Propounding Modernist Maleness: How Pound Managed a Muse

Culturalist readings analyzing how social debates and meanings are inscribed in art works and ancillary texts must not—and need not—lose formal specificity or overlook the nuanced, pleasurable textiness of texts. The challenge of reading twentieth-century poetry in relation to modernity is to find a method of mediation between what is said in poetry and what is said as poetry, a method that attends to the interdependent mesh of a text's social and aesthetic aspects. Otherwise a poetic text has to be seen reductively as a bizarre choice of message delivery system for ideas—something inexplicably quirky and rather less effective than writing polemic or "sending a telegram." Paraphrasable meaning is hardly all a reader seeks and authorial claims of what is intended cannot illuminate all a text's territory or its effects. ¹ Hence, one must use a postformalist reading strategy willing to look at the deep formal mechanisms of literary texts with a kind of "New Critical" care, yet linking formal moves to the issues that purist new criticism rejected: social substance, biographical traces, constructions of subjectivity, historical debates, and ideological strata. My position—shown in a particular way in my recent book on modern poetry—is that language choices, forms, and the making of poetic artifacts can be read in relation to subjectivity, cultural ideology, and social circumstance, to echo Susan Wolfson. ² I have called this kind of culturalist close reading a social philology. ³

Further, one specific activist strand of cultural criticism that has contributed to new modernist studies—that is, gender studies or feminist criticism—has, as part of its "repoliticization of the aesthetic sphere," insisted on the examination of gendered materials in the apparatus of poesis. ⁴ This means not only looking at institutions around poetry (patronage, publication, reception, canonizing trends, coterie groups, poetic careers), but also analyzing cultural conventions and institutionalized topoi inside poetry that have a gendered torque. One part of the apparatus of poesis is the relation of gendered muse to poet. This is a particularly fraught site because it involves cultural convention, biographical materials, literary representation, and their reinvention in any particular situated case. That is, subject positions such as "muse" or "inspired by a muse" appear variously in poetic tradition as figures and in real life as biographical choices and activities ideologically and culturally available to people situating themselves inside careers. ⁵ Other gendered materials in the apparatus of poesis include the subject positions of poet, poetess, and genius, what is played out in each, and how these interactive postures emerge inside texts and in ancillary situations at historically determinate times. These subject positions are culturally institutionalized and personally, if unevenly, internalized—as shown in Svetlana Boym's work on the tropes of femininity in "the death of the poetess," which examines her character as a mix of excess and lack, and Barbara Johnson's work on "male [poet's] privilege as the right to play femininity." ⁶ These positions can emerge in texts as recurrent but variable motifs, topoi that are necessarily susceptible to some kind of situational reading because of the mix of social, ideological, and even historical materials condensed in them.

A glance at one-frame cartoons, whether in The New Yorker or elsewhere, will convince anyone of the ideological persistence of muse motifs (often figured in relation to visual artists): at its most banal, this is a beneficent, lovely, noble, and saintly female figure who inspires a male artist, yet who may capriciously and inexplicably, or pedagogically, withhold favors causing artistic blockage or further growth. There are also parodic and satiric uses of muse motifs that depend on our sense of the convention. The interplay between passivity and activity, initiator and recipient seems to run counter to gender stereotype, raising the issue that—in a kind of Dinnersteinian historical psychology—the muse has her psychological origin in the imprint of the powerful mother on the needy baby. ⁷ Considering the muse...