13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 1 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

"There must be great audiences too"—Poetry: A Magazine of Verseby Ben-Merre, David

This object is available for public use. Individuals interested in reproducing this object in a publication orwebsite, or for any commercial purpose, must first receive written permission from the Modernist JournalsProject.

For further information, please contact:Modernist Journals ProjectBox 1957, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912MJP_Project_Manager@brown.edu

ContentsIntroduction

I. Harriet Monroe and the Beginnings of Poetry

II. The "Foreign Correspondent" and "A. C. H.": Ezra Pound — Alice Corbin Henderson

III. Literary Debates and Controversies: Imagism — Vers Libre — The Jepson Attack — PoetryPrizes — Poems of War and Peace

IV. Poetry's Poets: T. S. Eliot — Robert Frost — Vachel Lindsay — Amy Lowell — Carl Sandburg —Wallace Stevens — William Carlos Williams — W. B. Yeats

V. Even More of Poetry's Poets: Conrad Aiken — Maxwell Bodenheim — Joseph Campbell —Skipwith Cannell — Emanuel Carnevali — Padraic Colum — Grace Hazard Conkling — HildaConkling — Babette Deutsch — Arthur Davison Ficke — John Gould Fletcher — F. S. Flint —Florence Kiper Frank — Jun Fujita — Wilfrid Wilson Gibson — Ben Hecht — Helen Hoyt [Lyman] —James Joyce — [Alfred] Joyce Kilmer — Alfred Kreymborg — Harold Monro — Ernest Rhys — LolaRidge — Isaac Rosenberg — James Stephens — Ajan Syrian — Sara Teasdale — Eunice Tietjens —Allen Upward — Arthur Waley — John Hall Wheelock — (Arthur) Yvor Winters — Edith Wyatt —Elinor Wylie

VI. Closing — Endnotes — Works Cited

Introduction

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 2 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

"POETRY may not be a grand enough portal, and the lamps that light it may burn dim in driftingwinds; but until a nobler one is built it should stand, and its little lights should show the way asthey can."—Harriet Monroe, Poetry 11.1, p. 41

For fifteen cents in 1912, Chicago, you could have purchased one pound of New Evaporated CrawfordPeaches or Stollwerck's Premium Chocolate 1/2 pound cake, some of Madame Ise'bell's Face Powder oran oak-framed picture of Cupid (awake or asleep), 1/4 lb box of “Effervescing Sodium Phosphate” (used tomake granular salt) or, granted you were willing to put up with “slight defects, never noticeable,” someinfants' cashmere stockings.1 If, however, you were a bit more culturally adventurous and wanted to take alook at a small periodical boasting “the best poems now written in English,” your fifteen cents could havebought you Harriet Monroe's Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (Poetry 1.2 L; hereafter abbreviated as P). Inaddition to Poetry's original poems and fresh reviews, in addition to its sharp, witty editorials and theprospect of participating in transatlantic cultural conversations, you would have received the satisfactionthat you were helping to “promote in every possible way the interests of the art.” An endeavor of so wide ascope, however, depended upon the promise that a poetic culture, complementing the magazine, could findits place amid the French plumed hats, personal player-pianos, and electric motorcars of the day.

Monroe understood, as many of her contemporaries—poets and editors included—failed to understand,that she needed to find the right balance between promoting what was new, strange, and outside themainstream and maintaining a reading public, especially for one of the first American journals devotedentirely to poetry. This meant, in effect, creating a poetic marketplace, one that would be curious, open-minded, and patient with new work. To have great poets there must be great audiences too—this quotationfrom Whitman appeared in each issue of Poetry. It promised readers who might otherwise be wary ofmodernist verse that there was a continuous lineage from the poetic past even in work that seemed todismiss it. It also assured readers not only that they were important, but, moreover, that they, too, were partof this very new and very thrilling literary adventure.

While hundreds of such "little magazines" appeared in major cities across the country during the first twodecades of the twentieth century, the likelihood that such a venture would survive was bleak. The magazinewould need a top-notch editorial staff, a constant stream of new poetic offerings, an innovative editorialpolicy, and, above all, a marketplace to fund its product—whether through philanthropic contributions, areadership that would subscribe to its pages, or, and this was quickly becoming a new phenomenon, itsown advertising pages. Harriet Monroe's Poetry, published out of Cass Street in Chicago, seemed to haveall of the above. Its outstanding editorial staff included the in-house poets Alice Corbin Henderson andEunice Tietjens (another poet-contributor, Edith Wyatt, served on the advisory board), and the impeccablyfrustrating, intellectually luminous, one-of-a-kind advocate of everything modernist—the “foreigncorrespondent,” Ezra Pound.

“Fears have been expressed by a number of friendly critics that POETRY may become a house of refugefor minor poets,” Harriet Monroe wrote in the second issue of her journal (P 1.2 62). She wanted to make itclear that being "minor" was acceptable. Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Burns, Poe and Whitman were all minorpoets (in their day), she reminded her critics, as were “Drayton, Lovelace, Herrick, and many anotherdelicate lyrist of the anthologies . . . [who] created little masterpieces, not great ones” (P 1.2 63-64).Poetry—or what Monroe called “a Cinderella corner in the ashes” of popular magazines (P 1.1 27)—wouldbe a home for poets big and small, for poets who sought to change the heavens and those who just wantedto provide glimpses into modern life. Monroe's famous "Open Door" policy, which applied equally to poetsand critics, outlined this view:

may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius!To this end the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school.They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, bywhom, or under what theory of art it is written. Nor will the magazine promise to limit its editorialcomments to one set of opinions. (P 1.2 64)

Monroe's editorial policies attracted modernist poets considered both major and minor. She published T. S.Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Wallace Stevens's “Sunday Morning,” Carl Sandburg's“Chicago,” H. D.'s “Hermes of the Ways,” and Ezra Pound's first Cantos. She published W. B. Yeats, AmyLowell, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Richard Aldington, D. H. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, andMarianne Moore. She published important, canonical poets slowly being forgotten and wonderfullyinnovative poets quickly being remembered: Vachel Lindsay, John Gould Fletcher, Edwin ArlingtonRobinson, Maxwell Bodenheim, Sara Teasdale, and the young Elinor Wylie. Monroe devoted issues to theAmerican Indian and the African American, to the Southern bard and the Western cowboy; she even maderoom in her pages for poetry by children.

The high quality of Poetry's verse was not the only factor defining its relationship to modernist culture.Many of the aesthetic debates of the time—those surrounding vers libre, imagism, the role of a nationalpoetics, the scope and function of a poetic audience—happened in the pages of Poetry. The book reviewsand critical essays, often written by the magazine's own staff—including Monroe, Alice Corbin Henderson,Edith Wyatt, and others—vigorously defended modernist experimentation as it argued for a greater role of

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 3 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

poetry in the art world and beyond.

The March 1919 issue of Poetry (13.6) shows us how all of these elements—poetry, essays, reviews,advertisements, national and international concerns—come together to form an undivided whole. Theinstallment had an assortment of verse sounds: Ezra Pound, who was on his way out of Cass Street,alongside William Carlos Williams, who was on his way back in, beside Morris Bishop and Robert M.McAlmon who were fighting overseas with the American Expeditionary Force. Pound's (mis)translation,“Poems from the Propertius Series,” begins with his typically allusive and elusive “Shades of Callimachus,Coan Ghosts of Philetas, / It is in your grove I would walk—” (291). William Carlos Williams's “CompleteDestruction” provides an altogether different phrasal rhythm. It is tragic but more whimsical, and itsminutiae leads to a metaphysical speculation on mortality:

It was an icy day.We buried the cat,Then took her boxAnd set match to itIn the back yard.Those fleas that escapedEarth and fireDied by the cold.

Morris Bishop's “With the A.E.F,” written in France, and Robert M. McAlmon's “Volplanetor,” written uponhis return from the war, supply entirely different senses of transient being. “In the clairvoyance of a midnightwaking / I took an inventory of myself . . . / Scraps of old songs, fragments of childish fears, / And blowingmemories of unlit years,” begins Bishop's intriguingly heartfelt verse (308). McAlmon's sounds are jarring,his language off-kilter: “Insoluble in high air's quiescency / My plane, on earth a sophist, naively /Reconnoitres promiscuously” (320).

Following these selections is “Comment: A Radical-Conservative,” Harriet Monroe's reply to Max Eastman'spreface “American Ideals of Poetry” published in his collection Colors of Life (Knopf). Ads for Eastman'sThe Enjoyment of Poetry had appeared in earlier issues of Poetry. Now, with Eastman's “indictment of freeverse as necessarily unrespectful of the line and therefore unstructural and formless” (323), Monroe felt theneed to respond. “Would Hamlet's soliloquy or Antony's death-speech,” she posed, “be any the less poetryif written out as prose, or if scrambled into irregular lines? Is Lincoln's Gettysburg speech any the lessessentially poetry, in rhythm, structure, and spiritual motive, because it happens to be printed with line-divisions?” (324-25). The whole back-and-forth seems ironic given that Eastman was a social reformer,editor of socialist journals, and a friend and translator of Leon Trotsky. Avant-garde modernist literature,unfortunately, just never made it onto his program.

The book reviews in this issue include the poet Vachel Lindsay's assessment of Yanks: A Book of A. E. F.Verse, “written in the American language” and published by The Stars and Stripes, “the doughboy paperpublished in France”: “full of . . . the sense of Tomorrow. . . . [Yanks] records the moods of the privatesoldier, and absolutely refuses to be heroic, though some of the amateur versifiers are now dead on thefield” (329). Alfred Kreymborg, the important modernist editor, provides a review of Lola Ridge's The Ghettoand Other Poems. Ridge, a Marxist and feminist, was born in Ireland and then spent time in Australiabefore moving to the United States. Kreymborg called her “a revolutionist . . . [who] will be charged withlunacy, incendiarism, nihilism,” and he insisted that her collection about the New York Jewish communitywould subject the average American gentlefolk “to the most uncompromising excoriation I've ever seenbetween two American bookboards” (336). Following Alice Corbin Henderson's review of John GouldFletcher—“Masks that only imitate other masks eventually become lifeless,” because they “do not move us,either as art or life” (340)—Helen Birch's review of Maxwell Bodenheim—“not a negligible book” (342)—andMonroe's review of a posthumously published A. C. Swinburne collection, appears “a letter from one of thecontributors, a First Lieutenant in the 330th Infantry,” Morris Bishop, who wrote that he was “reveling in yourbunch of back numbers as in a first taste of chocolate after months deprived of luxuries” (346).

By providing glimpses of very real war experiences alongside aesthetic debates, the March 1919 issue ofPoetry seems almost violently to be showing how social relations are no longer part of one integratedwhole. I would argue that Monroe's journal illustrates the reverse—that the whole is no longer anything butan expression of its integrated parts. Monroe was wary of aestheticizing war, but she also knew that itsrhetoric, like the rhetoric of poetry, was something that was to be bought and sold. The closing pages of theMarch 1919 issue, containing the advertising pages, show how all of these parts come together. An ad forHorlick's Original Malted Milk—to be used “FOR SAFETY and CONVENIENCE”—is squeezed in betweenads for Monroe's and Henderson's verse anthology The New Poetry, bound volumes of Poetry, and TheMorality of Women and Love and Ethics by the Swedish feminist writer Ellen Key. Another ad for Monroe'sjournal at the end of the issue reminds readers that “A subscription to POETRY is the best way of payinginterest on your huge debt to the great poets of the past.” Poetry not only links together war and verse, themilk and morality of the present, but also ties everything back to the shared speculations of a cultural past.

What follows here are five sections devoted to various aspects of Poetry magazine. The first section

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 4 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

recounts the magazine's fascinating beginnings and the individual who made it all possible—HarrietMonroe. The second section follows two essential personalities, each with an essential hand in thejournal's development and each with a differing idea as to what constituted a modernist journal: Ezra Poundand the often-overlooked Alice Corbin Henderson. The third section details some of the controversies thatfound their way into the pages of this journal. Finally, the fourth and fifth sections consider some of thepoems and poets—both major and minor—who appeared in the journal. The assumption that modernistpoets stood free from their immediate cultural influences led critics and readers for a time to seemodernism as just an assemblage of anthologized names. Modernism was more than just its names. Eventhe modernist poets we consider "major" today were very much the cultural outgrowth of modernism, andeach was a part of a complicated network of politics, poetics, and personalities.

Both the marketing and form of Poetry are important to how we have come to conceive of culturalproduction in the beginning of the twentieth century. Recent critical work by Suzanne W. Churchill, AdamMcKible, Robert Scholes, Sean Latham and others, termed "periodical studies," hopes to resituatemodernism in its culture of "little magazines."2 Modernism was never just “The Waste Land,” Ulysses, andMrs. Dalloway—despite what our syllabi may claim. It was dynamic; it was something that was traded; itwas a vortex without being Vorticism. And it was something that happened not in museums but atopeditorial tables and among characters, big and small. Periodical studies attempts to recover the littlemagazine not just as the container of important modernist work, but as its specific medium. The culturalinstitution of the little magazine—not the authors who can be picked out of it—defined modernism. Poeticartworks were not to be dreamed up overnight and left on the kitchen counter for publication and posterity.They were mediated extensively: sent out (often to unknown readers), rejected, rewritten, and re-sent; theywere published next to other poets, next to advertisements, next to essays about what ought to constitute amodern poetics. Most importantly, perhaps, modernism was something that was bought and sold—which isone of the biggest paradoxes for an artistic movement that (at least initially, in its critical context) has shiedaway from its own historical frameworks.

“Modern culture,” Sean Latham and Robert Scholes write, “was created from a still-obscure alchemy ofcommercial and aesthetic impulses and processes” (521).3 Their work is part of a project to “rescu[e]modernism from modernists like Ezra Pound, who claimed a purity of intention and achievement for modernliterature that is belied by the actual relationship between commerce and culture that made modernismwhat it was and is revealed so powerfully in the magazines, where the relationship between art andadvertising is inescapable” (Scholes, “Afterword” 225). Looking at the advertisements printed in the backpages of Poetry, we may begin to see how everything was coming together. The June 1913 issue (2.3), forexample, promotes The Enjoyment of Poetry by Max Eastman, the journal Art—“All the twaddle thatthrough the centuries has twined itself about that simple three-letter word has not sufficed to strangle it”—published by M. O'Brien & Son, and The Art of Versification by J. Berg Esenwein and Mary EleanorRoberts—“Clear and progressive in arrangement. . . . Indispensable to every writer of verse” (see Scholes220-21 for a reading of this text). An ad from the Ralph Fletcher Seymour Company—a publisher proposingto print limited editions of books—appeared next to a subscription offer from Poetry (which “has introducedto America the great Bengal poet, Rabindra Nath Tagore; and it will soon publish a group of translationsfrom the Chinese by Allen Upward”). Other advertisements in the coming months and years would promotemodernist anthologies and other periodicals (such as Blast and The Egoist), offers of engagements forlectures, and even dogs for poets. Taken together, the ads show the disparity of a commercial literaryculture as well as its burgeoning global reach.

Harriet Monroe understood the new marketplace for poetry by accepting a notion that few practitioners andfewer readers wanted to believe—that art was indeed property. She sold poetry, she sold advertisingspace, and she sold Chicago—all were part of the same project of advertising modernism. Her “idealisticyet pragmatic modernism,” according to John Timberman Newcomb, “admitted no inherent contradictionbetween the creation of poetry and the creation of a market for poetry” (102). Defending her decision togive out poetry prizes against those claims that it would debase the art, Monroe betrays a little of herpanache, a little of her metaphoric gift, and a little of her Midwestern zeal. As luck would have it, her noteon “The Question of Prizes” appears in the alchemic cauldron of Poetry (just before Carl Sandburg's reviewof Ezra Pound):

Why should a poet be “utterly lacking in self-respect” if he accepts a fellowship, when so manypainters and architects, scholars and scientists, have stood up nobly under the infliction? . . .“Miss Monroe led us to suppose she was building a cathedral—it now appears that it was aWoolworth Building,” says one critic. A cathedral, did I? Modern cathedrals are second-rate—mere imitations. I would rather build a first-rate sky-scraper! But not the Woolworth Building—theMonadnock perhaps. (P 7.5 246-49)

The best account of the first decade of Poetry is still Ellen Williams's Harriet Monroe and the PoetryRenaissance (hereafter referenced as EW), to which my introduction owes a great deal. Unfairly or not,scholars have critiqued Williams for her tendency to marginalize Monroe's enormous influence onmodernism. Despite her detailed description of Monroe's arduous labor and effectiveness as a poet andreader, Williams seems to subordinate Monroe's work to that of others: “This seems the most importantcontribution of Harriet Monroe as editor of Poetry: she made Pound available, spread his influence abroad,

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 5 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

but was not swallowed up by him” (EW 288). Such pronouncements unfortunately echo those ratherunforgiving assertions of Humphrey Carpenter in his usually excellent biography of Pound. Consider hisdismissive “Harriet Monroe was a fifty-two-year-old spinster, the daughter of a lawyer. For nearly a quarterof a century she had been writing bland, mediocre verse which she was now having difficulty in gettingpublished, so she decided to start her own poetry magazine” (Carpenter 184-85).

More recently, scholars such as Newcomb, Jayne Marek, and Ann Massa have re-discovered Monroe'spivotal presence at the center of modernist poetics, while also contesting the gender politics behind pastcritiques. I am indebted to their work as well. “[I]t is long past time to discard the image of Harriet Monroeas a 'literary spinster,'” Newcomb argues, “and to accept her instead as a pioneer of an American avant-garde modernism that needs to be seen . . . as strikingly different from its European contemporaries” (88).Such projects not only recover the contributions of female editors of the small magazine, but also elevatesuch editors to their rightful place in modernism. “The denigration and dismissal of Monroe throughoutmuch of modern literary history,” Marek writes, “constitutes a telling example of the fate of many women;reexamining her contributions to that history requires a change of perspective that allows her to be seen onher own terms” (Women 26). While the recovery of the female voice within the male-dominated confines ofa manufactured modernism is a recent project, the implicit gendering and sexism of modernist institutions isnot a new discovery. Monroe herself attacked the sexism of, for one, the National Institute of Arts andLetters, which encouraged only “those creations of art which proceed from sober and earnest males”(“Sobriety and Earnestness” P 3.4 144).

The goal of my introduction is to recast literary modernism so we see it not just as a conglomeration ofpoems that can be pulled out of a magazine, but also as a space of contrasting poetics, personalities, andpolitics. In what follows, I recount many of the remarkable controversies and anecdotes that shed light onthe happenings of the era. Because so many of Poetry's stories have been told already (in much betterwords than I can piece together), I spend most of my energy looking closely at some of the poems andessays that appear on its pages. My hope is that one poem or poet will catch hold of your interest, sendingyou along to that “first-rate sky-scraper”—the Modernist Journal Project's (MJP's) archive—where, with anybit of luck, you'll become as lost as I have been.

I. Harriet Monroe and the Beginnings of Poetry

The red and black cover of the first issue of Poetry featured a half-rolled parchment and quill sitting atopa bed of laurel branches, the artist and publisher's name Ralph F. Seymour hiding in the corner. Above it,the cost and volume number were listed. Below it, a white Pegasus was flying into the red P of Poetry. Redand black weavings adorned the side, bracketing the name and contents. The cover advertised poems byArthur Davison Ficke, William Vaughan Moody, Ezra Pound, Emilia Stuart Lorimer, Helen Dudley, andGrace Hazard Conkling, and it promised an Editorial Comment (or comments) and Notes andAnnouncements. The very bottom broadcast what would become a famous office address and deliveryterminal for all poems modern—543 Cass Street, Chicago. Looking closely, above the month andRomanized year, we would see that the smallest type on the cover was the words: “Copyright 1912 byHarriet Monroe. All rights reserved.” While the copyrighting of work wasn't new, it was undeniablyimportant. It acknowledged that poetry was indeed property—specifically that of the publisher—and that thepoetic marketplace didn't exist only with the Pegasus in an imaginary world in the clouds, but also in the

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 6 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

very real, very dirty world of capitalist finance. Monroe knew all about the necessity of safeguarding herpoets' efforts and her own. And this is where the story of Poetrygoes back a few years.

Monroe had been commissioned to compose a poem that would be read at the dedicatory ceremony of theChicago World's Fair of 1892. Her poem, “The Columbian Ode,” was a paean to Chicago, America, anduniversal brotherhood. Monroe was “determined to use no classic images” in her celebration of the“splendors and triumphs of modern civilization and an era of universal peace” (Monroe A Poet's Life 121;hereafter cited as APL; Monroe's Poets & Their Art and “The Free-Verse Movement in America” will bereferenced as P&TA and FVMA, respectively).

Lo, clan on clan,The embattled nations gather to be one,Clasp hands as brothers on Columbia's shield,Upraise her banner to the shining sun.Along her sacred shoreOne heart, one song, one dream—Men shall be free forevermore,And love shall be law supreme. (121-22)

Monroe was paid $1000 for the contribution. More importantly, she insisted that the rights to it remain withher. Covering the World's Fair, the New York World had reprinted this poem without permission. In whatwould become a rather important court case, Monroe successfully argued that her copyright had beeninfringed, and she won punitive damages “sufficient to punish the trespasser and prevent a repetition of theoffense” (APL 142). The ruling was affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals, and, when the Supreme Courtrefused to hear the case, the World had no further recourse. Monroe had sued and successfully won$5000. Add that to the $1000 she already received for her poem from the World's Fair dedicationcommittee and this was not a bad deal for a poem in 1892. The whole episode, what Ann Massa calls “ahighly effective public relations exercise for Monroe” in which she “acquired an image and a role in theworld of American poetry,” provided the future editor with the funds and the institutional backing necessaryto promote poetry domestically (Columbian 61). The court case also helped set the grounds for what wouldbecome an essential principle of intellectual property, and it ensured that the publication rights of thelaboring poet ought to be protected.

Born in 1860 to Henry S. Monroe, “a lawyer prominent in the affairs of the very new and rapidly growingcity” of Chicago, Monroe had a natural gift for all things literary (EW 8). She frequently published essays,poetry, and criticism in the New York Sun, the Atlantic, the Chicago Evening Post, and the ChicagoTribune—where, for a time, she was the art critic (EW 9). When she started Poetry, she was fifty-two yearsold. “[W]hat was Chicago then as an inspiration to the muse?” Edgar Lee Masters wrote to Monroe (EW 9).Masters was not entirely correct to imply that Chicago lacked culture, for there were numerous art societies,patrons, galleries, music halls, and theaters; architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, andJohn Root (Monroe's brother-in-law) made a home there. The problem wasn't that there was no market forart, but that there was no market for poetry. “Poetry alone,” Monroe wrote in her 1912 grievance list, “hasno powerful friends” (qtd. in EW 10). Years later, recollecting the situation in her autobiography, Monroeexplained:

The Art Institute, with the arts which it officially represented and encouraged, was backed by agroup of the most powerful and wealthy men and women in the city. . . . Their efficient andexcellent work was inspired by enthusiasm, by faith in the value of the arts in the nation's culture.. . . But . . . why was there nothing done for poets, the most unappreciated and ill-paid artists inthe world? One reason, manifestly, was that a poem cannot be exhibited and bought andpossessed by some private or public collector in a manner or a painting or statue. Anotherreason was the common desecration of the art by prosy teachers in colleges. (APL 241-42)

Poetry wasn't much talked about and, when it was, it was misunderstood. In order to fill the cultural void ofthe masses, Monroe believed that poetry would have to become more democratic. Her long list ofgrievances concluded this way: “In short, the vast English-speaking world says to its poets: 'Silence.'” How,then, to un-silence not just individual voices, but the entire prospects of a generation?

“Gradually,” Monroe writes, “I became convinced that something must be done; and since nobody else wasdoing anything it might be 'up on me' to try to stir up the sluggish situation” (APL 242). As Ann Massawrites, “Chicago had a reputation as the graveyard of little magazines. There appeared to be a scant supplyof good new poetry and less demand” (Columbian 51). The success of Poetry depended upon Monroebeing able to figure a national culture both internationally and locally, and she soon learned how. Poetrybecame a national magazine, seeking verse from America's differing geographical spaces and variousethnic groups. It became an international magazine, introducing American poets to audiences abroad, andintroducing British, Irish, and French poets, as well as poets from other countries and continents toaudiences back home. “The American metropolitan newspaper prints cable dispatches aboutpostimpressionists, futurists, secessionists and other radicals in painting, sculpture and music, but so far asits editors and readers are concerned, French poetry might have died with Victor Hugo, and English with

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 7 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

Tennyson, or at most Swinburne,” Monroe argued (P 1.1 32). Her journal would rectify this. And, just assignificantly, Poetry became a local magazine, putting many Chicago poets—such as Carl Sandburg andhis "Chicago" poem—on the map. Advertising the manufacturing center of the Midwest meant advertisingits culture, and Monroe wanted poetry to receive its due as an important part of that culture. “We feel thatthe magazine is the most important aesthetic advertisement Chicago ever had,” Monroe wrote. “We aredoing the same kind of work for the city which is done by the Art Institute, the Orchestral Association, theChicago Grand opera co., the two endowed theaters, etc. Indeed our work is of more far-reachinginfluence, as poetry travels more easily than any other art” (draft of a letter to Howard Elting; qtd. inNewcomb 92).

Monroe describes the early years of her journal in the essay “These Five Years” (P 11.1 33-41). Sherecounts that, at the suggestion of Hobart C. Chatfield-Taylor (later on the advisory board of Poetry), shesought 100 patrons to commit $50 a year for five years to fund the first critical years of the magazine.“[A]lready a figure of some note in the city,” connected to its people and culture, Massa notes, Monroe “wasable to sell her sponsors two products: poetry and herself” (Columbian 52). She got 108 pledges. With apatience and boldness indispensable for her upcoming career, Monroe thrust her way into the homes ofsome of the most important artistic benefactors of her city. “Her list of guarantors reads like a social registerof Chicago in the teens of this century,” writes Joseph Parisi, the associate editor of Poetry since 1976(218). During the summer of 1912, Monroe “spent many hours at the public library reading not only recentbooks by the better poets, but also all the verse in American and English magazines of the previous fiveyears” (APL 251). She then wrote to many of them, sending along her plans for a journal and the “poets'circular” she had written the spring before (APL 251).

The responses and encouragement she received, from both poets and critics, were overwhelming. In thefirst four months alone, Monroe published the experimental verse of Ezra Pound, Joseph Campbell,Richard Aldington, William Butler Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore (the year before he was given the NobelPrize), Vachel Lindsay, and Hilda Doolittle. “If modern music could make room for Debussy and Stravinskyand even Jazz,” Monroe reasoned, “modern poetry should be able to listen with an open mind to EzraPound and H. D. and Richard Aldington, and whomever might try still more adventurous experiments, eventhough they should ride roughshod over long-accepted precepts and prejudices” (FVMA 694). “At the headof this group” of modernist experimental poets, Monroe wrote,

was Ezra Pound, a man who, whatever one may think of his poetry, was born a great teacher,born to be the leader of a school. An inquiring and provocative mind is his, never content withthe conventionally accepted thing, always searching beneath surfaces and appearances, alwaysviolently rejecting the lifeless, the over-ornate, the stilted, the merely formal. An inspiringinfluence this poet has been, unfailing in the courage of his convictions; leading others, notnecessarily to agree with him, but to examine their own foundations and standards. (694-95)

Poetry's advisory board, whose sole duty was pretty much voting on prizes, included Henry Blake Fuller,who wrote The Cliff Dwellers, Edith Wyatt, and H. C. Chatfield-Taylor. Alice Corbin Henderson screenedsubmissions and Eunice Tietjens, later an assistant editor, was part of the office staff. Subsequent assistanteditors included Helen Hoyt, Emanuel Carnevali, and Marion Strobel. Ezra Pound was the “foreigncorrespondent,” a position briefly assumed by Richard Aldington when Pound resigned. Penelope Nivendescribes the mood of the Poetry office as “emblematic of Harriet Monroe's gentility and enterprise”:

The spacious front room of a renovated mansion on Chicago's Near North Side accommodatedtwo desks borrowed from her landlord and patron James Whedon; some comfortable wickerchairs and a Wilton carpet loaned by her sister; and her own antique French colored-marbleclock which sat on the white marble mantel under a gilt-framed mirror. (236)

For Monroe, the space was “lively”; it developed an “atmosphere,” and “[p]oets came from far and near asto a kind of headquarters of the art. . . . Indeed, the place rapidly filled up with books, until the Poetry librarybecame, as it still is, a problem demanding space and shelving” (APL 317-19). Lively, she meant, not in theoverwhelmingly busy sense of a newspaper office but rather in terms of an intellectual energy. According toJoseph Parisi, “[t]he atmosphere at Cass and Erie streets was more like that of a club than an editorial, letalone business, office. Poets and friends . . . were continually dropping by to read manuscripts, argue,listen to chief assistant Alice Corbin Henderson's witty remarks, and to eat Miss Monroe's candy and theimpromptu meals she whipped up over a bonfire out back” (Parisi 220).

The second issue of Poetry contained the famous Monroe doctrine—the "Open Door" statement, whichimportantly set the quality of work ahead of everything else. The inaugural issue contained the equallysignificant essay “The Motive of the Magazine.” In it, Monroe offered not just her intentions but also ageneral defense of what had become a long-forgotten genre:

Poetry alone, of all the fine arts, has been left to shift for herself in a world unaware of itsimmediate and desperate need of her, a world whose great deeds, whose triumphs over matter,over the wilderness, over racial enmities and distances, require her ever-living voice to give themglory and glamour. . . . Poetry has been left to herself and blamed for inefficiency, a process as

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 8 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

unreasonable as blaming the desert for barrenness. This art, like every other, is not a miracle ofdirect creation, but a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public. The people must dotheir part if the poet is to tell their story to the future; they must cultivate and irrigate the soil if thedesert is to blossom as the rose. (P 1.1 26-27)

To do her part in irrigating this wasteland, Monroe proposed a test which was “to be quality alone; all forms,whether narrative, dramatic or lyric.” She offered “a place of refuge, a green isle in the sea, where Beautymay plant her gardens, and Truth, austere revealer of joy and sorrow, of hidden delights and despairs, mayfollow her brave quest unafraid” (28). Monroe then got Walt Whitman (metaphorically speaking) to helppromote the part of the people. “If you believe with Whitman that 'the topmost proof of a race is its own bornpoetry,'” Monroe wrote—“subscribe.”

Edith Wyatt's essay in the same issue, “On the Reading of Poetry,” went a little further, defending both theart and its new manifestations. To many, she argued, “poetry may concern herself only with a limitednumber of subjects to be presented in a predetermined and conventional manner and form. To suchreaders the word 'form' means usually only a repeated literary effect: and they do not understand that every'form' was in its first and best use an originality” (24). To borrow a metaphor from Wyatt, the walls thatPoetry would build around literary art would not be so exclusive. “The hospitality of this hall,” Wyattmaintained,

will have been a genuine source of happiness if somehow it tells the visitors, either while theyare here, or after they have gone to other places, what a delight it is to enjoy a poem, to realizeit, to live in the vivid dream it evokes, to hark to its music, to listen to the special magic grace ofits own style and composition, and to know that this special grace will say as deeply as somerevealing hour with a friend one loves, something nothing else can say—something which is lifeitself sung in free sympathy beyond the bars of time and space. (25)

A poet in her own right, Monroe was often caught between the modern sounds of her city and the call of theAmerican wild. The openness Monroe admired in the varied American landscape helps explain her "OpenDoor" policy toward poets. Like Whitman, whom she evokes in each issue of her magazine, Monroe feltthat America was a parataxis of its many diverse sounds. Her “Mountain Song” shows such an affinity:

Wide flaming pinions veil the West—Ah, shall I find? and shall I know?My feet are bound upon the Quest—Over the Great Divide I go. (P 6.5 220)

In locating a particularly American aesthetic, Monroe needed to balance the rapidly-developing urbanlandscapes with an American mythological heritage that was decidedly outdoors. Indeed, as Newcombargues, “Monroe's magazine challenged the prevailing notion that poetry had no business in urban-industrial modernity” (86), and, yet, as Robin G. Schulze maintains, “Monroe's notions of modernist versewere rooted in her imaginative confrontation with the American land” (50). Newcomb and Schulze stressdifferent aspects of Monroe's modernity, but at the center of each stands a common question. As Schulzeputs it, “[h]ow might the American poet retain a defining relationship with American nature while reimaginingnature as a viable subject of modernity?” (49-50). Many of Monroe's own articles in Poetry “are filled withcalls for poets to throw off their bondage to European forms, go back to nature, and create some new,large, masterful verse out of their confrontations with the land” (Schulze 59-60).

Schulze turns to “To the Wilderness”—where Monroe wants American poets to “bring the art 'back tonature'” (P 10.5 263)—and “The Great Renewal”—where Monroe argues that artists “need the greatrenewal from Mother Earth who bore them” (P 12.6 321). According to Schulze, such articles do a lot toexplain Monroe's poetic tendencies, for example, her love of Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and CarlSandburg who composed like “the educated sons of pioneers” (P 12.6 322; qtd. in Schulze 60), and heraversion to the verse of T. S. Eliot, which “seemed to her the hyper-urbane musings of one who had neverin his life been outside” (Schulze 60-61).

Monroe frequently published poets and essays that she knew would bring controversy. While she certainlyhad her own preferences, she was open to the opinions of others, but that did not stop her own pen fromdefending her methods. Her “The New Beauty” attacks those who are “pathetically ingenuous in theirintellectual attitude” of living in “an Elizabethan manor-house or a vine-clad Victorian cottage. This is trueeven of certain ones who assert their modernism by rhyming of slums and strikes, or by moralizing inchoppy odes, or in choppier prose mistaken for vers libre, upon some social or political problem of the day”(P 2.1 22). When these comments angered some critics, she attacked tradition itself, arguing that it “ceasesto be of use the moment its walls are strong enough to break the butterfly's wing” (P 2.2 67). Monroe likedpassionate intensity (perhaps not as much as Pound), and she reveled in being the center of the newAmerican renaissance. Her essays put poetry in the news. An essay in May, 1914 began: “Next to makingfriends, the most thrilling experience of life is to make enemies” (P 4.2 61).

Ezra Pound, one of Monroe's most thrilling acquaintances, was also one of her most persistent enemies.

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 9 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

His essay “Small Magazines,” a belittling soubriquet for the "little magazine" of modernism, aggressivelytargets Monroe, especially so in its underhanded compliments:

In 1911 Miss Monroe and her backers recognized that verse, to be of any intellectual value,could not be selected merely on the basis of its immediate earning capacity. This idea was notnew, but it was not at that moment functioning vigorously in other editorial offices.

I don't know of any other constructive idea that is directly traceable to the Chicago office. . . .

Miss Monroe has occasionally mutilated a work by excisions and has occasionally failed to seethe unity of a longer work and given it in fragments.

Nevertheless, she has done valuable service by reason of the purity of her intentions. She meantto provide a place where unknown poets could be printed; she has done so. Where new ideasand forms could be tried, she has done so. She has provided a meal ticket when the meal ticketwas badly needed. (691-92)

Monroe helped poets when she could. But she wasn't a “meal ticket” and wasn't a cook. Too often, Monroeis ignored for what she was—the cultural pulse at the center of modernism who had a sense not only of thescope and possibilities of modernist verse but also of all dimensions of American culture. “[M]ore than anyAmerican poet of her generation,” according to Newcomb, she “combined an interest in experimental verseforms, a progressive idealism about the social benefits of poetry, and a pragmatic understanding of poets'work as intellectual property with economic as well as aesthetic functions” (103).

It is good to see that recent critics have embraced Monroe's role in modernism, especially given that EzraPound's masculine ideology, confused for too long with modernism itself, would dismiss the work of others,specifically that of women and editors—two identities Monroe embodied. Jayne Marek's important recoveryof women's modernism takes Pound to task for his expectation that “editors (and women) . . . act accordingto certain roles helpful to literary men, roles in which either editors or women would provide money andencouragement for male writers, appreciation for men's critical and creative activity, and labor for the tasksof publication” (Women 168). Similarly, as Newcomb argues, Pound “simultaneously demonized andfeminized genteel culture, situating the ideal little magazine into heroic male opposition against the forcesof rank commercialism and closet conventionality embodied by women such as Monroe who presumed toclaim a key role in American intellectual life” (Newcomb 87). While it is important to consider Monroe andPound together, we should note that they don't fit neatly into any binaries of modernism. Even though mostcritics like to stress their differences, and even though Pound, at his worst, would refer to Poetry as“Harriet's miserable rag” (qtd. in Sutton 138), the two would agree more often than not.

II. The "Foreign Correspondent" and "A. C. H."It is unfair to its various editors, contributors, and readers to claim that the early years of Poetry were madepossible by three figures, but, if one had to point them out, they would be Monroe, Ezra Pound, and AliceCorbin Henderson. Monroe had to balance Pound's unmatched enthusiasm with his ever forceful carpingabout everything. “They were two strong people who were devoted to the cause of poetry but saw poetry invery different ways” (Scholes, "Ezra" 5). Whether Pound's part in the process was greater or less than hebelieved, it was still considerable. Monroe liked Pound because he “stood with his back to the wall, andstruck out blindly with clenched fists in a fierce impulse to fight” (APL 290). By contrast, Monroe had agood, albeit somewhat uneasy relationship with Henderson, an integral part of Cass Street, despite the lackof public credit Monroe gave her. Their arguments, in Monroe's words, “never quite brought us to blows orbloodshed”; she and Henderson “made a strong team” (APL 318).

Ezra Pound

Before launching her magazine, Monroe wrote to Ezra Pound, then in London. Pound had alreadyacquainted himself with the Poet's Club (T. E. Hulme and F. S. Flint), the Rhymers' Club (W. B. Yeats,Ernest Rhys, Arthur Symons), various other club-less writers (such as Ford Madox Hueffer, H. G. Wells,Henry James), and a crowd of editors, namely A. R. Orage who, as editor of the New Age, had just offeredPound a regular column, and Elkin Mathews (who ended up publishing some of Pound's earliest verse). Itwas Mathews, in fact, who introduced Monroe to the poetry of Ezra Pound.

Hoping to secure early submissions for her new magazine, Monroe had sent out a circular expressing heraims to various poets on the international scene. Pound, one of them, was enthusiastic. In his letter ofresponse, he offered his own suggestions for an editorial policy: “We support American poets—preferablythe young ones who have a serious determination to produce master-work. We import only such stuff as isbetter than that produced at home. The best foreign stuff, the stuff well above mediocrity, or theexperiments that seem serious, and seriously and sanely directed towards the broadening anddevelopment of the Art of Poetry” (Paige 45, letter dated 9/24/12; qtd. in Carpenter 214). Pound'ssuggestions would eventually get louder, turning into insistences and then into demands. He sought a“universal” or a “Weltlitteratur standard” (Paige 62, 11/7/12), and according to his biographer Humphrey

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 10 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

Carpenter, he “decided on the spot that Poetry would be the wagon on which American poets would rollacross the plains into their Renaissance” (184).

“You may announce,” Pound wrote to Monroe, “that for the present such of my work as appears in America. . . will appear exclusively in your magazine” (Paige 9f; qtd. in Carpenter 185). More significantly than hisown verse, perhaps, was Pound's offer, later in the same letter, of his editorial eye and literary connections.“I do see nearly everyone that matters,” he made sure to mention, adding that he would keep “themagazine in touch with whatever is most dynamic in artistic thought, either here or in Paris.” Within no timeat all, Pound became the self-appointed foreign correspondent of Poetry magazine, resolved to carry outhis “American Risorgimento.”

The first poem Pound published in Monroe's magazine was in the inaugural issue; it was titled “To Whistler,American.”4 There, the aesthetic differences between Pound and Monroe quickly became apparent.Compared to Monroe, who saw the demand of poetry everywhere because it was always part of thegeneral culture, Pound believed that people had to be hauled in to its cause. He writes,

for us, I mean,Who bear the brunt of our AmericaAnd try to wrench her impulse into art. (P 1.1 7)

The coup de grace comes at the end:

You and Abe Lincoln from that mass of doltsShow us there's chance at least of winning through.

Calling the American public a “mass of dolts” might not have been the most tactful move, but Pound wasn'tknown for tact. Even through the phrase provoked “emphatic resentment,” Monroe called Pound's words“bitter medicine which possibly we need” (P 1.5 168). As David A. Moody writes, she “found a way ofdefending her foreign correspondent from the indignant critics, while both keeping her distance from hisbraggadocio, and shrewdly inviting sympathy for him as a young poet who had suffered neglect” (215).Pound was a firebrand. “Print me on asbestos,” he wrote, “let them revile me, and perhaps some few willget mad enough to tell the truth in plain passionate language” (qtd. in EW 36). At heart, Monroe believedthat Pound “was the best critic living . . . and that his acid touch on weak spots was as fearsomelyenlightening as a clinic” (APL 266; Moody 215). Her confidence in him would soon pay off.

Pound sent poets and poems along, often doing so with his own "improvements." He sent Monroe poemsby Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolittle, W. B. Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore (Pound's “sensation of the winter”[Carpenter 186]), and shortly thereafter D. H. Lawrence and Charles Vildrac. He introduced SkipwithCannell, John Gould Fletcher, William Carlos Williams, and the “VURRY Amur'k'n” Robert Frost (Letters49). His own verse wasn't too shabby either; it was always fresh, always inimitable, and alwayscontroversial. That was part of his point. “I don't know that America is ready to be diverted by the ultra-modern, ultra-effete tenuity of Contemporania,” he wrote about his collection published in Poetry in April,1913 (Paige 11; qtd. in Carpenter 189). It began:

Will people accept them?(i.e. these songs).As a timorous wench from a centaur(or a centurian),Already they flee, howling in terror . . . (P 2.1 1)

While Monroe wouldn't flee, she would often howl back at Pound, protesting some of his more contentiousphrases. Pound responded, “Morte de Christo! . . . You can't expect modern work to even look in thedirection of Greek drama until we can again treat actual things in a simple and direct manner” (Paige 18;Carpenter 190).

Readers will be familiar with the final poem in the collection, “In a Station of the Metro.” The original versionprinted in Poetry, however, is not the one often found in anthologies. Here, it appears a good deal belowPound's previous poem, almost as if it were its own island. The title is pushed across the page and thewords are separated by typographical indentations. Seeing the poem differently makes us hear itdifferently. The broken phrases mimic breaths—those taken by the poet or those taken by the speakerunhurried by the rush of the crowd.

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 11 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

In November, Poetry published parts of Pound's Lustra, where David A. Moody finds Pound “assum[ing]the new role of sardonic critic of his society's way of life” (206). In May, 1914, Pound published, uncredited,the Noh drama Nishikigi (by Zeami Motokiyo), after discovering it in one of Ernest Fenollosa's notebooks.The translations continued, Pound sending in his “Exile's Letter” “from the Chinese of Rihaku (Li Po),”“thenotes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the Professors Mori and Araga” (P 5.6 258-61).It has many of the same rhythms of Pound's more famous rendering of a Li Po poem, “The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter.” The “Exile's Letter” ends with the soft:

And there is no end of talking—There is no end of things in the heart.

I call in the boy,Have him sit on his knees to write and seal this,And I send it a thousand miles, thinking. (P 5.6 261)

That spring, Poetry also issued Pound's “Provincia Deserta,” and the following winter it printed his Sordello-esque “Near Périgord,” both based upon his travels in the south of France. Pound wrote often about thecontemporary poetry scene or, rather, what he wanted it to be. He wrote about Parisian poets, about Joyce,about Yeats, and about A. C. Swinburne (3.1, 8.1, 9.3, 11.6). In return, Monroe sent Pound $100 every nowand then (Carpenter 195).

At the end of 1913, barely a year after giving himself the title and position of foreign correspondent, EzraPound's six-year process of resignation began. In November of that year, he asked Ford Madox Hueffer totake over (Carpenter 211; Moody 216-17). Knowing that this replacement would cause more trouble than itwas worth, Hueffer told Monroe of Pound's plans and asked her to ask him to reconsider the resignation.Pound, in turn, was “willing to reconsider . . . pending a general improvement of the magazine,” as hewould “not have [his] name associated with it unless it does improve” (Paige 27). Upset with the direction ofPoetry, Pound castigated Monroe, her poets, and her public: “Good god! Isn't there one of them that canwrite natural speech without copying clichés out of every Eighteenth Century poet still in the publiclibraries?” (Paige 15). His aesthetic fascism was beginning to become apparent in his refutation of anysense of a popular ethos: “we artists who have been so long the despised are about to take over control”(qtd. in Carpenter 199).

Too often, Pound aired his grievances in public. In his essay “The Audience” in the October 1914 issue ofPoetry, Pound took a stab at the heart of Monroe's project—the value of a readership, as encapsulated bythe Whitman quotation. According to Pound, “The artist is not dependent on the multitude of his listeners.Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of thearts. . . . [T]his rabble, this multitude—does not create the great artist. They are aimless and drifting withouthim. They dare not inspect their own souls” (P 5.1 29-30). While the growing gap between Monroe andPound couldn't be ignored, it ought to have been understood for what it was—“a kind of lovers' quarrel,” asMoody declares, “a quarrel of two people in love with poetry and committed to putting it at the heart ofthings, but two people with such very different tastes, talents, and temperaments. Their collaboration inPoetry and their quarreling, or at least Pound's making a war of it, would continue for several years” (217).Pound, however, could never meet anyone halfway.

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 12 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

The exclusivity promised to Monroe was soon forgotten, as Pound began sending poems to Smart Set,founded by William d'Alton Mann (H. L. Mencken became editor after 1914), because its editor had “thegood sense to divide all of the poets . . . into two classes: Yeats and I in one class, and everybody else inthe other” (Carpenter 207).5 Bankrolled personally by John Quinn—attorney and benefactor of manymodernist causes (Conrad, Eliot, Joyce)—Pound quickly became the foreign editor of the Little Review. Inthe opening pages of its May 1917 issue, Pound explained himself: “Poetry has done numerous things towhich I could never have given my personal sanction, and which could not have occurred in any magazinewhich had constituted itself my 'instrument.' Poetry has shown an unflagging courtesy to a lot of old foolsand fogies whom I should have told to go to hell tout pleinement and bonnement” (qtd. in EW 205).

Monroe took things in stride, claiming that the Little Review was now “under the dictatorship of Ezra Pound”(qtd. in Carpenter 312). She was rightfully angry that Pound ever believed Poetry was his "organ," and,besides, that he would air his grievances in public. Yet she was also grateful for both his personal help overthe years and his service to the cause. “At first I was simply furious,” she wrote, “but I am honestly too sorryfor E.P. to continue mad. He ruins his own case continually and perpetually. . . . but I am very sensible ofthe many benefits conferred by E.P. not only upon Poetry editorially, but upon poetry at large . . . he hashelped criticism and has made for less sentimentality and softness” (qtd. in EW 208). It was Alice CorbinHenderson who, perhaps, put it best: “Isn't he a great idiot?” (qtd. in EW 208). While 1917, according toEllen Williams, marked the “effective end of Pound's foreign correspondence” (214), it wasn't until a fewyears later that things became official.

Poetry's June, July, and August issues of 1917 saw in print what would become the first three of Pound'sfifty-plus-year epic adventure—the Cantos. Harriet Monroe wrote to Henderson, wondering if Pound was“petering out, that he must meander so among dead and foreign poets? has he nothing more of his own tosay?” (Nadel 194n). Taken literally, Monroe's criticism would become an honest question for Pound and hiscontemporaries—how to refigure a literary tradition when one is always walking among the dead. Thiscyclic patterning of history, mixing old and new would soon become Pound's modernist poetic.

The Cantos are worth much consideration in their original form. Although he would revise them, theyprovide the first glimpses of how Pound would treat literary history as a series of epic fragments. RobertBrowning, unnamed and later moved to Canto 2, opens the meditation as it first appears in Poetry. The"Nekyia" episode of the Odyssey, which would eventually make up Canto 1, here closes Canto 3:

JustinopolitanUncatalogued Andreas Divus,Gave him in Latin, 1538 in my edition, the rest uncertain,Caught up in his cadence, word and syllable:"Down to the ships we went, set mast and sail,Black keel and beasts for bloody sacrifice,Weeping we went."I've Strained my ear for –ensa, -ombra, and –ensaAnd cracked my wit on delicate canzoni—Here's but rough meaning:"And then went down to the ship, set keel to breakers,Forth on the godly sea. . . ." (P 10.5 250-1)

Very significantly, we get the sense early on that the momentary experience of the verse depends on morethan the verse itself. Canto 3 already contains the reference to Andreas Divus, who translated an edition ofthe Odyssey—the edition that Pound had on his shelf. Why Divus makes his way into Pound's loosetranslation becomes very important for understanding Pound's poetic method. As Humphrey Carpenterreminds us, Pound was, in effect, conjuring Divus just as Homer was conjuring Odysseus, just asOdysseus was conjuring the dead. Like Elpenor, Pound's Divus could be sent to the underworld but couldnot be erased. It was through Divus that Pound's encounter with Homer, with literary history itself, wasmediated. It wasn't only that the specific translation (which itself contained an interesting error) mattered,but moreover that the cycles of literary culture were themselves material:

Lie quiet, Divus.In Officina Wechli, Paris,M. D. three X's, Eight, with Aldus on the Frogs. . . . (254)

The published page—with its date of 1538 written out as MDXXXVIII (or as Pound's doctor xxx 8) besidean insignia containing an image of the Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius (who printed Aristophanes' Frogsand invented italic type among other things)—was suddenly part of the long story of Odysseus trying to gethome. We wouldn't call Pound a reader-response theorist, but his attention to the experience of readingmaterial texts cannot be ignored, notwithstanding his many pronouncements to the contrary. Such is thecase (pace Pound) of reading these Cantos for the first time in Poetry. The Cantos follow Mary CarolynDavies's “A Girl's Songs” and precede Alice Corbin Henderson's note on “Cowboy Songs and Ballads”—each a part of its immediate materialist culture, and each, now, a part of Pound's initial reception . . .despite some ghostly echoes of protestation. Lie quiet.

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 13 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

The final straw for Pound in his relationship with Monroe and Poetry Magazine came in the spring of 1919.In March of that year, Monroe published four of the twelve translations of the set Homage to SextusPropertius, which Pound had sent her; the collection had tested her, and, as she claimed, would havetested her censors' good will. A month later, Monroe published “Pegasus Impounded,” a devastating stormleveled at Pound by Professor William Gardner Hale of the University of Chicago. The title is a double pun,and one that presumably takes issue not only with Pound but with Monroe's journal as well, the "Pegasus"(Poetry's logo) which has been im-Pound-ed. Hale wrote that he had found sixty errors—humorous ones,careless ones—which called into question the accuracy of Pound's translations and pretty much belied thepoet's knowledge of Latin. “If Pound were a professor of Latin, there would be nothing left for him butsuicide,” Hale wrote, adding, “I do not counsel this. But I beg him to lay aside the mask of erudition” (P 14.155).

Left without much public recourse, the generally hearty Pound wrote to Monroe: “Cat–piss and porcupines!The thing is no more a translation than my 'Altaforte' is a translation, or than Fitzgerald's Omar is atranslation” (letter dated 4/14/1919; EW 254; Moody 354). The letter was signed “In final commiseration.”After six months of no further correspondence from Pound, Monroe took this “final commiseration” as aresignation. Always the diplomat and sincerely grateful for his efforts over the years, Monroe wrote toPound on the first of November with “unfailing gratitude for all that you did to help the magazine duringthose difficult first years, and deep regret that we have had to come to a parting of the ways. I cordiallyhope that you will continue to contribute to Poetry, and that poems finer than you have ever written—whichis saying a great deal—may be yours next year and the years after” (qtd. in EW, 258-59). Some words,perhaps, were due from Pound in return for his editor who took “the Art of Poetry seriously” (Paige 43). Asfar as we know, he didn't respond.

Alice Corbin Henderson

Another figure at the center of Poetry's poetry was Alice Corbin Henderson, poet, critic, and reader of thehighest rank. She joined the magazine as an Associate Editor early on and remained with it after shemoved to Santa Fe in the spring of 1916 because of tuberculosis. Even after resigning as an editor in 1922,she still contributed poetry and essays for the next decade. She was involved in the local arts culture of theSouthwest, supporting various artists and writers, and co-edited Monroe's anthology The New Poetry(Macmillan, 1917). Although Monroe called Henderson “the one fit person available to assist in my project”(APL 286), she often downplayed Henderson's influence in the office and her impact on modernistproduction. It is clear from Ezra Pound's letters, though, and from material in the Poetry collection at theUniversity of Chicago just how important Henderson was to her contemporaries.

The centrality of Henderson to Monroe's project cannot be overstated. John Gould Fletcher noted that“without her influence Miss Monroe's paper might have been . . . narrower in its scope and less epoch-making in its effect” (Fletcher 197; qtd. in Nadel xvi). And, as Jayne Marek writes, “[i]n those crucial earlyyears of Poetry, it was often Henderson who set down distinct guidelines for an intrinsically Americansensibility in poetry and criticism,” one which “would be both technically firm and variegated with the manycolors of this country's ethnic heritages” ("Alice" 16). None of the other associate editors, Ellen Williamsclaims, had Henderson's “critical trenchancy, and none of them could challenge and debate Harriet Monroeas a peer” (265). And challenge Monroe Henderson did, making no bones about it: “Your sentence addedto the Rupert Brooke item takes all the point out of the pointed brevity. . . . And, oh, Harriet, whatever youdo—don't speak of 'boosting the art.' It is dreadful. . . . And can't you get something better than Massiveabove the Robert Frost item. . .” (qtd. in Marek Women 32).

Henderson would insist to Monroe that there was “absolutely no use in encouraging the poet who has onepassable poem in a lot of bad ones. . . . Encourage him to keep on trying all you want to. But let him tryoutside the magazine” (Marek Women 33). Because Henderson didn't want to abandon Monroe's "OpenDoor" policy, but also wanted to maintain the journal's higher standards, she often found herself playing thearbiter when things got rough, say, between Monroe and Pound.6 To Pound, she was “proof . . . that anAmerican poet could incorporate an international aesthetic” (Nadel xviii).

It was Henderson—not Pound and not Monroe—who first realized the talents of Carl Sandburg, SherwoodAnderson, and Edgar Lee Masters. Sandburg respectfully accredited her as “the original 'discoverer' of the'Chicago Poems', and the evocator of that title” (January 8, 1916; Mitgang 106-07). He did feel indebted toher for publishing his poetry, but he was also a fan—of her and her work. As he wrote to her in 1920,“sometimes I think how in the afterworld you and Wallace Stevens, writing better poetry than the mass ofthe listed, printing and performing poetry, will have your laugh” (Mitgang 177). When Sandburg finished hisreview of Pound (P 7.5), he immediately wrote to Henderson, expressing gratitude to her and calling herand Monroe “Modern Forces”:

I hope you enjoyed my Pound stuff if you've seen it. Harriet has it. I told her I have the notes fora similar treatise or public love letter on you and Harriet M. as Modern Forces. Coiled inside thegraphite of my pencil also is a disquisition on your poetry and your personal urge for the briefand poignant. I am slaving now to get a boo into shape to send to Harcourt of Henry Holt andCo. [later of Harcourt and Brace] He wrote me on your suggestion. . . . (Mitgang 104;

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 14 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

12/15/1915)

And it wasn't just Sandburg. Henderson was often a better reader than Monroe, more attuned to the soundthat hadn't yet been spoken and the phrase that hadn't yet been thought. She admired Pound's earlyexperiment with the Cantos, calling them “very beautiful and . . . long[ing] for more to come.”“I've sent themss. on to Harriet though I hated to give it up,” she wrote him, adding that he “explored worlds beyondworlds, and it's a pleasure to follow” (February 17, 1917; qtd. in Nadel 190). Ira Nadel makes the significantpoint that she offered Pound “possibly the earliest direct criticism of the poem” (190). In return, Ezra Poundread, commented on, and published Henderson's poetry.

Henderson's essays are sharp, funny, and, like an Imagist poem, seemingly without an extraneous word.Her December 1912 piece, “A Perfect Return,” attacks American audiences who didn't like Poe andWhitman until they became fashionable in Europe. She was an important figure in the debate on vers libre,defending it and her magazine's editorial choices to her colleagues, competitors, and audiences. Two sucharticles—one early in the debate, one a little later—include “Poetic Prose and Vers Libre” (P 2.2), whichstressed the importance of line divisions, and “Lazy Criticism” (P 9.3), which responded to The NewRepublic's continual condemnation of vers libre.

Her May 1916 review of Alfred Kreymborg's Others anthology shows off a bit of her wit: “Replacing theoutworn conventions of the I-am-bic school, we have now the I-am-it school of poetry . . . not to beconfused with Les I'm-a'gists who are already out-classed and démodé” (“A New School of Poetry” P 8.2103). With one stab, she poked fun at the metric formalists unwilling to change, the Imagists unwilling toprovide more than a "gist" of anything, and the poetic ego of what couldn't even be called an early brand ofconfessional verse—Kreymborg's Others and all of its uses of "I." The final wink comes at the expense ofWallace Stevens's “Six Significant Landscapes,” which Henderson quotes in her review:

I measure myselfAgainst a tall tree.I find that I am much tallerFor I reach right up to the sun,With my eye;And I

Henderson's final word: “We regret to say that the printer announces that there are no more I's in the font”(105). While certainly funny, the cut-and-paste review did little to explore Kreymborg's collection—a rival toMonroe and Henderson's own anthology—just as it did little to explain, say, Stevens's "I" which (as above)is always mediated by its phonetic alter ego—the "eye." Maxwell Bodenheim, a contributor to bothKreymborg and Monroe, was incensed, demanding that Poetry return his already-accepted poems: “Thecheaply satirical article . . . in which a group of poets is ridiculed, in which the work of these poets isdeliberately misquoted, and their names twisted and mutilated . . . will probably deprive you of the good willand friendship of the poets unjustly libeled, and of myself,” he wrote to Monroe, adding later that Kreymborgwas “worth ten timid editors like you” (5/16/1916; qtd. in EW 193, 195-96).

Henderson's publications in Poetry are noteworthy for their attention to the Southwest. Her cowboy balladcollection in November of 1917 ironically offers as much of the open silences of the land as its wondrousvariety. Take “Old Timer,” for instance: “He had an air of open space / About him as he walked; / He was apriest of mystery, / Because he never talked” (P 11.2 85). What isn't said—the mystery—and what isn'thurried—speech—become parts of the landscape. The beautiful opening verse, “New Mexico Songs,”might be read as a response to both the vociferous Pound and the Emerald City of Monroe.

After the roar, after the fierce modern musicOf rivets and hammers and trams,After the shout of the giantYouthful and brawling and strongBuilding the cities of men,Here is the desert of silence,Blinking and blind in the sun—An old, old woman who mumbles her beadsAnd crumbles to stone. (P 11.2 82)

We might also read it as a response to Shelley's colossal wreck “Ozymandias”—“After the roar” of the city,after the roar of modernism, what survives is an old, old woman falling back to the dry earth. The genderingis important: “the cities of men” are contrasted with the woman in the “desert of silence.” Will this distinctionalso remain after the rivets and hammers are gone?

III. Literary Debates and ControversiesToday, the many aesthetic debates surrounding the early years of Poetry seem trivial and relatively benign.Yet they weren't so at the time. New poetic forms, rhythms, and schools of thought (such as vers libre and

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 15 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

imagism), the role of a national poetics, and the scope and function of a poetic audience—these were allpoints of contention in the new cultural economy. There was a lot at stake in determining what type of poemwould or should emerge alongside the scientific and technological wonders of the twentieth century, ifindeed such "outside" forces mattered at all to poetry. The arguments waged in and around the pages ofPoetry were bitter and funny, personal and illogical. Sometimes longtime friends would find themselvesquarrelling, while poetic adversaries would find themselves caught in odd moments of agreement.Oftentimes, what was sought was not so much any sort of poetic "answer" but the publicity of the questionitself.

Many of the earliest attacks on Monroe's editorial choices came from The Dial: “We would not say a word indepreciation of any earnest effort to provoke the poetic spirit into activity, although the fruits of such aneffort are likely to prove for the most part innutritive and insipid” (“The Case of Poetry” Dial 53 [1912], 478;qtd. in Newcomb 96). Newcomb writes, “The Dial and its ilk saw the genre as an instrument of moral uplift,now menaced by an ultramodern lunatic fringe that Poetry was misguidedly sponsoring” (96). We shouldnote that such condemnations came before The Dial was taken over by Scofield Thayer and James SibleyWatson—this was certainly not the same magazine that would print T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land a decadelater.

A glance at the contents of the June 1916 issue of Poetry reveals some of the potential differences,conflicts, and bizarre aesthetic juxtapositions set forth by the magazine during this time. The issue beganwith Vachel Lindsay's verse memorial to Booker T. Washington and contained work by the Kentucky poetMadison Cawein (whose “Waste Land” appeared in Poetry in January 1913), by the Chicago editor of aLithuanian newspaper Kleofas Jurgelionis (who translated Macbeth into Lithuanian), and by the poet, critic,and famous anthologizer Louis Untermeyer. Toward the end of that issue, Harriet Monroe wrote of

a quaint old myth of a goblin who, blowing the fog out of his face, started a tempest which wentcareering around the world. Now and then I feel like that goblin. Is it possible that less than fouryears ago poetry was “the Cinderella of the arts”? Already a great wind is blowing her ashesaway, and on the horizon are rolling dust-clouds which may conceal a coach and four—or is it anautomobile?

For there must be some gift of the gods in the large and many-colored cloud of words which fillsour eyes and ears. Never before was there so much talk about poetry in this western world, or somuch precious print devoted to its schools and schisms. This is as it should be, no doubt. It maybe evidence of that "poetic renaissance" which some of us profess already to be living in; or atleast it may initiate that "great audience" which will be ready for the renaissance when it comes.A breach has been made, we may hope, in that stone wall of public apathy which tended tosilence the singer ere he began. (P 8.3 140)

By 1916, many of the initial dust clouds had settled. And yet, that wouldn't stop Monroe from looking backupon one of the more controversial first breaths of her poetic goblin—the movement known as Imagism.

Imagism

The origins of Imagism are usually traced to the lectures of T. E. Hulme and the meetings of the "Poet'sClub" in London; for some, it goes back further to Arthur Symons and the Symbolists; and, for Ezra Pound,it can be found “in all the best poetry of the past” (qtd. in Nadel 4). The movement's tenets are well-known,but they do little to explain the varying sounds and visions of the practitioners. These tenets—directtreatment of the thing, economy of language, and musical phrasing—are traced back to an F. S. Flint articlein the March 1913 issue of Poetry, that was almost certainly written by Ezra Pound.7 Following this shortnote is a message from Pound himself, titled “A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste,” which the author insistedPoetry print 50000000000 copies of and “insert . . . in each returned msss. for the next decade” (Letter toACH, January 20, 1913; qtd. in Nadel 19). In this now famous treatise, Pound defines an "Image" as “thatwhich presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (P 1.6 200). Not even Poundreally knew what that meant. But that was fine by him, as it left each Imagiste free to explore thepossibilities of the new movement. As Pound had written earlier, “To belong to a school does not in theleast mean that one writes poetry to a theory” (P 1.4 126).

Poetry can lay claim to the first Imagist poems published in America—“ΧΟΡΙΚΟΣ” (or “Choricos”), “To aGreek Marble,” and “Au Vieux Jardin” by Richard Aldington—which all appeared in the second issue.These contributions shed the stiff iambic meter—say, that of Charles Hanson Towne's poem which appearsbefore the Aldington poems—adopting instead a phrasal rhythm attuned more to the sounds of a modernear. Monroe asserted that the first of Aldington's poems “holds its own . . . not only as one of the finestpoems of the group, but as one of the finest of this century” (FVMA 695). It is ever so mournful; the speakercalls out with various apostrophes to Death, as if calling him by name could stave off “the illimitablequietude [which] / Comes gently upon us.” The poem plays upon the notion of "passing," especially in itsopening lines:

The ancient songs

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 16 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

Pass deathward mournfully.

Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths,Regretful eyes, and drooping breasts and wings—Symbols of ancient songMournfully passing. (P 1.2 39)

Does “[p]ass deathward,” the poem asks, mean the inevitable passing away or the hopeful passing by thethreat of death? Are the ancient songs to go by the wayside or are they passed along, revitalizingthemselves with each passing age? The poem is almost a metaphor for Imagism itself, asking whethertradition will pass away or whether the new art will continue to pass the ancient songs along. In introducingboth Aldington and Imagism, the issue's editorial note tried to have it both ways:

Mr. Aldington is a young English poet, one of the "Imagistes," a group of ardent Hellenists whoare pursuing interesting experiments in vers libre; trying to attain in English certain subtleties ofcadence of the kind which Mallarmé and his followers have studied in French. Mr. Aldington haspublished little as yet, and nothing in America. (65)

It turns out that the Hellenic nature hadn't so much to do with a previously agreed upon aesthetic ofImagism, as it was useful in describing some of Aldington's poems. Pound wanted to make sure HarrietMonroe and her American reading public knew of this error—hence the reason for his and Flint'sclarifications the following spring in Poetry. In a December 1912 letter to Alice Corbin Henderson, Poundwrites, “Now: a word about Imagism. I seem to do nothing but object. I refrained from defining Imagismbecause I think it bad for a school to put out a lot of formulae before there is any large body of workwhereon to apply them. The note in Poetry is very incorrect. Imagism is concerned solely with languageand presentation. Hellenism & vers libre have nothing to do with it. It is not a matter of subject” (qtd. inNadel 4).

Before Pound's official clearing of the air, however, Monroe published a series of new poems by RichardAldington's soon-to-be wife Hilda Doolittle, who had been a childhood friend and love interest of Pound.Besides discovering “a gleam of hope in the work of Richard Aldington” (P 1.4 126), this January 1913issue of Poetry has Pound famously taking the "ilda oolittle" out of Hilda Doolittle. As she remembers theaffair, Pound “slashed with a pencil. 'Cut this out, shorten this line. “Hermes of the Ways” is a good title. I'llsend this to Harriet Monroe of Poetry. Have you a copy? Yes? Then we can send this. or I'll type it whenwe get back. Will this do?' And he scrawled 'H.D. Imagiste' at the bottom of the page” (Doolittle 18).

Readers will be familiar with the loose translation of H. D.'s “Hermes of the Ways” (P 1.4)—Monroe called ita “haunting beauty”—as well as H. D.'s “Hymen” (P 15.3) and the “Hesperides” fragments (P 19.1). In hercollection in March 1915, we see the imagistic transformations of a poet fascinated by movement in all itsforms. Consider, for example, a poem like “Moonrise”:

Will you glimmer on the sea? Will you fling your spear-head on the shore?What note shall we pitch?

We have a song, on the bank we share our arrows— the loosed string tells our note:

O flight,bring her swiftly to our song.She is great,we measure her by the pine-trees. (P 5.6 268)

Are the notes of love played by instruments of war or music? Glints of the sea come onto the shore. The“pitch” of a spear turns into the notes of a musical tone. Bows turn into lyres, their loosed string flighting thelovers' arrow. Or is there a different currency secretly running through the speaker's words, where banknotes seem to measure it all? Such was the "wildness" Monroe admired in H. D.'s poetry: “She is neverindoors, never even in a tent. . . . Her breath is drawn from bright breezes and bold winds, but never fromthe walled in atmosphere of rooms” (P&TA 92).

Ezra Pound published his anthology Des Imagistes soon after, taking most of its selections from the pagesof Poetry. Monroe, generous, but ever attentive to the necessity of copyright protection for poets andeditors, “threatened legal action, withdrawing only on condition that printed stickers of acknowledgementwere added” (Carpenter 211). Amy Lowell's Imagist (minus the "e") anthologies came next. As HumphreyCarpenter humorously writes, “[a] reader of poetry might well have judged from this that London wasswarming with Imagistes” (197). It wasn't, but that didn't mean the movement didn't cause a stir on bothsides of the Atlantic. The critical debates surrounding Imagism across the various literary journals werecomplicated. Individual projects were at stake where questions of poetics were always balanced by politics

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 17 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

and personalities.

“'Imagism,' though a wee small voice, was very upsetting to those who heard it,” writes Monroe, adding that“[m]any were the 'Is-this-poetry?' protests received by the editors during that first exciting year” (P&TA 317).William Stanley Braithwaite—an interesting figure in his own right—was an African-American poet andinfluential literary critic who wrote an annual review in the Boston Evening Transcript surveying the poemsof the past year. He paid little attention to Poetry during its first few years but then suddenly attacked anddismissed it in 1916, claiming that “the radical influence of Poetry itself has waned” (EW 201). In theJanuary 1917 issue of Poetry, Monroe dismissed the claim that Poetry was “the organ of Ezra Pound'sradicalism,” and responded: “this is the first time the Boston dictator in these annual reviews has evenmentioned Poetry or its influence. We should be duly grateful that he has finally discovered us . . .” (P 9.4212). Alice Corbin Henderson detected Amy Lowell's hand behind the attack (EW 202).

If we followed that old adage stating that my enemy's enemy is my friend, we would assume (incorrectly)that Conrad Aiken, critical of Braithwaite's policies, would find himself sitting alongside Monroe. And yet, inan essay published a year before Braithwaite's criticism, Aiken found himself attacking both Braithwaite andMonroe: “November is a deadly month for poets: simultaneously, then, appear two annual phenomenaagainst which I am sure the fastidious must rage: Mr. Braithwaite's selection of the year's best poem, MissMonroe's prize-giving and list of honorable mentions” (qtd. in EW 171).

Monroe responded to Aiken in an essay titled “Its Inner Meaning” in the same issue, interestingly enough,in which she published his poems “Discordants I-V,” a verse sequence which begins: “All that was once soBeautiful is dead” (P 6.6 287). Having some fun with Aiken's name-calling, Monroe writes: “Mr. ConradAiken . . . accuses [the Imagists] of a dark and piratical conspiracy to 'revolutionize poetry,' and ofnameless crimes like 'myopia,' 'synaethesia,' 'super-refinement,' 'over-civilization.' They are 'absurdlyartificial,' 'singularly inhuman.' . . . prosers instead of poets” who needed to be “put firmly in their place”(302). It was not as if the Imagists were not aware of the effete, pretentious images they sometimesprojected. Flint, in his defining manifesto, had written, “It is true that snobisme may be urged against them;but it is at least snobisme in its most dynamic form, with a great deal of sound sense and energy behind it”(P 1.6 200). Monroe's defense was attuned more to poetic tradition than to a revolutionary proclamation.“Certain metric forms and rhyme tunes,” she wrote, “have been followed by so many generations of Englishpoets that the modern world has come to think of them fundamental instead of incidental.” She stressed theneed to “go back to first principles, and remind ourselves that the art of poetry existed before everShakespeare, or Chaucer, or even Homer was born, and that it will exist when English is a dead language.”And, with a poetic eye watching not only the past but also the future, she reasoned that “Imagism is by nomeans the last word . . . but in so far as it is a protest against narrow-mindedness and provincialism . . . it isa good word, and a word that needs to be uttered” (P 6.6 304).

Vers Libre

The controversies surrounding Imagism morphed into the larger debates surrounding vers libre or freeverse. Harriet Monroe's two-part “Confessional,” called “Rhythms of English Verse” and published at theend of 1913, defended the practice to the hilt. It called on a natural order to break what she saw as thedead end of accentual-syllabic verse. “Rhythm is rhythm, and its laws are unchangeable, in poetry, inmusic, in the motion of tides and stars, in the vibration of sound-waves, light-waves, or the still more minutewaves of molecular action” (P 3.2 61). The following month, she defended “vers libre, whose rhythmicsubtleties may be only at the beginning of their development,” because it was “a demand for greaterfreedom of movement within the bar and the line” (P 3.3 110).

Some were thrilled with the new poetic rhythms, some were repulsed. Everyone had an opinion. Floyd Dell,speaking for the younger generation in the Friday Review of the Evening Post, was ecstatic: “Ezra Poundwe salute you! You are the most enchanting poet alive. Your poems in the April Poetry are so mockingly, sodelicately, so unblushingly beautiful” (APL 310). “Other newspapers parodied or attacked” the new verse,Ellen Williams notes, adding that even “Poetry's own readers wrote in sputtering letters about 'esotericwrithings,' 'insufferable snobs,' 'expatriate sensationalists,' and 'plain blackguardism'” (48).

In a letter printed in the Dial, Wallace Rice, writer for the Tribune, called Poetry magazine “a thing forlaughter.”8 For Rice, as Williams notes, poetry meant technique, technique meant tradition, and “bothPound and Poetry [were] violators of everything sacred in the past” (49). William Rose Benét of the Centuryjoined the Dial's criticism. For what it was worth, Pound seemed amused, but thought the whole debateoutdated: “It's like quarreling over impressionism or Manet,” he wrote to Monroe (April or May, 1913; qtd. inEW 50). Even many of Monroe's own poets were dismayed. John G. Neihardt, whose verse-drama TheDeath of Agrippina constituted the entire May 1913 issue, wrote to Monroe about her “wretched drivel”:“Will you and an impudent young man wipe out a tremendous past that has produced us?” (EW 51).

The debates over vers libre continued for the remainder of the decade and, in some pockets, continue tothis day. Monroe's more modest personal response of 1924 perhaps best captures her position: “Of late asmall but loud group of sonneteers have been trying to persuade us that 'the free-verse movement' was apassing fashion. But no movement is a mere fashion if it produces work of enduring beauty and value”

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 18 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

(FVMA 704). If we might lightheartedly paraphrase some words from Dr. Johnson's comment aboutLaurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, “nothing odd will do long. Free verse did not last.”

The Jepson Attack

It wasn't only the experimental verse at Poetry that became controversial. With the departure of Pound after1917, but not necessarily the result of it, Poetry lost over a third of its subscribers. Much of what Monroepublished, according to many critics, did not have the bite of the earlier selections. Edgar Jepson, Englishmystery writer and one-time editor of Vanity Fair who had just published his address “Words and the Poet”in Poetry (10.2), launched a malicious attack upon Poetry and American verse. His article in the May, 1918issue of the English Review put into words many of Pound's not-so-secret frustrations (Pound ended upreprinting the article in the opening pages of the Little Review, September, 1918). As Ellen Williams writes,Jepson berated Lindsay, Masters, and Frost, and he assailed Poetry as “the seat of a western school in apastiche of the recent prose of Mrs. Henderson and Miss Monroe . . . [and he further] speculated thatAmerican writers in general lacked all sense of beauty in words because of the ugliness of Americanspeech” (233-34).

Monroe's response was swift and across the board. “The editor of POETRY has wiped Mr. Jepson off themap in an article recently sent to the editor of the English Review, who will publish it unless he feels sorryfor Mr. Jepson,” she wrote (P 12.4 208). Curiously, Monroe's reply also attacked T. S. Eliot—the oneAmerican poet admired by Jepson: “Can it be that Mr. Jepson is unconsciously prejudiced in Mr. Eliot'sfavor by the fact that he has left this barbaric land of plop-eyed bungaroos, and gone into what seems to be—alas!—permanent exile in a country truly civilized?” (210). For Monroe, the attacks on the magazine andAmerican poetry, particularly during a time of war, were attacks on America itself. Mr. Jepson, shesuggested, ought to “get acquainted with our boys in the trenches. They are of all kinds—from farm anduniversity, factory, office and forest range. They are not afraid of life—or death” (212).

Although Monroe would continue to defend her journal and the democratic values of American poetrythroughout the run of the magazine, she did so with heightened attention during the war. Her November1913 essay, “A Century in Illinois,” expresses these beliefs:

When Poetry began, for example, two courses were open: it could have become, what The LittleReview is now, the organ of a choice little London group of superintellectualized ultimates andexpatriates; or, as I hope it has become, the organ of a higher and more conscious,concentrated and independent imaginative life in this country. (P 13.2 92; qtd. in EW 241)

Despite the positive front, Poetry, according to Williams, “no longer had any real chance of capturing thebest work of the new movement. The Jepson attack genuinely paralyzed Harriet Monroe, and rendered herold balancing act between the schools unworkable” (252-53). Scofield Thayer's The Dial (1920-29) wouldsoon become the focal point of modernist experimentation. Many poets, like John Gould Fletcher,abandoned Poetry, and many, like William Carlos Williams, criticized it.

Still, others such as Richard Aldington, W. B. Yeats, and the editors Alfred Kreymborg and Jane Heap (ofthe Little Review) offered support. In spite of its "paralysis," Poetry continued to publish remarkable poetsand new voices. From 1921 through 1922, it published, among others, Elinor Wylie (18.1), Elizabeth MadoxRoberts (18.4; 20.5), Louise Bogan (20.5), and Yvor Winters (14.6; 17.3; 20.6). Wallace Stevens became arejuvenating voice. Pound eventually made up with Monroe, sending first a poem by Ford Madox Hueffer(“On Heaven”) and then one by himself (“Thames Morasses”). “I am sure,” he wrote to Monroe, that “therewill be a special niche for you on Parnassus, or the Heaven of Good Poets, wherever it be” (qtd. in EW272). Hueffer chimed in with his own sentiment that the little peak of American periodical literature, “raisingit to the level of the best of European cosmopolitanism,” was because Monroe and her “small papershowed how, editorially and economically, it could be done” (P 19.5).

Poetry Prizes

Monroe felt that offering prizes was “a most valuable service to the art” (see “The Question of Prizes” P 7.5246-49). In contrast to critics who argued that prizes represented a debasement of art by bringing it down tothe level of rank commercialism, Monroe believed that prizes promoted the literary arts (as they did formusic and the visual arts), recognizing and rewarding talented writers for their important work, while alsoguaranteeing that, at the very least, they would be fed. Poetry offered two prizes during its early years: thefirst was the "Guarantor's Prize" and the second the "Helen Haire Levinson Prize," funded by Salmon O.Levinson. Ezra Pound, always ready with an objection, thought the awards were too little: “the offer ofthirty-five dollars for Yeats's 'Dying lady'” was “a gratuitous insult” when “any sculptor or painter of anystanding . . . would get £1000 for work of equivalent caliber” (EW 211). Meanwhile, William Carlos Williamsthought they were too much, believing they “only create a false market, attracting imitative andopportunistic poets” (EW 218).

Aside from these objections, generally there wasn't much controversy over Poetry's prizes—poets werehappy to be recognized and fortunate to have received further financial backing. Amy Lowell and Pound

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 19 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

seem (once again) to be the two exceptions. Incensed at not yet being recognized, Lowell suspected theworst. “I know that it [“The Allies”] has no chance whatever of getting a prize,” Lowell wrote to Monroe,“your vaunted Democracy is not so democratic as to give me a prize if you thought I did not need it” (qtd. inGerber 238). As Philip Gerber writes, “Years afterward, still nursing the hurt, she reminded Harriet of thiswithdrawal from the prize (“that was the reason I did not receive it”) and wondered why Poetry had not hadthe grace to mention the fact in its pages” (238).

In 1913, Pound insisted that the first annual Poetry prize go to Yeats over Monroe's choice, Vachel Lindsay(Carpenter 214; EW 77-78). Was the award “a local high school prize for the encouragement ofmediocrity?” he wondered. Pound won out but was soon angered by Monroe's letter to Yeats, in which shementioned the prize but also, possibly, a personal preference for Lindsay. “If you think what the magazinewould have been without the foreign contributions,!!!!!!!” Pound wrote her (10/13/1919; qtd. in Williams 77).In January of 1914, Monroe printed a gracious thank you letter from Yeats announcing that he wanted toreturn most of the prize money so that “some young American” could receive it (P 3.4 149). As a matter offact, Yeats suggested, “Why not give the £40 to Ezra Pound?” (149-50).

The following year brought the announcement of the new Levinson prize. The decision to make itexclusively eligible to American poets freed Monroe somewhat from Pound's dictates on the matter, butcouldn't free her from his always polite recommendations. Pound, for what it was worth, would come to callit “the American citizen prize” (EW 124). Sandburg's “Chicago Poems” won in 1914 over Pound's choices ofHueffer, Fletcher, Frost, or Lindsay. In 1915, Lindsay won for his “Chinese Nightingale.” By then, however,Pound was finished with Lindsay, having moved on to his next discovery, T. S. Eliot. “If your committeedon't make the [annual Poetry] award to Eliot, God only knows what slough of infamy they will fall into . . .!!!!!!!!” he wrote Monroe (Paige 64). (We might note that Eliot, at least in Pound's currency of exclamationpoints, has by now one-upped even Yeats).

Monroe, though, would continue to have her say. The following years, the Levinson Prize went to EdgarLee Masters's “All Life in a Life,” Cloyd Head's drama Grotesques, and John Curtis Underwood's “Song ofthe Cheechas” (which, it turned out, was partially cribbed from Paul Fortier Jones's With Serbia into Exile)(EW 249). Between H. L. Davis and Lew Sarett, the award went to Wallace Stevens for his “Pecksniffiana”poems. Robert Frost won in 1922, followed by Edwin Arlington Robinson and, at last, Amy Lowell. WilliamCarlos Williams won the Guarantor's Award that same year as Lowell and would go on to receive theLevinson Prize in 1954.

Poems of War and Peace

If there was one ethical critique leveled at Poetry, it was that the journal didn't have enough serious socialcommitment—that Monroe didn't believe it was the artist's job to fix what was wrong with the world. Thiswasn't really the case, but, looking back from today, it might often seem that way. Part of the challenge wasMonroe's aestheticism, her belief that artistic commitment was a long-term mission that operated on its ownterms instead of the terms of fashionable social movements. Her “Aesthetic and Social Criticism” ofOctober 1918 effectively outlines her position:

The poem or picture will stand by its aesthetic adequacy in the triumphant expression of thevision in the artist's soul, whether this vision be minute or cosmic. And if it is aestheticallyinadequate the most illuminating social wisdom will not save it. . . . The artist, big or little, is in hisdegree a seer; and it may be that he sees deeper than the critic who is obsessed by “themovements of the time.” . . . Movements pass, but beauty endures. . . . if [our living poets] fail itwill be through lack of power to feel or to express, or both, but not through lack of social criticism.(P 13.1 41)

While she would not hitch Poetry to any social movement, she believed that it could and ought to appeal tothe compassion of the public, especially if the poetry itself shared part of the blame for social ills.

Monroe was aware not only of the importance of poets in keeping civilization in peace (as most poets seemto be aware), but of the very same poets' culpability in begetting millennia of war. In September of 1914,she wrote, “[p]oets have made more war than kings, and war will not cease until they remove its glamourfrom the imaginations of men” (P 4.6 237). That month, a few weeks after the war had started, Monroeannounced a prize for the best “poem in the interest of peace” (P 4.6). Two months later, Poetry publishedfourteen of these poems (from among 738 submissions). Robert Scholes and I wrote about these poems inthe October 2009 issue of PMLA (“War Poetry from 1914”), so I won't describe them all in detail again here,but I do want to take a moment to look at one of them again.

Wallace Stevens's “Phases,” his first major publication, was one of the poems Monroe chose for the WarPoems issue. It is a difficult poem, because we're never quite sure how to understand its rhetoric. Thephases of “Phases” continually echo. The repetition is important, because it is how poetic refrains work.But, as the poem makes clear, such repetition is also how we get mindless and dangerous political rhetoric—empty words and insincere songs. We see this in the parrot of the first phase, who “will see us on parade. . . / And serenade.” Later in the poem, the serenading of the war parade is hollowed out as the mythology

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 20 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

of the soldier is lost. Contrasted with Agamemnon, the modern warrior is “[o]nly, an eyeball in the mud.”How then can we read: “Fallen Winkle felt the pride / Of Agamemnon / When he died”? Is this epigram a“short, triumphant sting” or merely the parrot in the window repeating someone else's words?

In addition to these selections from Stevens, the special issue includes poems from both sides of theAtlantic, namely the work of Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Joseph Campbell, Richard Aldington and others.In total, the poems show us the terrors of war as well as the possibilities of hope, which the world needed tohear then as much as it does now.

Something that often gets lost in the anthologies is the strong commitment of periodicals to the servicemenwho were fighting abroad. And it wasn't just the journals' contents that expressed this support. ManyAmerican periodicals during wartime were stamped with the following "Notice to Readers," fromPostmaster-General A. S. Burleson: “When you finish reading this magazine, place a one-cent stamp onthis notice, mail the magazine, and it will be placed in the hands of our soldiers or sailors.” The journalswere popular, and many of these soldiers wrote back, such as the poets who published in the March 1919issue (13.6) of Poetry.

The war poems make visible the central paradox of aesthetic ideology: on the one hand, poetry isideological, safeguarding national, political, and social consciousnesses; on the other hand, poetry mightbe the only instrument with the fortitude to revise such cultural practices. There is always the danger thatthe rhetoric of hope will become the call for action. We see this in Padraic Colum's and Joseph Campbell'scorrespondence on “The Dead Irish Poets”— Thomas MacDonagh, Padraic Pearse, and Joseph MaryPlunkett—who were killed by a British firing squad following their participation in the Easter 1916 Rising.Colum wrote to Monroe “[a]s a friend of each of the three poets who were executed in Dublin . . . to thank,through you, the poets of America for the demonstration of sympathy and protest they made in CentralPark, New York” (P 8.5 268). In presenting his case, Colum took care to inform the public that the hopes ofthe Irish poets were part of a larger quest for liberty—one that everyone, revolutionary poets included,ought to share. “The three poets,” he wrote, “were the clan of Byron and Shelley and Walt Whitman—theycommitted themselves to liberty even unto death” (268). Colum's and Campbell's letters were tributes totheir fallen companions, yet they were also testaments that poetry crossed national borders—that was whatmade it so powerful and so threatening.

As the horrifically brutal stretch of trench warfare was beginning on the continent, Monroe offered some ofthe most hopeful, most rhetorically elegant, most important words you will ever hear uttered about poetryand ethical commitment. Her “New Banners” began:

What are we to do with war—all these wars and rumors of war which absorb man's interests andenergies, waste his treasure, and interrupt his proper modern business—the business of makinga more habitable world, and more beautiful and noble men and women to live in it? . . . War . . .is in no detail so disgusting as in its monstrous presence of heroism . . . heroism which shouldhave been preserved for the slow struggles of peace. (P 8.5 251)

Monroe understood the discursive importance of poetry; she understood that “the war to end all wars”would not be fought in the fields but, rather, in the hearts and souls of the people. “Give them dreams morebeautiful and heroic than their long-cherished vision of the glory of war,” she wrote, “and they will put awaywar like a worn-out garment, and unite for conquests really glorious, for the advance toward justice andbeauty in the brotherhood of nations” (253).

To this end, Monroe was not only active in supporting the war effort. She also supported the peace effort,even when it turned out to be an unpopular position. Her defense of George Sylvester Viereck, who hadbeen thrown out of the Poetry Society of America for being a conscientious objector to the war, showed thatMonroe was there to defend those who otherwise wouldn't be defended. “A society of poets,” she wrote,“should be the freest body in the world, the most tolerant of individual idiosyncrasy of thought and word. . . .The whole tragi-comic incident is but a detail of a menacing public mood,” one which was “destructive ofliberty and provocative of violence” (P 13.5 266-67). For all of Monroe's populist leanings, she had notrouble going against the crowd when she thought it was the right thing to do. She even offered a piece ofadvice couched within a novel understanding of the U. S. Constitution. “[I]f the world is to be made, andkept, safe for democracy,” she contended, there had to be a continuous “spiritual war for freedom ofthought, freedom of speech, freedom of the press,” because “a constitution, however well written, does notfulfill itself; sooner or later it will become a scrap of paper unless it is fulfilled by the spiritual fervor of thosewho swear allegiance to it from generation to generation” (265).

IV. Poetry's PoetsT. S. Eliot

“An American . . . called this p.m. I think he has some sense tho' he has not yet sent me any verse,” Poundwrote to Monroe in September of 1914 (qtd. in EW 123). A week later, Pound wrote again about the poemthe American had sent him:

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 21 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American. PRAY GOD IT BE NOT A SINGLEAND UNIQUE SUCCESS. . . . He has actually trained himself AND modernized himself ON HISOWN. It is such a comfort to meet a man and not have to tell him to wash his face, wipe his feet,and remember the date (1914) on the calendar. (EW 123; Carpenter 258)

What is it? Let us go and make our visit. The modernized poet was T. S. Eliot, and the poem was called“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Published in the June, 1915 number of Poetry, “Prufrock” was unlikeanything that had come before it—what Pound called “a portrait of failure” (Paige 44f). It is still a wonder tosee how Eliot had presumed to begin:

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells. . . . (P 6.3 130)

Even though Monroe would later endorse this “masterpiece of agonized irony, of accusation . . . [whichgave voice to] the malaise of our time, its bitter suffering, its conviction of futility, its wild dance on an ash-heap before a clouded and distorted mirror,” her initial response was not too generous (FVMA 703). Shewasn't too impressed with the “very European world-weariness of Eliot's Laforgue-derived voice”—atedious argument, perhaps (Carpenter 260). It was significant that “Prufrock” was tucked away at the veryend of the issue, with Monroe seemingly wondering whether it would have been worth while after all—something that doesn't pop up in the modernist anthologies. The "Notes" section introduced Eliot simply as“a young American poet resident in England, who has published nothing hitherto in this country” (P 6.3159). (Kenner makes the point in Invisible Poet that even the unknown Ajan Syrian was given more facetime.) A few years later, Eunice Tietjens reviewed Arthur Davison Ficke's “Prufrock” parody “CafeSketches” (published in The Little Review, September, 1915), which began: “I want to see dawn spilledacross the blackness / Like scrambled egg on the skillet” (P 10.6 324).

Eliot, gaining more of a reputation, published his “Conversation Galante,” “La Figlia Che Piange,” “Mr.Apollinax,” and “Morning at the Window” in Poetry (8.6). Pound's review of Prufrock and OtherObservations came shortly after. Pound praised Eliot's verse for “its fine tone, its humanity, and its realism”(Carpenter 267). Even though Pound speaks of “realism of one sort or another” (267), his term isproblematic, as is much of Eliot's verse, not only because the term "realism" is unsettled, but also becauseit carries significant gender implications. “[H]ow complete is Mr. Eliot's depiction of our contemporarycondition,” Pound contended—“complete,” because Eliot “has not confined himself to genre nor to societyportraiture. His 'lonely men in shirt-sleeves leaning out of windows' are as real as his ladies who 'come andgo / Talking of Michelangelo'” (265). The men are the pensive poets looking out onto the world, while thewomen are merely gossiping about and consuming what social culture put forth. Both Pound and Eliotdeserve the criticism. Still, it should not be the only context for understanding their contributions. As Poundwrote of Eliot, “[t]he reader will find nothing better and he will be extremely fortunate if he finds much half asgood. . . . Confound it, the fellow can write—we may as well sit up and take notice” (P 10.5 264-71).

Robert Frost

“Have just discovered another Amur'kn. VURRY Amur'k'n, with, I think, the seeds of grace,” Ezra Poundwrote to the Poetry office in 1913 (Letters 15). He was talking about Robert Frost. “I only found the man byaccident,” he continued, “and I think I've about the only copy of the book that has left the shop. . . . I thinkwe should print this notice at once as we ought to be first . . .” (Paige 16). As usual, Pound could be bothpleased and displeased with a poet's work. He called Frost “that dull beast,” “as dull as ditch water, as dullas Wordsworth. But he is trying almost the hardest job of all and he is set to be 'literchure' some day” (letterto Alice Corbin Henderson, 10/14/13; Carpenter 200-01, EW 67). Pound was frequently more generous inprint. In a May 1913 review of Frost's A Boy’s Will, Pound wrote that Frost “has now and then such a swiftand bold expression. . . . He is without sham and without affectation” (P 2.5 74).

“There is evidence that Robert Frost, before meeting Pound, submitted poems to Harriet Monroe . . . andthat the poems were refused by . . . Alice Corbin Henderson” (Thompson 588n). A letter from Monroe toPound states: “Alice says mea culpa about Frost. For we find him among our returns. . . . She has the gritto stand up, however, and say if it was returned it deserved it, or at least those particular poems did. Youcan apologize for us and say we are very contrite and would like some more some day” (qtd. in Thompson588n). Frost sent more along, specifically the very icy dialogue-poems: “The Code—Heroics” (3.5), “Snow”(9.2), and “The Witch of Coös” (19.4), a horror story-in verse. As Poetry magazine made clear, it could beboth a blessing and a curse to be “Vurry Amur'k'n.”

Vachel Lindsay

Vachel Lindsay's song-poems, especially his popular “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” (P 1.4),

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 22 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

were favorites of Monroe. Lindsay's “roots run deep into the past of American literature,” Monroe wrote,castigating Amy Lowell for ignoring him (P 11.3 153). It is odd that Lindsay has fallen out of favor today, for,as John Chapman Ward writes, he was “once considered a giant of 'The New Poetry' . . . who seemedcapable of shaping the American idiom in verse for the modern age” (233). Lindsay's poems appearedfrequently in Poetry (see, for example, issue 4.4, his popular “The Chinese Nightingale” in 5.5, the poems in19.4, the collection Whimseys in 14.5, and 11.1, which contains a paean to the Russian revolutionaryAlexander Kerensky).

Lindsay was a supporter of many causes, respecting those, particularly, of African Americans.Unfortunately, Lindsay's verse often ended up perpetuating many of the grotesque stereotypes his effortswere meant to undo. His poem “Congo,” for instance, shows what Ward calls Lindsay's “(racist. . .) attemptto value an Afro-American culture” (238). Even though W. E. B. Du Bois was a defender and fan of much ofLindsay's work, he would critique the poem for reinforcing the belief that the African exhibited a violent,anti-rational primitivism. Lindsay's “Booker T. Washington Trilogy” sends Simon Legree (the brutal slaveowner who kills Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin) “down to the Devil,” where he“share[s] the throne / . . . matching pennies and shooting craps / . . . playing poker and taking naps” (P 8.3109, 111-12). The verse shows how horrors might be vilified and made light of at the same time. Whetheror not such responses were appropriate is just one of the complicated problems that arise when culture,politics, and racial identity intersect.

“Poems to Be Chanted,” from July 1914, shows the inner workings of Lindsay's verse-songs, complete withmarginal-note instructions on how they ought to be chanted. This stanza from, for example, from “TheFireman's Ball” is “[t]o be read or sung in a heavy buzzing bass, as of fire-engines pumping”:

With a red and royal Intoxication, A tangle of sounds And a syncopation, Sweeping and bending From side to side, Master of dreams, With a peacock pride. . . . (P 4.4 126)

Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell's relationship with Harriet Monroe and Poetry is best described by what Philip L. Gerber calls “adecade of professional sparring”: “Harriet thought Amy's manner officious, her poetry less than first-rate;Amy sensed the editor's reservations and resented them deeply” (233). For Monroe, Lowell will always be“remembered more as a person than as a poet” (P&TA 80).

After reading the January 1913 issue of Poetry, Lowell famously exclaimed “Why, I, too, am an Imagiste!”(Damon 196). Sent by Monroe to meet Pound in London to find out more about the Imagist movement,Lowell found the movement dead and Pound onto the next big thing—Vorticism. Pound notoriously ruinedthe banquet Lowell was holding for the Imagists, by putting a mock bathtub over his head and calling for anew movement of "Les Nagistes" (See Fletcher 148-49). Not giving up just yet on the possibilities ofImagism, Lowell returned home and brought many of the Imagist poets originally printed in Pound'scollection together in a few new anthologies, titled Some Imagist Poets. Pound dismissively called thispoetic reincarnation "Amygism." Monroe unwittingly became a sounding board for what quickly became theLowell-Pound controversy.

There was a lot at stake in this hullabaloo aside from simply determining the rightful progenitor andimplementer of Imagism. As Bonnie Kime Scott notes, making Lowell the consummate punch line had moreto do with Pound's masculine political ideology than with any aesthetic matter. Scott writes, “Lowell's 'feud'with Ezra Pound provides a precedent for resisting his version of modernism, and the mastery traditionallygranted to the male makers of modernism” (136). Scott's critique is not leveled at Pound so much as hislater advocates, such as Hugh Kenner, who ended up “patrolling the boundaries of masculine modernismagainst Lowell's incursion by air and sea”.9 Shifting the biographical anecdote to where it belongs—on thelap of the critic conveying the tale—Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw write: “Whether she isremembered as the interloper who used money and family connections to wrest the term [Imagism] awayfrom Pound, water it down, and sell it to the masses; or whether she is remembered as pivotal inintroducing modern poetics to American audiences through her clever deployment and marketing of theterm depends on who is telling the story” (xiii).

Monroe was grateful to Lowell both for Lowell's personal sponsorship of the magazine—Amy “had, ineffect, exchanged a $200.00 contribution for Harriet's assurance of early publication” (Gerber 233)—and forthe publicity she often brought it. But Monroe was also indebted to Lowell for contributing some very goodverse, despite what she and Alice Corbin Henderson frequently thought about her personally. “Miss Monroehad seen and admired Miss Lowell's sonnets in the Atlantic Monthly, and invited her to contribute,” Lowell'sbiographer S. Foster Damon writes (186). This admiration notwithstanding, Monroe and Henderson had

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 23 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

good enough reason to be put off by Amy's constant complaints: why she didn't appear first in a givenissue, why she didn't have an issue dedicated solely to her, why she wasn't being paid more for her poems,why she wasn't an editor, why she wasn't listed on Poetry's advertisements as one of the outstanding newwriters (Gerber 235-36). Even more maddening, perhaps, was Lowell's fear of persecution—“Why is it thatyou alone conspire to keep me in the back seat, when neither my own talents nor the public appreciation ofthem keep me there?” (Gerber 240).10 Sometimes, Gerber writes, “even Harriet, ordinarily the soul of tact,might slip, as when she requested that rather than taking cash payment for her poems Amy should deductthe amount from her next contribution . . .” (240). Funny, yet also unfair for a poet who, rightfully or not,didn't get the attention she felt she deserved.

Scanning the Poetry collection, you'll discover why Lowell has become a major modernist figure. “It wouldnot be overstatement,” Munich and Bradshaw assert, “to claim that Lowell was modern poetry to themajority of readers: her opinions about other poets, her views about literary history, her popular and well-attended lectures reading her own poems and those of her contemporaries definitively reshapedconceptions of the literary scene” (xii). And from the pen of Monroe herself comes the following: “[Lowell]has used free-verse in certain fine lyrics—'Night Clouds,' 'Ombre, Chinoise,' 'A Gift'; in her New Englandnarratives—character sketches couched in a harsh dialect; in brocaded monologues and narratives like'Patterns'; and with delightful gaiety in grotesques like 'Red Slippers' or the Stravinsky pieces” (FVMA 700).Beyond all the controversies, suspicions, and obsessions, Lowell left an extraordinary legacy behind in herverse contributions to Monroe's journal.

Lowell's prose-poetry, or what she called “polyphonic prose,” offers yet another possibility for contemporarysound. “The Bombardment,” one such poem, pushed into the "War Poems" (P 5.2) issue on Lowell'sinsistence, iterates the sounds of war through the sudden shocks of “Boom!” William Carlos Williams, forone, was a big fan of Lowell's “Appuldurcombe Park” (P 12.5). Lowell's poems in 2.4, 4.1, 6.1, and 16.6,her Chalks series (6.6), the Lacquer Prints (9.6), and the haiku collection, “Twenty-Four Hokku on aModern Theme” (18.3), are all worthy of second looks. These two hokku are from June, 1921. They holdthe weight of years in such a tight space.

How have I hurt you? You look at me with pale eyes, But these are my tears.

Take it, this white rose. Stems of roses do not bleed; Your fingers are safe. (P 18.3 124-25)

Carl Sandburg

“In 1914,” writes Monroe, “two powerful middle-western names added to the noise of controversy which theImagists had stirred up: Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters were champions whom no protagonist ofexact metrics could afford to ignore” (FVMA 701). Sandburg and Masters became friends, as did Sandburgand Lindsay. In fact, it was difficult not to be friends with the always affable Chicagoan. Unlike Pound, andin keeping with Monroe's vision, Sandburg was a poet of the crowd, celebrating it at every turn. PenelopeNiven acknowledges that “[i]n large measure it had been Harriet Monroe who helped Sandburg find himselfand his home in Chicago, nearly a quarter of a century earlier, when she read 'Chicago Poems,' and heardthe music and the message in them, and shared them in the pages of her small, courageous magazine”(525).

And yet, “[e]ven Harriet Monroe found the opening lines of Sandburg's 'Chicago' 'a shock at first,' but she'took a long breath and swallowed it'” even though she was “also 'laughed at scornfully by critics andcolumnists'” for publishing the poem (Niven 242; APL 322). The opening lines, Whitman-esque in their ownway, astonish to this day:

Hog Butcher for the World Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys. They tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again. And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger. . . . (P 3.6 191)

Eunice Tietjens, then working in the Poetry office, saw the outrage and confusion first-hand. She writes thatthe poems “roused a veritable storm of protest over what was then called their brutality. Many Chicagoans

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 24 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

were furious at seeing the city presented in this, to them, unflattering light” (The World at My Shoulder(1938) 38-42; qtd. in Niven 243). Unsurprisingly, The Dial responded: “The typographical arrangement forthis jargon . . . creates suspicion that it is intended to be taken as some form of poetry . . . [in] a futile littleperiodical described as a 'magazine of verse'” (qtd. in Niven 243). Monroe, in turn, defended her poet inessays such as “The Enemies We Have Made,” which began “Next to making friends, the most thrillingexperience of life is to make enemies” (P 4.2 61). She wrote, “It is possible that we have ventured rashly in'discovering' Mr. Sandburg and the others, but . . . [w]e have taken chances, made room for the young andthe new, tried to break the chains which enslave Chicago to New York, America to Europe, the present tothe past—what chances has The Dial ever taken?” (63-64).

Sandburg's “Chicago,” Newcomb writes, became “a self-defining editorial statement for this proudlyChicagoan magazine” (97), and he would go on to publish there extensively. “Jan Kubelik,” “The Harbor,”and “Lost” joined his “Chicago” poem (3.6), and the collections: Days (7.1), My People (10.1), RedhawWinds (13.1), and Smoke Nights (15.5), as well as the set of poems in March of 1922 (19.6) came later.Sandburg also wrote reviews for the journal, including a February, 1916 reflection on Ezra Pound, “the bestman writing poetry today.” Given their very, very different poetic styles, it will be surprising for some readersthat Pound found such an admirer in Sandburg. “He stains darkly and touches softly,” Sandburg writes ofhis contemporary; “The flair of great loneliness is there” (P 7.5 250, 257). He wasn't wrong.

Monroe wrote that Sandburg's

free-verse rhythms are as personal as his slow speech and massive gait; always an appropriatebeating-out of his subject, from . . . frank, grotesquely disguised prose . . . to the magicaldelicacy of “The Great Hunt,” “Gone,” “Cool Thumbs,” and certain other songs which should rankamong the most beautiful in the language. His subjects, usually intensely local and personal,take on the spaciousness of all adequate art, and his work as a whole gives us the very feelingand quality of the prairie, the men it breeds, and the great city it has built. (FVMA 701)

Always going out of his way to be generous, Sandburg spoke in a very heartwarming manner at Monroe'sfuneral (“In appreciation of Harriet Monroe” The Courier 10 May 1938). He might not have been the “bestman writing poetry,” but he was one of its, shall we say, “Big Shoulders.”

Wallace Stevens

“Most readers of [Wallace] Stevens remember Monroe's editorial liberties with 'Sunday Morning,'eliminating three stanzas and encouraging rearrangement of four of the remaining five,” writes Stevensscholar George Lensing (245). In fact, it was Stevens who “allowed [her] to reduce 'Sunday Morning' fromeight to five stanzas and to reorder four of the five for Poetry” (Lensing 92). While in the case of “SundayMorning” Monroe's suggestions might have been a little off the mark (Stevens was later able to print thepoem as he wanted it in Harmonium), Stevens was generally patient and appreciative with her critiques. “Iam grateful to you for your notes,” he writes, “and, of course, for the check” (Stevens 182).

The bond between Stevens and Monroe seems never to have frayed. Stevens was a friend and supporterof Monroe, even after 1920 when many of the poets she discovered and promoted began to abandon her.She had praised Stevens's “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” which had been published in the rival journalOthers: “Mr. Stevens has a sense of words, of rhythm and color, and better still, of things underneath whichthese reveal” (P 6.6 316). Later on, she called him “intensely individual, [as] he had belonged to no schooland taken orders from his muse alone” (FVMA 703). In return, Stevens always sent along “what I like most”(qtd. in Lensing 245-46). According to Lensing, “Monroe's loyalty to Stevens . . . her pleas for him to go onas a poet, her advocacy of his work, and, behind it all, her keen understanding of his art single her out asthe poet's first important reader” (245). Unlike Pound and others who often didn't ask permission to reprintpoems originally published in Poetry, Stevens paid careful attention to respect Monroe's earlier efforts andrights as a publisher: “A. Kreymborg . . . wants to put the thing [eight poems from “Pecksniffiana”] in thisyear's Others anthology. I said that he might as he liked but thought he should first procure your consent”(Stevens 215).

Stevens's verse drama “Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise,” published by Poetry in 1916, won themagazine's prize. Stevens sent in more poems thereafter, collected as Letters d'un Soldat (12.2),Pecksniffiana (15.1)—the name was based on the character in Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit—andSur Ma Guzzla Gracile (19.1). Pecksniffiana included “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Homunculus et la BelleEtoile,” “Of the Surface of Things,” “The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage,” and “Ploughing onSunday.” It won the Levinson Prize. Sur ma Guzzla Gracile included the popular “The Snow Man,” “Tea atthe Palaz of Hoon,” and the tantalizing “Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores”:

I say now, Fernando, that on that day The mind roamed as a moth roams, Among the blooms beyond the open sand . . .

Then it was that that monstered moth

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 25 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

Which had lain folded against the blue And the colored purple of the lazy sea . . .

Rose up besprent and sought the flaming red

Dabbed with yellow pollen—red as red As the flag above the old café— And roamed there all the stupid afternoon. (P 19.1 9)

Stevens at his best. We never know where we stand or, in this case, flutter. Originally conjured as a meresimile, the moth in the mind is enlivened, like that monster of Frankenstein. It “rose” up into the red, the “redas red,” the flaming red, not the blue and the purple of the “lazy sea.” The moth worked all day unlike thesea, unlike the mind conjuring moths in the stupid afternoon.

William Carlos Williams

“Our poems constantly, continuously and stupidly were rejected by all the pay magazines except Poetryand The Dial,” William Carlos Williams wrote in his Autobiography (174). Accompanying his firstpublications in Poetry magazine was interestingly enough his verse-review about Ferdinand Earle's poetrycollection Lyric Year. Williams's review poem is a parody of John Keats's famous sonnet “On First Lookinginto Chapman's Homer,” as can be seen in its title, “On First Opening The Lyric Year” (P 2.3 114-15).Williams had hoped to be included in this collection, and, while his "review" was enthusiastic, he was still alittle bitter at being left out (Mariani 101). His twelve-line poem in couplets compares being immortalized inan anthology to being mortalized in a cemetery: “how good it must be to spend / Some thousand yearsthere from beginning to end.” Upon realizing “That I too would have to be like all the other dead,” thespeaker concludes that, perhaps, it was better in the end to be left out of both.

Williams's other poems in this issue are in keeping with this unusual critique. They range from weird(“Peace on Earth”) to weirder (“Sicilian Emigrant's Song: In New York Harbor”). The discordant character ofthese works, however, later gives way in the same issue to the rhythmically beautiful “Postlude,” a poemthat was much admired by Pound. It was Pound after all who insisted Monroe publish Williams. PaulMariani notes the similarity between “Postlude” and Pound's own verse: “If Pound had a special liking forone poem of Williams' other than 'Hic Jacet,' it was for his 'Postlude,' a poem studded with classicalallusions and bearing the mark of a new rhythm, closer to Pound's own advanced metrical experiments,and Pound sent it on to Harriet Monroe in February with directions to be sure to print it” (105).

Unlike Monroe's relationship with Stevens, the one with Williams quickly became unsteady. Williams wassensitive about his own work and confident enough with it once he became a more prominent poet. He alsodidn't care for many of the magazine's editorial policies, such as paying its contributors, and he let Monroeknow as much. According to Mariani, Williams

didn't like [her] interference with his poems and he didn't mind telling her that Poetry was already“closed to rugged beginnings.”Poetry would have to get tougher or stop publishing. And the factthat Poetry insisted on paying its contributors (unlike Others) could only hurt. “Verse don't pay,”he told her, “and no boosting by Poetry will ever make it pay.” One wrote because one hadsomething to say, and not for money. (127; April 11, 1916)

Throughout the years, though, Williams would continue both successfully and unsuccessfully to playmediator for Monroe. He patched up the relationship between Monroe and Kreymborg for a time and tried,but failed, to restore the one with Maxwell Bodenheim: “should I be able to get him to reconsider hiswithdrawal of the verse and play you had accepted would you print them for him?” (qtd. in Mariani 127). Afew years later, after Williams had a falling out with Kreymborg, “he wrote to Monroe to tell her . . . thatKreymborg had given his manuscripts back so that he might turn them over to Poetry. Frankly, Williamsadded, he wanted to get paid now for his poems; he was 'sick of standing at the Paying Teller's window'”(qtd. in Mariani 154-55). This paying teller's window became a sort of a private joke in the poems Monroenext published of Williams, as Mariani notes. She called his contribution for the March 1919 issue: “BrokenWindows.”

Williams's “Notes from a Talk on Poetry” (P 14.4) speaks of the laws of poetry and science. “The poet goesup and down continually empty-handed.” The poet attacks, Williams writes, punning that it “is his job, in lieuof getting into the game on a fair footing” (211). “It is impossible,” he concludes “to write modern poetrytoday in the old forms . . . nothing is safe” (216). Williams's empty-handed “Love Song,” “Naked,”“Marriage,” “Apology,” and “Summer Song” show just how unfair a poet's footing may be.

So different, this man And this woman: A stream flowing In a field. (“Marriage,” P 9.2 84)

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 26 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

Why do I write today? The beauty of The terrible faces Of our nonentities Stirs me to it. . . . (“Apology”)

W. B. Yeats

One of Ezra Pound's first big scores as foreign correspondent was getting his friend William Butler Yeats tosend along work. Yeats gave poems to Pound, which Pound, of course, could not help but reword(Carpenter, 191-92). Yeats was angry but forgiving. When he won Poetry's first annual prize in 1913, hesuggested Monroe give most of the money to Pound. While Pound was a defender of Yeats, he often didn'tshy away from speaking his mind. “[A]lthough [Yeats] is the greatest of living poets . . . his art has notbroadened much in scope during the past decade,” Pound wrote, insisting that Yeats's “gifts to English artare mostly negative”—as in showing other poets what not to do (P 1.4 125). A year hence, Pound—writingabout “The Later Yeats” before he had become what we think of as "the later Yeats"—declared that “Mr.Yeats is so assuredly an immortal that there is no need for him to recast his style to suit our winds ofdoctrine” (P 4.2 65). That was from Pound's review of Responsibilities in the May, 1914 issue of Poetry,which followed on the heels of a set of Yeats's poems. The poems, there, included “To a Shade,” “ThePeacock” and “When Helen Lived”—another take on the mythologizing of Yeats's love interest, MaudGonne, as Helen of Troy:

We have cried in our despair That men desert, For some trivial affair, Or noisy, insolent sport, Beauty we have won From bitterest hours; Yet we, had we walked within Those topless towers Where Helen walked with her boy, Had given, but as the rest Of the men and women of Troy, A word and a jest. (P 4.2 54)

Here, we have the men foolishly walking away from their brides, the irony being that they are “deserting” bygoing to war. The pun on “affair” brings the triviality of the whole business to light. At first, we might wonderwhy the men didn't give Helen more than a word and a jest. But that might not even be the right question.Who is the "we" crying about the silly men, and is this the same "we" who had won beauty, and the same"we" who, to borrow a phrase from another poem, had uttered “polite meaningless words”? Is the "we" theGreeks or the Trojans, the men or the women, or anyone else without a voice? It's not as clear as it wouldinitially seem. And finally, as the title of the collection begs us to answer, what is the responsibility here?

Yeats published poems early and often in Poetry (1.3, 2.1, 3.1). His selections in issues 4.2 and 7.5 provideinitial samples of work that would be revised again and again. Yeats's verse drama of split dialecticalselves, “Ego Dominus Tuus,” appears at the end of 1917 (11.1), and his much loved “A Prayer for MyDaughter” was published two years after (15.2). Personally, I found the version of “The Scholars” in theFebruary 1916 issue most interesting:

Bald heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love's despair. . . . (P 7.5 226)

The poem is a condemnation of literary critics who get so bogged down in the minutiae of their job that theyforget the romantic essence of poetry. Or, at least that's what it would seem to be. When I wrote about thispoem a few years ago, I argued that Yeats's revisions—specifically of this poem—ironically show him to bemore like the despised critic than the youthful poet.11 Coming across this poem in Poetry, I discoveredanother interesting twist. The final lines, there, read:

Lord, what would they say Should their Catullus walk that way!

We understand the final couplet rhetorically—the speaker, poking fun at the dry critics, asks (or seemsrhetorically to imply) that they wouldn't be so enamored of Catullus if he treated poetry as they treated it. Insubsequent versions of the poem, Yeats replaced "Should" with "Did." But none of these other versions endwith an exclamation mark—the final line is always a question. Granted, we understand that the question isrhetorical, but here, because of the exclamation, there is no mistaking it. This version makes us re-consider

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 27 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

the other versions and whether (as in Paul de Man's famous reading of the final lines of “Among SchoolChildren”) we might otherwise understand the line literally, as the speaker honestly asking a question aboutwhether literary critics ought to rethink their whole enterprise.

V. Even More of Poetry's PoetsIn addition to the poets listed above, you'll discover, in the MJP's collection, poems from canonicalmodernist authors, such as Sherwood Anderson, Rupert Brooke, D. H. Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay,and Marianne Moore. The poetic-prose of Anderson's Mid-American Songs (10.6) makes a nice contrast tothe seamless rhymes of Millay (10.5, 12.3) and the perfectly chiseled verses of Lawrence (3.4, 5.3, 13.5,21.2). Pound, in a review of Lawrence, had called him “pre-raphaelitish slush, disgusting or very nearly so”and yet there was “no English poet under forty who can get within shot of him” (P 2.4 149). Lawrence's“War Films” (14.4) might, in turn, be read against Brooke's Nineteen Fourteen poems (6.1), which werepublished years earlier in April 1915, the month he died on the Continent from sepsis. And then there arethe scrupulous “Pouters and Fantails” of the incomparable Marianne Moore (6.2). You'll also come acrosssome names that are slowly being forgotten, like Walter de la Mare (10.1; 19.3), Orrick Johns (3.5; 5.5;9.6), Edwin Arlington Robinson (3.6, 6.6), and Edgar Lee Masters (11.1, 14.3, passim) whose Spoon RiverAnthology was quite popular in his day.12 There is so much to explore, from Max Michelson's Masks (13.2)to Marjorie Allen Seiffert's Gallery of Paintings (“Words curl like fragrant smoke-wreaths in the room” 18.4),from the academic Joseph Warren Beach's Drypoints (6.2) to Moireen Fox a Cheavasa's “Silence” and“Disillusion” (17.4).

I want to introduce some of the less familiar poets and personalities you'll find in these pages and thenleave you alone with their words. It is not for me to say whether this poetry is good, bad or (even) ugly; but,taken together, as we ought to read them, the poets tell the incredible stories of a generation in verse.

Conrad Aiken (1889-1973)—poet, novelist, and vitriolic critic—was born in Savannah Georgia. He movedto Massachusetts and attended Harvard University, where he met and befriended T. S. Eliot. He won thePulitzer and Bollingen Prizes and the National Book Award. He had no compunctions about making hisexasperations known, as in his resistance to Imagism, which I described earlier. He wrote to Monroe thatshe and Pound were “using Poetry too egotistically, in order to give expression and scope to their ownpersonalities. . . . Must we believe [Pound] when he says with lazy indifference . . . that there is no newpoetry in England at present . . . ?” (qtd. in EW 35). His “Discordants” (6.6) and the series Many Evenings(14.5) are worth looking at. The “Prelude” to the latter echoes Eliot's “Prufrock”: “ . . . along black streetsthat glisten as if with rain, / The muted city seems / Like one in a restless sleep who lies and dreams.” But,as Aiken would remind us, the influence worked both ways. Some words from his “Haunted Chambers”:

The lamp-lit page is turned, the dream forgotten; The music changes tone, you wake, remember Deep worlds you lived before, deep world hereafter Of leaf on falling leaf, music on music, Rain and sorrow and wind and dust and laughter. (P 14.5 239)

Maxwell Bodenheim (1892-1954) was an inexhaustible writer in every sense of the term. He was a lifelongfriend of Ben Hecht (see below) but had a rough relationship with Monroe. In a letter dated June 19, 1914he wrote her: “If you had written poetry for six years without seeing a line of your work in print, would younot be a trifle impatient?” (qtd. in EW 146). Monroe was always more generous, writing that Bodenheim's“irony is less bitter [than Eliot's], sometimes almost humorous. It amuses him to search for the neat word,and fit it like an arrowhead to the keen shaft, and send the idea shooting into the heart of a stupid world.Sometimes it even pleases him to be serious, and write a love-poem or a death-poem as though hebeautifully meant it” (FVMA 703). In midlife, he moved from Chicago to New York City, where he waseventually murdered. His attack on free verse, “A Reply to A.C.H.,” was published in 1919 (P 14.3). Somewords from “Suffering,” part of his series Sketches in Color:

The morning lowers its fire-veined back And quivers beneath the edged feet of winds: So do you stoop to your agony. (P 8.2 73)

Joseph Campbell (1879-1944)—not the famous American mythologist who wrote the Skeleton Key toFinnegans Wake, but the Irish poet Seosamh Mac Cathmhaoil who participated in the Easter Rising andfought in the Irish Civil War. His and Padraic Colum's correspondence on “The Dead Irish Poets” (8.5) putinto words the horror of the British response to the Easter Rising of 1916. His poem “The Puca,” like muchof his work, is based upon Irish legend, here the shape-shifting fairy:

The Puca's come again, Who long was hid away In cave or twilight glen: Too shy, too proud to play Under the eye of day. (P 3.2 50)

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 28 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

Skipwith Cannell (1887-1957) was an Imagist poet and one-time favorite of Ezra Pound, who initiallypublished and promoted him. See his submissions in issues 4.2 and 6.3 and his Poems in Prose and Verse(2.5). “Ikons” provides a glimpse of his Imagistic technique:

My thoughts Are little, silver fishes jumping in a row, Little fishes leaping upon a black cloth. . . . (P 4.2 50)

The Italian poet Emanuel Carnevali (1897-1942) came to America at the beginning of the Great War inorder to avoid conscription. He eventually became an associate editor of Poetry in 1919-20. Monroepublished his sequences Splendid Commonplace (11.6), The Day of Summer (14.6) and Neuriade (19.3).There are some hints of Wallace Stevens in Carnevali's “His Majesty the Letter-Carrier”:

Ah, there he is! Who? . . . The letter-carrier, of course! (What do you think I got up so early for?) He is so proud Because he's got my happiness in that dirty bag: He's got a kiss from my sweetheart. . . . (P 11.6 299)

Padraic Colum (1881-1972) was an Irish playwright and mythologist. An important figure in the IrishLiterary Revival, he was on the board of the Abbey Theatre with Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats. He was alifetime friend of James Joyce. His work in Poetry ranges from ballad renderings of Irish songs to moreloosely constructed private meditations (3.6, 8.5, 14.4). Here is an excerpt from the early contribution,“Three Irish Spinning Songs”:

An old woman sings:There was an oul' trooper went riding by On the road to Carricknabauna, And sorrow is better to sing than cry On the way to Carricknabauna! (P 3.6 211)

Grace Hazard Conkling (1878-1958) and Hilda Conkling (1910-1986) were mother and daughter poets.As Monroe explained it, Grace Hazard “transcribes her [daughter's] extraordinary improvisations,” whichhad been published every year in Poetry since Hilda was four years old (P 14.4 232). Both mother anddaughter ended up teaching at Smith College. Grace Hazard Conkling's “Symphony of a Mexican Garden,”in the first issue of Poetry, contains the varying cadences of a four-movement classical symphony. Herdaughter's poems vary similarly in sound. Here is a face of Hilda's “Snow-Flake Song,” from the collectionA Little Girl's Songs:

Snowflakes come in fleets Like ships over the sea. The moon shines down on the crusty snow; The stars make the sky sparkle like gold-fish in a glassy bowl. (P 14.4 207)

Babette Deutsch (1895-1982) was a poet, critic, and translator of Russian poetry. Her Poetry Handbook(1957) was influential both inside and outside the classroom for decades. The name of her collection,Semper Eadem, or “always the same,” was the motto of Queen Elizabeth I. Her poem “Knowledge” fromthat collection shows how emotions might be more complicated than they seem, even if they seem alwaysthe same:

And there is something difference understands That peace knows nothing of. It is the pain in pleasure that we seek To kill with kisses, and revive With other kisses; For by our hurt we know we are alive. (P 18.4 193)

Iowa poet Arthur Davison Ficke (1883-1945), like T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens,studied under George Santayana at Harvard University. There, he also met his lasting friend and eventualpoetic co-conspirator, Witter Bynner. He was close with Edgar Lee Masters and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Inaddition to his literary endeavors, he was an attorney and a Judge Advocate. With Bynner (then the editorof McClure's), Ficke developed a new poetic movement, called the "Spectric School." It wasn't until April25, 1918, that the Dial uncovered their whole vers librist movement as a hoax (not unlike the Sokal Hoaxmany years later). Poetry had accepted some of the faux poems, but hadn't yet published them before thehoax was revealed. As Ellen Williams notes, Alice Corbin Henderson congratulated Poetry “on escapingthe hoaxers, without revealing how narrow the margin of escape, and declared the joke rather pointless”(239). Fiske's poems appear in issues 1.5, 5.6, 9.2, and 18.1. His first submission was an epic elegy to A.C. Swinburne:

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 29 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

The autumn dusk, not yearly but eternal, Is haunted by thy voice, Who turns his way far from the valleys vernal And by dark choice Disturbs those heights which from the low-lying land Rise sheerly toward the heavens, with thee may stand. . . . (P 1.5 137)

John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950)—a “rebellious imagist” moved “to worship . . . the earth's enormouspageantry” (P&TA 87)—was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. He financially supported Pound's section in theNew Freewoman, a weekly literary magazine edited by Dora Marsden and owned by Harriet Shaw Weaver,which eventually became The Egoist—the very same journal that printed chapters of Joyce's Portrait.Fletcher's own poetic adventures began with Imagism, although eventually he returned to his Southernroots, and his autobiography reads like a modernist tell-all. Monroe described him as “essentially alandscape poet—landscapes of London streets as well as Mississippi banks and Arizona deserts, andincluding marine effects . . .” (FVMA 699). He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939 and committed suicide adecade later. He published in Poetry often (7:4, 7:6, 11.3, 17:1, passim). His December 1913 submission“Irradiations” betrays how present determinations may hide within childhood hopes:

Oh, all you stars up yonder . . . I hoped you would dance—but after twenty-six years, I find you are determined to stay as you are So I make it known to you, stars clustered or solitary, That I want you to fall into my lap tonight. (P 3.3 89)

F. S. Flint (1885-1960) studied with Ezra Pound in T. E. Hulme's Imagist group. Initially, he was close toPound, but he eventually disputed the other's claim to have invented Imagism. Flint's essay on“Imagisme”—which many believe was written by Pound, and which was published in Poetry in March, 1913—provides a sort of manifesto for the movement. His “Four Poems in Unrhymed Cadence” (2.4) areinteresting pieces, as is his set In London (7.5), which “Cones” is from:

The blue mist of after-rain Fills all the trees;

The sunlight gilds the tops Of the poplar spires, far off. (P 7.5 227)

Florence Kiper Frank (1885-1976), a popular playwright, was an interesting figure in the local culture ofChicago. Her poem “A Girl Strike-Leader” appeared in Upton Sinclair's The Cry for Justice: An Anthology ofthe Literature of Social Protest (1915). She wrote often on the unspoken conditions of womanhood andethnicity. Monroe reviewed her collection The Jew to Jesus and Other Poems, calling it “largely juvenilia” (P8.5 265). Her verse-dialogue Women was published in the 21.2 issue of Poetry. The following is from herseries New Life:

Ah, I am heavy now and patient, Moving as the dumb, tamed animals move, ploddingly, Burdened, burdened . . . How shall I carry the burden of a soul! (P 11.3 136)

The versatile Jun Fujita (1888-1963) was a Japanese-American poet born near Hiroshima. He was a silentactor in many Chicago films and a famous photojournalist who captured photos of the St. Valentine's Daymassacre in Chicago. His biography is long overdue. It was good to see, however, that Denis M. Garrisonhas recently edited a collection of Fujita's tanka poems (Jun Fujita, Tanka Pioneer, 2007), some of whichappeared originally in Poetry (18.3). Short and dense, like the haiku, the tanka brings a boundlessmeditation into the bounds of a moment's thought. Consider, for example, “To Elizabeth”:

Against the door dead leaves are falling; On your window the cobwebs are black. Today, I linger alone.

The foot-step? A passer-by. (P 18.3 128)

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878-1962), a friend of Rupert Brooke, wrote war verse, even though he neversaw action. One of his Battle poems, “The Going,” demonstrates the subtlety and quickness of the warexperience:

He's gone. I do not understand. I only know That he turned to go

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 30 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

And waved his hand, In his young eyes a sudden glory shone: And I was dazzled by a sunset glow, And he was gone. (P 6.5 239)

Ben Hecht (1894-1964)—who Monroe called “a new adventurer” (P 11.5 285)—was one of the mostremarkable figures to appear in the pages of Poetry. He was a Hollywood director and one of the mostimportant screenwriters of all time, working on Underworld, Scarface, Stagecoach, Some Like It Hot, Gonewith the Wind, His Girl Friday, Notorious, Monkey Business (the Cary Grant-Ginger Rogers-Marilyn Monroefilm—not the Marx Brothers' one), and A Farewell to Arms (to name more than a few). The list seemsendless. His short story collection 1001 Afternoons in Chicago (1922) ought to be read more often. Hepublished “Snow Monotones” in Poetry in February 1918, a decade before he would win the honor for bestoriginal script for Underworld at the first annual Academy Awards.

The night is not so silent as the snow And yet the night is dark and mute and deep— The faery strains that wander to and fro Are what the night is dreaming in its sleep. (P 11.5 247)

Helen Hoyt [Lyman] (1887-1972) was an associate editor at Monroe's journal, who saw poetry as avehicle to escape male patriarchy. She was the aunt of Elinor Wylie (see below). Monroe described herverse and that of others: “Helen Hoyt, Eunice Tietjens, Marianne Moore . . . have exercised to the full awoman's privilege of independent choice. Each has a strongly personal rhythm. . . . Helen Hoyt'simpassioned love-songs, Eunice Tietjens' Profiles, Miss Moore's icily acid reflections, all exist on their ownrhythmic terms; each poet escaping into prose now and then but achieving poetry of singular precision inher happier moments” (FVMA 704). Her prolific verse includes Poems of Life and Death (6.5), CityPastorals (9.6), and The Harp (13.3). “The Letter” is from the second of these:

The words were beautiful, Before I had read them.

I laid my fingers along the edges, Over the fold your hands had folded— I laid my face to the face of my letter. (P 9.6 282)

James Joyce (1882-1941), writer of such poems as “Tutto è Sciolto” and “Gas from a Burner,” also wrote alittle modernist novel called Ulysses. Unfortunately for his reputation as a modernist poet, his verse neverhad a word out of place. “Alone” was published in 1917:

The moon's soft golden meshes make All night a veil; The shore-lamps in the sleeping lake Laburnum tendrils trail.

The sly reeds whisper in the night A name—her name, And all my soul is a delight, A swoon of shame. (P 11.2 70)

[Alfred] Joyce Kilmer's (1886-1918) poem “Trees,” though anthologized today, didn't have the best ofcritical receptions. In fact, it was the scourge of the New Critics—specifically Cleanth Brooks and RobertPenn Warren in their influential book, Understanding Poetry—who despised its pedestrian sentiment. Itwould have been interesting to see how Kilmer, quickly becoming more and more popular, would havefared after the Great War, but he was sadly killed fighting for the Americans at the age of 31. “Trees”appeared in issue 2.5; it was followed by more poems in 4.1, 4.6, and 9.6. Interestingly enough, HelenHoyt's “Ellis Park” with a similar sound and theme (“Little park that I pass through, / I carry off a piece ofyou / Every morning hurrying down / To my work-day in the town”) appeared in the same issue directlybefore Kilmer's poem.

I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. . . . Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree. (“Trees” P 2.5 160)

Alfred Kreymborg (1883-1966), an important modernist editor, published Others: A Magazine of NewVerse from 1915 to 1919. The magazine was financed by Walter Arensberg, and its contributors includedWilliams, Stevens, Moore, Pound, Eliot, Lowell, H. D., Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and the artists Man Rayand Marcel Duchamp. Kreymborg and Alice Corbin Henderson often found themselves on opposite sides ofthe poetic spectrum, as did Kreymborg and Pound, who in his essay “Small Magazines” played theQueen's Gambit: “I cannot see that Kreymborg has ever understood language. He is an excellent chess

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 31 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

player. Chess is a highly conventionalized game. Each piece moves in a certain, set, determined way.Words do not function in this manner. They are like the roots of plants: they are organic, they interpenetrateand tangle with life, you cannot detach them as pieces of an anatomical figure” (701). Kreymborg andMonroe were fierce competitors, but they published each other's work. We might think of this all as a typeof nepotism, but I think, rather, that it shows, even among literary and personal rivals, a genuine desire tobuild a network of poetry and promote it rather than the poets themselves. Kreymborg's Toadstools serieswas printed in 1917:

I have been a snob today; Scourge me with a thousand thongs! The crowds that passed me atoms were: Plunge me into a vat of tar! Love was dead all day. (“Love Was Dead All Day,” P 10.1 27)

Harold Monro (1879-1932) was another major modernist figure, often overlooked because he operatedbehind the scenes. He ran the Poetry Bookshop in London, which published Pound's Des Imagistesanthology, and he had a hand in publishing such journals as The Poetry Review and Georgian Poetry. Likeher relationship with Kreymborg, Monroe's relationship with Monro was touch-and-go. She wrote to him,protesting that he was focusing too much on reviews rather than on poetry (see Grant 42-43). Heresponded that one could not “expect the public to turn over piles of rubbish to find something for itself,”because it “need[ed], above all, a direction” (APL 255). His poem “Introspection” mixes curiosity andconfession:

The house across the road is full of ghosts. The windows, all inquisitive, look inward. All are shut. I've never seen a body in the house. Have you? Have you? (P 15.6 298)

Ernest Rhys (1859-1946) was part of the "Rhymer's Club" in London. He was the initial head-editor ofKnopf's Everyman's Library. “April Romance,” published by Monroe in the spring of 1916, carries ameditative tone:

I understood each thing The leaf says to the flower when, both adoring, See like themselves, leaf-shaped and flower-painted, The sun descend, to bathe in painted shade. (P 8.1 2)

Lola Ridge (1873-1941)—the Irish-Australian-New York poet, socialist, and feminist—had an altogetherdifferent twentieth-century voice, which is, fortunately, now undergoing recovery. Alfred Kreymborg's reviewof Ridge's The Ghetto and Other Poems was published in Poetry in March 1919 (13.6). Ridge's ownreviews were published in issues 17.6 and 20.2. Her poems, such as those in the Chromatics series, are toNew York what Sandburg's poems are to Chicago. They are stark, loud, and precise.

That day in the slipping of torsos and straining flanks, On the bloodied ooze of fields, plowed by iron . . . Do you remember how we heard All the Red cross bands on Fifth Avenue . . . And the harsh and terrible screaming, And that strange vibration at the roots of us— Desire, fierce like a song? (“The Song,” P 13.1 26)

Like so many artists of his era, Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)—a Jewish poet from London, with roots inLithuania—was taken before his time. “Mr. Isaac Rosenberg, formerly a student of the Slade School of Artin London,” as Poetry introduced him, had become “a member of the British army in France” (P 9.3 163).Monroe published his “Trench Poems” at the end of 1916. They spoke of the “iron cloud” and the “the tornfields of France.” Rosenberg “had mailed her his 'somber trench poems, sent on ragged scraps of paper'”(Niven 258). Just over a year later, he was killed fighting in the trenches. His “Break of Day in theTrenches” is, perhaps, one of the most influential poems of the war. Its speaker is a little more complicatedthan we might take him to be on first glance:

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass: Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes, Less chanced than you for life; Bonds to the whims of murder, Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, The torn fields of France. (P 9.3 129)

James Stephens (1882-1950), the Irish poet and Celtic mythologist, was a friend of James Joyce. Joyce

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 32 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

considered him as a possible completer of Finnegans Wake, should he prove unable to finish it. Like Yeats,Stephens was a collector of Celtic mythology, often invoking it in his works. Much of his work, like “DarkWings,” haunts:

Sing while you may, O bird upon the tree! . . . The day and thee and miserable me Dark wings shall cover up and hide away Where no song stirs of bird or memory: Sing while you may. (P 4.5 194)

"Ajan Syrian" (1887-?)—named initially with the quotation marks and later without them—is described byMonroe as “a rug-dealer in New York. . . . [b]orn . . . on the Syrian desert” (P 12.5 289). His collection Fromthe Near East (12.5) and his poems “I Sing of My Life while I Live It: The Syrian Lover in Exile RemembersThee, Light of My Land” and “Alma Mater: The Immigrant at Columbia” (6.3) mix nostalgia and wonder.“Alma Mater,” about his time at Columbia University, shows the strength of poetry to push across culturaland geographic borders:

From the red, red dust, the long dead dust Of ancient Syria, I come . . . To see thy laureled head— Massive, calm, with gloried brow— Flame before the open portals of the House of Books; Where the thoughts of noble men— Dressed in all habits, speaking all tongues, Gathered from all ages of time— Meet like pilgrims at one shrine. . . . (P 6.3 110-11)

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), who won what would later become the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, is alsoexperiencing a serious critical rereading. Her work seems simple, but that may be misleading. She offereda perspective about female experiences that was unmatched in much of her contemporaries' work. Early inlife, she had been close to Vachel Lindsay who had proposed to her. She killed herself in 1933, just a yearafter Lindsay's own suicide. Her collection Memories (14.6) shows her range as a poet. “Debt,” an earlierwork, shows her sharpness:

What do I owe to you Who loved me deep and long? You never gave my spirit wings Nor gave my heart a song.

But oh, to him I loved, Who loved me not at all, I owe the little open gate That led through heaven's wall. (P 3.6 200)

Eunice Tietjens (1884-1944)—the writer, poet, and one-time war correspondent— became an associateeditor at Poetry. She wrote often, both critically and creatively, and found herself leaning more toward CarlSandburg's aesthetic than that of T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. She was the widow of Paul Tietjens, who wrotethe musical score for The Wizard of Oz and co-produced the musical with L. Frank Baum (in the EmeraldCity of Chicago). The following excerpt, from “Parting After a Quarrel,” is out of the larger collection Facets:

Then all the air was thick With my last words that seemed to leap and quiver. And in my heart I heard the little click Of a door that closes—quietly, forever. (P 14.5 244)

Allen Upward (1863-1926), a lawyer and judge, wrote the philosophical work The New Word. He wroteregularly for the New Age and published widely. Ezra Pound became a big admirer when he came acrossUpward's “Scented Leaves—from a Chinese Jar,” which were a series of poems translated from theChinese. Pound convinced him to publish his work in Poetry. It jibed well with what would quickly becomePound's fascination with Ernest Fenollosa. Like Pound's "translations," though, Upward's were what wemight call “loose,” mostly made-up from recollections (Carpenter 218). The “Scented Leaves” poems werepublished in September of 1913 (2.6). The following sestet is from Upward's sonnet “Finis”:

There is no love but first love; all beside Is passion's lightning or affection's moon. I floated once on that triumphant tide.

But stranded now among the wrecks and spars I watch the night succeed the afternoon, And bide my sleep beneath the ancient stars. (P 8.2 62)

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 33 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

Arthur Waley (1889-1966), friends with many in the Bloomsbury circle, also translated Chinese poetry.Although he took his own liberties with the texts, his renderings were more faithful than those of Upward orPound. He translated the great poet Li Bai [Li Po], Confucius, and Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (The Way andIts Power). “On Finding a Hairpin in a Disused Well,” a sixth-century poem of T'ang Seng-ch'i, was includedwith Waley's collection Chinese Poems (11.4):

Once a girl was gathering flowers. . . . And she looked at herself in the well-water. Long she looked and couldn't stop, Laughing and laughing at her own beauty, Till one of her golden pins fell out And there in the well it has lain ever since. . . . The person who wore it is dead and gone; What was the use of the thing lasting? (P 11.4 198)

John Hall Wheelock's (1886-1978) musically-oriented poetry was a favorite of Monroe. He was born onLong Island, New York, and he attended Harvard University where he befriended the soon-to-be literarycritic Van Wyck Brooks. Wheelock won the Bollingen Prize in 1962. “Beethoven,” like much of his otherearly work, celebrates the range of sounds Wheelock admired in others:

Behold the tormented and the fallen angel Wandering disconsolate the world along, That seeks to atone with inconsolable anguish For some old grievance, some remembered wrong; To storm heaven's iron gates with angry longing, And beat back homeward in a shower of song! (P 7.2 77)

(Arthur) Yvor Winters (1900-1968) was a poet, literary critic, and one-time assistant editor of Poetry. Hewon the Bollingen Prize in 1961. His literary criticism was influential and controversial: R. W. Emerson was“a sentimental philosopher with a genius for a sudden twisted hardness of words” (P 19.5 278); EmilyDickinson was “a prophet of unspeakable doom,” and “a spinster who may have written her poems to keeptime with her broom. A terrible woman, who annihilated God as if He were her neighbor, and her neighboras if he were God” (279). And he liked Dickinson! Winters's criticism was often leveled at modes ofunreason. His “crying need for a Poets' Handbook of Science,” for example, takes issue with expired poeticlicenses. “W . R. Benét, for instance, should be informed that bats do not hang in barns at night, that theyfly around at night and hang there in the day-time; Lola Ridge that palms do not grow on mesas, thatjaguars do not inhabit deserts, etc., etc.” (P 14.6 346). Issue 14.6 of Poetry contains Winters's Monodies,and the selection in 20.6 gives us glimpses of Winters's seasons. His book reviews started appearing in thejournal in 1922. The following quote, from “The Far Voice,” is characteristic of his terse verse lines:

Roads lie in dust— White, curling far away; And summer comes. (P 17.3 142)

Edith Wyatt (1894-1968) was a poet, novelist, and critic, who served on the advisory board of Poetryduring its early years. Her essay “Poetry and Criticism” (4.6) takes issue with petty critics who would, forexample, pick out and excoriate Shakespeare for his mixed metaphors. Her poems weren't published asoften as those of other members of the Poetry office, say Helen Hoyt, but she often contributed essays andreviews—all of which are worth considering. “City Whistles” was officially dedicated to Monroe, but it couldbe read as a dedication to the city of Chicago as well:

Down the midland mists at twilight, have you heard their singing sweep, Where their far-toned voices, many-chorded, buoy— And our mortal ways in wonder hail creation's unknown deep— "Siren ship! Silver ship! Sister ship, ahoy!" (P 9.3 115)

Elinor Wylie (1885-1928), novelist and poet, was a friend of Edmund Wilson, Sinclair Lewis, and John DosPassos. She was an admirer of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her biography interestingly runs close to his.She was critically acclaimed during her time and died young. A formalist poet who never took form forgranted, she was a big influence on James Merrill and one of his favorites. She is one of my favorites too.Her poem “Atavism,” published in 1921, plays upon poetic tradition and the expectations of the sonnet formas much as it plays upon the anticipations of the reader. The sonnet's turn comes when we expect it, but itstill takes us by surprise:

I always was afraid of Somes's Pond: Not the little pond, by which the willow stands, Where laughing boys catch alewives in their hands In brown, bright shallows; but the one beyond. There, when the frost makes all the birches burn

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 34 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

Yellow as cow-lilies, and the pale sky shines Like a polished shell between black spruce and pines, Some strange thing tracks us, turning where we turn. (P 18.1 21)

VI. ClosingIn 2003, Poetry magazine received a $100 million grant from Ruth Lilly, heiress to the pharmaceuticalcompany Eli Lilly, along with a promise that more was to come. While it is tempting to say that thestaggeringly large endowment was a testament to how important poetry had become in the century afterMonroe first published her journal, we know that isn't quite the case. The shock of the news shows thatpoetry still isn't what most people think of when giving away $100 million dollars. The news, however, wasa testament to how important Monroe's journal had become in the cultural world of America. “WithoutPoetry,” William Carlos Williams wrote, “the poem like the wild pigeon would have remained among us nomore than an official memory” (qtd. in Whittemore 8).

The Modernist Journals Project (MJP) has been acting as a similar sentry for modernism, hoping not onlyto continue to promote poetry, but also to preserve the legacy of what poetry meant a hundred years ago.Such an awareness is still critical for our contemporary cultures, and it might shed some light on theaesthetic conventions and innovations we take for granted today. At the heart of the MJP is the belief that agreater understanding of literary history depends upon examining how it was mediated by its periodicalforms. Ezra Pound recognized that the “history of contemporary letters has, to a very manifest extent, beenwritten in such magazines” (702). What Pound didn't understand was that, as Jayne Marek writes, “[t]hepersonalities of editors”—importantly female ones—“like those of the writers and artists who opened thedoors of experimentation, became central to the dynamics of modernist publishing” (Women 3). For Pound,the “significance of the small magazine has, obviously, nothing to do with format ” (Pound 689). As the MJPreveals, however, it had everything to do with format. Too often we focus on the events of history ratherthan the moments that make such events possible. Modernism was—is—dynamic. Writers reacted to otherwriters who were already, as I wrote earlier, enmeshed in a web of personalities, politics, and poetics.Teaching modernism means teaching the complexity of the moments of a historical culture; it meansgetting enmeshed in the very same web of culture. The teaching section of the MJP offers wonderfulsuggestions on how to work with the archive. To these wonderful ideas, I would add a prompt on how to getproductively lost in the web of modernism. Why, for example, did William Carlos Williams write to HarrietMonroe to try to get her to reconsider not not-publishing Alfred Kreymborg's and Maxwell Bodenheim'spoems, and what did this all have to do with one of Alice Corbin Henderson's snarky reviews?

This is not only about recognizing some intriguing coincidences, say, that Ezra Pound, "Dryad" (H. D.), andWilliam Carlos Williams spent time together as undergraduates in Pennsylvania, or that Pound and Yeatswere tramping about together at Thoor Ballylee in 1914 and 1915, or even that Pound's mother-in-law'scousin (Lionel Johnson of the "Rhymers' Club") had a friend named Yeats, who ended up having an affairwith Pound's mother-in-law (Olivia Shakespear). It means acknowledging the fundamental happenstancesof modernist culture; it means seeing that, not unlike today, why, how, where, and if poets were gettingpublished often depended upon quid-pro-quos and settling old scores. Suzanne W. Churchill and AdamMcKible remind us how, exactly, T. S. Eliot's “Prufrock” first appeared to the public—not as the greatmodernist poem of existential grief, not as the 20th-century version of the split lyric self, but as a workembedded “in the literary and social discourses, political debates, and historical events of the day . . . aspart of the larger dialogue of modernity”:

Indeed, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was first published in the June 1915 Poetry,alongside poems by Bliss Carman, Arthur Davison Ficke, and Skipwith Cannell—poets whowere, according to the editors, “well known to our readers.” Eliot, in contrast, was introduced as“a young American poet resident in England, who has published nothing hitherto in this country.”First billing was given to the exotic free verse landscapes of the Syrian-born immigrant, AjanSyrian. Eliot's poem appears last, tucked between a selection of conventional rhymed lyrics byDorothy Dudley, Georgia Wood Pangbom, and William Griffith, and a prose section that includeda eulogy for Rupert Brooke, a “symbol of the waste of war,” and reviews of Edgar Lee Masters'sSpoon River Anthology and Some Imagist Poems—An Anthology. (5)

Churchill and McKible show how, when looking to find Eliot, we can get as lost as Prufrock. But it is not onlyabout getting lost within periodicals. It is about getting lost across them. What was happening in Masters'sAnthology? What was being included in Some Imagist Poems . . . and, just as importantly, why? Despitethe rivalries and constant bickering among the editors, subscribers, and poets of the various journals, thehopes of one journal always rested on the shoulders of the other. “Success to them all!” Monroe wrote in“Our Contemporaries”:

It is the little magazines which should be encouraged and subscribed for. The great magazinesare mostly engaged in the same game—that of getting a million readers. But each magazinerepresents someone's enthusiasm for a cause or an art. It represents self-sacrifice, courage,some vital principle. The Liberator, beginning in a garret, ended by freeing the slaves. POETRYor one of these others, beginning in a dream, will end by freeing American literature. (P 6.6 317)

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 35 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

Perhaps Monroe was overstating her case, perhaps not. But for one who, in Timothy Newcomb's words,“pioneered the rhetorical self-fashioning of the modern American avant-garde, celebrating the young andthe new, welcoming experimental forms and outsider subject positions, and defining itself in antagonisticopposition to an anti-modern national tradition,” dreaming large was never off the mark (94).

Endnotes1. Chicago Daily Tribune (1872-1963) 6 Oct. 1912, ProQuest Historical Newspapers Chicago Tribune

(1849 - 1986), ProQuest. Web. 18 Aug. 2009.2. Mark Morrisson writes, “In the realm of editorial theory, little magazines have also made an

appearance. Editorial scholars such as Jerome McGann and George Bornstein have distinguished'linguistic code' (words) from 'bibliographic code' (layout, surrounding texts, font, illustrations,typography in general, publication genre, and the like). Not surprisingly, little magazines have provedto be richly significant sites for exploring how bibliographic code works in modernism” ("Preface" inChurchill and McKible xvi).

3. They continue: “The rise of cultural studies enables us to see this distinction [between art andeconomics] as artificial, since high literature, art, and advertising have mingled in periodicals from theearliest years, and major authors have been published in magazines both little and big” (519).

4. As Rebecca Beasley writes: “In 1912 Pound visited an exhibition of Whistler's paintings at the TateGallery, wrote a poem about the exhibition . . . and he sent editor Harriet Monroe his poem . . .commenting: 'I count him our only great artist, and even this informal salute, drastic as it is, may notbe out of place at the threshold of what I hope is an endeavor to carry into our American poetry thesame sort of life and intensity which he infused into modern painting'” (“Ezra Pound's Whistler”American Literature 74.3 (2002), 499; the quotation is from Paige, Letters, 10: August 18, 1912).

5. Pound suggested to Alice Corbin Henderson that Poetry should have “All the Yeats and all the me itcan get, and when it gets us I think it should fill in with people whom I can take seriously” (letter of10/14/13; Nadel, 55-58).

6. As can be seen in Pound's letter to Henderson: “I have just written a violent epistle to Miss Monroe,on the sins of American poetasters. . . . Do tell me when she gets really tired of my tirades”(December 1912/January 1913; qtd. in Nadel 8).

7. Or Southampton. The new manifesto called for: 1) “Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjectiveor objective”; 2) “To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation”; and 3) “Asregarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome”(P 1.6 199).

8. “Mr. Ezra Pound and Poetry,” (May 1, 1913), 370.9. Scott writes, “Lowell was a defender of Monroe for other modernists; she criticized Richard Aldington

for harshly rejecting a set of Monroe's own poems. . . . She should be credited for bolstering thisimportant journal and influencing its generous treatment of rhythm and cadence” (139). While Scott'scritique of the patriarchy overshadowing modernist studies is indispensable, she too often goes out ofthe way to excuse Lowell's inexcusable behavior. She reads, for example, Lowell's letter to Aldingtonas “defend[ing]” Monroe. In the letter, Lowell describes Monroe as “a poor woman, with hardly enoughmoney to live upon, on the wrong side of middle age. She is lonely and exceedingly unattractive. Herone consolation in life is to believe herself talented. It is frightfully pathetic. . . . ” (5/20/1915; qtd. inScott 150-51n).

10. Or, see her letter to D. H. Lawrence of September 16, 1922: “If you stay in Sante Fé, you will be rightin the nest of my enemies. Alice Henderson and Witter Bynner—how they hate me!” (qtd. in Damon621).

11. (With humble apologies): “The Brawling of a Sparrow in the Eaves: Vision and Revision in W. B.Yeats,” The Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 31, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 71-85.

12. Monroe writes: Masters “started with a modern theme and a new method, soon found himself carriedaway into heights which his muse had never before explored. . . . his escape from classic and historicsubjects made him an epic poet of the formative period in the region where he was born” (FVMA 701-2). He is “huge, careless, profound” (702).

Works CitedCarpenter, Humphrey. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. Boston: Houghton MifflinCompany, 1988.Churchill, Suzanne W. and Adam McKible, eds. Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches.Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.Damon, S. Foster. Amy Lowell: A Chronicle. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1935.D[oolittle], H[ilda]. End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound. Eds. Norman Holmes Pearson andMichael King. New York: New Directions 1979.Fletcher, John Gould Fletcher. The Autobiography of John Gould Fletcher. Ed. Lucas Carpenter.Fayetteville, AR: U of Arkansas P, 1988.Gerber, Philip L. “Dear Harriet. . . . Dear Amy.”Journal of Modern Literature 5:2 (April 1976): 233-42.Grant, Joy. Harold Monro and the Poetry Bookshop. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967.Latham, Sean and Robert Scholes. “The Rise of Periodical Studies.” PMLA 121:2 (March 2005): 517-

13/08/13 13:23Modernist Journals Project

Página 36 de 36http://dl.lib.brown.edu/mjp/render.php?id=mjp.2005.00.110&view=mjp_object

31.Lensing, George S. Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1986.Marek, Jayne. “Alice Corbin Henderson, Harriet Monroe, and Poetry's Early Years.” Illinois WritersReview 7:2 (Winter 1988): 16-22.___. Women Editing Modernism: "Little" Magazines & Literary History. Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky,1995.Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981.Massa, Ann. “'The Columbian Ode' and Poetry: A Magazine of Verse: Harriet Monroe‟sEntrepreneurial Triumphs.” Journal of American Studies 20:1 (1986): 51-69. Abbreviated as"Columbian" in the body of the essay.___. “Form Follows Function: The Construction of Harriet Monroe and Poetry: A Magazine of Verse”in A Living of Words: American Women in Print Culture. Ed. Susan Albertine. Knoxville: U ofTennessee P, 1995. 115-31.Mitgang, Herbert. The Letters of Carl Sandburg. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968.Monroe, Harriet. “The Free-Verse Movement in America.” English Journal 13:10 (December 1924):691-705. Abbreviated as "FVMA" in the body of the essay.___. Poets & Their Art. New Edition. New York: Macmillan, 1932. Abbreviated as "P&TA" in the bodyof the essay.___. A Poet's Life: Seventy Years in Changing World. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Abbreviated as"APL" in the body of the essay.Moody, A. David. Ezra Pound: Poet. Volume I: The Young Genius 1885-1920. Oxford: Oxford UP,2007.Munich, Adrienne and Melissa Bradshaw, eds. Amy Lowell, American Modern. New Brunswick:Rutgers UP, 2004.Nadel, Ira B., ed. The Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson. Austin: U of Texas P, 1993.Newcomb, John Timberman. “Poetry's Opening Door: Harriet Monroe and American Modernism” inChurchill and McKible. 83-103.Niven, Penelope. Carl Sandburg: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1991.Paige, D. D., ed. The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941. London: Faber and Faber, 1951.Parisi, Joseph. “The Care and Funding of Pegasus” in The Little Magazine in America: A ModernDocumentary History. Eds. Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie. Yonkers: TriQuarterly/Pushcart, 1978.216-35.Pound, Ezra. “Small Magazines.” The English Journal 19:9 (November 1930): 689-704. Pound's“Small Magazines” is also available through the essays page on the MJP website.Scholes, Robert. “Afterword: Small Magazines, Large Ones, and Those In-Between” in Churchill andMcKible. 213-25.___. “Ezra Pound, Founder of Modern Periodical Studies.” In Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman'sModernism in the Magazines: an Introduction. Yale UP, 2010. 1-25.Schulze, Robin G. “Harriet Monroe's Pioneer Modernism: Nature, National Identity, and Poetry, aMagazine of Verse.” Legacy 21:1 (2004): 50-67.Scott, Bonnie Kime. “Amy Lowell's Letters in the Network of Modernism” in Munich and Bradshaw.136-53.Stevens, Holly, ed. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.Stock, Noel. The Life of Ezra Pound. New York: Pantheon, 1970.Sutton, Walter, ed. Pound, Thayer, Watson, and The Dial: A Story in Letters. Gainesville, FL: UP ofFlorida, 1994.Thirlwall, John C., ed. The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams. New York: McDowell,Obolensky, 1957.Thompson, Lawrance. Robert Frost: The Early Years 1874-1915. New York: Holt, Rinehart andWinston, 1966.Ward, John Chapman. “Vachel Lindsay is Lying Low.” College English 12:3 (Fall 1985): 233-45.Whittemore, Reed. Little Magazines. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1963.Williams, William Carlos. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. 1948. New York: RandomHouse, 1951.Williams, Ellen. Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance: The First Ten Years of Poetry, 1912-22.Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1977. Abbreviated as "EW" in the body of the essay.