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...

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. 

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 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...

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).

"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?). 

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.

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.