How Did Poetry Survive?: The Making of Modern American Verse

Notes

notes Introduction 1. Greenslet,“Propaganda,” 52. American poetry’s declining cultural status after 1850, and the interval of crisis between 1890 and 1910, are treated in my 2004 book, Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity, which argues that the aspiring poets of these years, despairing that their work would be appreciated or even seen, produced a poignant body of verse marked by anxieties of belatedness and uselessness. 2. Monroe, “At Twilight,” 120–21. 3. To consider how these terms were used and varied, note the titles of several works competing to summarize the developments of the 1910s: the three volumes entitled Others: An Anthology of the New Verse, edited by Alfred Kreymborg (1916, 1917, 1920); the 1917 anthology The New Poetry, edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson; Louis Untermeyer’s critical survey The New Era in American Poetry (1919); and Marguerite Wilkinson’s anthology New Voices: An Introduction to Contemporary Poetry (1919). 4. Lowell, Tendencies, 1. 5. I use the terms vers libre or unmetered verse rather than free verse because the latter so easily slips from a neutral description of prosody into an implicit claim of liberation from the shackles of tradition, faction, or ideology. 6. R. Williams, Politics of Modernism, 32. 7. Ibid., 33. 8. Ibid. 9. The devaluation of poetic subject matter was a central tenet of the high-modernist project. To organize the verse of a given period by subject—city streets or skyscrapers or advertisements or farm implements—means tolerating a jumble of forms and rhetorical styles, including many verses that don’t seek to forge their own forms but willingly situate themselves within some anterior stylistic tradition.Attending to the subject matter of poems also means treating them as statements about the Newcomb_How_text.indd 263 12/15/11 4:06 PM world, which in high-modernist dogma led inevitably to propaganda or didacticism. This anxiety produced such defensive formulations as the “fallacy of communication ” from Allen Tate’s seminal New Critical essay “Tension in Poetry” (1938). For Tate, because “communication” had “tainted” all forms of “public speech” in the twentieth century, poetry written to communicate to a reader became just another form of “mass language,” devoid of artistic integrity (58, 57). 10. Spears, Dionysus, 74. 11. Harrington, “Why American Poetry”; see also Harrington, Poetry and the Public, 160–69. 12.The high-modernist campaign against popular female poets was exemplified by John Crowe Ransom’s 1937 essay“The Woman as Poet,”in which he circumscribed verse by Millay and all women to the expression of “personal moods” and “natural objects which call up love and pity” (104). ­ The ostensible closeness of “woman” to “the world of the simple senses” (77) meant that she must remain “fixed in her famous attitudes, . . . indifferent to intellectuality” (78); her mind, untempered by scientific training, was“not strict enough or expert enough to manage”complex poetic forms (103). For Ransom, such failures of intellect had feminized and disfigured late Victorian verse and threatened, particularly through the enormous popularity of Millay, to mire twentieth-century poetry in immature emotionalism and obsolete formalism. For detailed discussion of New Critical attacks on Millay, see Newcomb, “Woman as Political Poet.” 13. Waggoner, American Poets, 456. 14. Among the valuable exceptions to this pattern are Susan Schweik’s A Gulf So Deeply Cut (esp. 67–77) and articles by Artemis Michailidou, Elizabeth Willis, and Walter Kalaidjian. 15. R. Williams, Politics of Modernism, 35. Chapter 1. American Poetry on the Brink 1. Newcomb, Would Poetry Disappear? 104–39. 2. The motley assortment of poetry anthologies that were published between 1901 and 1912 vividly reveals poetry’s low estate. Apparently the only markets for anthologies consisted of seekers after local civic pride (The Evanston Poets [ed. William C. Levere, 1903]); pupils in recitation classes (Days and Deeds: A Book of Verse for Children’s Reading and Speaking [ed. Burton E. Stevenson and Elizabeth B. Stevenson, 1906], Poems of American History [ed. Burton E. Stevenson, 1908], and others); and people seeking undemanding light verse, who were served by compilations with such titles as The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics (ed. Frederic Lawrence Knowles, 1901), A Book of American Humorous Verse (ed. Wallace Rice, 1904), American Familiar Verse (ed. Brander Matthews, 1904), Heart Throbs in Prose and Verse Dear to the American People (ed. Joseph Mitchell Chapple, 1905), and, most revealing of all, The Humbler Poets (ed. Wallace Rice and Frances Rice, 1911). As far as I can determine, only...