"The Housetop Sea": Cityscape Verse and the Rise of Modern American Poetry

In her 1914 review of The Little Book of Modern Verse, Harriet Monroe objected to Jessie Rittenhouse's selections: "If this anthology were complete evidence, our living American poets would deserve the common reproach of having little or nothing to say in immediate relation to modern life and thought."¹ This polemic was part of Monroe's ongoing insistence that American verse could—and must—address industrial-age modernity. Born in 1860 when poetry was the main genre of American literary culture, Monroe had watched as, over her lifetime, poetry came to be treated as the province of perfumed dilettantes, its powers circumscribed by a rigid idealism that appeared oblivious to the forces shaping turn-of-the-century American life: big business, the industrialized metropolis, mass immigration, a bewildering array of life-altering technologies, and emerging genres of mass culture that measured their audiences in the millions. Clucking with self-satisfied disdain for the unpoetic times, poetry's institutional custodians seemed to prefer that it become nothing more than "an esoteric cult," as one exasperated commentator remarked in 1899, if the alternative meant implicating it in the nation's headlong modernization.² For two decades before 1910, the impasse between the immovable gatekeepers of gentility and modernity's irresistible force had mired American poetry in a crisis of value that many suspected would prove fatal.³

At their most doctrinaire, poetry's genteel defenders repudiated contemporary subjects, insisting that the genre was a species of "divine make-believe" necessarily about "remote times and places."⁴ These inhibiting strictures were internalized even by young poets who desired greater relevance. Josephine Preston Peabody, for example, argued in 1902 that contemporary verse urgently needed to bridge a widening chasm between the real and ideal that defined modern life. But even as she diagnosed a "terrible exclusiveness . . . thrust upon Poetry" in which "the average man" assumes "that he is offensive to the Muses nine,—he and his household, his ox and his ass and everything that is his," Peabody resisted a poetry of the ordinary, the everyday, the modern. Instead she chastised the era's "utter preoccupation with our splendid wherewithal," concluding that "never before did any century so keenly appreciate its own importance."⁵ Despite her desire to make poetry relevant, Peabody was unable to shed the prevailing belief that poets were already being forced to value the modern too highly and ought to be allowed to drift back toward an idealized past. Two years later, these suspicions of topical and modern subjects were theorized into prohibitions by the young critic Oscar Firkins, who asserted that "poetical matter is but a small part of the real or imaginable life" and then proceeded to anatomize five categories of what "the poetical" could not include: "the repulsive" (including the rude, clumsy, grotesque, coarse, foul, brutal, ugly, and rank); "the arid" (the plain, homely, dull, mean, trivial but also the technical, general, and abstract); "the humorous"; "the utilitarian" (the industrial, economic, commercial, legal, and political); and finally, "the conventional." Firkins conceded that "the contents of this list are large and rich," comprising "[t]hree-fourths perhaps of all that men observe."⁶ If these things are what poetry isn't, his essay never manages to say what, if anything, poetry might actually be.

A distrust of verse on topical subjects sounds quaint in the anxiously high-toned idiom of Peabody and Firkins, but the attitude has been formative to modern poetry. Its persistent influence can be traced forward from turn-of-the-century genteel culture to its reemergence as a key tenet of New Criticism and high modernism, and finally into the practices of much current American literary scholarship.⁷ Few today would openly accept the exclusionary premises of New Criticism, but its prohibitions against topicality and modernity, lingering in scholarly choices made and not made, continue to inhibit American poetry's participation in the...