Modernism & Democracy

The confrontation of the concepts of modernism and democracy in the title of this book seems an obvious one, especially considering the fact that the two movements came into being simultaneously and were famously considered to be at odds with one another for most of the twentieth century. At the same time, however, the two terms are difficult to grasp and recent scholarly works have opted out of this stark opposition by using the plural form rather than the singular. Not so Rachel Potter: she goes back to the old hostility between the two although she is aware of the danger of definitions and of letting those take root in a given time and cultural context. What was it that "modernist writers meant by the terms 'democracy,' 'liberalism,' and 'authority,'" and what "exactly was Pound attacking in 1914?" are some of the questions indicating her awareness of imposing a twenty-first-century definition of those terms on early-twentieth-century usages.

Potter goes on to address and explode another conviction which many literary scholars seem to have espoused fairly unreservedly—that is, that modernist women writers were on the side of democracy: "Women modernist writers tend to be read in relation to this central opposition between democratisation and elite modernism. In these accounts, women writers are seen to identify their interests with less authoritarian aesthetic values." Her aim, then, is to question and investigate the interpretative framework used in most of the modernist studies; firstly, by going back to the historical context of the debates to achieve a better understanding of the philosophical and political concepts involved and, secondly, by looking at the concepts of democratisation and authority as reflected in the poetry of three poets: T. S. Eliot, Mina Loy, and H.D.

The first chapter, however, scrutinizes the dissemination of philosophical ideas with respect to liberalism and democracy through some of the modernist journals in the prewar years. According to Potter, A. R. Orage's New Age became the propagator of Nietzschean ideas when he became the editor in 1907 and the New Freewoman (later the Egoist) supported Max Stirner's philosophy of the "unique ego." Potter goes on to explain the significance of those philosophies at the time, pointing out that Stirner's influence, for instance, was due to his opening up the possibility of an egoist's freedom "to shape the world in his own image," which is exactly what modernist writers aspired to at the time. The spread of Nietzsche's theory in Britain predated that of Stirner by a few years. It came at a time when artists were hoping to move on from Decadent concerns to something new and different. Potter's approach to the historical context is commendable in that she not only looks at the journals and the networks in great detail but also at the publication history of Stirner's and Nietzsche's work in translation in Britain.

With Nietzsche and Stirner the war was also declared on "feminism," which was seen as "an extreme version of the democratic prejudices of the modern epoch." But, interestingly, some feminists adopted the egoist philosophy and changed their allegiance. Beatrice Hastings, for instance, is shown to transfer her politics "from the suffragette cause to a Nietzschean feminism," thus changing from a pro-suffragist into an anti-suffragist. And Dora Marsden, too, as editor of the New Freewoman, advocated a dynamic, individualist feminism and explicitly rejected an equal and collective feminism. It was she, Potter argues, following the arguments by Bruce Clark, who led Pound, her literary editor, to assume the egoist position, not the other way around.

Before tackling the three poets she is set to discuss, Potter looks at the work of a selection of major modernist writers, whose ambition it was to experiment with language and style so as to adapt it to the changed modern environment: Ford, Lawrence, Pound, Lewis, and Stein. The chapter is a detailed but lucid exposé on the interrelationships among the authors' poetics and politics and...