology is coming out, and that the Flint and Pound founding essays have been reprinted by The New Statesman. It also has a gesture toward the fact that Pound won't be appearing in this anthology--Amygism has begun.

The New Age, March 11 1915

Hello all: I skipped an issue of The New Age because none of my favorite authors appeared in it, and a lot of it was saddening or offensive--but if you are looking for patronizing antifeminism from the time period, do take a gander at March 4 for the first installment of Maurice Rickett's "Women in a Guild Socialist State." Unfortunately many of the arguments are very familiar and still alive.

"It is no secret to the foreign Press that large forces of French and British troops have been landed on the Gallipoli peninsula, and that the Greek army is mobilising for a march on Constantinople as soon as the Dardanelles are forced... it will be seen that the attack on the Dardanelles is probably the happiest solution of the problem which could have been devised... There will be the minimum loss of
life; the minimum destruction of property" (S. Verdad, 500).

The battle of Gallipoli has begun. This issue of The New Age is an almost-unbelievable testament to British confidence at the beginning of the battle. Even Marmaduke Pickthall, the unabashedly pro-Turkish writer at The New Age, seems to have given up on the Turkish Empire, hoping instead that Turkey preserves an independent state ("The Fate of Turkey," 503).

For his part, the military adviser Romney (never a favorite of mine) takes a cheap shot at his co-contributor: "Before long, one may hope, the fall of Constantinople will have given Mr. Marmaduke Pickthall something to cry about" (501).

Of course, they are all wrong. The campaign will last until next January, and fail, killing half a million people in the process.

Quick notes:

B. Hastings contributes another "Impression of Paris" as Alice Morning. The funniest moment comes when she is explaining that she's moved, rented out three rooms for herself, which is one too many. The extra room has become The Necropolis:  "If anyone coming over here would bring me a parcel or two from THE NEW AGE office, I would reward them with a cup of tea and a view of my third room, the Necropolis, where I put masterpieces of dead art, and volumes of vers libre and Imagism, and yesterday’s milk bottle" (507).

And, under the heading of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, R.H.C. (presumably Orage) ends his "Readers and Writers" column with the below. Oh, for a vorticism-producing machine! Something went off deep in my memory, sending me to Ann Ardis' Modernism and Cultural Conflict, where I found that she discusses this passage on pages 167-8.

The New Age, February 25 1915

The silliest, but most interesting, part of this issue of The New Age is Ezra Pound's next "Affirmation," "The Non-Existence of Ireland." In this one, he satirically describes how he can't find any evidence of an actual Ireland as a way to criticize the stall-out of the Celtic Revival. Naturally, James Joyce is an exile, so he doesn't count and is the exception that proves the rule. Pound praises Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, "so far as I know [they are the] only two writers of prose fiction of my decade whom anyone takes in earnest." Intriguing footnote after that: "A critic, whom I respect, frequently quotes a pseudonymous romance--'The Maid's Comedy'[sic]--which I have unfortunately never read." So without reading Hastings, he's willing to give her boosters in TNA the benefit of the doubt that she (pseudonymously) might be on the par of Lawrence and Joyce. And now, forgotten!

 BH as Morning notes that she's laid up with influenza and won't be able to contribute anything new for the next few weeks.

"Readers and Writers" this week contains transcribed tidbits of conversations Orage has had recently. Some are very insightful, some not so much, some are revealing outside of their own terms. My favorite of these last: "The modern movement is likely to land us in a series of marital disasters. On the one side, men are aiming at the synthetic man typical of the Renaissance: on the other, women are specializing in fragments. Very soon it will take seven women to balance a man, and polygamy will be talked of. But even a fragment of a woman will insist on the rights of a whole" (457). So, skipping the New Age misogyny at the end of that for now, consider what he's saying: male modernists are synthesizing, while female modernists are fragmenting. That this thesis is even possible shows the stature of women in modernism, but I wish he'd provided examples.

Quick Notes:

The last of Morgan Tud's Three Tales runs today. I still don't know who he is--but I'm feeling more sure that these are satires of Joyce. I will write about them someday, I think...

"An Open Letter to Mr. Stephen Graham" by one Percy Cohen is a nice response to antisemitic tripe about moving all the Jews out of Russia and Poland. Really cool. The New Age is taking on The English Review's implicit bias. The effect is somewhat dulled by C.E. Bechhofer's [sic, but I think this was spelled differently before?] account of anti-foreign and antisemitic bias in Kiev.

"Reviews" covers many recent books. December's Poetry comes in for a drubbing, as does Huntley Carter's book on Max Reinhardt, and new poems Rabindranath Tagore.

Pound responds to the satire of the prisoners from last issue: "His parable of the two prisoners is full of marrow," he says, but as a way to swipe back. Also, a direct reply to BH as AM, in a series of rhetorical questions. Most important are the last two, "Does she find no difference between the direction of my propaganda and that of the destructionists? Who most respects the masterwork of the past, one who battens upon it, cheapening or deadening its effect by a multitude of bad imitations, or one who strives toward a new interpretation of life?" He's calling her out for her bad classical poetry, I think, which is delightful to me.

The Egoist, February 1915.

Another truncated post. Out of gas. Dissertation too much.

Quick notes:

"As the article under the heading 'I Am' in the last issue of THE EGOIST raised all the debatable an insoluble problems in philosophy, we realize that promptness in acknowledging their existence and attempting  to deal with some of them is very desirable..." So begins this month's Egoist. Marden has such a flair for the dramatic, such confidence...

Her essay responds to the correspondence pages. Stephen Byington writes in with his objections, for one.

Portrait of the Artist continues...

Aldington contributes Synthetic Sonnets, funny satires.

Pathetic post, but hey!