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chapter 5 Volunteers of America, 1917 The Seven Arts and the Great War In contrast to Poetry, celebrating its centennial in 2012, the Seven Arts lasted only twelve tumultuous issues between November 1916 and October 1917. Yet perhaps even more than Poetry and The Masses, the Seven Arts challenges conventional views of the modernist little magazine as a fugitive publication whose amateur status redeems it from the capitalist marketplace, making it a haven for formally experimental work. Based in Manhattan, the Seven Arts enjoyed substantial financial backing, found a broad audience, proposed an ambitious synthesis of genres into an integrated national culture , and sought to impact American politics at the highest level. Yet these “mainstream” attributes did not keep it from exploring avant-garde, even radical positions. Like the three magazines discussed in previous chapters, the Seven Arts was inspired by an idealistic conviction in the promise of twentieth-century modernity, but even more than the others, its existence was deeply shadowed by the Great War, and its end resulted directly from its principled stand against governmental policy after the declaration of war in April 1917.The magazine’s life divides rather neatly into two halves, an initial phase of utopian cultural nationalism between November 1916 and March 1917, followed by a steadily intensifying oppositional phase between April and October. Its demise provides disturbing evidence of the limits and weaknesses of American free-speech traditions and marks the end of the utopian moment of early American modernism. But its odyssey from cheerleading nationalism to radical dissent also demonstrates the possibility of a modernism passionately engaged with a politicized public sphere. The central role played in this project by verse texts and by “poetry” as a metaphor for national identity reveals the cultural impact of the New Verse movement in a particularly striking way. Newcomb_How_text.indd 118 12/15/11 4:06 PM In its initial phase, the Seven Arts combined the Progressive-era cultural nationalism catalyzed by Herbert Croly’s 1911 book The Promise of American Life with the emerging generational consciousness articulated in such works of “Young America” as Randolph Bourne’s Youth and Life (1913) and Van Wyck Brooks’s America’s Coming-of-Age (1915). Croly and several colleagues had established the New Republic as an organ of political commentary along progressive-nationalist principles in 1914, and in some ways the Seven Arts sought to become a New Republic for the arts, covering newer modes of expression for a self-consciously modern readership. But even from the beginning there was a substantial divergence: those in charge of the New Republic were middle-aged technocrats who had little to do with the artistic avant-garde or with radical politics, while the editors of the Seven Arts, all well under forty, responded strongly to innovations in artistic and political spheres alike. Van Wyck Brooks joined the advisory board of the Seven Arts and eventually became an associate editor, as did Waldo Frank, whose Our America would make a notable if slightly belated contribution to the discourse of cultural nationalism in 1919.Also on the advisory board were prominent younger figures from a range of artistic fields: the dramatist Edna Kenton of the Provincetown Players; the violinist and music educator David Mannes; the modernist theatrical designer Robert Edmond Jones; and three poets, Robert Frost, Kahlil Gibran, and Louis Untermeyer. True to its name, the Seven Arts would feature an eclectic mix of fiction, drama, reviews, and prose commentaries on everything from reminiscences of the Victorian novelist Samuel Butler to contemporary Italian religious cinema to“Two Views of Ragtime.”Still, the editor-in-chief, James Oppenheim, and half the advisory board were primarily poets, suggesting the central role poetry would play among the seven. Cristanne Miller notes that the Seven Arts, with Oppenheim, Frank, Untermeyer , and the journalist and music critic Paul Rosenfeld within its inner circle, was essentially run by progressive Jews.1 The magazine’s strong affiliation with a cultural pluralism sympathetic to Jews and immigrants and its connection to the geographic locale of lower Manhattan give it a lot more in common with The Masses (in which Untermeyer was also a central figure) and with Others than most historians have realized. Ironically, the forgotten figure on the magazine’s roster is its editor-in-chief, Oppenheim, a prolific writer of vers libre and enthusiastic advocate of the New Poetry movement, whose later career was shorter and less noteworthy than those of the magazine’s other key participants. Despite...

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