Museums of Modernism

ELT 47 : 2 2004 Pound. While Pound did observe admiringly of Browning in Three Cantos that "half your dates are out, you mix your eras," the modern poet was much more dedicated to historical accuracy than his Victorian precursor , as an important essay by George Bornstein on Pound's relationship to Browning has shown. Stylistic qualities—Browning's colloquial language, the employment of dramatic masks, the habit of direct address , and the difficulty of a presentation that required intellectual involvement on the part of the reader—were equally significant to Pound. Likewise, Pound's rendering of history can best be understood as ideogrammic (Bornstein's term) rather than cyclic (Williams's claim), so that historical events fed off of the energy of each other and thus built up a kind of positive electric field. It would have been helpful if Williams had measured her argument against some of these significant alternative models offered by literary critics. In conclusion, Williams offers an attractive thesis constructed around masses of primary materials that make for fascinating reading. While the execution of the project is workmanlike, this reader wishes that a few of its limitations had been addressed. RICHARD BADENHAUSEN ________________ Westminster College Museums of Modernism Catherine Paul. Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. viii + 296 pp. $52.50 WHAT ARE the museums of modernism? The Municipal Gallery in Dublin; the old Reading Room of the British Museum Library in London ; the American Museum of Natural History in New York; and Gertrude and her brother Leo Stein's apartment at 37 rue de Fleurus in Paris during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century. About these places and their variously innovative ways of displaying their collections , Catherine Paul has interesting and valuable things to say. They are interesting and valuable especially because her perspective on these four oddly assorted but extraordinarily important cultural institutions is one with which most readers of this book are likely to be unfamiliar. So, we learn that in the so-called "Sir Hugh Lane Gallery" in Charlemont House when Yeats paid his celebrated visit there, subsequently memorialized in "The Municipal Gallery Revisited," the sole occupant of that room was Albert Powers's Portrait Bust of Sir Hugh Lane. In this way, the startlingly empty room, with its monitory severed head, reminded visitors, including of course Yeats himself, of the absent collec220 BOOK REVIEWS tion of nineteenth-century paintings that Lane had twice bequeathed to the Irish people and that, to Yeats's dismay (as notably expressed in "September 1913"), had at first been refused by them. Aside from telling details such as this one, Paul also discusses in her introductory chapter the specific ways in which early twentieth century museum theory and practice differed from those of the preceding century . As a result of important changes advocated and undertaken by leading museum administrators, Paul argues, the "new" museum—the titular museum of modernism—became a place where past life was resurrected and even re-created instead of one where aesthetic or natural historical corpses were put on display in proverbial glass cases. This unprecedented emphasis on making things new and alive in museums contributed significantly, in Paul's view, to a similar tendency in modernist poetry. Hence, when, as recounted in his poem "History," William Carlos Williams encountered the empty sarcophagus of Uresh-Nofer in the Metropolitan Museum in 1917, he was able, even though the Met was not to be reckoned among the Big Four museums of modernism, to step up to it, run his "finger against the edge," and, after literally peering into its ornate innards, hear himself being addressed by the still living voice of the Prophet of the ancient Goddess of Mut. In this way the past reentered the life of the present, and the gods, as described in one of Ezra Pound's most powerful early poems, began to take their first hesitant steps back into the modernist world. According to Paul, however, Pound, unlike his friend Williams, did not primarily experience his epiphanies by gazing into the depths of sarcophagi , but did so rather while desultorily inhaling the liberal atmosphere...