Virtue in Scraps, Mysterium in Fragments: Robert Graves, Hugh Kenner, and Ezra Pound

What do Robert Graves and Hugh Kenner have in common? Papyrus. This is not a riddle, but an odd moment of convergence in the confusion surrounding definitions and delineations of what we now term "modernism." Papyrus, that marker of writing through history and of history, signifying scraps and fragments of a literary past. Papyrus is also, strangely, a spot of minor significance in the history of modernism:

    Papyrus
Spring .......
Too long ......
Gongula ......

This is Ezra Pound's poem "Papyrus," published in Lustra in 1916.¹ In 1916, Pound was already gradually moving away from the poetic movement he had created, Imagism, and toward Vorticism and Blast. Yet "Papyrus" is not to be forgotten.

Forgotten is Robert Graves's place in the early defining moments of modernism. This representative of Georgian Poetry, a series of anthologies attacked by T. S. Eliot, the Sitwells, and, of course, Ezra Pound, was one of the first, if not the first to coin the term "modernist." In the 1927 book A Survey of Modernist Poetry, written with Laura Riding, the authors define, debate, and deride the term "modernist," and key to their argument is "Papyrus." Their line of thinking is worth quoting in full:

When modernist poetry or what, not so long ago, passed for modernist poetry, can reach the stage where the following:

    Papyrus
Spring .......
Too long ......
Gongula ......

is seriously offered as a poem, there is some justification for the plain reader and orthodox critic who are frightened away from anything which may be labeled "modernist" either in terms of condemnation or approbation. Who or what is Gongula? Is it a name of a person? of a town? of a musical instrument? Or is it the obsolete botanical word meaning "spores"? Or is it a mistake for Gongora, the Spanish poet from whom the word "gongorism" is formed, meaning "an affected elegance of style, also called 'cultism'_"? And why "Papyrus"? Is the poem a fragment from a real papyrus? Or from an imaginary one? Or is it the poet's thoughts about either a real or imaginary fragment? Or about spring too long because of the gongula of the papyrus reeds? Rather than answer any of these questions and be driven to the shame-faced bluff of making much out of little, the common-sense reader retires to surer ground. Better, he thinks, presumably, that ten authentic poets should be left for posterity to discover than that one charlatan should allowed to steal into the Temple of Fame.²

A charlatan stealing into the Temple of Fame. Robert Graves was neither the first nor the last to describe Ezra Pound as such. But what about "Papyrus" exactly so raises his ire?

The question is worth asking because, in a small way, it illustrates the divergence between modernism and the critical mode, the way of reading, it inspired: New Criticism and close (or, rather, closed) reading. In juxtaposing the work of Graves, Pound, and Kenner, we can see that modernist poetry lends itself not to a way of reading that seals the text off from meaning, but to an openness to the polyphony of texts reading and responding to each other across time.

In defining modernism, Graves and Riding close it off, much the same way New Criticism closes texts off in reading practice. New Criticism may have emerged out of modernism, but its way of reading runs counter to what modernism meant to do_—_reveal the openness of texts and revel in their lack of closure. The institutionalization of modernism through close reading, a practice that itself institutionalizes texts, leads to attempts to define and preserve value, an inherently conservative move. Graves and Riding saw themselves as conservative, as the conservators of poetry and a vanguard against the "new" in all its newfangledness.

We might begin with a look at Graves's critical project, which began several years earlier...