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. 

The New Age December 19 1912

Highlights from this issue:

The first column in The New Age is always "Notes of the Week."  This week's is a really interesting piece on a railway worker who was fired for being drunk OFF duty.  Unfortunately for the railroad companies, this guy Knox was a forty year veteran railroadman who was always sober on the job and friends with every worker in England: the injustice led to a 10000 man strike. They were protecting, as the column points out, their freedom from having every moment of their lives scrutinzed and regulated. 

Beatrice Hastings continues her assault on the "White Slave Bill," which has been passed in the last week without much substantial debate (much to her chagrin).  She calls out the people who want flogging reinstated to recognize the connection between violence and lust, adroitly turning the tables on the moralists.  I can't help but feel like the truth must be somewhere between the two extremes I have encountered in these last issues: women need more substantial protection under the law, but the lust for blood has clouded the real issue.  There's a certain women's-lib edge to Hastings, who (if she is right) is claiming that women deserve the freedom to leave the strict moral universe of post-Victorian England.  Which of course they do.  But the picture she paints of prostitution is much more of the courtesan than the streetwalker.  Arthur Rose's short story "The Downfall of Elizabeth," later in this issue, must be by Hastings or a sympathizer.

Things get a little postmodern (early) in the "Present Day Criticism" reviews section: in which the author (Orage?) reviews a reviewer, pointing out that his christmassey schmaltz is hilariously bad. 

The Insurance Act, including compulsory contributions, is just like Obama's health care plan.  But 1912. 

And one more before I'm up to date on The New Age.  Then other reports.

The New Age December 12 1912

It's been a while, I can't really explain why.  But I've been reading along, even if I haven't been writing, so I'll do a whirlwind set of posts today to make up for the gap.

First, The New Age Dec. 12th. 

Romney's "Military Notes" are growing more disturbing, as when he declares that "tactical finesse" is "a positive danger" when soldiers should "simply go straight forward at their mark."  Hello Somme.  More on this next post, in which he takes this idea farther. 

"The New Servitude" has a very familiar feel, claiming that business is unfairly speeding up the level of production without raising wages.  This all funnels into advocating guild socialism, of course.

"More Hygienic Jinks," the column that satirizes public health issues, has a great depiction of the eugenics movement as a confused and intentionally confusing mass of pretensions. 

John Masefield is brutally attacked in "Present Day Criticism."  Might relate that to the dueling reviews of Masefield that will come up in Poetry at some point...

As has often happened in The New Age, the real gems are in the letters to the editor.  R. B. Kerr responds to Pound's earlier claim that America doesn't have any geniuses by agreeing!  Blames American lack of leisure.  I wish I could blame the same for my late posts. 

Really the most startling debate in the magazine is the struggle over the "White Slave Bill."  Bewildering--it seems like the Archbishop of Canterbury and company are trying to bring back flogging as a punishment for pimps and johns.  They have a groundswell of more moderate support from people who want to end sex trafficking in England.  But Beatrice Hastings is dead against it.  My picture of Hastings continues to develop: in this issue, a woman writes to her with an example of a time she met a prostitute who was being held against her will (and who the police did not protect).  Hastings reiterates her earlier position that women cannot be forcibly made into prostitutes, then doubles down by attacking equal suffrage!  I want to discuss this with an expert... maybe I'll try to find a book. 

Onward.

The New Age December 5 1912

Hello anyone,

It’s been a short while since my last post—end-of-quarter rush has pushed the blog to the backburner, for a moment at least. But I don’t want to get behind, and the relentlessness of The New Age compels me to take a break from writing my seminar paper (on Aldington, I’m gonna post on the neat stuff I found lying around the library soon). At some point (I’ll try to find it tomorrow, I think it was in his autobiography Life for Life’s Sake), Aldington commented on the near-legendary status that A. R. Orage had in his own lifetime. I can see why. The weekly pace is intense.

This post’ll be a quick one. My favorite discovery this week was a furious review of Rupert Brooke’s poem “Mary and Gabriel.” A sexy poem indeed, and it certainly caused a scandal: “Beginning boldly : “Young Mary, loitering once,” this young man nibbles after all the supposititious sensations of the Virgin. His licence is only limited by the exactions of printed matter. We may conclude, for certain, that his thoughts left nothing unstated… Mr. Rupert Brooke is a youth of evil taste” (109). Now, I’m not a scholar of Brooke, but I’ve encountered him primarily as a jingoistic war poet. Claudia Emerson pointed out his incredible last fragment—it begins “I strayed about the deck” and should be easily Googlable. Apparently that one was written the night he died, or the night he sickened. It’s really great to see him as a sacrilegious rapscallion instead of a tragic warmonger. Sort of hilariously, the first google hit I got when tracking this poem down was a religious anthology.

A moment more to follow up on the duels in the “Letters to the Editor.” Pound is vanquished, Hastings escalates. It’s been largely out of my experience to read Pound being contrite: “Sir,-I regret the haste and ill-considered phrasing of my letter of two weeks since. I regret its ambiguities. I have, it seems, been as much bored by uninformed pro-Turks as Mr. Pickthall has been by uninformed pro-Bulgars” (116). And the letter goes on largely in that vein. Worth a look.

Hastings, you might remember, is writing that girls cannot be forced into prostitution. She counters a letter alleging the opposite by calling its examples “myths.” But where it gets interesting is where she shifts the terms of the debate—calling out the anti-“white slavery” lobby for its bloodlust. Apparently they were pushing to bring back flogging as punishment for pimps. This line doesn’t show any signs of dying soon.

Right, gotta get back to work. More soon as winter break starts.