The PMLA and the Backstory to Making Poetry New

The time is ripe for a literary awakening.

—Marion Learned, PMLA (1909)

Even considering the breadth of material that the phrase "modern periodical studies" might cover, does cover for those of us engaged in this field, it is probably safe to say that when we think of "modernist periodicals" we do not automatically think of the magazine that many of us receive regularly as part of our membership in the Modern Language Association (MLA). Yet, considered by the measures we customarily apply to modernist periodicals, the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, or PMLA, began its history, quite self-consciously, as a modernist magazine (see figure 1).

The magazine began by declaring itself the mouthpiece of an organization committed to the promotion of modern languages—a commitment that was itself, in 1883, a modernist move. Through their new magazine, the MLA's founders aligned themselves, as firmly as in any modernist coffee shop manifesto, with change—in their case, a determination to make education new. Underlying the magazine's title, which linked the organization and its house journal to the "pioneering" activities of its sponsors (a word they applied to themselves), ¹ there was an ideological commitment to the same kinds of things we see widely valued in other modernist periodicals: the determination to adopt interdisciplinary approaches and embrace

fig. 1.

Transactions of the Modern Language Association, vol. 1, 1884-85 (1886); subsequently the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA).

international trends, along with a readiness to accept what the MLA's president of 1902 referred to as "the formula of modernity." ²

While the PMLA is certainly not an unknown publication, it has not before been analyzed with respect to the insights it provides into modernist literary history, and especially into the technical origins of experimental modern American poetry. Using the PMLA as a primary source document, I offer here what might be described as the untold prehistory of poetic modernism in America as it relates to the changing scholarly and pedagogical practices of the time. In general, journals written by and for educators have received almost no critical attention in scholarly re-creations of the intellectual climate out of which literary modernism emerged. But such journals have important stories to tell. One of those stories, the one I will tell here, concerns trends in American higher education in the period immediately preceding the sudden emergence of radically new poetic forms in America during the opening years of the twentieth century.

In his History of Modern Poetry, David Perkins observes that "if 'modern' poetry had any clear, dramatic beginning, breaking sharply with the past, it was with poets in the second decade of the [twentieth] century in America." ³ In trying to explain why such poetry began to appear in America when it did, Perkins gives a good deal of credit, with reason, to Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine, founded in 1912. Beyond that, though, he does not provide a specific historical explanation for why America proved such a rich breeding ground for dramatic innovations in poetic practice. I believe this was a story he could not tell (magnificent as his history is) because he did not examine the history of American education—a source that furnishes concrete, traceable answers to his implied questions: "Why America?" and "Why then?"

In contrast, the PMLA provides significant insights into the development of modernist poetics in America by allowing us to examine the preparatory groundwork laid by American educators. In the first part of this article, I use the PMLA to examine the ways in which American educators contributed to the emergence of modernist poetics through the teaching of literary theory. Nineteenth-century literary theorists proposed in scholarship published in the 1890s and early 1900s that literature had originally, in its primitive origins, crossed genre barriers between language, music, and dance with great fluidity; that there was no real technical difference between poetry and prose, because all language is essentially rhythmic; and that poetry could be very effectively written in unrhymed, irregularly...