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American Literature 74.3 (2002) 662-664



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Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 . By Rachel Blau DuPlessis. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. 2001. xiv, 238 pp. $64.95.

In her latest book, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, Rachel Blau DuPlessis proposes a thick close reading of modernist poetic texts. By postulating a "social philology" of poetry, DuPlessis wishes "to examine in poetry the textual traces and discursive manifestations of a variety of ideological assumptions, subject positions, and social concepts concerning gender, race, and religious culture." This attempt to "mediate between the historical terrain and the intimate poetic textures of a work" is consistent with such concepts as Clifford Geertz's "thick description" or Fredric Jameson's "political unconscious" and the latter's exhortation to "always historicize." DuPlessis uses her interest in "gender, race, and religious culture" as a way of being sensitive to textual nuance and implication. Her writing style, while densely textured and erudite, is fresh and readable.

DuPlessis focuses on modernist poets who validated themselves as new—responding perhaps to Pound's dictum to "make it new"—including the New [End Page 662] Woman, the New Negro, the New Jew. To this purpose, she reads a poem "not as a formalist narrative only, nor as a social narrative only, but in some conjunction" in order "to articulate the layering of ideological nuance in particular statements in poems." These are reading strategies for "engaging the social meanings embedded in poetic texts."

In discussing gender ideologies in relation to public discussions of property, sexual freedom, and the vote, DuPlessis discusses such writers as H.D., Moore, Pound, Stein, Stevens, and Williams, analyzing the presence of arguments about the New Woman. Pound occupies a central place here, with reflections of the New Woman appearing in his Lustra and "Mauberley." In her ingenious formal reading of "Mauberley," DuPlessis suggests that "Pound acomplishes multiple instances of ‘feminine' rhymes without falling into lightness, inconsequence, or comedy, and he continuously rhymes masculine (monosyllabic) and feminine (polysyllabic) syllables with each other, or as cross-rhymes in one stanza in such a way as to bring the polysyllabic diction under the authority of the ‘masculine' monosyllable." Her reading of Moore, while also interesting, is more straightforward. DuPlessis quotes from "Novices":

stupid man; men are strong and no one pays attention:
stupid woman; women have charm, and how annoying they can be

She comments that it is "tempting to see this double dose of stupidity as Moore's answer to Pound's attack on the genders." In a related chapter on new sexuality, DuPlessis reads Mina Loy's work also in the context of Pound, discussing the sexual radicalism of her "Feminist Manifesto" and "Songs to Johannes." Loy writes the most sexually explicit verse of the period. The male poets, in spite of being the dominant gender, deal with sexuality more guardedly, often insecure about implied challenges to their dominance, whereas the women poets assert themselves as equals in sexual behavior and freedom.

DuPlessis discusses race in a chapter entitled "‘HOO, HOO, HOO': some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness." Here DuPlessis reads white and African American poets in light of issues developed by W. E. B. DuBois and others in the Harlem Renaissance. The word "hoo" appears in works of such white poets as Lindsay ("The Congo"), Stevens ("Bantams in Pine Woods"), and Eliot ("Sweeney Agonistes") as a vulgarization of voodoo into hoodoo. This aspect of Yoruba religion symbolizes racial anxieties in white and African American poets alike, from celebrating African American culture in crude rhythms of "The Congo," to "confrontation" in Eliot's Sweeney fragment, to the evocation of African origins in Helene Johnson's "Bottled." In the latter poem, DuPlessis writes, "African power has been compromised and made pitiable by being bottled as minstrelsy inside American culture." Is this a way of avoiding Conradian "horror"—as DuPlessis claims—by turning voodoo mysteries into a hoodoo patter song, as in Cole Porter's "You Do Something to Me"? [End Page 663]

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