The Egoist, January 1916

Something's come between Dora Marsden and the editorial contribution this week--perhaps her ill health? Whatever the reason, we get a rare treat in a full editorial from Harriet Shaw Weaver, usually silent, at this point the force behind what actually gets published in The Egoist. Weaver's essay should probably be required reading in the standard Intro to Theory courses in graduate schools, because it is a theory of theories in the humanities. Weaver's essay doesn't contain as many mind-bending twists as a Marsden piece, but it is a sophisticated look at the way theories come to dominate readers, who rely on their favorite theories to interpret all things, regardless of whether the theory is applicable or not. 

After arguing that theories are properly means to an end, but often become "pets or hobbies" instead, Weaver shows how the indeterminacy of language combines with rhetorical power to tend to channel people to the theories they already know: "And since the weapons of the warfare of beliefs are language, the shifting meanings of words, the fluidity and mistiness of connotation of abstract terms give the protector of any favoured theory his chance... Without consciously going such lengths, the propagandist nevertheless becomes skilful at so manipulating words and phrases as to confuse the issue, and he actually measures his success by his ability finally to create a dilemma from which the only apparent way of escape is by adoption of his theory" (2). Weaver moves from this to a keenly-observed point: the very revelatory power of a theory can lead to it creating obscurity later, as the ease which a theory solves problems can lead to it being applied where it is inappropriate, or even can lead to it being applied to prove contradictory points. 

Weaver uses the above to draw a distinction between The Egoist and its contemporary journals, which are more shaded by political programs and theories: "THE EGOIST is wedded to no belief from which it is unwilling to be divorced." That alone makes it superior to the likes of The New Age. I've added this essay to my syllabus for the class I'm teaching next quarter, and placed it early. There's a lot packed into these two pages, but Shaw's lucid writing makes this accessible enough for a 200 level course, I think (and hope). 

Quick Notes:

Leigh Henry is back to contributing essays on music, albeit from his prison camp in Germany. This week he reviews the Fantasiste poets, and is full of high praise for them. 

John Cournos reviews Fyodor Sologub, and a few satirical stories by Sologub appear in the issue.

Richard Aldington reviews book reviewers very negatively, but delightfully for me bases his criticism on the fact that the public only likes things that are one hundred years old, using Keats as his example of an unpopular poet who is now too popular a century later. 

H.D. contributes "The Cliff Temple." 

F.S. Flint reviews Amy Lowell's translation, Six French Poets. Mostly kindly. 

R.B. Kerr writes in recommending that we read Mother Earth, the journal edited by Emma Goldman. I found a digitization here, maybe I'll take a look at it soon. 

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.

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. 

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.

The Egoist, March 1915

A day late, my post on The Egoist for March: just a few quick notes for myself.

Richard Aldington writes an essay on Ernest Dowson that warms my heart because he was inspired to do so while "turning over old numbers of the Mercure de France" (41). This piece is particularly interesting because of its economic theory of art, lamenting the struggles of his contemporary young poets. I wonder if there's some oblique commentary on Pound in his account of geniuses who are unfit to make a regular living.

Marsden continues her "Truth and Reality" series, with meditations on reality as based in conventions of language. Importantly, she attacks Bergson, who was important to the magazine in 1913. This essay is really interesting, and will get more attention than I'm going to give it right now--in my dissertation.

Harold Munro, after the collapse of Poetry and Drama, has found his way to The Egoist to pen a piece on a poet who died young, James Elroy Flecker, which ends with this sentence: "Few writers have devoted such careful study to their art, and few modern poets realized so truly the necessity for devotion to the art of poetry" (39). Note how, oddly, Munro seems to say that modern poetry is already finished with the past tense of "realized." I wonder if that's a slip, or if there's an implied periodization there.

F.S. Flint contributes a few lines of translation from the Mille Nuits et Une Nuit, presumably from Antoine Galland's edition.

The Egoist prints poems in french by Paul Fort.

Three Chicago journals have taken out a full page ad at the end: Poetry, The Little Review, and Drama. The momentum of American modernism seems to be shifting from New York to Chicago in a hurry.

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 Freewoman, September 1 1913

September is the cruelest month for graduate students--but we've come out of our annual move mostly intact in Bellingham, WA.  After a bit of a stressful beginning, I hope to get back to writing these posts in a more timely fashion. 

I've been reading Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project again--straight through for the first time.  I finished convolute "N" a few days ago, which has given me a new impulse for this project.  I think I'll try to make it more Arcadian--more presentation, perhaps, less commentary, certainly less retrospect.  Naturally there will still be a lot of both because the blog's primary function is still as a scholar's notebook... but I'll give it a try.

"Method of this project: literary montage.  I needn't say anything.  Merely show... the rags, the refuse--these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them" (Benjamin 460).  I'm hardly playing with refuse--but at least rags? 

With that, I'll turn to Sept 1 1913.

1. "Concerning the Beautiful" By Dora Marsden?  Unsigned.

"To read the history of the "Idea of the Beautiful" is the best known way of destroying respect for philosophy.... The reason is clear... [a]n effect is put up as a cause; from the supposed cause, a quality is supposedly abstracted; the supposed abstraction is given a sturdy name and then set free to roam the thin atmosphere of thoughts" ("Concerning the Beautiful, 101). 

This in the context of The New Freewoman's general skepticism toward concepts and "thoughts" as opposed to realities.  Calling Marsden and co. materialists may have angered them: it would domesticate them.  It's worth noting that the essay moves on to figure beauty as an elusive bird, building up an extended metaphor.  It also claims that beauty is "repose," a peaceful state of the soul.  Like Burke and his sublime/beautiful split, I think. [I was right--see below]

After arguing that beauty is food for the soul, which becomes larger and better integrated through beauty, this gem: "As the intrinsic feature of a food is merely that it feeds, ie. that is can be used up in satisfaction of a need, so in the case of what we call the "beautiful," it is everything which overcomes disparateness in the soul, now being one thing, now another.  Sometimes the same thing will fairly regularly answer to the purpose.  Sometimes not.  All depends on the specific character of the need. 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever,' sang Keats.  Not at all." (101-102).  This manages to at once dissipate the power of tastemakers on both sides--the traditionalists and avant-gardists are revealed as part of the same overall experience of soul-feeding.  The twist is the NFW's characteristic hint that not all souls are equal, nor do they require the same food--which of course reestablishes their own claim to elite taste.  A delicate operation with/of power and confidence. 

Beauty must be "sensed, not thought," therefore "effects which primarily belong to a thought-process must be eliminated from the category" (103).  The editor lists three "brands" of this ersatz "associative" beautiful: the sublime, the picturesque, and the seductive.  The sublime is an "intellect-tainted substitute."  The picturesque "intellectualized beauty-fake."  The seductive "is merely the evidence of a suitability in the objective means to a definite objective end" (103). 

The end of the article, with its catalog of fakes, never really establishes what beauty actually is.  Here it seems to contradict the principle established at the start: "The intellectual malaise connected with the sublime the sentimental melancholy of the picturesque, the quickened desires... of the seductive, tend to dispersal rather than to cohesion.  They may have their contribution to make to the soul's need.  The casting forth of seed is as necessary as the reaping of the grain; but for the 'beautiful,' its function lies in the reaping" (104).  So dispersal is admitted as a potential need.  This hedging of the beautiful with the shrubbery of the picturesque (and allies) shows that the fear of dissolution is tempered by acknowledgment of its necessity.  I wish Marsden(?) had followed up on that--perhaps in future essays?

[I'm afraid that the rest of the issue didn't lend itself as well to sampling with commentary--or I just fell back into my old cataloging habits.  Consider the following notes as bookmarks, not finished comments.]

2. "Views and Comments."

Interesting attack on The New Age's guild-socialism, including a takedown of the concept of a "monopoly of labor-power."  Followed by half-humorous linking of NA with Pankhursts, and truly Hastings isn't far off. 

3. "The Poet's Eye," Ford Madox Heuffer.  This is a slightly-changed reprint of the essay from August's Poetry.  Transatlantic timeshifts?  I'm seeing more and more reprints and arguments across my journals--looking across and inwards already ready for canonization?

4. "In Metre," Ezra Pound.  Same review as from Poetry. 

5. "The New School" by Imagistes.  A nice selection of single poems from Aldington, H.D., Lowell, Cannell, Flint, and Williams.  Flint's poem is my favorite.  Williams's the best in retrospect, he's very much playing H.D. here, I wonder if the poem is for her. 

6. "Domestic Studies in the Year 2000": another science fiction anecdote, this one by E. S. P. Haynes.  It's about an old man about to be compulsorily euthanized and his reminisces of the 1913-present.