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chapter 6 Gutter and Skyline The New Verse and the Metropolitan Cityscape So far, my narrative of the New Verse movement has focused on the little magazine as the discursive innovation that catalyzed the dramatic change in American poetry’s fortunes after 1912. The three remaining chapters complement this institutional history with an interpretive history, focusing on the struggle of American writers between 1910 and 1925 to fulfill the little magazines’ call for a poetry of modern life by casting off long-standing generic strictures of style and subject matter and immersing their work in the industrialized metropolis. Soon after 1910, an astonishing range of poets—William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Joyce Kilmer, Amy Lowell, John Reed, Sara Teasdale, Claude McKay, to name only a few—suddenly began to produce verses about life in the modern city. Over the next fifteen years, dozens and even hundreds of individuals produced a huge archive of verse intensely engaged with the defining social forms of twentieth-century metropolitan experience. This turn toward urban subject matter marked a decisive shift in American poetry’s relationship to modernity and an epochal departure from national traditions. With the signal exception of Whitman, most literary verse in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, and most commentary upon it, had expressed powerful antipathy toward the modernization transforming the nation and the leading signifier of that process, the industrialized city. Urban and modern subjects were tolerated to some degree in departments of self-designated light verse featured in various magazines such as Munsey’s and The Century, but any serious poet taking up an urban subject or setting felt great pressure to reassert a hierarchized opposition between urban and pastoral realms.1 Sadakichi Hartmann’s celebration of the brandnew Flatiron Building, appearing in an obscure self-published volume in 1904, anticipated the poems resisting knee-jerk condemnation of the city Newcomb_How_text.indd 147 12/15/11 4:06 PM that began appearing in certain American magazines around 1905.2 By the summer of 1912, this city poetry had become a trend sufficient to provoke the indignation of traditionalists such as René Laidlaw, who wrote to The Century condemning partisans of “gutter verse” for taking meretricious delight in “anything in poetry, or painting, that drags in Brooklyn Bridge, the Third Avenue Elevated, or a boxing exhibition under the Frawley Act. . . .‘How clever he is!’ we say of the young poet,‘to have heard iambic pentameters in the racket of Times Square, or to have vibrated with a rhythmic beauty in the McAdoo Tube.’”3 For Laidlaw, the outrage of “gutter verse” was exemplified by a sonnet published in The Independent in September 1910 that would also exercise other commentators: “The Subway (96th Street to 137th Street)” by, of all people, Joyce Kilmer.4 The integral connection between these new developments in verse and the visual arts is revealed in the terms of Laidlaw’s objections, such as the parallel construction“anything in poetry, or painting,”and the derisive epithet “gutter verse,” recalling the sobriquet applied to a group of American painters working with modern urban subject matter whose February 1908 show had divided the New York art world into modern and antimodern camps as never before: the “Ashcan Artists.”5 The imputation of radical modernity to Kilmer—later singled out by the New Critics as the period’s quintessential purveyor of meretriciously accessible doggerel, the antithesis of the great modern poet—reminds us that the impact of the New Verse came from its aggressive embrace of new subject matter as much as from its new styles.6 In poetry no less than painting, realist and even sentimental approaches to urban subjects were perceived as avant-garde provocations and should be seen now not merely as resisting the transformational energies of modernism but as helping to initiate those energies. The urgency and the difficulty of learning to represent urban modernity in verse became the theme of many American poems between 1910 and 1925. Such poems seek meaning from the city’s welter of discordant material , but not by effacing anxieties over emotional dispossession and social heterogeneity. Instead they posit ironic forms of coherence built from the jagged contradictions of experience in the twentieth-century metropolis. “The City” by William Rose Benét, first published in Munsey’s in February 1920, exemplifies this thematics of urban representation in two key emphases: on the city as the inescapable site of modern experience; and on socially charged acts of seeing as responses...

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