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chapter 1 American Poetry on the Brink, 1905–12 The status of poetry in the United States hit bottom between 1900 and 1905. Commentaries during these years routinely assumed that the art was in precipitous decline, and many questioned its very survival.1 The genteel custodians of the nation’s literary culture clung desperately to poetry as an anticommodity, something ostensibly above the frantic getting and spending of modern life. In this climate, any step toward organizing, professionalizing, or remunerating poets was likely to be disdained as degradation of a noble art. Thus in the early 1900s no one assumed sustained responsibility for the publicizing and reviewing of new books of verse, the identification of emerging poets and trends, or the preservation of periodical verses past their immediate moment of publication. No serial publications devoted themselves primarily to verse by living Americans. No ongoing national prizes remunerated poets. Following Edmund Clarence Stedman’s monumental American Anthology of 1900, not a single anthology of serious literary verse by living Americans was published for twelve years.2 The writing of poetry was not taught in institutional contexts, as architecture and painting and music now were, because nearly everyone assumed that poets were not made but born. Aspiring poets of these years, knowing they could hope to see a volume of their work only by paying for it themselves, felt isolated and useless, actively discouraged from writing for anyone except their own closeted muses. The first attempts to challenge this dismal state of affairs can be detected beginning around 1905. The people behind these early initiatives, however tentative or traditional they might look to us now, were revolutionaries of a sort, the first to contest the obsolete ideal of amateur authorship used by the genteel literary establishment to barricade poetry away from commercializing and professionalizing forces of turn-of-the-century American life.While Newcomb_How_text.indd 9 12/15/11 4:06 PM the immediate impact of these initial steps was mild at best, the forms they took and the fates they met reveal much about what American poetry had desperately lacked and what it would need in order to revive. All addressed crippling absences of access—to print, to time and money, to readers and other poets, to a vital national tradition. Disputing the widespread view of modern poets as preposterous dilettantes and seeking to reimagine them as productive artists, they proposed new methods of preserving published poems , networks of personal interaction, and incentives of money and publicity. Outreaching into the Ether: 1905–12 The crisis in the years before 1912 was greatly exacerbated by a perceived vacuum of national tradition. For many Americans, the existing genteel canon, built around the six greatly revered “Fireside poets,” had become an inhibiting, oppressive force.3 The only viable alternative to this canon was Walt Whitman, who in the twenty years after his death in 1892 was transformed from a disreputable cult figure into an icon whose importance was acknowledged in nearly every arena of American literary culture. He dominated sizable chunks of scholarly and critical works of the 1900s, including Paul Elmer More’s 1906 series of Shelburne Essays, Leon H.Vincent’s American Literary Masters (1906), and John Macy’s The Spirit of American Literature (1910). Among the many dozens of magazine pieces on the poet published between 1900 and 1912, several near-duplications of title and approach suggest that periodicals were actively competing for their share of the Whitman market.4 Even the two bellwethers of the genteel “quality magazines,”The Atlantic and The Century, were run by devotees of Whitman after 1900. The Century, whose longtime editor Richard Watson Gilder had befriended the Good Gray Poet during his later years, began around 1905 to give Whitman the same reverential treatment that the Fireside poets had enjoyed in its pages three decades earlier.5 In November 1905 and again in September and October 1907, The Century offered extensive excerpts, more than forty closely printed pages in all, from Horace Traubel’s hagiographic account of the poet’s later years, “With Walt Whitman in Camden.” This campaign survived Gilder’s death in 1909, continuing with a portrait of the poet in March 1910 and then, in February 1911,“Some Portraits and Autographs of Walt Whitman,”which, by emphasizing the“hitherto unpublished” nature of its images and manuscripts, portrayed Whitman’s handwriting as treasured markings and his countenance as a source of nearly idolatrous power.6 The Atlantic under Bliss Perry’s editorship (1899...

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