Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture 1900–1930 (review)

Alexis de Tocqueville warned that American democracy must guard against the tyranny of the majority, who erect "formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them."¹ In Democracy and Leadership (1924), Irving Babbitt complained that social justice now "operates through a megaphone." His chief antagonist, Rousseau, had been the evangelist of "liberty, equality, fraternity"—which, to Babbitt, was "only a portentous patter of words." For Babbitt ridiculed the American ideal of equality of opportunity: "Opportunity to do what? To engage in a scramble for money and material success, until the multimillionaire emerges as the characteristic product of a country dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."²

Rachel Potter's Modernism and Democracy explores some of the interrelations between democracy and Anglo-American modernist poetry. Her study opens with the heroic self-dramatizations of those modernist writers and intellectuals who portrayed themselves as the "unacknowledged legislators" of mass democracies. Potter traces the "voguish popularity" (12) of Stirner and Nietzsche in pre-1914 London—exhibited in the pages of The New Age and The Freewoman—which lent support to an attack on the supposed "herd instincts" of a modern mass electorate. Potter connects this distaste with the entrance of women into the political and cultural spheres. Ford Madox Ford's and D. H. Lawrence's writings expressed an ambivalence about the emancipation of women: their fiction celebrated liberated female characters, but they were critical of the cultural "standardization" they believed to be a corollary of universal suffrage. Potter, however, counters the assumption that modernist women identified themselves with "less authoritarian aesthetic values" (4). Radical feminists, such as Dora Marsden and Beatrice Hastings, were scarcely less assertive in their claims to authority, or in their rejection of liberal democracy, than their modernist male contemporaries.

This observation informs Potter's section examining the cultural elitism of the aggressively "masculine" modernisms propounded by Hulme, Pound, and Lewis. This is familiar, controversial terrain in modernist studies, yet Potter's attention to the gendered construction of much anti-democratic posturing seeks to unsettle revisionary genealogies of "female modernism." Potter demonstrates that "the modern male artist will often set himself the task of imposing a form onto the mess of modern life, and that the mess will be connected to democracy and bourgeois femininity" (71). Having said that, Potter does not misrepresent the complicated motivations of Mina Loy's "Psycho-Democracy" or H. D.'s "Hellenic" aesthetics, showing that they, too, displayed aspects of the anti-democratic "egoism" symptomatic of the "Men of 1914."

Potter's transitions between intellectual history and her readings of the poetry of H. D., T. S. Eliot, and Mina Loy are not always seamless. To claim that H. D.'s Trilogy is "written in the interstices of the war, sexual difference and selfhood" (123) or that in Loy's poetry "questions about composition involve a meditation on ideas of authority and democracy" (176) encourage forms of attention that depreciate the poetry as poetry. While "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Portrait of a Lady" are fraught with anxieties regarding cultural authority, it is hard to see the nervous male sensibilities in these poems as embodiments of a political critique of democracy. At their best, however, Potter's skilful illumination of details is arresting and thought-provoking. Meditating on the "images of power and subjection" (90) in H. D.'s poetry, she fastens upon Eurydice's reproach to Orpheus—"So for your arrogance/ I am broken at last, / I who had lived unconscious, / who was almost forgot"—in order to draw out the sexual politics underlying the poetry's glacial surfaces. H. D.'s oeuvre was energized by her attraction/repulsion towards a series of legislating egoists (Pound, Aldington, Lawrence, Bryher). Those "unacknowledged legislators" who feature in her work are often in greater need of emotional, rather than political, acknowledgement.

Potter's foray into this fascinating...