Poetry March 1913

Poetry March 1913

 

This issue didn’t have any poems that stood out to me as especially excellent, though it is famous for its essays on imagism.  I will admit that for a minute I thought I was readings early Yeats when I ran into Fannie Stearns Davis's “Two Songs of Conn the Fool.”  Very much Yeatsian in their subject matter and style. I might look into the connection. Perhaps they are imitations?  Davis, I’ve learned, was from Ohio, and would seem at first to have no reason to be so Irish…

Imagisme gets further defined with the publication of Flint’s famous essay, and Pound’s incredibly famous essay, on that subject.

The news, for me, is the editorial footnote:

“Editor's Note—In response to many requests for information regarding Imagism and the Imagistes, we publish this note by Mr. Flint, supplementing it with further exemplification by Mr. Pound. It will be seen from these that Imagism is not necessarily associated with Hellenic subjects, or with vers libre as a prescribed form” (198). 

It’s delightful, isn’t it?  The implication is that the public was more curious about the Greek content and the form than the underpinning idea, and Poetry is quick to make the distinction.  On the one hand, the footnote placates the “poems about aeroplanes” modernists, and on the other it heads off the anti-free-verse traditionalists.  Monroe attempts to determine the grounds of the debate to a place where it won't alienate key constituencies. 

Flint and Pound together are too much for this blog post, though I might refer back to it when they begin to fight over the definition of imagism later. 

Also, Harriet Monroe contributed an essay on the “Servian Epic,” really more of a report on a lecture by Madame Slavko Grouitch.  I’m intrigued because the First Balkan War appears often in The New Age, but I hadn’t exactly expected it to appear in Poetry.  The thesis: that the heroic spirit of Serbia has been preserved by their poetry, and it has inspired the war.  Weaponized poetics, not an uncommon theme, nor an irrelevant one—I think Poetry, in this pre-WWI moment, relishes the thought.  A line from a long-forgotten Latin class is hovering around my mind, I can’t quite catch it, but I think somewhere Juvenal says something to the effect that everyone would like to be able to hurt people, even if they don't want to actually hurt anyone...

Poetry February 1913

 

It’s been a very long time since I managed to get on the blog.  In keeping with the theme of the blog, that I’m following along simultaneously with the magazines 100 years later, I’m going to pretend that I’ve turned to the large pile of back-issues on my 1913 coffee table and give a catch-up of the most important details from each issue, at least for Poetry.  Perhaps I will then scramble over the many missed issues of The New Age and salvage what I can, hopefully then settling into a more regular rhythm (pun intended). 

February, 1913

Two things caught my eye in this issue.

First, at the end of the issue the editors take it upon themselves to issue a sort of apologia for Pound’s first poems in the first issue of Poetry (before I started this project).  At issue is the negative response to “To Whistler, American,” in which Pound calls Americans a “mass of dolts.”  I am intrigued by the tone of the editorial, which tries to excuse Pound on the grounds that he had been ignored in America, and is probably right to have left, and probably does have a quarrel:  “Mr. Pound is not the first American poet who has stood with his back to the wall, and struck out blindly with clenched fists in a fierce impulse to fight. Nor is he the first whom we, by this same stolid and indifferent rejection, have forced into exile and rebellion” (169).  A whiff of prophecy clings to that, right? Naturally, by including him in the magazine, they remedy this.  The editors of Poetry are always conscious of the power of their magazine as magazine, as a medium with real power.  This issue shies away from what has come to be known as modernist poetry, perhaps to retrench the magazine’s more serious and respectable side.  The magazine always strives to be moderate, which lends yet more weight to Ann Ardis’ thesis that there are few (if any) strictly modernist periodicals. 

Second, and perhaps less importantly, it published poems by Witter Bynner.  I first heard about Bynner in a backyard party in Fredericksburg, Virginia, from Diane Bachman, who studies him.  She got me interested in him by positioning him as the organizing force behind a now-mostly-forgotten center of modernism in Santa Fe, sort of in tension with Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Taos colony.  I may not be remembering that exactly right.  I’m most interested personally in his co-authored collection Spectra, a brutally funny satire of imagism.  His poems in this issue are earlier than that, and certainly earlier than his Santa Fe period.  None of them stand out to me as particularly excellent, as they are following the (apparently) dead-end version of modernism that tried to make-it-new through increased versification and incorporation of urban themes. 

Edith Wyatt’s rave review of John Masefield’s Dauber uses very familiar rhetoric to advance traditional poetry.  More on this soon, when in a later issue Alice Corbin will rip Masefield hard.  Again, it’s how Poetry (Harriet Monroe?) positions itself in controversy that interests me most. 

 

The New Age January 2 1913

I'm currently in a class on fashion and modernism, taught by Jessica Burstein.  I'm planning on combining my research for the class with my periodical project--so this issue has  particulalry perfect moments, especially in the short story "The Changeling" by Beatrice Hastings, and in the article "The Evolution of a Bonnet" by Auguste Filon, translated by Paul V. Cohn.  Filon was the tutor of Napoleon, Prince Imperial. 

"Bonnet" is a little weird, first, in linking overtly clothes and thought: "the bonnet must needs know something of what goes on in the head that it adorns." 

Yet this article is not really about the evolution of the bonnet.  It's about the shift in gender roles that is demonstrated by changes in professional garb.  See page 199:

I knew it [the bonnet] twenty-five or thirty years ago, simple, plain, and sober. It only aspired at covering the head, while leaving the forehead free, and at keeping the hair in order. After that I lost sight of it, and now I find it again--smart, coquettish, ambitious, at times challenging and fascinating."

That's pretty much the essence of the piece: that nurses have changed, probably for the worse, as nursing shifted from a "call" to a "profession" (200).  Filon grumps about their flirtatiousness, tyrrany, and especially their desire for social mobility.  I think the most telling moment might be where her scorns their romantic dreams of adventure, or at least of caring for the detritus of adventure, the "millionaire taken prisoner at bayonet point."  Filon's young pupil was not taken prisoner: his rash audacity got him killed in the Zulu wars (see Wikipedia above). 

So, the evolution of the bonnet is intimately tied to Imperial anxieties?  Women becoming callous through their professionalization ruins their sentimental goodness?  This is all pretty familiar stuff for a student of early 20th century literature, but where it might be useful to me is in the way Filon reads so much into the ostensible subject of the essay--professional women's wear.  Once it ceases to be merely utilitarian, it becomes uncanny. 

Hastings's short story, again under pseudonym, adds another wrinkle to her view of women (see earlier posts).  It's the very-unflattering portrait of a kept woman, drawing connections between her desire for material comfort and her decision to be kept.  Issues of authenticity abound.  I have a feeling that I'll be writing a paper on this story--too much to say for a short blog post, but the mannequin will feature...

Other found objects of note in the issue:

Epigrams against T.E. Hulme and Rhyhtm, by Hastings under a different pseudonym (three in one issue!), page 212.

Then, and this blows my mind, she's published a letter to the editor to the effect that the white slave traffic is all anti-foriegn propaganda--followed by a rebuke to a sufferagette who accuses her of minimizing the length of the struggle for a vote. I will read her biography (by Stephen Gray) when it arrives at the library--and perhaps I'll get some insight. 
 

Poetry January 1913

What an epic issue of Poetry!

H.D.'s debut in print (to my knowledge) is the most exciting part, for me--as a student of imagism and of H.D., seeing these three poems makes me happy, simply glad.  They remind me of the first time I read them, in Dr. Mara Scanlon's modern poetry class at the University of Mary Washington--a life-changing course and a course-change in life. 

Rather than close-read them, I want to make a few notes on how they are presented in the magazine. First surprise: they are under a heading that declares them "VERSES, TRANSLATIONS, AND REFLECTIONS FROM 'THE ANTHOLOGY.'"  In caps.  It's fascinating that they are labeled by these three plural descriptors, none of which quite pertain to the poems themselves.  They aren't traditional "verses," certainly not in the pejorative sense "verse" sometimes gets in Poetry (see pg. 131 of this issue: "Already many books of verses come to us, of which a few are poetry.).  They aren't translations.  Perhaps "reflections" is the closest approximation, foreshadowing H.D.'s famous "Oread."  Tucked into the back of the issue is H.D.'s biographical note, which includes a more accurate description: "Her sketches from the Greek are not offered as exact translations, or as in any sense finalities, but as experiments in delicate and elusive cadences, which attain sometimes a haunting beauty" (135).  I like this description because it really captures the essence of H.D.'s Hellenistic poetics--especially labeling them as resisting "finality," granting them a sort of ephemerality that stands in direct opposition to the usual characterization of imagist poetry as hard or icy.  I might come back to this.

Other things of note in this issue: Vachel Lindsay opens with a funeral ode for William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army.  It couldn't be more different than H.D.'s poems. I'm starting to get a feel for the way poetry as an art form had little direction (and few restrictions) at this point in 1913--at least in America, there's a wide diversity of styles. 

The big surprise of the issue is no doubt "Waste Land"--no, not that one.  This one is by Madison Cawain--an American from Louisville.  It's an eerie prefiguring of Eliot's "The Waste Land," down to the briary reeds and noisy insects:

The cricket's cry and the locust's whirr,
And the note of a bird's distress,

With the rasping sound of the grasshopper,

Clung to the loneliness Like burrs to a trailing dress. (104).

 

That's it, right?  This one is far less experimental than Eliots, but the parallels in tone and diction are really fascinating.  A half-second of research shows that this similarity has been discussed, by Bevis Hiller and by Robert Ian Scott.  Might be worth a follow-up.,

 

In the editorial section, Pound writes a famous sketch of literary London.  Good to revisit it--the best part is the positioning of Yeats and Ford as polar opposites.

 

The second editorial caught my eye because it mentions that Edna St. Vincent Millay has published "Renascence," declaring that it "outranks the rest and ennobles the book" while also delicately questioning whether or not Millay is a real person or actually just twenty years old: "said to be by..." (128-129).  Awesome. 

 

Right, I have to run to a lecture by a current prof., Jessica Burstein, on fashion and "cold modernism." 

 

 

Rhythm December 1912

I've read a few issues of Rhythm, but this'll be the first I post about.  Rhythm features Katherine Mansfield, one of the minor modernist women who I have heard about but don't know much about--she's the assistant editor.  John Middleton Murray is the head editor.

The stand-out best thing in this issue is a retrospective on the Polish artist Stanislaw Wyspianski.  I'd never head of him before.  Here's a stained glass window of his, that I've flower-plucked from a Polish Blog.  Wyspianski died in 1907--the article in Rhythm is for the five-year anniversary of his death. While Rhyhtm praises his paintings, their mention of the stained glass as "color music" made me seek it out via google images (315).  Beautiful--Blake in glass.  On my list of things to see before ya' know.  His other works of visual art are quite beautiful--but alas, the Wikipedia article on him was rather more informative than the one in Rhyhtm. 

 

 

Of the rest of the work in this issue of Rhythm: the short stories are solid tales, but I can't recommend any of them as much as "The Blue Peter," from the November issue.  That one was about an outsider artist before they were called that. 

 

I'm a little bummed by Katherine Mansfield's poetry.  "The Opal Dream Cave" is not exactly... well.  What I like.  On the other hand, she's younger than I am, in the 100-year-later scheme of things.  Whatever I mean to imply by that.  Inferiority complex of blogger vs. editrix?  P'raps. 

 

Finally, the "Literary Supplement" (delightfully insulted by Beatrice Hastings in The New Age, see above) has a gem of a review: Ford Madox Hueffer's of H. M. Tomlinson's The Sea and the Jungle.  Hueffer claims that he told Tomlinson about Conrad, and then insinuates that Tomlinson just rips off Conrad.  Apparently The Sea and the Jungle is about Tomlinson's trip to the Amazon, where he follows the transcontinental railroad (or something).  Hueffer's best belly laugh comes from a moment when he implies that great anthropologists go to the jungle seeking poisons, great biologists go for creatures, but Tomlinson leaves his life catching the train to London to... well the punchline would ruin the joke, it's on page v of the literary supplement.

The New Age December 26 1912

Just a few dashed off notes--I'm ridiculously behind in The New Age so from this issue:

Romney's "Military Affairs" has a dark foreshadowing of the miserably bad tactics of World War One: on page 74, see his description of men not using "skill with the rifle" but rather "successfully assaulting with their bayonets."  Advocating frontal charges rather than taking cover...

I hate to skip so much, but the best part is a little letter by (pseudonymously) Beatrice Hastings that contains my first inter-journal burn: "Rhythm has announced a literary supplement to its usual contents.  It needs one badly." 

Onwards.

Poetry December 1912

Just a few quick comments on the December issue.  Yeats has his Poetry debut, with very precise and depressing lyrics.  No time to wax on them, poetic or not--snatching this moment before running to class. 

The most interesting parts of this issue are for me are the contributions of Rabindranath Tagore, Pound's short editorial that accompanies it, and Alice Corbin's essay on Whitman and "Whitmanism." 

First, Tagore's own translations of his poetry are rendered in elegant prose poetry--I don't know much about Bengali, and would be curious to learn whether it is lineated.  They are beautifully parallel to the tenets of imagism--spare, relying on juxtaposition, etc.  Pound's essay on Tagore is extremely positive, and interesting: it claims that Bengali meters are better than the "most advanced artists in vers libre."  High praise.  I'm curious how this correlates to his brutal attacks on the Turks in The New Age--he appears to be a culturalist, rather than a white supremacist.  Not sure how this links to "Notes on the Present Kalpa" in that periodical, but I'm intrigued at how this piece doesn't follow the typical Imperial Modernism of British periodicals as described by Patrick Collier--don't have the article in front of me at the moment, but the articles he reviews never declare the east to be outright superior. 

Second, Alice Corbin Henderson's own poems and her editorial on Whitmanism.  Corbin repeats the myth that Poe was neglected by Americans--a myth that my esteemed fellow-panelist at MLA, Melissa Bradshaw, neatly exploded, though in the context of Amy Lowell.  Corbin's own poems in the issue don't seem to take up her own challenge to be more Whitmanic--they are more Walter (de la Mare) than Walt.