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:

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...

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.

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:

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 New Age, August 14 1913

This issue of The New Age contains the first protest against anti-Semitism that I have come across in my explorations, "The Folly of Anti-Semitism" by one of the editors (Orage, presumably?), starting on page 449.  It's very disturbing, and very revealing, how much the author has to hedge their position.  The main thrust of the piece is to discredit the Jewish international finance conspiracy theory, and further to discredit the idea that Jews have more money than is proportionate to their population.  So far, so good.  The author also defends Jewish intellectual culture, particularly their left-wing, to which The New Age is (at the moment) claiming alliance. 

But then the bad: there's a lot of very-vintage backpedaling about "intermixture" and "purity of blood and spirit."  This isn't shocking.  I almost wrote about it in my piece on Rebecca West's "At Valladolid," (The New Freewoman, August 1)--but there's a throw-away aside in that story that has the narrator casually say, "We hate the Jews because of their habit of evaluation," going on to explain that Englishfolks are just as bad (67).  Stuck in my craw.  West has the fictioneer's excuse that she's writing characters and not her own views, but it says something about the audience.  I remember  a professor of mine during my undergraduate schooling telling the class that Pound was somewhat of a scapegoat--he was attacked by people who felt guilty for his public airing of their private thoughts.  That seems likely, definitely possible, if not grounds for excuse. 

At any rate, I'm glad The New Age has at least taken steps to combat the more-obviously-bullshit conspiracy theories then current. 


Other moments:

I love it when the journals I read give me a shout-out.  This time, Orage published the financials of The New Age "published, not as an appeal, but as a record for posterity, how soon to arrive I do not know" (458).  They're losing one thousand pounds a year, pretty tough. 

They also review John Gould Fletcher's Fool's Gold.  Remember last New Age, when I was surprised to see him outright panned?  They're just as surprised to really like his second book, going so far as to accuse the publisher of delaying the first one too long.  So he's redeemed.  

Satirical poet P. Selver makes fun of the vogue for villanelles, by writing a crappy one about villanelles.  Ha. 

There's a great surrealist urban short story by Arthur Thorne, "A Modern Metamorphosis," on page 466.  I won't give away what the "organism" is--maybe I should have figured it out sooner, but I was happy when the moment of recognition came. 

Beatrice Hastings, alas, continues "Feminism and Common Sense."  This week's concern: how the decay of English hospitality has made it difficult to marry off daughters.  Complete with totally square anger over dance parties.