The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse and Values (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History)

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY Series Editors Anthony J. La Vopa, North Carolina State University. Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University. Javed Majeed, Queen Mary, University of London. The Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History series has three primary aims: to close divides between intellectual and cultural approaches, thus bringing them into mutually enriching interactions; to encourage interdisciplinarity in intellectual and cultural history; and to globalize the field, both in geographical scope and in subjects and methods. This series is open to work on a range of modes of intellectual inquiry, including social theory and the social sciences; the natural sciences; economic thought; literature; religion; gender and sexuality; philosophy; political and legal thought; psychology; and music and the arts. It encompasses not just North America but Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. It includes both nationally focused studies and studies of intellectual and cultural exchanges between different nations and regions of the world, and encompasses research monographs, synthetic studies, edited collections, and broad works of reinterpretation. Regardless of methodology or geography, all books in the series are historical in the fundamental sense of undertaking rigorous contextual analysis. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Indian Mobilities in the West, 1900–1947: Gender, Performance, Embodiment By Shompa Lahiri The Shelley-Byron Circle and the Idea of Europe By Paul Stock Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East By Yaseen Noorani Recovering Bishop Berkeley: Virtue and Society in the Anglo-Irish Context By Scott Breuninger The Reading of Russian Literature in China: A Moral Example and Manual of Practice By Mark Gamsa Rammohun Roy and the Making of Victorian Britain By Lynn Zastoupil

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Carl Gustav Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative By Jay Sherry Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire By Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter, eds. Sir John Malcolm and the Creation of British India By Jack Harrington The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century By Sven Beckert and Julia Rosenbaum, eds. Benjamin Constant and the Birth of French Liberalism By K. Steven Vincent The Emergence of the Russian Liberalism: Alexander Kunitsyn in Context, 1783–1840 By Julia Berest The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse and Values By Lisa Szefel Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India (forthcoming) By Indra Sengupta and Daud Ali, eds. Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment (forthcoming) By Thomas Ahnert and Susan Manning, eds. Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (forthcoming) By Jessica Riskin and Mario Biagioli, eds.

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The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era Reforming American Verse and Values Lisa Szefel

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THE GOSPEL OF BEAUTY IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

Copyright © Lisa Szefel, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11284–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Szefel, Lisa, 1965–, author The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era : Reforming American Verse and Values / Lisa Szefel. p. cm.—(Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History) ISBN 978–0–230–11284–1 (hardback) 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Progressivism (United States politics) 3. Progressivism in literature. 4. Social action in literature. 5. Modernism (Literature)—United States. 6. United States—History—1865–1921. I. Title. PS324.S94 2011 8119.52093581—dc22

2010045448

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Contents List of Illustrations

vii

A Note on the Text

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

List of Abbreviations

xv

Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6

1

Genteel Designs, Modern Renovations: Poetics and the Poetic Community from Hearth to Dynamo

21

Reforming Verse, Uplifting Society: The Labor Theory of Poetic Value

57

Curating a Community, Engineering a Renaissance: A New Infrastructure for the “New Beauty”

85

Rescripting Gender Codes, Redrawing the Color Line: Anthologies and the Dream of Aesthetic Universalism

127

Paring Words, Crafting Images: The Economy of Authorship in the Literary Marketplace

161

Romantic Individualism, Radical Politics: Lyric Solidarity in Peace and War

187

Epilogue

217

Notes

225

Index

271

v

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Illustrations Cover of book: Edwin Markham reciting “Lincoln, The Man of The People” at the Lincoln Memorial Dedication, 1922. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62–64974. 2.1

3.1

3.2

3.3

4.1

Edwin Markham, 1899, the year he wrote “The Man with the Hoe.” Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress George Sylvester Viereck, ca. 1904, the year he published his first book of poems. Photo courtesy of University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa Carlo de Fornaro’s Drawing of Poetry Society of America members at the Third Annual Dinner on January 28, 1913, which featured George Sylvester Viereck front and center. Originally published in the New York Sun on February 2, 1913 William Rose Benét, “As I Imagine Harriet Monroe Editing Poetry,” 1917, depicts the editor atop a pile of manuscripts balancing the competing dictates of the genteel tradition and modernism. Reproduction courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library William Stanley Braithwaite, frontispiece to his self-published Lyrics of Life and Love, 1904. Braithwaite remarked that his light skin prompted questions about his ethnicity. He was sometimes mistaken to be either Italian or Mexican instead of African American

58

94

110

118

139

vii

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A Note on the Text Ellipses (. . .) are used to indicate that I have omitted some words.

ix

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Acknowledgments Joseph Brodsky may have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he taught one of the most under-enrolled courses at Mount Holyoke College, “Modern Lyric Poetry.” Few students cared to meet the requirement of memorizing more than a thousand lines of verse. Brodsky demonstrated the value of this practice. Leaning against the blackboard, smoking a cigarette, he recited stanza after stanza, then recalled the life of a friend, Nadezdha Mandelstam. She learned by heart thousands of lines written by her husband Osip, whose epigram satirizing Stalin had landed him in jail; after visits, she wrote them down on paper to smuggle out of the country. Brodsky himself served almost two years in a labor camp for writing poems that celebrated individual human dignity rather than collective life under Communism. In other classes, Pulitzer-prize winning poet and historian Peter Viereck modeled a life of the mind that inspired me to pursue graduate studies. Once in a doctoral program, I enrolled in one of the most overly subscribed courses on campus taught by Richard Rorty, who, as a young man, memorized T. S. Eliot’s poetry and, as a professor, closely read philosophical texts to highlight ways of knowing, thinking, discerning value, and, ultimately, living that led to greater self-knowledge and a more just society. It is no wonder, then, that I spent so many years writing a book about the moral inquiry of individuals devoted to pursuing meaning, authenticity, and justice by advancing the cause of poetry. Dana Gioia’s 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” sparked the idea for this project, prompting me to think of a time in American history when poetry deeply mattered. Studies by Wendy Steiner, Elaine Scarry, and Martha Nussbaum further influenced my thinking about the topic. In an independent study with Daniel Albright my understanding of modernist poetry deepened, as did my appreciation for his brilliance, which he combined with kindness and generosity. Many archives and drafts later, Rochester friends and faculty read and commented on various chapters: Tara McCarthy, Mary Henold, Jeffrey Tucker, John Michael, and Henry Sommerville. Wayne Ripley, Joy Davis, and Mara Kozelsky generously and graciously provided on-point criticism and on-call advice. xi

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xii

Acknowledgments

A postdoctoral fellowship at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences afforded precious time to revise the dissertation. Chris Klemek, Hsuan Hsu, Asif Siddiqi, Matt Lindsay, along with the rest of my cohort, and James Carroll, Kate Lane, and Michael Boudin, helped to make that year so special. An NEH summer fellowship hosted by Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute expanded my understanding of African-American history, while funding from the American Antiquarian Society to participate in a seminar with two of the most verbally dynamic scholars on the history of the book, Jay Fliegelman and Leah Price, provided a clearer conceptual focus for my research. Fellowships from the University of Rochester, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas–Austin, and Pacific University’s Faculty Development Award facilitated visits to archives and libraries across the country. The Friedrich Ebert Stiftung made it possible to conduct research in Europe. Through another grant from the Dean’s Office at Pacific, I attended a Wye Faculty Seminar sponsored by the Aspen Institute. I am grateful to David Townsend, Guy Hubbs, and other participants for a week that rejuvenated my faith in the liberal arts enterprise. I had the privilege of working with inspiring students and colleagues in Harvard’s History and Literature concentration. To Steve Biel, Jeanne Follansbee, and Homi Bhabha I owe a debt of gratitude for fostering such an academically rigorous yet congenial department. My colleagues at Pacific University took a leap of faith by hiring me in a tenure track position, a rare opportunity these days. For this and for sharing perspectives on pedagogy, listening to close readings of the (unjustly canceled) soap opera Guiding Light (long live Otalia!), and nostalgic tales about the heaven on earth that was growing up blue collar and Catholic in Buffalo, New York, in the 1970s, thanks to Larry Lipin, Martha Rampton, Rick Jobs, Jeff Barlow, Jeff Seward, and other members of the Pacific community. Palgrave Macmillan saw promise in my manuscript. I would like to thank editors Chris Chappell and Anthony LaVopa, editorial assistant Sarah Whalen, and the anonymous reviewers. Scholars who gave helpful comments at various stages of the draft process strengthened the various chapters in this book: Michael Thurston, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Honor Moore, Casey Blake, Bob Lockhart, Ed Blum, Jonathan Holloway, and Joseph Parisi. A former actor and famous MHC professor Michael Burns deserves an Oscar for his star

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Acknowledgments

xiii

turn as my undergraduate senior thesis advisor. Thanks are also due to George Nash, Harold Wechsler, Bruce Schulman, Joe Kett, Erik Midelfort, Steve Schuker, Alon Confino, Lenard Berlanstein, Ann Marie Mikkelsen, Raphael Allison, James Longenbach, Kim Reily, Amy Kittelstrom, and the Viereck family. Tom Beck and Nickie Augustine provided sustenance in the way of home-cooked meals, wide-ranging wisdom, and a safe haven. Progressive era poets liked to use the words “good,” “vital,” and “sincere” to describe poems they admired. These adjectives certainly apply to a person I admire, Lynn Gordon, who has provided mentorship and friendship for more than a decade. While most of the world may be familiar with Robert Westbrook for his path-breaking study of John Dewey, I know him as the man who takes the “doctor” part of Doctor of Philosophy seriously: He is the best diagnostician of scholarly writing around, and he tended to dissertation-advising duties with expert care. This project could not have been written without Daniel Borus, dissertation advisor extraordinaire. In addition to giving three-page responses and line-by-line critiques, usually within forty-eight hours after receiving a chapter draft, he offered valuable book suggestions, rich intellectual conversations, sound career advice, and a correcting vision. Karen, Ben, and Sarah likewise provided a doctoral-level education on care and friendship over shared meals, books, baseball, stories, and songs. For trying to lure me out to, ahem, “poetry readings” in downtown bars when I would rather spend a night reading, distracting me with updates on the NFL draft and the Sabres’ Stanley Cup bid, and promising to pay off my student loans if they win the lottery, thanks to my siblings Jay, Debi, and Rik. With Terry and Jerry Szefel for parents, I have already hit the jackpot. It is to them, for their endless love and support, that I dedicate this book.

Permissions Several sections from Chapter 4 appeared previously in the New England Quarterly and Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters. I would like to thank those publications, especially Linda Smith Rhoads, for allowing this material to be reproduced. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the following libraries, archives, and

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xiv Acknowledgments

individuals for granting permission to reproduce copyrighted material for this book: Letter from George Sylvester Viereck papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, reprinted with the permission of copyright owner Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath; Amy Lowell Papers, bMA Lowell 19.1, William S. Braithwaite Papers, bMS AM 1444, Witter Bynner Papers, bMS AM 1891, Houghton Library, Harvard University; The Trustees Under the Will of Amy Lowell ; The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Elmer Gertz Papers and the Florence Hamilton Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; H.L. Mencken Papers and the James Oppenheim Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; MSS 111, Louis Untermeyer Papers, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware and the Estate of Louis Untermeyer, Norma Anchin Untermeyer; Poetry: A Magazine Records, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago; Personal Papers of Harriet Monroe, MS 169, Newberry Library and Ann Monroe, the Harriet Monroe Estate; Alice Corbin Henderson Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin; William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite Papers, 1904–1932, (1958), Accession #8990, William Vaughn Moody Papers, #8045, Shaemus O’Sheel Papers, Sara Teasdale Papers, Accession #8170-d, Jessie B. Rittenhouse Papers, Accession #8449, Harriet Monroe Papers, Accession #6998-a, Robert Frost Papers, #6261, Conrad Aiken Papers, #6180-d, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia; Edwin Markham Archive, Horrmann Library, Wagner College; Willian Stanley Braithwaite Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Abbreviations AHUT ALHH ALHU BET BR BYHH CAVA

CL CO EGLC EMWC FHLC GVHH HMNY HMUC JONY JRVA

LUUD MFBY NYT OHCU

Alice Corbin Henderson Papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin Amy Lowell Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Boston Evening Transcript The William S. Braithwaite Reader Witter Bynner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University Conrad Aiken Papers, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia Current Literature Current Opinion Elmer Gertz Manuscript Collection, Library of Congress Edwin Markham Archive, Horrmann Library, Wagner College Florence Hamilton Collection Relating to Edwin Markham, Library of Congress George Viereck Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University H.L. Mencken Papers, New York Public Library Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia Personal Papers of Harriet Monroe, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library James Oppenheim Papers, New York Public Library Jessie B. Rittenhouse Papers, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia Louis Untermeyer Papers, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware Miscellaneous Files, Beinecke Library, Yale University The New York Times William Braithwaite Oral History, Columbia University xv

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xvi

Abbreviations

PMUC PSA RFVA

STVA

SSVA

WBHH WBVA

Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Records, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library Poetry Society of America Robert Frost Papers, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia Sara Teasdale Papers, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia Shaemus O’Sheel Papers, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia William S. Braithwaite Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University William S. Braithwaite Papers, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia

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Introduction

They have helped me to hold reality and justice in a single vision. —William Butler Yeats In August of 1912, Robert Frost boarded the steamship, the SS Parisian, setting sail for Great Britain. Like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot before him, Frost left in search of audiences and outlets for his verse as well as a supportive community of fellow poets. For twenty years he had sent poems to the leading monthlies, including The Century, Scribner’s, Atlantic, Harper’s Weekly, and The Youth’s Companion, with little but discouragement to show for his efforts. “If I ran away from anything when I went to England it was the American editor,” he wrote.1 Frost’s move abroad thus represented a profound disillusionment with the state of the modern American literary marketplace. In his self- described “protest against magazine poets and poetry,” Frost was not alone. Between 1898 and 1910, articles and letters to the editor at major newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe, and popular periodicals, including The Saturday Review and Harper’s Monthly, regularly debated if poetry were a dead enterprise, gone the way of the Pony Express. A 1905 symposium on “The Slump of Poetry” in The Critic concluded that the public ignored poets both because they used outmoded forms about irrelevant topics, and because the fast-paced, materialist, scientific nature of modern life inoculated Americans against an appreciation of poetry’s benefits.2 By the time the forty- one-year- old poet returned to America three years later in February of 1915, the cultural landscape for literature had changed dramatically. Shortly after his arrival, Frost came across a review of his book, North of Boston, originally published in England and fresh off the presses in the States. Writing 1

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2

The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era

in The New Republic, critic and poet Amy Lowell praised the book’s “unusual power and sincerity,” declaring it “certainly the most American volume of poetry which has appeared for some time.”3 Frost later told Lowell that the review made him feel that “America was holding out a friendly hand” to welcome him home.4 Then, in the Boston Evening Transcript, William Stanley Braithwaite published two articles, complete with photos and excerpts, while Jessie B. Rittenhouse’s favorable notice appeared in The New York Times Book Review.5 In August, the Chicago Evening Post featured an effusive endorsement from Louis Untermeyer.6 Within a few months, both North of Boston and A Boy’s Will went into several editions to become best sellers, and Frost’s career as “plain-spoken” poet in high demand on college campuses, the lecture circuit, and in the book trade had begun. What had immediately appeared to Frost, and later to historians, as a sudden rupture in American cultural life, was in fact the product of piecemeal changes begun at the turn of the century. A new cultural infrastructure formed, fostering a more welcoming reception for poetry that departed from genteel norms. Frost’s experiences— both his frustrations and his eventual success—illuminate the situation of many turn- of-the- century American poets in this transitional period. Between 1910 and 1920, thanks in no small measure to the new poetic communities that vaulted Frost to prominence, America experienced a “renaissance” in poetry. The Chicago-based Poetry: A Magazine of Verse founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe, William Stanley Braithwaite’s articles and best-selling anthologies (1913–1929), editorial policies at Current Literature, and some of the short-lived “little magazines,” such as The Masses and Seven Arts, along with the Poetry Society of America, founded in 1910, provided much-needed forums for the new poetry. These individuals and institutions took over where the genteel poetic community that preceded them left off, and created the foundation for a modern literary tradition to prosper. As in perhaps no other period in the nation’s history, poetry mattered urgently as Americans wrote verse, entered contests, purchased volumes, attended lectures, and created poetry prizes, fellowships, and institutions. Beginning in 1912 “an epidemic of poetry” (as poet Clement Wood deemed it) swept through the country, with the “Lyric Year” competition drawing over 10,000 entries and significant works published by Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, and others.7 As John Butler Yeats (father of W. B. Yeats)

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Introduction 3

observed (perhaps with some derision): “The fiddles are tuning all over America.”8 While acknowledging this phenomenon, historians of the Progressive era nevertheless relegate it to a footnote. Poetry has been ignored for so long in part because it seems so wildly irrelevant and precious. Historians of the era focus instead on excavating the origins of a reform ethos that sought to address the ills of unregulated industrial capitalism. As the titles of representative historical monographs attest—The Age of Reform, Pivotal Decades, A Very Different Age, The Tyranny of Change, A Fierce Discontent—the main story of the twentieth century’s first two decades centers on understanding the way Americans negotiated massive changes wrought by urbanization, immigration, and industrialization in the midst of an emerging New Woman, rising tides of racial violence, and the gathering storm of world war.9 Yet the social reform movement and the creation of modern poetic communities developed in tandem, with both invested in the belief that greater empathy was needed to build social harmony and buttress the effects of massive change. Poetry played a crucial role in this transformation because it marked a dramatic retooling of the contours and function of the imagination, and it linked creativity to a moral obligation—one sensitized to the blight and suffering inherent in modern life. One such poet, Vachel Lindsay, believed that the crabbed and commercial times required poetry that addressed the soul and socialism. As Frost set sail for England, Lindsay set out on a twomonth walking tour from his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, to New Mexico, preaching what he called “the Gospel of Beauty.” His one-page description of this “new religious idea” explained his intent: to encourage fellow Americans to work “expecting neither reward nor honors” toward making their “neighborhood and home more beautiful and democratic and holy with their special art.”10 Unlike industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie who issued “The Gospel of Wealth” over two decades earlier, providing instruction on philanthropy for the top echelons of American society, Lindsay lived simply and without money as he wandered the country spreading his message. In return for a night’s stay in a barn or a home- cooked meal, he exchanged copies of a self-printed pamphlet Rhymes To Be Traded For Bread. In the chronicle of this peripatetic experience, Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty, first serialized in American Magazine in

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The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era

1912 and published in book form two years later, Lindsay outlined a new religious denomination, “the church of beauty,” that preached “the love of beauty and the love of God.” Parishioners were to travel across the nation in search of the “secret of democratic beauty with their hearts at the same time filled to overflowing with the righteousness of God.” Their purpose in life “should be that joy in beauty which no wounds can take away, and that joy in the love of God which no crucifixion can end.”11 With beauty and poetry being largely synonymous in this period, Lindsay’s verse relayed his political and social convictions. It praised Lincoln, the Governor who pardoned anarchists convicted of the Haymarket bombings, John Peter Altgeld, and in “The Kallyope Yell” sketched an egalitarian, agrarian utopia shaded as much with Barnum and Bailey as the Holy Spirit. He demanded that, instead of lying about wistfully in rococo splendor, beauty needed to take up a cross, or a sword, and lead. Lindsay prophesized a renaissance in art with the battle cry “Religion, equality and beauty!”12 Lindsay devised this plan at a time when a generation of reformers clamored to the Social Gospel movement of Protestant Christian intellectuals. With origins that traced to the 1880s and a key articulation adumbrated by Rochester- born Walter Rauschenbusch in Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), this intermingling of religion and politics inspired church goers in the Progressive era to reorient their faith. Rauschenbusch sermonized about the need for good Christians to approach religion not as a quiescent retreat, but as a call to ameliorate the inequalities and strife of modern life. In a similar fashion, a cohort of authors, editors, critics, and readers flocked to the new gospel of beauty, which linked verse with the values of community, fairness, and democracy. Not everyone shared Lindsay’s advocacy of temperance, farm work, Christianity, and poverty; indeed, some liked gin, neon lights, Nietzsche, and savings accounts. But the conviction that modern American life had to be about more than money and materialism, industry and individualism, and that poetic beauty could play a dramatic role in developing subjectivity and improving society, united them all. Claims to poetry’s moral and didactic power had of course been articulated throughout the centuries. From Aristotle and Horace to Renaissance Humanists and Enlightenment philosophes, poetry has been cast as a means to self- cultivation, civilization, catharsis, and

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Introduction 5

divertissement. With the development of Romanticism in the nineteenth century, attestations to poetry’s civic function reached its fullest articulation, most notably in William Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800) and Percy Bhysse Shelley’s Defence of Poetry (1819). In a famous passage, Shelley referred to poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and deemed their work crucial to creating a just society: A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause . . . Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.13 That same year John Keats composed “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which equated beauty with truth, and venerated art as the embodiment of idealistic virtues. Beauty was a concern to European writers and thinkers throughout the nineteenth century. In Russia, Dostoievski’s hero in The Idiot (1868) believes that “Beauty will save the world” from materialism and greed, while in Germany, Nietzsche tried to turn the tide of aesthetics and divest beauty of divine connections, arguing: “Man believes that the world itself is created by beauty—he forgets that it is he who created it.”14 While taking note of Nietzsche, Progressive poets took their cues instead from Platonic ideas along with antebellum calls for a “tough beauty” made by transcendentalists who, in the early nineteenth century, responded to the first wave of industrialism, not by fomenting rebellion but by developing a conception of human nature that aligned with market relations. As Jeffrey Sklansky has shown, Romantic idealists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Horace Bushnell—reconceived ideas about possessive individualism. They insisted that autonomy need not rely on property ownership but on spiritual self-reliance, and that epistemology, transitioning from Enlightenment faith in logic to a Romantic respect for inspiration, offered a means to combat encroachments on social relations wrought by the market revolution. Drawing on inspiration from English and German Romantics, transcendentalists

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6

The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era

privileged spiritual over material wealth, intuition above intellect, and harmony with nature rather than dominion over it.15 In the essay “The Poet” Emerson criticized the separation between aesthetic beauty and individual souls. Whereas Plato, while acknowledging the import of beauty on individual conduct, divided it from philosophy, Emerson recombined the two, arguing that poetry bestowed a way to think about life because it was in nature that individuals experienced glimmers of self-transparency; poetry helped to capture, and spark, such fleeting moments of revelation. He outlined a role for “the Poet, or the man of Beauty” to remain separate from society yet liberate fellow citizens by transcribing messages of instruction and inspiration from the universe (which was itself created by Beauty).16 In the early twentieth century, Progressive poets similarly worked to infuse selfhood with nonmarket, spiritual values on which, they claimed, true freedom and democracy depended. This current of thought intersected with discussions about the role of art and ethics in American political and social life. Understanding this change involves more than simply analyzing reform texts; it requires studying works of the imagination that shaped narratives about responsibility and community. The correspondence, criticism, activism, and compositions of Progressive poets reveals how and why values—in which remaking a society rent by industrial capitalism required rebuilding community was a crucial tenet—in the early twentieth century transformed. Just as muckrakers such as Jacob Riis had blamed the conditions of poverty for human depravity, Progressive poets blamed poetic decline on a climate of inattention; by improving literary institutions they believed they could recover the social power of poetry, and thereby reapportion outmoded frameworks of value. For the leading figures who instituted this cultural transformation, reclaiming not just human subjectivity but emotion, even passion, as a force against objectification and standardization was key. Poems published in newspapers, chapbooks, daybooks, anthologies, and monographs, along with the interpretive practices developed to analyze artistic expression, provide an entry point into the cognitive and emotional lives of individuals, showcasing the benefits inherent in viewing modernism through the lived experience of writers and readers.17 Readers were alternatively moved to express sympathy, pleasure, outrage, and delight. Individuals read, wrote, and discussed poetry as a vehicle to make sense of daily life in the modern world. The language they used to describe their

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Introduction 7

response to particular poems provides an entry point into understanding their values and feelings. Instead of turning to poems to find moral lessons, to experience misty moments of sentimentalism, or to encounter the beautiful mind of a sensitive writer, these readers found in verse an opportunity to create practical meaning in their lives. The new poetry they discovered often echoed their own feelings of apprehension and alienation along with hope. Sensibility and taste, therefore, as much as manifestos and muckraking exposes, reflected and refracted the major currents of thought and culture in the era of reform. In scores of memoirs and personal correspondence, readers repeatedly described the moment when they decided to write or promote poetry as an “epiphany” that altered the course of their lives and provided great comfort. For many, the moment was not so much one of conversion to a cause but of a realization that poetry could be used as a means to self- discovery. Historian of print culture Robert Darnton has written that reading “unlike carpentry or embroidery . . . is not merely a skill; it is an active construal of meaning within a system of communication.”18 Studying the richly imagined environment produced through the practice and process of reading helps to recover what texts and authors meant to individuals in the past.19 Jonathan Rose’s study of working class autodidacts who went on to become Labour party members or MPs in Victorian and Edwardian England demonstrates how a history of reading reception can illuminate the way books inflected political consciousness. Far from being oppressively elitist and misogynistic, Rose maintains, literature considered to form part of high culture “provided profoundly emancipating reading experiences” and “critical empowerment” to working class and female readers alike.20 The reading practices of this specific historical moment both assumed and shaped contemporary ideas about gender. Changes in reading reflected and, in turn, influenced a broader cultural system of female identity and power relations. As women increasingly moved into the public sphere they challenged the medical and scientific discourses that limited female functions to reproductive dictates. The reading culture surrounding poetry provided space for women to inscribe their lives outside the private sphere and expected norms. The books that women read helped to shape their sense of possibility. As the memoirs and letters of female poets during the early twentieth century reveal, young women appropriated models of

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The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era

daring and heroism in books featuring males as the main protagonists to refashion their selves.21 The reading practices of Progressive era women shaped notions of selfhood, which, in turn, altered the broader cultural system of gender identity. Females “read” themselves into stories by and about males, thus abrogating for themselves a far greater share in established power relations.22 Amy Lowell, Harriet Monroe, Jessie Rittenhouse, and salon hostess Mabel Dodge read British authors, such as Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and the Pre-Raphaelites, as well as male American writers, and testified to the fact that reading provided a rich soil for cultivating adventurous, imaginative lives—an ambition otherwise denied. As with their Victorian predecessors, modern readers participated in a literary culture of sensibility in which writers appealed to readers’ sympathy.23 One’s humanity was based on the ability to be moved, and the poet, above all, was a subtle figure able to cultivate passions in a constructive way. In this shared literary context, the language of sensibility sought to increase sympathy, subjectivity, and the spontaneous overflow of emotions. Reading helped to clarify desire and spurred a sense of vocation, prompting involvement in social and political reform movements. Reading practices also reshaped notions about race. The Progressive era byword “uplift” formed part of a Victorian vocabulary that valued self-help, self- control, and thrift, but it had a tiered meaning among African Americans; control over the self and body, as part of the Victorian expressive culture, often meant almost absolute control by whites over the black body. What possible role could the literary culture of uplift play among African Americans living in the turmoil and violence of Jim Crow? African-American men and women pursued reading as a social activity and as a technology to support and nurture a sense of community. They organized reading groups, which served as interpretive communities, throughout the country. Named after the first black female poet in the United States, Phyllis Wheatley Clubs assembled in cities nationwide, with the motto “Lifting As We Climb.” Members believed that, far from being a passive or escapist experience, the intensely intimate experience of reading helped to rearrange racial identities and authorize ambitions and agency beyond menial work.24 At a time when women could not vote, these clubs also offered a venue to exert influence and effect change. Women in the club’s Buffalo chapter, for example, augmented discussions about

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Introduction 9

books with volunteer work, giving meals to the homeless, founding a home for senior citizens, teaching children to read, distributing books by African-American authors to local libraries, acting as mediators between the police and black neighborhoods, organizing a protest to include a Negro Exhibit in the city’s 1901 Pan American Exposition, and raising money to support Harriet Tubman, leader of the Underground Railroad, in her final years. It was in the home of Mary Talbert, one of the chapter’s founding members, that W. E. B. Du Bois, John Hope, Monroe Trotter, and others met in secret to form the Niagara Movement, forerunner to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).25 Du Bois himself rendered the democratic effects of reading in a famous passage from his 1903 study Souls of Black Folk: I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.26 While “the veil” refers to skin color, which separates blacks and whites and also act as a shroud that distorts understanding about race and self, the phrase, “I dwell above the veil” is rich with resonances of Shelley and Tennyson, where Truth dwelled behind the veil of sensory illusions. Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” contains the lines “Behind the veil, behind the veil,” while Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” argues that the finite particulars of manners and customs (and, by extension, skin color) are trivial—the poetry lies only in the universals beneath.27 Even the more radical activist, Claude McKay, rebutted notions of racial essentialism by laying intellectual claim to the Western literary tradition as a natural right. When McKay visited the office of The Seven Arts magazine, editor James Oppenheim recalled: “I said to him then that he had an amazing opportunity with his talent—namely, to produce poetry with Negro rhythm in it. To my surprise he was affronted, and said he had the same right to the heritage of Shakespeare and Keats and Wordsworth and Milton that I had.”28 A friend of Du Bois, Braithwaite, too, articulated a belief in “the common possession of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth,

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The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era

Keats, Shelley, Swinburne, Browning, Longfellow, Poe, and Lowell.” As a teenager Braithwaite embarked on a regimen of self-improvement, reading the sacred texts of Eastern religions, Latin, Greek and Roman literature, and European classics. Literary exploration posed no barriers of race or class. As a result, he “traveled mentally and emotionally through these golden realms of man’s spirit and experiences, and his striving aspirations for truth and beauty, for faith and ideals.” He read Ruskin’s Modern Painters “as under a spell.” In certain literature, as in Christ’s gospel, he could bypass bigotry: “It was my belief that Beauty and Art were the leveler of all distinctions.”29 Appreciating that literacy and literature occupied an elite space where important cultural capital accumulated, both Du Bois and Braithwaite were committed to drawing African-American authors into that coveted territory. Du Bois evidently understood that he and Braithwaite shared a philosophical point of view as well as a strategy for effecting it, for he selected Braithwaite to serve as the first literary editor of Crisis, the monthly magazine Du Bois founded in 1910. Vital to this study is the reception—a word that may be too passive—of the new poetry as it was mediated by a new community of editors, anthologists, critics, and lecturers.30 An investigation of Progressive era reading reception discloses individual hopes and emotional responses—“structures of feelings”—as much as it does ideology.31 It reveals strategies of individuals working to craft a new kind of moral agency in the midst of uncertainty, revealing the affective dimension of people whose intellectual and emotional world has largely been lost to historians.32 Strikingly, the appeal of poetry at the turn of the twentieth century was, in part, a matter of scale—an affirmation of the value of the human and the individual amidst skyscrapers, and national, even global, networks of commerce—and of angle, equipping readers in the same way as Alfred Stieglitz’s “straight photography,” Gertrude Stein’s stream of consciousness prose, and Picasso’s cubism lent new perspectives to navigate modern life. Poetry gave voice to a tiny self in a boundless world, fueling a moral vision that replaced a sense of diminution with agency. At the time, poetry appeared to a significant number of Americans to be a primary endeavor, helping to make superable the complexities and disorientations of modern life. In an age of industrialization, urbanization, and vast technological growth, encountering a work of poetry—reading it alone and aloud or in a public setting, owning a volume as a material object,

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Introduction 11

or assuming ownership by learning it “by heart”—contributed to a sense of inviolable selfhood, to the integrity of the individual human voice and consciousness.33 Authors exhorted such readers to see more clearly the perils, as well as the promise, of materialism, technology, secularism, and mass culture. This study of the trenchant links among aesthetics, ethics, and American society provides a contribution to an interdisciplinary discussion taking place among cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and literary scholars who contend that moral judgments have as much to do with aesthetic sensibility as with logical reasoning. Scholars ranging from Martha Nussbaum, Elaine Scarry, and Alexander Nehamas draw on a philosophical tradition that sees beauty as the first step in a process leading to greater individual fulfillment and moral capabilities.34 Fostering responsible citizens and just societies, Nussbaum argues, requires cultivating sympathy. One route to this ability is through the development of a “narrative imagination”—seeing the world by considering the inner life of another person. For philosopher Richard Rorty, the greatest novelists promote empathy through their “imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers,” leading to a more expansive conception of human connectedness. This is achieved, Rorty insisted, not through mere reflection, but by active attempts to increase “our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people.”35 The private experience of transcendence while reading literature translates into public action on behalf of those in need. Just as historians have largely ignored American poetic culture between the heyday of genteel aesthetics and the rise of high modernism, so too have literary scholars overlooked the verse of this era, which does not conform to standards set by New Critics. Devised in the 1930s and institutionalized in the 1940s, the New Critics set as the standard of achievement works ridden with ambiguity, paradox, originality, and difficulty, a move that eclipsed scores of Progressive era poetic production. Beginning with Cary Nelson’s landmark Repression and Recovery, scholars have worked to identify and correct this omission.36 Similarly, literary critics such as Paula Bennett, Jane Tompkins, and Cheryl Walker have helped to uncover and restore the contributions of women and works in the sentimental tradition, a gender and genre belittled in the New Critical emphasis on masculinity and the avant garde.37

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The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era

Marshall Berman’s definition of the highly contested term, modernism, gets beyond New Critical’s limited usage: “I define modernism as any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it . . . To be modern is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction; to be part of a universe in which ‘all that is solid melts into air.’”38 Language structures conception, and past studies of avant garde movements or a singular “Modernism” have largely focused on a select number of canonical authorial figures in the prewar era.39 Changing the terms of discussion, as Lawrence Rainey has demonstrated in his study of the sociology of modernists in England, to communities, institutionalization, and multiple modernisms, bringing into view the various tendencies, sensibilities, and relationships at play in the construction of literary traditions.40 Far from symbolizing an “end of American innocence,” as Henry May would have it, the individuals involved in this community continued to value sincerity and “practical idealism.”41 The development of literary modernisms in the United States can be traced more broadly to a generation of individuals who took part in a trans-Atlantic movement that included artists, intellectuals, architects, writers, and musicians. With origins that traced to France in the 1820s, Baudelaire’s adulterated beauty, Wilde’s art-for-art’s sake aestheticism, Seurat’s pointillism, Proust’s nostalgia, and Braque’s Fauvism, this movement in the arts responded to the intellectual, political, social, and economic changes wrought by modernizing forces.42 Whereas European modernism emphasized disruption and discontinuity, the American brand had a less heightened sense of rupture and a more muted connection of art to politics.43 These individuals stood between two major strands in the history of American culture—the Victorian genteel tradition of the late nineteenth century and modernism in the twentieth.44 Philosopher and poet George Santayana noted this gap in “The Genteel Tradition” where he diagnosed the two regnant mentalities that divided an older “slightly becalmed” generation—which he aligned with “American Intellect” and a “colonial mansion”—and a younger generation whose “aggressive enterprise” he represented as “American Will” and a “skyscraper.” Progressive poets took up this slack. They noticed the potential in poetry for effecting personal transformation and social change,

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Introduction 13

regretted the profusion of new patterns of thought and writing piling up and being passed over, and they made possible the poetic richness of the second decade of the twentieth century by pursuing critical campaigns to explain the new writing to the general audience. This is a story of intent but also a story shot through with ironies and chance, as some of these mediators served as witting, and sometimes unwitting, midwives to a far more radical and antibourgeois modernism than they had intended. The story of literary history in this era is not a triumphalist march of progress from effete Victorian verse to vigorous Modernist high culture. It is a much more complicated tale. Modern poetry’s emergence was a complex result of the opportunities created by a nexus of writers, editors, publishers, and readers. As the historian George Cotkin has argued for the period from 1880 to 1900, in art and academia individuals sought a synthesis of old and new, reluctant to release the secure past or embrace the fluid present completely.45 Poet and activist Joseph Freeman who, as an undergraduate at Columbia wrote a paper on “temperance as beauty” and held as the ideal type a “doer of deeds and maker of beauty,” described the liminal space his generation occupied: “Whether you studied philosophy or thought of marriage, drilled in the uniform of the U.S. Army or wrote Elizabethan sonnets, wandered in Paris, worked in New York or watched events in Moscow, you were caught in the conflict between the old and the new.”46 The epic notion of a titanic shift from aesthetic idealism in genteel Victorianism to roaring rebellion in High Modernism continues to influence popular and critical understanding, however, and thereby obscures the equally compelling story of the intricate interplay of personalities and institutions that carved out a new social space for change to occur. Even in scholarly circles, although the profound continuities between romanticism and modernism have been recognized since at least the 1950s, little attention has been paid to the role of institutions, minor poets, and non-poets.47 Work done by scholars of print culture and the history of the book helps to illuminate this story.48 While acknowledging that individual inspiration and genius may account for the creation of some books, the literary community and publishing climate strongly determines who writes, receives contracts, and wins an audience.49 Nonetheless, the way in which a community arises to revive poetic ideals in new social circumstances is often ignored. In an important work, Joan Rubin

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The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era

presents a broad survey of the period from 1880 to 1950 examining the uses of poetry in elementary schools, nature studies, religious, and civic institutions. My work focuses instead on the creation of a web of institutions and texts between 1910 and 1920, paying particular attention to the ways poetry inflected political consciousness. I investigate how textual encounters increased readers’ understanding of the modern world and of modernism.50 While tales about Greenwich Village bohemians and avant-garde poets who assailed bourgeois conventions and the story of literary modernism is well-known, the stories of more traditional-minded readers, authors, editors, and institution builders remain untold. Scattered in memoirs, unpublished letters, and biographies of minor poets are details about those individuals who influenced cultural production by creating new forums, engaging general readers, and mediating between old and new. I readjust the historical lens to capture these previously overlooked players; those who figured only in the footnotes of literary history now take center stage. And I cull reactions from other largely overlooked historical actors: audience members. An examination of fan mail to poets, letters to the editor, autobiographies, and diaries allows me to shed light on the reception of texts and authorial ideas by readers.51 Steeped in the genteel tradition, all agreed that poetry should play a larger role in American life and that poetics had to be made more relevant, but they approached the problem in different ways and had to juggle competing imperatives. The many poets and popularizers who gradually built up a cultural apparatus that reinvigorated verse and served as mediators between genteel and modern readers formed distinct yet overlapping communities that knew each other and felt bound by a shared enterprise. They linked cultural progress with scientific practices, and, in a world in which ideas about Darwinian evolution, the closing of the frontier, and corporate industrialism seemed to replace imagination with instrumentalism, they extolled the virtues of a more rigorous beauty, one that dealt with the new visual culture of tenements and skyscrapers as well as teardrops and sunsets. Echoing Vachel Lindsay, George Sylvester Viereck articulated their goal: “What the world really needs from our poets now as always is the gospel of beauty, presented in convincing terms. Failing in that, poetry is a bankrupt, and the world will get along without it, or, will hark back to the poets who saw the beauty of life and who make us see it.”52 While members of these various communities may have disagreed,

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Introduction 15

passionately at times, each saw it as their task to transcend genteel standards of poetic beauty and renovate poetry, making it relevant to modern life. The first chapter examines this dilemma, sketching the fin-desiècle literary scene that aspiring poets faced, governed as it was by cultural arbiters opposed to reforming verse. Rejected by the dominant literary culture of genteel idealism, they found inspiration in the democratic idealism of Walt Whitman. They fashioned a poetics that rendered modern life in all its splendor and hardship, and that offered a tool for self-understanding and political reform. To deflect notions that poetry lacked the necessary brawn, they appropriated discourses of masculinity, then set out to bring verse to a nation focused on science, technology, business, and efficiency. The economic depression that plagued the country in the 1890s greatly influenced their outlook, reshaping their attitudes toward economic arrangements, obligation toward those left out in the forward march of industrial and entrepreneurial capitalism, and the task of poets. The decade opened with the appearance of How The Other Half Lives, exposing the underside of American society. Van Wyck Brooks recalled the impact made by Jacob Riis’s photos of urban squalor, impoverished immigrants, and forlorn children: “What do we do with these people? Imaginative minds of the decade were obsessed with this question.”53 The second chapter analyzes the use of poetry as a significant social and political force as epitomized by the career of Edwin Markham, author of the famous “Man with the Hoe.” He represents a turn toward the modern in both the figure of the poet—Markham became a celebrity known as much for his verse as for his cowboy attire—and the function of poetry. His overtly socialist poem became a major literary and cultural event because it intersected with a coalescing Progressive project, which appealed to moral sensibilities to improve life for the poor, immigrants, workers, women, and African Americans. Markham toured the country as one of the first, and few, poets able to make a living through lectures and the anthologizing of his poems. Significantly, although Markham himself was perhaps more concerned with reform than with poetry, his wide influence helped to establish the writing of poetry as a serious and respectable profession. While Markham contributed to the transformation of the figure of the poet, other Progressive poets created a web of institutions to support new work, including periodicals, mass-market magazines,

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The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era

newspapers, trade and vanity publishers, societies and clubs, colleges and universities. Chapter three examines two of the most significant strands in this network. The Poetry Society of America (PSA) assembled a broad spectrum of poetic styles, subjects, forms, and poses. Founded in 1910, the PSA provided a forum for established and aspiring poets to meet, share their work, and discuss the state of their craft. Although ridiculed by the avant garde for a conservative bent and overly broad constituency—H. L. Mencken referred to the group as “dessicated ladies of both sexes”—in these early years, PSA members debated three questions with particular intent54: What role should the intellect and the emotions play in the creation of poetry? What standards should be used in determining the value of a piece of literature? What are the obligations of an American poet, especially during war? The two individuals at the forefront of founding the PSA and addressing those questions, Viereck and Jessie B. Rittenhouse, had careers in journalism as well as in poetry. From that vantage, both saw the importance of mobilizing poets to deal with the changes in print production and to pool their resources to interact with the market, publishers, booksellers, and readers. The PSA’s eclectic mixture of conservatives, innovators, and fanatics showcases the inadequacy of analysis that divides participants into highbrow, lowbrow, or even middlebrow, or their products into strict categories of sentimental or modernist. The endeavor to popularize poetry depended in large measure on the judicious balancing act of editors and publishers. Chief among them was Harriet Monroe, who in 1912 established Poetry: A Magazine in Verse in Chicago, the nation’s emerging industrial center, site of the labor movement’s most radical faction, and home to the City Beautiful Movement, which espoused urban beautification as a means to inculcate civic and moral virtue among citizens.55 Monroe embraced the advances in technology, industrialism, and financial institutions and saw in poetry a vehicle for exploring the resulting changes in modern life. Until recently, scholars have viewed her contributions to the poetic community in derivative terms, viewing her as a handmaiden to the smarter, more critical Ezra Pound, or as a middlebrow mediocrity who published what would become canonical high modernist poems only by mistake. Important work by feminist scholars has begun to recuperate the ingenuity and savvy with which Monroe promoted new voices.56 Had she been as ardent and unapologetic an advocate of modernism as she is sometimes depicted, she might well have

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Introduction 17

alienated a generation of readers; instead, in her role as editor both of Poetry and popular anthologies, she published innovative works alongside more traditional fare, thereby making literary change more palatable to her middlebrow supporters and lay readers. Monroe’s career demonstrates how the old accompanied the new, how custodians of modernist culture applied conservative criteria as often as avant-garde aesthetics, and how the reception and rejection of modern literature was a piecemeal process, sifted through genteel hands. Gentility and uplift held peril as well as promise for African Americans during an era that saw a high tide of lynching. Chapter four investigates the efforts of black poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite who sought to redraw the color line by appealing to aesthetic universalism, the Arnoldian notion that art transcends all barriers and differences, offering the hope of equality and enrichment to all. Braithwaite’s vision of an American community founded on devotion to beauty and creativity rather than bigotry and color fired his determination to promote poetry through every possible channel. He published reviews and anthologies, composed bibliographies of verse for classroom use, corresponded with established poets as well as talent- challenged enthusiasts, and organized the first National Poetry Week, which gained wide support from clergymen, politicians, literary editors, college professors, librarians, and ordinary citizens. His active patronage helped to refashion American literature. Even the irascible Pound had to admit his influence. Monitoring developments from London, the “toreador of modernism” groused in 1915: “It is Braithwaite’s country not mine. Why shouldn’t he have it. If it likes him.”57 Braithwaite, like Pound, was not an uncontroversial figure. As a member of Boston’s interracial elite literary community, Braithwaite was situated at the crossroads (or, to be more accurate, crosshairs) of two important movements: black activism and literary modernism. His conservative strategy to advance civil rights sparked criticism from those who accused him of being an accommodationist, while his indiscriminate efforts on behalf of writers engendered charges of flunkeyism. An investigation of the racial stereotypes used by fellow editors and poets in private correspondence reveals the limits of Braithwaite’s idealized, ethereal philosophy of beauty, especially its inability to create a disembodied, spiritual democracy. The use of juxtaposition, this time of concrete images, played a key role in the dramatic turn poetry took in the 1910s. On the pages

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The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era

of Braithwaite’s anthologies and Poetry magazine, in the halls of poetry societies and college campuses, and in letters among writers and readers of verse, one of the most controversial debates of the decade took place with the arrival of Imagism. Informed by Haiku and Japanese tanka, it began with discussions at the Poets’ Club in London, traveled to America via Poetry, and was popularized by Amy Lowell. Considered a key portal for modernist poetry, Imagism stripped away excess emotions, unnecessary adjectives, and discursive ideas and put at the center of a poem what Pound referred to as “luminous details,” those select facts that, placed in just the right order, stir insight and understanding.58 Chapter five analyzes Lowell’s role in unleashing this movement by harnessing a middlebrow audience. Over-bearing and thin-skinned, a baron among bohemians, and a gay woman amidst conservative Brahmins, she traveled to London to investigate new literary movements, toured America lecturing on vers libre and Imagism to packed audiences, wrote a best-selling book of literary criticism that explained the new poetry in simple and clear language, and generally leveraged her considerable wealth, family name, and persistence at every opportunity. Lowell also crafted a professional image of the poet that called to mind a savvy business entrepreneur in a crisp suit to counteract popular notions of a starving artist in a garret. In these years another unusual pairing, of romantic individualism with radical politics, took place in the monthly socialist magazine The Masses. Running from 1911 until shut down by government officials in 1917, it has received much attention from historians, but, while explicating the magazine’s progressive politics, few have known what to make of its inattention to radical movements in the arts. Marinetti’s collage poems celebrating guns and declarations about the beauty of war (“belle guerre”) and Dada pronouncements about the death of art are conspicuously absent from The Masses; despite holding radical political convictions, they subscribed to conventional aesthetic norms. Modern in wanting their writing to emerge not from encounters with dead authors but from contemporary experiences, they rarely strayed outside standard verse protocols.59 Their adherence to conventional forms and topics need not be seen as an unfortunate, subliterary, anomaly; it can be viewed as a valuable endeavor. Editor Max Eastman is perhaps the most famous example, but his associates Louis Untermeyer and James Oppenheim exerted influence at several crucial junctures as well. These “senti-

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Introduction 19

mental rebels” (to use Eastman’s term) struggled to reconcile the dictates of socialist solidarity and romantic individualism, instinct and ideology, art and propaganda. The letters, lectures, and literary- critical evaluative terms that appear repeatedly in their letters, lectures, and verse indicate the template of values that animated the era’s reform impulses as well: “real” (not learned from books), “sincere” (spontaneous and honest), “strong” (bold rather than retiring language), “vital” (about contemporary issues or experiences) and, above all, a word that, is everywhere in their early twentieth century writing about literature, “beauty.” Collectively, they put into place an infrastructure that supported poets who held to various poetic codes, who wanted to be taken seriously as professionals, and who pursued a more complex and revealing beauty that went beyond Anglo-American notions of the sublime found in Romanticism to provoke rather than sooth and evoke discomfort as much as comfort.60 Acting as the new cultural gatekeepers, these individuals cultivated an audience and, with a shared sense of mutual endeavor and a common aesthetic, set forth what constituted beautiful poetry and what poems should do. As these chapters reveal, regular recalibrations of tradition and innovation, more than an aggressively discreet focus on the new, characterized the contours and practice of change. Americans wedded to traditional notions of truth, beauty, and goodness, who turned to verse for solace or understanding in the face of political, social, and economic change on a mass scale, or as a site for the cultivation of imagination and negotiation of the complex, now had trustworthy advisors assuring them that the new, in assorted incarnations, actually could fit both their tastes and their lives. In peace and war, poetry played a striking role in cultivating a reform ethos during the Progressive era. Smoothing the transition from Victorianism to modernism, these genteel-modern writers as much as radicals who became famous and writers who became canonized, were instrumental in transforming American values and sensibilities.

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1 Genteel Designs, Modern Renovations: Poetics and the Poetic Community from Hearth to Dynamo

You must remember that we were not very much later than Ruskin, Pater, Swinburne, and Matthew Arnold; our atmosphere was that of poets and persons touched with religious enthusiasm or religious sadness. Beauty (which mustn’t be mentioned now) was then a living presence, or an aching absence, day and night.1 —George Santayana Writing from Rome in 1928, at a time when the stock market, modernism, and Mickey Mouse assailed American culture, Santayana invoked the beauty- soaked poetic, philosophical, and aesthetic milieu of genteel idealism in which his generation came of age. For almost forty years—from the 1860s until the early 1900s—genteel writers, editors, and publishers dominated the nation’s intellectual life. In the midst of the upheavals and perceived chaos of industrial life that followed the Civil War, they fashioned a web of cultural institutions and critical methods designed to elevate morality and promote standards. They turned to culture as an antidote to the materialism of capitalism and socialism alike, believing it would supply a foundation for unity in a society riven by conflict. As idealists, they placed special value on the centrality of the spiritual; eternal ideas constituted an epistemological framework and wielded religious force as they found embodiment in poetry. Far from being alienated in ivory towers or society’s margins, these liberal Victorians assumed authoritative public roles and 21

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promoted a vision of life beyond the mundane and material, advocating self- culture as a means to improve public life and to bolster American democracy. In this they went beyond the superficial. As E. L. Godkin noted in his “Chromo- Civilization,” one did not obtain culture through casual reading or a grand tour of European capitals; it required intensive engagement with words, continued effort, and rigorous thought. 2 They drew inspiration, as did Progressive reformers, from a transatlantic exchange of ideas. The British poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–88) offered eloquent explanations for the powerful role played by culture in reforming individual lives, a service viewed as especially necessary in an industrializing nation. In his influential 1869 study Culture and Anarchy, Arnold defended culture against accusations of frivolity and protested the veneration of machines and materialism. Far from being “moonshine,” as critics deemed it, culture served a practical role by providing models of perfection that would help the human race achieve greater wisdom and harmony. Beauty, in turn, exerted a positive ethical force. Grace, serenity, and symmetry had marked the great eras in history, which Arnold identified as the Italian Renaissance, Elizabethan England, and, above all, ancient Greece, when art, culture, and democracy (though his ideas were more oligarchic, with members of the elite sharing in governance) worked together. Men and women of culture served as “true apostles of equality” because they sought to disseminate the best ideas of their time, making “the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere” and bringing “sweetness and light” to all, regardless of class, although of course an elite defined the standards. As the perfect embodiment of beauty, poetry sustained, consoled, strengthened, and encouraged. 3 Similarly, at a time when England was reeling from the full brunt of industrial capitalism, John Ruskin, a Tory radical, championed the regenerative effects of nature, architecture, and art. God revealed Himself in nature, and perceiving His beauty entailed a moral exercise. Ruskin realized this one day when the sun peered through after a storm cloud lifted: “And then I learned—what till then I had not known—the real meaning of the word Beautiful,” he wrote. It was that which: “can turn the human soul from gazing upon itself . . . and annihilate—be it ever so small a degree, the thoughts and feelings which have to do with this present world,

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and fix the spirit—in all humility—on the . . . BEAUTIFUL.”4 This aesthetic perception intertwined with moral acuity; the greater the degree of observation, the greater degree of sympathy.5 In architecture, as in life, beauty incarnated an “orderly balance and arrangement” and hailed from heaven, far from “the violence and disorganisation of sin.”6 In the post-Darwinian world, Ruskin believed art needed to assume a more active role in social government and political economy. Organicism was central to his view of social life, and he advocated the handicraft movement. In his seminal chapter “The Nature of Gothic,” from The Stones of Venice, Ruskin painted a picture of an arcadia where work, belief, and art mingled harmoniously, conjuring an image that stirred a generation of Victorian readers to rectify social and economic injustices.7 Arnold and Walter Pater perpetuated these ideas, insisting on the reciprocal nature of beauty and goodness. To discern either, they asserted, required a pristine character, a “clear crystal nature.”8 Thus, the famed English craftsman, artist, and poet William Morris set out, a friend noted, to make this transformation more readily available by creating “none other than the democratisation of beauty.”9 Such precepts greatly shaped two of the most influential American magazines of the post- Civil War era: The Atlantic Monthly and Scribner’s (later called The Century Magazine). The publishers, editors, and contributors aimed to create a common vision of the social role played by culture. Exposure to long-held values, they believed, would bring individuals in touch with the eternal. This contact would elevate the morality of middle- class readers, resulting in a more virtuous, harmonious, and gracious society. While the periodicals included fiction as well as nonfiction essays on contemporary issues, the editors viewed poetry as the apex of civilization, “the purest expression of ideality,” and, as such, needed safeguarding.10 In Boston in 1857, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Francis Underwood founded The Atlantic Monthly as an instrument to civilize and humanize the country. With Matthew Arnold, they believed that encounters with great literature as well as contemporary authors would promote both individual and national progress by elevating individual aspirations, guiding conduct, and dampening materialism and greed. To them, culture was an inward condition of moral and intellectual character, not an outward set of circumstances; all individuals had the ability to cultivate

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their inner selves.11 To this end, they, along with their counterparts in academia, such as Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, strove to free literature and education from the restraining hand of religion. Magazine staffers took their roles as cultural evangelists seriously, claiming a quasi-religious role for themselves. Their goal was to produce a monthly magazine that rivaled the finest books and that could serve as a compendium of culture for years to come.12 The Century Magazine, founded in 1870 as Scribner’s Monthly, an evangelically oriented periodical edited by Josiah Holland, held similarly lofty aspirations. Under the editorship of Richard Watson Gilder (1844–1909), it became a general secular magazine. Son of a high- church Methodist minister, Gilder preached the Platonic credo that truth equals beauty equals goodness. For thirty-five years, first as assistant editor from 1874 to 1881, then as editor from 1881 to 1909, he strove to make each issue a work of art.13 Gilder and his circle viewed poets as “custodians of noble thought” who “in the midst of a sordid world are trying to keep alive the harshly blown-upon and flickering flame of the ideal.”14 In Gilder’s view, certain eternal verities girded the universe; the poet’s duty was to embody those in his work. By the 1880s, The Century had reached a circulation of 250,000 and could outbid competitors for prized poems and prose. These magazines along with Harper’s and Lippincott’s set moral, intellectual, and aesthetic standards for readers and rendered important services to American writers. They furnished a national market for authors, granting their contributors recognition and respect and enabling them to earn a modest living. As editor, Gilder treated writers with the same kind of courteousness and dignity that he feared was disappearing from civic life. During his tenure, the magazine raised professional standards by sending acknowledgments upon receipt of manuscripts, providing payment for them upon acceptance, and returning unwanted submissions. Poets received more money and more opportunities to publish at The Century than at any other periodical.15 Such consideration impressed Walt Whitman, who was not a genteel poet but contributed to their magazines. Whitman wrote to a friend, “Gilder takes what I offer unhesitatingly, never injecting a single word of petty criticism . . . Do you realize that this is treatment no other magazine editor in America has accorded us?”16 Similarly, Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907), who later edited The Atlantic

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Monthly, expressed his delight with the respect genteel editors granted poets. He wrote to a friend, Bayard Taylor, in 1866: The humblest man of letters has a position here which he doesn’t have in New York. To be known as an able writer is to have the choicest society opened to you. Just as an officer in the Navy (providing he is a gentleman) is the social equal of anybody—so a knight of the quill here is supposed necessarily to be a gentleman. In New York—he’s a Bohemian!17 This sympathetic communication extended beyond the text to other relationships in the literary world. Publishers treated their authors more as social acquaintances than as business clients, while editors, reviewers, and writers addressed one another as peers.18 Shared backgrounds, social circles, and outlooks sustained these informal and personal business arrangements. In 1891 members of the genteel Author’s Club, a spin- off of the Authors’ Copyright League, helped to secure passage of the International Copyright Law, which strengthened the marketing viability of American writers by outlawing cheap editions printed overseas and sold at bargain-basement prices, underselling American editions. Gilder spearheaded the movement by joining with his close friend President Grover Cleveland to lobby for the legislation, and then to steer it through Congress.19 The creation of anthologies that included contemporary American writers corresponded with this larger movement for American literary independence. In the field of poetry, the esteemed Gilded Age literary critic and patron Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833–1908) led the effort to promote the native verse of living authors. Stedman made a comfortable living as a Wall Street broker and pursued poetry as a pastime. During the 1880s, he contributed a series of critical essays on British and American authors to The Century Magazine, which he later published as immensely popular books, Victorian Poets (1883) and Poets of America (1885). In a more theoretical work, The Nature and Elements of Poetry (1892), Stedman set forth his artistic values.20 He began by acknowledging that the pursuit of poetry in a capitalist, Protestant society appeared futile. But this difficulty served only to stiffen his resolve: “Under stress of public neglect or distaste, the lovers of any cause or art find their regard for it more unshaken than ever.”21 American life, he insisted, needed the saving

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grace of poetry because it gave glimpses of the “inmost truth of things” and provided eternal truths. In Stedman’s idealistic view, the poetic imagination acted as a spark, “by whose aid man makes every leap forward.” Poetry’s eminence resided in its capacity to enable “common mortals to think as the poet thinks, to use his wings.” To support this assertion, Stedman quoted these lines from the beloved poet James Russell Lowell: For I believed the poets; it is they Who utter wisdom from the central deep, And, listening to the inner flow of things, Speak to the age out of eternity.22 Stedman diverged from his fellow Victorian anthologists in recognizing the contributions of female poets. Rufus Griswold, for example, had traditionally published a separate anthology for women.23 An astute businessman as well as editor, Stedman understood that women formed his largest contingent of readers and that female authors accounted for nearly three- quarters of the poetry submissions. Thus, inclusion of women not only recognized their achievements but also formed an astute marketing strategy. In Stedman’s best-selling anthology Poets of America, they received critical treatment alongside male poets. But inclusion did not mean equality; Stedman still posited essentialist notions about gender, arguing that a woman’s nature proved an asset in the composition of verse: “The revelations of the feminine heart are the more beautiful and welcome, because the typical woman is purer, more unselfish, more consecrated than the typical man. Through ardent self-revelations our ideals of sanctity are maintained.” Poetry was not effective unless it rose and fell as a woman’s breath, “like an exhalation.”24 Throughout the nineteenth century, men and women of letters had to contend with the tension that arose between science and poetry; science was accruing the kind of cultural capital formerly held by verse.25 Wordsworth prefaced Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1802) with a paean to the superior wisdom of poets, calling poetry “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.”26 Nevertheless, he entertained the possibility of poets brokering a truce in the future if scientists would permit more of human nature and needs into their theorizing. In “Lamia,” one of the most acclaimed poems of the century, Keats provided ballast to those arguing for poetry’s

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preeminence as he forlornly viewed the post-Newtonian world of demystified beauty where scientists and philosophers “unweave a rainbow”: There was an awful rainbow once in heaven We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.27 Newton may have killed the wonder of the cosmos, enslaving mankind to a materialistic universe, but poets had the tools to reassemble the shattered light. Shelley, too, reaffirmed the poet’s duty to bring coherence because “Life like a dome of many-coloured glass/ Stains the white radiance of eternity.” Later in the century, Matthew Arnold provided assurances that “more and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”28 To connect knowledge, morality, and ideal perfection, both poetry and science were needed. Still, members of the genteel community felt compelled to justify their convictions about the worth and value of poetry. They did so by highlighting the similarities between both endeavors. Poets, Edmund Stedman declared, occupied themselves with technical matters, “with ‘the science of verse,’ its rhythm, diction and metrical effects.” He praised Tennyson, for example, for his technical skills, and cautioned against “the lesser pupils of Wordsworth, the ‘spasmodic’ lyrists, the Neo-Romantic artificers.”29 While Stedman admitted his chagrin with the “superb optimism of our scientific brethren” who marched ahead confidently making material discoveries about nature’s secrets, he celebrated the complementary nature of the two disciplines. Too much analysis applied to literature, however, functioned as a solvent with the potential to “retard” poets. “Can we take up poetry as a botanist takes up a flower, and analyze its components?” Stedman asked. “One element must forever elude researchers, and that is the very element by which poetry is poetry.”

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Ultimately, the power of poetry remained inscrutable: “I confess we cannot define the specific perfume of a flower.” Poetry reigned supreme because while science depicted mere phenomena, poetry provided “an insight which pierces to spiritual actualities.” Poets offered a less tangible, but nonetheless valuable, find: a “distinctive voice.” Their work provided a perfect counterpart to science because, with each new technological advance, poetry promised to reenchant the world: “Each time when science fulfil[l]s our hope, the poet will be charmed to dream anew.”30 As with the English and continental Romantic poets they so greatly admired—Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Heine—genteel poets expressed their dissent from the nascent political and economic arrangements of democratic capitalism for stifling the infinitely creative potential of the individual. Mugwumps or Liberals, they pursued a more reformist line than the mainstream. They actively championed social causes, but their politics hewed closely to the principles laid out in their poetic desiderata: they would make some accommodation to innovation but, with few exceptions, they would not challenge the status quo. In the postbellum era, their calls for civil service reform and criticism of laissez-faire capitalism found adherents among the middle class. At The Century, the selfproclaimed “squire of poesy,” Richard Gilder, became involved in progressive reform issues, commissioning articles from prominent politicians including Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt that advocated conservation, civil service reform, and honest public officials.31 To those ends, Gilder published essays by the nature preservationist John Muir, sought to extend the 1883 Pendleton Act, which required competitive exams for federal civil servants, to state and city governments, and fought the corrupt officials of Tammany Hall.32 Later, New York Governor Roswell Flower called upon Gilder to serve as chairman of the New York Tenement House Commission. Gilder solicited the advice of muckraking journalist Jacob Riis and commissioned him to chronicle the committee’s findings for The Century’s readers. Gilder toured the living conditions of the city’s poorest residents and then drew up reports to guide legislators on how best to ameliorate the appalling living conditions. Edmund Stedman lobbied for a national poetic tradition and for international copyright protection, and served as president of the Public Art League as well as the New York Kindergarten Association, where he campaigned for free kindergartens.33

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As they battled against their countrymen’s hostility to the imaginative arts—making compelling cases of the need for “the faculty divine”—they also exerted something of a democratic impulse. The Gilders and Stedmans of the poetic world released poetry from the grip of a religious elite and worked toward democratic ends, believing that all could participate, provided they developed the proper skills. In theory, at least, they had inclusive ideals and aspired to reach a mass audience. Inroads made by immigrants, workers, cities, and popular culture venues posed a threat to the carefully maintained preserves of the genteel coterie. With the deluge of immigrants that began in the 1880s, such genteel optimism about the democracy of culture diminished. Genteel arbiters then held that it required a certain level of culture to appreciate poetry, to contemplate beauty. Members of this community increasingly became synonymous with elitism, rigidity, and mediocrity because they could not meld high standards with mass participation, assuming, as they did, that admitting the masses meant lowering standards. And, in their poetry, they refused to explore the new experiences wrought by modernizing trends such as urbanization, industrialization, and bureaucratization. They tended to treat beauty as so pristine that it would be sullied by impure people. As a result, while a staple of civilized life, genteel poetry, for the most part, became a personal pursuit or private space, where the middle and upper classes could preserve their values in an industrializing, capitalist society. Their cultural vision now left little room for non-Americans and began to link aesthetic faculty to innate character traits and class. Stedman wrote: “The truth is that taste, however responsive to cultivation, is inborn.”34 Whether reading, writing, publishing, or politicking, the genteel reformers remained particular about preserving privilege. After the railroad strikes of 1877, genteel poet George Curtis called on the state militias and the U.S. army to quell the workers.35 Richard Gilder, despite his efforts on behalf of poor immigrants, harbored suspicion about the foreign born. In the period of Haymarket and Pullman clashes, he could not imagine that pure-bred, hard-working Americans would resort to violence to solve labor disputes. He had little patience for rioters, advocating harsh measures against them, and prescribed immigrant restriction as a remedy to worker strife.36 So, too, did Thomas Bailey Aldrich, an editor and a poet of such preeminence that the prestigious publishers Ticknor and Fields issued his work

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in an exclusive Blue and Gold series (along with the likes of Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, and Longfellow). When speaking about American imperialism, he voiced objections, not out of pacifism, but out of a fear of mongrelization.37 The changing cultural configurations of manhood also prompted concern. In the 1880s, Stedman readily deemed the artistic temperament “androgynous” and the poet’s composition transgendered: “The woman’s intuition, sensitiveness, nervous refinement join with the reserved power and creative vigor of the man to form the poet.”38 Such formulations became problematic when new anxieties about masculinity emerged in the late nineteenth century with a concatenation of developments amplifying this trend. The industrial economy had engendered a class of white- collar workers who toiled in bureaucratized office positions, while a new middleclass and respectable consumer culture that undermined manly self-restraint in favor of pleasure and frivolity emerged. It also introduced financial volatility at a previously unforeseen rate. The depression of 1893, which lasted until 1897, made many families vulnerable to economic vagaries and sparked fear of dependency or penury among a new middle- class contingent of workers. At the same time, the “New Woman” asserted herself, eschewing the bustle, earning a college degree, pursuing a career, and picketing for suffrage. The growing force of immigrant votes and labor strikes, and the new categorizations of homosexuality and neurasthenia further distilled fears of class and gender disintegration. Gender and race defined one another: men and women of color were simultaneously denied the privileges of gender distinctions and were hypersexualized. 39 Demands for more “virile” poems (meaning verse with fewer emotions on more relevant topics) multiplied. In 1884, a critic at The Writer Magazine complained that “Every singer takes his net and chases a butterfly, there are none climbing up to the eagle’s eyrie.” Thomas Aldrich inadvertently articulated critics’ complaints when he wrote to Gilder in 1892: “Your May number is a nest of singing birds. I don’t believe any single number of a magazine ever before contained so much excellent verse. Not one of the twelve or thirteen poems touches on the commonplace.”40 A regular contributor, Lee Wilson Dodd, decried the predominance of fragile, feminine verse about flowers and towers and exhorted colleagues to submit more robust contributions. Bliss Perry, The Atlantic Monthly editor

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from 1899 to 1909, grumbled about poets “telling us about their little emotions with . . . tiresome peculiarity.”41 He rejected poems by Harvard poet Trumbull Stickney because of their weak, even female, character, which had “too little of the trumpet and drum about them to be suitable for magazine use.”42 Other genteel editors acknowledged this state of affairs, publishing spoofs of the kind of effete, out- of-touch verse too often found between their covers: Far better mute Were the emasculate lute, Far better silent, than this chirping on An echo of things gone— 43 In 1890, The Century printed a satire, “T’Is Ever Thus,” on the subject: Ad Astra, De Profundis, Keats, Bacchus, Sophocles; Ars Longa, Euthanasia, Spring, The Eumenides Dum Vivimus Vivamus, Sleep, Palingenesis; Salvini, Sursum Corda, At Mt. Desert, To Miss These are part of the contents Of “Violets of Song,” The first poetic volume Of Susan Mary Strong44 Routine references to spring, Latin, and profound thoughts by women marked poetry as a remote, female vocation unworthy of serious attention.45 The forming of a modern poetics more attuned to contemporary motifs inevitably involved grappling with issues of gender and sexuality as well as with racial and political issues. With long-held notions of masculinity under siege, literature’s association with femininity became increasingly problematic.46 Some individuals sought to save it from derision and irrelevance by asserting literature’s stoutness. Theodore Roosevelt, who had successfully

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transformed his own less-than-robust public image, became one of the most vocal exponents of a masculinist poetics. As an undergraduate, Roosevelt wrote letters to the Harvard Crimson accusing those who opposed President Cleveland’s foreign policy of “non-virility.” Early in his career, Roosevelt’s mild demeanor, youth, genteel speech, and associates had prompted journalists to compare him to Oscar Wilde; in 1890 journalists still referred to him as “a Jane dandy” and “Rosy Roosy.” His accomplishments as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and as lieutenant- colonel of the Rough Riders regiment during the Spanish-American War changed this perception.47 Roosevelt teamed with his literary mentor, Brander Matthews, to reinvigorate his class. Imperialism, carrying out the “White Man’s Burden” of “civilizing” the darker races, and fighting cultural decadence with its morbidity and spiritual malaise, required a more masculine literature. Alleging that effete Easterners had softened cultural life by importing European works, Matthews produced appropriately strenuous texts for American students.48 His 1896 textbook An Introduction to the Study of American Literature defined an accepted American canon, reaching sales of one- quarter million over the course of twenty-five years.49 Matthews extended his influence to students as professor of literature at Columbia University from 1892 to 1924. An avid Arnoldian, he used his perch as chief book reviewer for The Nation from 1875 to 1895 to issue decrees about the role of culture in combating anarchy.50 However, by addressing the new forms of masculinity, Matthews and Roosevelt sought to refurbish gentility, not to overthrow it. The poetic community began to fracture in the 1890s as social transformations, innovations in print culture, and changing tastes brought the limits of genteel idealism into bold relief. During that decade, labor strikes, economic depression, Jim Crow confrontations, and war with Spain increased conflict. Within a year of the depression that began in 1893, unemployment hit 18.4 percent and Coxey’s army of out- of-work laborers marched on Washington. Heated debates over currency reform, specie, and antitrust laws took place alongside farmers’ revolts. In this time of ominous labor strife, parlous extremes of wealth and poverty, and a deafening clamor for American intervention in the Cuban uprising against the Spanish, genteel poets avoided representing the difficult realities. While antebellum American Romantic poets such as John

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Greenleaf Whittier—who edited anti-slavery newspapers and wrote abolitionist poetry—and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—who used the proceeds from “Hiawatha” to purchase the freedom of slaves, donated money to abolitionist groups, and published Poems on Slavery (1842)—included activism in their art, genteel poets kept the two pursuits separate. Heeding Matthew Arnold’s call (made in the famous preface to his 1853 Poems) to seek out models of excellence from the past and to depict basic but universal feelings, genteel poets often alighted on ancient or medieval times as the setting for their compositions. The desire to keep verse unspoiled and safe from the importunities of modern life and the sullied masses also inspired their choices. Regarding beauty as elevated, genteel authors sought to protect it from impurities. Gilder, for example, published five volumes of verse during this decade, discoursing with poise about nature, love, dutiful mothers, and the Civil War (“that glorious show”).51 Likewise, Thomas Aldrich explored the effects of unionization in a realist story saturated with sentimentalism, as he did earlier in a serialized novel The Stillwater Tragedy (1880), but he would never consider mentioning the problems of labor and class in any of his verse or in the poetry he selected during his tenure at The Atlantic Monthly. Whitman, who passionately addressed the pathos and misery of the Civil War in Leaves of Grass, dismissed genteel poetry for providing transport to a more ethereal realm despite grim reality impinging from all sides. He characterized the dominant tone of such verse as “delicatesse” and likened it to objects in a Victorian living room: “porcelain, fine china, dainty curtains, exquisite rugs.”52 Novelists took a different tact. Literary naturalism in the fiction of William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Ellen Glasglow, and Theodore Dreiser, among others, depicted characters subject to impulses and instincts and often victimized by more powerful individuals and forces. Tales of ordinary people facing cruel circumstances reached a new audience ready for close observations of contemporary life. Novels appointed with searing accuracy and penetrating prose retailed alongside standard literary confections rife with optimism and uplift, slowly but surely transforming the governing precepts of fiction. A more tangible menace to the texture, tenor, and tenability of genteel literary prescriptions emerged from within the publishing industry itself. In 1893, The Century sponsored an exhibition at

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the World’s Fair in Chicago on the magazine’s method of processing manuscripts and drawings for publication. As one commentator noted, “The Century comported itself like the national institution it had become.”53 Yet, in that same year, magazines that catered to the tastes of a more heterogeneous reading public challenged the dominance of genteel publications. Centered in New York, their appearance spurred the professionalization of the publishing industry. Underwritten by advertisements rather than subscribers, they marketed to a mass audience and could afford to lure authors with higher pay scales. Articles did not address the “gentle reader” or embody eternal verities; here, the immediate and ephemeral found a thirty- day shelf life among an ethnically diverse audience. With a cover price of fifteen cents per issue (compared to thirty-five cents for Harper’s or twenty-five cents for Scribner’s), photographs (rather than wood engravings), and a less personal, more journalistic tone, McClure’s soon reached a circulation of 365,000. By 1900, Munsey’s Magazine, at ten cents a copy, sold 700,000 copies a month.54 By catering to a broader, less- educated audience, inexpensive periodicals began to undermine the closed, hierarchical, and judgmental prescriptions of the cultural elites. The advent of these cheap, mass- circulation magazines splintered the reading audience, requiring publishers and editors to target specific demographics. At The Century, Gilder responded by including articles on trains, construction projects, and heavy industry, and in 1904 he serialized Jack London’s novel The Sea Wolf.55 While willing to make concessions with regard to fiction and non-fiction selections, Gilder refused to alter his policy on verse. Protectors and practitioners of the genteel aesthetic tradition relentlessly maintained that verse belonged on the heights of Parnassus; fitting stanzas with practicality would only ground the muse. Even though they appropriated Ruskin, instead of seeing the industrial poor as beautiful or locating in them an orderly balance and arrangement, they used his work to justify mere uplifting sentiment. Ruskin’s beauty consequently took on an apolitical, ethereal focus. Convinced that readers would recoil from long or difficult poems on issues of the day, Aldrich, Gilder, and other genteel editors continued to publish short, transparent verse in classical forms on traditional themes. Consequently, although the subject of avid interest among literary scholars today, American poetry during this decade appeared to contemporaries to have taken on a pallid cast. Once a lustrous

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craft, poetry published in magazines, chapbooks, newspapers, and books now seemed stale, unadventurous, and conventional—a mere parlor pastime composed by dilettantes and ladies who lunch. For their part, publishers and editors at influential magazines registered the dearth of good poetry and began to entertain doubts about the efficacy of their project. Writer Jessie B. Rittenhouse recalled the 1890s as a time, when editors diverted their readers with articles upon “The Slump in Poetry,” when critics spent their time speculating upon what had happened to this ancient and respectable art. Some declared the scientific age was inimical to imagination, others that the modern pace was too swift for the contemplative moods of poetry.56 The ideology, institutions, and relationships of this community resulted in poetry that a significant number of readers now considered sclerotic and irrelevant. Rigor mortis had set in. By the turn of the twentieth century, then, the genteel establishment was vulnerable on many sides: from below with the sentimentalists; from those who viewed it as backward looking, effeminate, and inconsequential; and from writers who had lost the Arnoldian faith. The rise of popular entertainment venues shaped by commercial interests rather than cultural concerns, and intended for leisure consumption rather than character building, threatened to make the genteel brand of poetry along with its social class and contingent of literary elite superfluous, unraveling their claims to superiority and power. From Coney Island to Bill Cody’s Wild West Shows, burlesque revues and moving pictures, jazz bands and jubilee singers, department store windows and neon advertisements, the division between “high” and “low” culture, which Van Wyck Brooks later configured, widened.57 Recognizing a loss of preeminence, genteel editors and critics established an organization to safeguard their promontory. Taking a nod in 1898 from Arnold’s idea of a standard-setting academy, Brander Matthews helped to form the National Institute of Arts and Letters with the motto, “Hold High the Flaming Torch from Age to Age.” The stated goal was to promote American literature by giving a “stamp of approval” to the best writing. Award categories promoted a taffeta, genteel emphasis: the William Dean Howells Medal for Best American Fiction; Gold Medal for Good Diction on the Stage; the

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Evangeline Wilbour Foundation Grant for the “preservation of the English language in its beauty and integrity and its cautious enrichment.”58 In 1904, members created a more exclusive wing, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for the most distinguished members.59 The Institute maintained a closed system of nomination, election, and veto, ensuring exclusivity and deflecting accountability for decisions resulting from class, gender, and racial biases. Meant to represent a benchmark of achievement, appointment to the National Institute to some degree served as a bulwark of elitism that promoted belletristic values of appreciation and moral uplift yet did little to build up a vital community of readers and writers. For example, Gilder’s successor as editor of The Century, Robert Underwood Johnson, fought behind the scenes against Carl Sandburg’s nomination to the Institute because he wrote about common people performing pedestrian tasks, such as a poem about a man shaving in a Pullman car.60 The poetry, criticism, and institutions of the nineteenth- century genteel poetic community had lost its vitality and vibrancy, and established cultural mediators found little of interest in the output of the younger generation; a disconnect between the poetics and projects of young authors and the prescriptions and procedures of established editors persisted. With few places to publish, receive recognition, and meet likeminded authors, American poets of a different bent began increasingly to vent their frustrations. Edgar Lee Masters recalled the staleness of this era: You know what poetry was in 1898 and in the years that preceded it, and how difficult it was for a writer in central Illinois in the late eighties and early nineties to rise from the earth bound conditions . . . what was Chicago then as an inspiration to the muse? There was no market for anything and no interest in it after you did it. Neither was I writing what Gilder and Stedman and Fawcett and others were.61 In 1899 Harvard poet William Vaughan Moody challenged editorial decision-making: [I] regret that the Atlantic has not seen its way to adopting a more liberal attitude toward verse . . . it could exert a wide and happy

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influence upon the future of American literature by laying stress upon positive rather than negative qualities in the verse manuscript submitted to it, by weighing an ounce of charm and power against an ounce of obscurity or imperfect finish.62 Moody wanted editors to acknowledge the virtues of his work instead of focusing solely on the technical deviations, but The Atlantic editor Alexander Sedgwick explained the strictures placed by audience expectations, along with the general quality of the poems submitted. In 1902 Sedgwick cut the number of poems the magazine published in half, from four per issue to two.63 Moody brought similar arguments to The Century, insisting that the magazine’s editors inaccurately gauged audience demand. He wrote to Robert Underwood Johnson: “I have been led to hope, by various signs which I noted, and by talk with many persons who habitually read the magazines, that the official and accepted diagnosis of the case was not quite a correct one, that there was a deep, wide, and very genuine interest in poetry per se, and that people were eager for something better than they got, or than they were supposed to be willing to ‘stand for.’ ”64 The many rejections that Robert Frost received during this era forever scarred him. Despite Frost’s bucolic countenance, quarries of animosity lay just beneath the surface, stockpiled over the course of twenty years as he unsuccessfully tried to break into the genteel world of publishing. Frost never forgot rejections, early or recent. As he told one biographer: During the years on the farm I had given all the good magazines a chance at my work. The office readers were dead set against me. One will never know just what good poetry the damn fool manuscript readers keep from ever being printed. There was an old bitch on The Atlantic staff who kept my verse out of the magazine for ten years.65 With typically less poise and more spleen, Ezra Pound also recalled the sting of rejection at the hands of turn- of-the- century editors: I bust out against such dung heaps of perfumed pus as the Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s and Scribner’s, as they were in the year 1900 and ceased not essentially to be as long as they lasted. The stink of

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stale perfume contains the deadly gasses which finally poison. No language could quite cover the loathing I feel for a Sedgwick.66 This missive to Harriet Monroe is representative of Pound’s plangent attacks on genteel editors and periodicals: Why I abominate the American magazines and why I think they should be exterminated in revenge for the damage they have done American poetry is that they specialize in two or three tones . . . They chase a popularity, express one or two moods, usually cheap complacency, or, elsewhere, stereotyped pity . . . The rest are blurred into The Century Magazine.67 Pound’s correspondence over the next forty years continued to harp on this problem. He contradicted claims that no audience existed: “My war is not on the public taste, it is on editors and on pretenders.” Until more receptive editors appeared, Pound could only fume: “TO HELL WITH HARPER’S AND THE ‘MAGAZINE TOUCH.’ ”68 Genteel editors returned Sylvester Viereck’s decadent compositions, reproaching him for taking too much poetic license and including too much licentiousness. He was able to get more traction with newspaper editors, including William Marion Reedy’s Mirror, which played a sizable role in supporting new poets, and several of William Randolph Hearst’s papers.69 Meanwhile, the North American Review turned down Untermeyer’s “Fable for the Frivolous” for its “prolixity—too many words for the thought to be expressed, a lack of the sententiousness indispensable to fables.” Untermeyer, another editor noted, included too many quotations, which added a “bookish flavor” leading to “a spirit of seeming insincerity.” The editor encouraged him “to write more simply. Don’t strive after effects, unusual thoughts, words, or figures.”70 Assistant editor at The Century Robert Underwood Johnson accepted “Wine of Night” but sent back the many other poems, which he stipulated were “not declined but simply returned.”71 Harriet Monroe achieved a bit more success than her younger counterparts. She was born in Chicago in 1860 to a well-read and noted lawyer married to a woman who feared the power of books to destroy familial bonds. Taking after her father, Monroe read Shakespeare and the Romantic poets and, at an early age, determined to devote her life to poetry.72 For years she earned a living as a teacher (for which

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she confessed little talent or patience), lecturer, and freelance journalist, contributing reviews of plays, art, and music to the Chicago Tribune and Hearst’s Chicago American. In search of a poetic community, she joined a woman’s literary club called the Fortnightly but left when she discovered, to her chagrin, the conservative nature of their tastes. After placing “With Shelley’s Poems” in the May, 1888, issue of The Century, she traveled to New York to meet with the editor. Years later, she recalled what the acceptance meant to her: “There was nothing haughty or patronizing about Gilder . . . I felt that I was launched by a The Century acceptance.”73 Monroe had less luck withThe Atlantic Monthly, which wanted shorter poems while Hampton’s Magazine wanted only verse of lyric uplift.74 When Monroe’s hometown of Chicago won the bid to host the 1893 World Exposition, she contacted Charles Yerkes, a member of the Committee on Ceremonies whom she knew casually through mutual acquaintances, and asked for a commission to write a poem memorializing the event. Noting that artists and architects, musicians and sculptors had already received substantial payment, she requested the hefty sum of one thousand dollars, which she received as well as the title “Poet Laureate” of the expo. In composing the piece about the procession of American history since the arrival of Columbus, Monroe resolved to be forward looking. “Throughout I was determined to use no classic images,” she wrote. “A new and wiser era was coming, when the marvelous discoveries of science would be used to promote the happiness and well-being of the race.”75 Despite this intent, Monroe had to conform to the Committee on Ceremonies’ poetic criteria, which requested that she make twentytwo changes to the submitted poem, such as asking, “Ought not ‘Alone’ be repeated three times? ‘Alone! Alone! Alone!’ ”76 For these committee members poetry meant lofty language and elevated sentiment. Monroe resisted many of the suggestions and the positive public response confirmed her instincts. Sarah Cowell LeMoyne, a six-foot tall New York actress whose voice projected more forcefully than the diminutive poet’s (who sat alongside other notables), recited the ode at the opening ceremonies. When the New York World published the poem in its entirety without Monroe’s permission, she brought a suit against the company. Edmund Stedman testified on her behalf, and she received a five thousand dollar settlement.77 Beyond this limited engagement, however, Monroe found no endowments, prizes, scholarships, or professional forums for her

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writing. Editor Bliss Perry wrote that he felt like a “dogged tennis player” rhythmically returning poems as soon as they volleyed in.78 Ida Tarbell at The American sent Monroe’s verses back with a sigh, noting that her files overflowed with poems that had already been accepted but not yet printed.79 Hampton’s Magazine rebuffed Monroe’s submissions because, as the editor wrote, “The verses we print are rather of the progressive, uplift type, the kind that Kipling might do if he were writing in this country. Anything more graceful and delicate is unbecoming to the contents of our magazine.”80 After conceding to some editorial changes, Monroe managed to get “The Hotel” and “The Turbine” in print. Likewise, The Century published “The Shadow Child,” and the Fortnightly Review accepted “The Dances of the Seasons.” Part of the problem lay in Monroe’s determination to treat in her poetry modern subjects. Anticipating by more than two decades French poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s call for poetry about machines that could compete in the marketplace, Monroe’s compositions wrestled with contemporary advances in science and technology, a move that was anathema to members of the genteel literary community.81 Her youth and experiences inspired this desire to embrace technological developments more readily. When she attended the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia with her family, the fourteen year old gravitated to the Corliss engine, with its “great wheels massively” turning, rather than the art gallery filled with Old Masters. Her sister married John Wellborn Root, architect in the firm Burnham and Root, famous for the skyscrapers poking through the Chicago skyline. In Paris in 1897 Monroe quickened to the “serene simplicity” of actress Eleanor Duse, whose subtle style contrasted with the standard melodrama. And, while working at Hull House with Jane Addams in 1907, Monroe marveled over modern dance performances by Loie Fuller and Isadora Duncan.82 The young poet’s enthusiasm for inventors and innovation— whether it be in industry, dance, theater, or painting—found its way into her verse. In “The Turbine” (written in the 1890s but not published until 1910), which Monroe dedicated to her brother, an engineer who designed power plants, she celebrated the ingenuity of machinists and generators. But such poems were routinely met with scorn rather than welcome. A contributor to The Atlantic Monthly scoffed at statements that linked poets with change rather

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than defense of old standards in an essay, “Contemporaneousness,” arguing: No great dramatic poetry, no great epical poetry, has ever dealt with contemporary conditions. Only the austere processes of time can precipitate the multitude of immediate facts into the priceless residuum of universal truth. The great dramatists have turned to the past for their materials, not of choice, but of necessity. Here and there in the dark backward and abysm of time, some human figure, some human episode, is seen to have weathered the years, and to have taken on certain mysterious attributes of truth; and upon this foundation the massive structure of heroic poetry is built.83 More than thirty years later, this position still exasperated Monroe. In her autobiography she bemoaned, the apathetic attitude prevailing through that period toward poetry, and especially any work in poetry which stepped out of the beaten tracks laid down by Victorian practice and prejudice . . . and the stony lack of comprehension or sympathy which greeted the publication brought a discouragement so profound as to prevent further thinking in that direction. Other evidences of indifference toward poetic art brought me constantly against a stone wall.84 As a result, poetry lagged behind other arts in representing or indeed constituting American life; the verse landscape remained a redoubt of accepted canons of beauty. Born in 1874, just four years after Monroe, to a Boston Brahmin family, Amy Lowell grew up in a household of books and learning. Her wealth, however, did not insulate her from the daunting task of trying to find outlets for her writing. Sedgwick at The Atlantic Monthly passed on Lowell’s poems because of their “unhallowed rhymes,” too “novel” subject matter, and obscure references.85 While praising her sonnets for escaping “the vapidity of ordinary magazine verse” and for expressing a single idea, he nonetheless found them “marred by faulty rhymes and similes.” Sedgwick objected to imprecise rhymes, such as “own” with “gone,” “worn”

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with “down,” and “withhold” with “world.” Several of the blank verse compositions could not be scanned, which led him to suspect an “arbitrary” method, while others related ideas too obscure to be understood by the majority of Atlantic readers. “It is my theory in conducting the magazine,” he wrote to Lowell in 1911, “that we should avoid absolutely novel subjects preferring those which are dimly or vaguely known.” He dismissed the license Lowell took in punctuation as well, citing her for violating grammatical rules whenever she omitted commas or periods. Sedgwick agreed to take some poems only after she repaired what he considered to be the technical breaches.86 Aspiring writers initially did not have strong ideological disagreements with the genteel tradition; they simply wanted entry into the existing literary structure. They were convinced that a deep well of appreciation for their work existed but that genteel gatekeepers of culture set up obstacles instead of bridges to facilitate the new poetry. In their efforts to pursue their careers and visions, they started to create an alternative infrastructure to stimulate new poetry. William Stanley Braithwaite was one of the first to take steps in this direction. He began with the hope of reinvigorating the genteel tradition, opening it up to new currents and making it more responsive to new developments in modern life and aesthetics. He knew firsthand the difficulties of breaking into publishing. As a young man Braithwaite had sent a sheaf of his verse to genteel editors and writers. Neither Stedman, who had just completed the multivolume Library of America as well as An American Anthology, nor William Dean Howells, who had used his influence to help launch the career of African-American writer Paul Lawrence Dunbar, had much advice for the aspiring poet.87 Richard Burton at the Lothrop Publishing Company rejected the manuscript of lyric poems, stating that “in these days . . . it is only a Riley with his dialect, or a Kipling with his military brass band who can attract many people.”88 The firm L. C. Page and Company likewise brushed aside Braithwaite’s efforts, as did editors at The Century, The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s, Book News Monthly, Critic, Cosmopolitan, McClure’s, The Independent, The Dial, Outlook, Metropolitan Magazine, and Everybody’s Magazine. An editor at Hampton’s found his poems “charming” but the magazine had a policy of publishing only “militant” and “vigorous” verse. In the first years of the century, Braithwaite managed to publish one poem each in The National Magazine, The American Magazine (edited by Ray

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Stannard Baker), The Christian Endeavor World, Book News Monthly, and in local Boston newspapers such as The Boston Courant, The Boston Journal, and The Boston Evening Transcript.89 A rejection from the iconic New England magazine Harper’s hit Braithwaite particularly hard. While sitting under a stone bridge in the Public Garden, he ruminated on the dismal opportunities available in his chosen craft. Searching for a remedy, he hit upon the idea of examining the leading periodicals to assess their record on poetry publications. Braithwaite approached the magazine editor of The Boston Evening Transcript and pitched the article.90 Two years earlier, in 1904, when Braithwaite had proposed an essay examining the best poems published in periodicals, the editorial board responded with a round of laughter. As The Transcript’s editor, Burton Kline, later recalled: “To heap the profoundest contempt upon an enemy, to blast him for the remainder of life, one had only to hint that he wrote verses for the magazines.”91 Yet, for this critical review, Braithwaite received the go-ahead. He set to work, poring through a year’s worth of issues from 1905.92 Braithwaite discovered that verse occupied but a miniscule fraction of the copy. Among the six leading monthly magazines surveyed, Lippincott’s topped the list with one hundred and six poems, while McClure’s rounded out the bottom with twenty-three. The mere thirty-three poems published in The Atlantic Monthly represented “a higher value of poetic achievement” than Harper’s (fifty-four poems) or Scribner’s (forty-seven poems). While commending Gilder and Robert Underwood Johnson of The Century as poets “of exceptional worth,” Braithwaite complained that only five of the sixty-two poems printed were “truly distinctive in matter,” with the rest falling into the “extremely commonplace” category. Not entirely without selfinterest, he laid the blame for this dismal state of affairs squarely at the feet of editors who “have been lacking in the judgment of good poetry.”93 He reprimanded genteel editors for not demanding “in a cultural way that the public pay attention to its poets” and determined to change this state of affairs.94 Jessie B. Rittenhouse made a similar commitment to foster fellowship and draw attention to innovative works. To her, the creation of a supportive community and publicity were critical. The daughter of wheat farmers, she and her six siblings grew up in the Genesee Valley near Rochester, New York. In her memoirs, Rittenhouse wistfully described her idyllic country upbringing along the Erie Canal: “I seem

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to have been enveloped in a brooding spell of beauty.” Then, within a span of two years, four of her siblings died—three from “fever” (probably influenza) and one from heart disease. Her ailing mother moved back to Michigan to be with her family, leaving thirteen-yearold Jessie to assume household duties. Rittenhouse took refuge in reading and memorizing British poetry. Unable to attend school, she joined with a group of neighborhood girls who pooled their resources to buy books. “The winter evenings were transformed,” she wrote, by Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Jane Austen. Four years later, her maternal aunt and uncle provided funds for college. She attended Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, coming into her own as president of the Literary Society, senior class essayist, toast mistress, orator at tree plantings, and perennial hostess at other school functions.95 After graduation the only career open to a woman of her talent and education was teaching, which she did reluctantly for several years. A selfdescribed “Pater disciple” she wrote in a memoir that two passions guided her life—reform and poetry—but neither afforded a living wage.96 In her commitment to reform, Rittenhouse resembled other writers of her generation who, born in the last third of the nineteenth century, moved away from the stern religion of their parents.97 Their autobiographies testify to the influence of the itinerant freethinking preacher Robert Ingersoll, who urged congregants to ask the “why” of things and to embrace life on earth. Poet and editor Floyd Dell later recalled: “Bob Ingersoll had fought the battle before we were born between Darwin and the priests . . . we placed ourselves, characteristically enough, on the side of Darwin. We were for the present, and against the past.”98 Their evangelical heritage prompted them to action, to find a vocation that had meaning and that engaged them spiritually and emotionally. They moved to large cities and found secular employment as outlets for their religious enthusiasms. If Ingersoll offered a model of socially engaged evangelicals, Abraham Lincoln served as their political icon, with each poet writing poems, essays, even (in the case of Carl Sandburg) multi-volume biographies about the Illinois Republican who freed the slaves and incarnated democratic virtues of egalitarianism, integrity, and opportunity. John Ruskin was also a hero, with “Ruskin Clubs” proliferating in the West (Jack London belonged to the chapter in San Francisco). Sandburg delivered a baccalaureate address on “Ruskin, A Man of Ideals,” while Jane Addams and Edwin Markham idolized both

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Ruskin and Tolstoy.99 These young, aesthetic Progressives also valorized John Peter Altgeld, the Illinois Governor and reform leader who had freed the surviving Haymarket rebels.100 At a time when governing norms likened the best poetry to “the Parthenon frieze,” they wanted to animate poetry with their new social vision.101 To effect this change, they began by insisting that poetry did not have to be restricted to towers and flowers; it had the durability necessary to represent velocity and viscosity—the many facets of contemporary life—rather than simply serve as a register of progress and moral uplift. They averred that, instead of being restricted to the divine, uplifting, or decorative in poetry, readers would encounter the mundane, mechanical, and messiness of modern life; they would read about sex and sofas, spark plugs and suspension bridges. An ardent admirer of Shelley, Harriet Monroe felt “the need to give poetic expression to modern life, to bridge a gap between poetry and reality that many seemed to feel.”102 At H. L. Mencken’s magazine The Smart Set, co- editor Nathan Haskell Dole, in the foreword to his privately printed 1907 Pilgrims and Other Poems, pushed for themes that addressed current concerns: “If, as has been often reiterated of late years, the love for the Muses has grown cold, may it not be largely caused by the fact that writers of verse have chosen subjects alien to our modern thought.” Historians of American culture, most notably Warren Susman and Jackson Lears, in their focus on antimodernism as a therapeutic reconciliation between authenticity and a bureaucratic ethos, overlooked this connection between poetic introspection and political engagement. In the therapeutic thesis, fin-de-siècle elites, beset and bewildered by the rationalization and alienation of modern industrial capitalist society, relinquished a quest for broad-scale societal transformation and developed instead a fascination for the premodern, crafts, and mysticism.103 They turned to artistic beauty to provide space for emotional, physical, and moral regeneration, to serve as a sort of “epistemological toilette” whereby fractured bourgeois psyches could retreat, reaffirm their knowledge of the world and their place in it, then return to reestablish their cultural dominance.104 As a result, a steady Victorian decorum gave way to moments of raucous reality not as an expression of defeat or as a means to reshape the world, but as a tool to assimilate traditional authority with emerging corporate and bureaucratic forms. This argument ignores a significant group of activists for whom art did not diffuse larger loyalties.

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Encounters with poetry, painting, or music, far from being distracting private delicacies, promoted empathy and a more expansive conception of solidarity. For Progressive poets, reading and writing verse was not merely a marginal treat or an esoteric ideal but a foundational tenet, offering pleasure, insight and empathy, and was crucial to the discernment of meaning, value, and individual freedom. They believed that largescale political and social change first entailed emotional transformation on an individual level. The scale of modern bureaucratic life required each person to cultivate a sensibility enlivened to direct experience and natural wonder, faculties that would otherwise be dimmed by the bray of modern life. Upton Sinclair, echoing the German Romantic writer Friedrich Schiller, declared, “It was my idea at this time that the human race was to be saved by poetry.”105 Poet and activist Orrick Johns recalled that George Bernard Shaw served as a hero for fusing the two realms in the famous creed of Louis Dubedat from “The Doctor’s Dilemma”: “I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez and Rembrandt, in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed, amen.” How we thrilled to these rolling syllables, and how confidently we looked to that abstract thing Louis called “beauty” to solve all problems.106 Modernizing and yet preserving beauty became a central concern of the Progressive poets, but just what constituted beauty became a topic of much disagreement. Efforts to retool beauty took place in the wake of major shifts occurring in modern American thought and culture. In the “revolt against formalism,” writers, intellectuals, and reformers came to view philosophical idealism and the stark free-market individualism of Locke, Smith, and Mill as unduly harsh and wrong headed. Sympathy for the poor, the creation of practical tools for uplift, and strengthening social cohesion promised to help the victims of industrialization and capitalism.They balanced precariously and intentionally between glorifying pristine and ethereal beauty, as in the genteel tradition, and stigmatizing beauty as suspicious and retrograde, as some of the more avant-garde artists were doing. They intentionally supported verse that conveyed difficulty and fragmentation, that expressed an

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equivocal, rather than a univocal bent, and that experimented in perspective and form, which they felt better represented the experiences of modernity. If revitalizing poetry meant legitimizing new subject matters, then a key challenge was to refract contemporary issues while still maintaining a patina of idealism.107 They rejected double-tiered Platonism, which separated the realm of imagination from the realities of everyday life, and employed a single-tiered approach that combined science and beauty to embrace all of life. Both Jane Addams and W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, sought to use culture not as a tool to separate or escape but to infuse lives diminished by poverty and prejudice with meaning and dignity. Poets might disagree with the degree of reality and action that should be embedded in verse, but they did agree on the need for a sort of poetry that reconfigured poetic sensibility by heightening sensitivity to all aspects of contemporary life. Because turn- of-the- century poetics remained intricately linked with the transcendent, changes in pivotal notions about ideal, ethereal, and Platonic beauty affected not only the form of poetry but also, to a large extent, its function. For centuries, as David Hall has shown, poetry had explicitly served as the handmaid of religion by providing a touchstone of moral orientation108; and indeed, the newly rising poets, even as they wrote poems that engaged the contemporary moment in new forms and with new intent, were loath to wholly abandon either this religious impulse or the ethical infrastructure of religion. At the same time, discerning readers and writers felt strongly, with good reason, that the old wineskin of anemic devotional verse was wholly inadequate to contain the new poetic wine, a wine compounded as much of social justice and sexual liberation as of spiritual longings and a devotion to beauty.109 In a succession of books on aesthetics and philosophy, iconoclastic Professor of Philosophy George Santayana (born Jorge Agustin Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás) articulated a spiritual function for poetry. A generation of Harvard University undergraduates, including Du Bois, Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Max Eastman, Wallace Stevens, and Witter Bynner, wrestled fiercely with some of the nineteenth- century convictions that they encountered in classes and conversations with Santayana. Along with other poets in his Cambridge literary circle, such as William Vaughn Moody, George Cabot Lodge, Philip Henry Savage, and Trumbull Stickney, Santayana argued against uplift but still maintained that beauty,

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truth, and divinity formed the tripartite foundation of any aesthetic undertaking. Flirting with a form of anti-moralism, Santayana argued that poetry offered deliverance from late-Victorian bourgeois morality, offering psychic benefits through harmony, rhythm, and the rush of words: “There is no situation so terrible that it may not be relieved by the momentary pause of the mind to contemplate it aesthetically. Grief itself becomes in this way not wholly pain; a sweetness is added to it by our reflection. The saddest scenes may lose their bitterness in beauty.”110 Santayana believed that imagination had a moral function while religion had a poetic nature. As such, the architecture of poetry resembled that of the house of God: “Verse, like stained glass, arrests attention in its own intricacies.” To read or write poetry meant answering a divine calling. It was “that subtle fire and inward light which seems at times to shine through the world and to touch the images in our minds with ineffable beauty, then poetry is a momentary harmony in the soul amid stagnation or conflict, a glimpse of the divine and an incitation to religious life.”111 Though, for Santayana, spiritual life connoted acceptance of human powerlessness rather than a wellspring for change. Ideas about perception, practical experience, and pragmatism articulated by Santayana’s colleague at Harvard, William James, served as foundational tenets to a radicalism that inextricably linked culture and politics. James, among others, had reconfigured philosophy to enhance the experience of everyday life. The pragmatist emphasis on empirical analysis over abstract discourse occurred in parallel with efforts of modern poets to expand the parameters of beauty to include more pedestrian concerns. In his memoir, poet Orrick Johns detailed the impact of James on members of the educated middle class who worked to improve conditions for factory workers, tenement dwellers, and the environment: It is really hard to overestimate how much we depended upon transcendental optimism, how much we were under the spell, politically, of Lincoln, Thoreau, Emerson, Jefferson, Rousseau, and the German sentimental poets of a century earlier, and correspondingly in for disillusionment. The first breath of tougher philosophy that came to me—and that a few years later—was that of William James. At first, we resented it a little.112

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Pragmatism provided a means to rethink the form and function of poetry: The thought that always haunted me was this: Of what use is this poetry of abstract thought about human conduct, of what use the great imaginative discoveries of philosophers and scientists—in the United States of 1912? To the Platonists beauty meant the “splendour of order.” I wondered whether these thinkers had ever known crude reality as we knew it. I was in search of some reality that might be beauty, but nowhere I looked could I see either order or truth. The impulse, which I think all men feel without exception, toward order and truth, and the chaos and conflict which men’s actions cause, simply did not make sense together.113 It was in the prose, poetics, and stance of Walt Whitman, who employed a “tougher philosophy” to illuminate the chaos of “crude reality,” that Progressive poets found the fullest embodiment of their vision for the role poetry might play in American life. Born to a poor family of farmers on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, editor, teacher, and typesetter before becoming a published author. Politics greatly informed his writing. He wrote a temperance novel and articles on the rights of immigrants, women, and workers, and protested the expansion of slavery into Western territories, empathetically describing the suffering of those in bondage. In 1855 he self-published the landmark Leaves of Grass. Written in free verse, the book marked a departure in many ways. In the preface, Whitman charted a more democratic course for American poets, steering clear of “talk on the soul and eternity and God” and keeping his sights on average men and on women, nature, equality, and justice: This is what you shall do: Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people . . . go freely with powerful, uneducated persons . . . reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book.114 Whitman’s ideal poet was neither aloof, effete, nor learned, but instead ambled along the avenue “stung with compassion” for his

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fellow man. He did not compose ballads about medieval love, but he did “flood himself with the immediate age” and wrote about machines, trains, inventors, chemists, and slavery. He saw no need for priests, no divide between poetry and science, no need to shy away from difficult, controversial subjects. “The English language,” after all, “is brawny enough and limber and full enough.” From the famous opening line, “I celebrate myself” to the infamous “loveflesh swelling and deliciously aching,/Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous,” Whitman’s vision of democracy in verse marked a departure in form, kind, and attitude. He described himself in unabashed terms: “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,/ Disorderly, fleshly, and sensual . . . eating drinking and breeding,/No sentimentalist . . . no stander above men and women or apart from them . . . no more modest than immodest.”115 Although some readers admired the author’s combination of transcendentalism and brawn, most contemporary reviewers took offense. Rufus Griswold deemed Leaves of Grass a “mass of stupid filth” and invoked Latin to criticize the inclusion of homosexual references: “Peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum” (“that horrible sin not to be named among Christians”). Unlike Griswold, Edmund Stedman included Whitman in his anthology, but he also voiced objection to the poet’s inclusion of physical and sexual themes: “The Underside of things should be avoided in art since Nature, not meaning it to be shown, often deprives it of beauty.” The mere presence of ugliness aggrieved his cultured sensibility and, besides, boldness did not lead to beauty, discretion did: “It is not squeamishness that leaves something to the imagination . . . The law of suggestion, of half- concealment, determines the choicest effects, and is the surest road to truth.”116 Whitman continued to revise the book, publishing various editions over the years. Those, too, garnered censure. The conservative magazine The Dial in Chicago complained about “his lack of a sense of poetic fitness, his failure to understand the business of a poet,” while the Literary World condemned “passages which sound like a lecture on the obstetrics of lust . . . and the apotheosis of the phallus.” In 1882 a district attorney in Boston officially declared the volume obscene literature and the postmaster banned it from the mails.117 Whitman had breached the rules of conduct governing authorial etiquette. In the nineteenth century, engaging a text resembled a polite conversation in mixed company. Readers imagined

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a relationship with the author and discerned his or her character through diction, tone, and subject matter. As Barbara Hochman’s study of reading practices of the period concluded: “A sense of connection ‘to one’s author’ was considered an inevitable, legitimate, indeed desirable part of the reading experience.”118 Offended by Whitman’s untoward references, readers of genteel periodicals turned instead to volumes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier, which they kept on shelves next to their fireside (hence, the term “Fireside Poets”) and organized groups such as the Tennyson Society and Browning Society because these writers comported themselves with august refinement and their poetry formed the culmination of sensibility and feeling. As Americans struggled in the discordant 1890s to tailor their ethos of agrarian individualism to a world girded with aggressive capitalism, Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” became much more fashionable. In an era of office buildings and telegraphs, plutocracy and speculation, nativism and imperialism, calls for a more compassionate, seamless society held more allure not only among the dispossessed, but among the middle class as well. A new generation of writers also found appealing his insistence, which Henri Bergson also endorsed, that poets engross themselves in the object or scene under examination, then register their perception, not as a realistic photograph but as an effusive moment of simultaneity and passion. With the consolidation and codification of Jim Crow around the country, African-American educators were among the first to invoke Whitman’s poetic vision. In 1895, the year of Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Exposition Address,” Kelly Miller, a dean at Howard University, appeared before the Walt Whitman Fellowship to praise the poet’s “aesthetic,” which transcended white- only notions of beauty and were anchored by the principles of equality and democracy. “In the literary realm of Whitman all are welcome; none are denied, shunned, avoided, ridiculed or made to feel ashamed. Indeed, Whitman’s whole theory is a protest against such exclusion.”119 Almost fifteen years later, Ezra Pound made a case for recognition of Whitman’s achievement, declaring him “America’s poet.” In 1910 James Oppenheim insisted, “Walt Whitman is the founder of the new poetry,” and argued that “We younger writers of America— and there must be thousands of us trying to throw our age into

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poetry—should strike out now deliberately and without fear. We must build on Walt Whitman.” Two years later, Leonard Abbot deemed Whitman “a liberator.”120 At Poetry magazine, Alice Corbin Henderson explained how Whitman helped break the stronghold of classicism and book-inspired writing by shouting “comradeship with all nature and all men” and urging compositions drawn “from nature directly, from the people directly, from the political meeting, and the hayfield, and the factory.”121 Harriet Monroe listed his contributions: insisting on “freedom of form”; rejecting “archaic diction”; and, most importantly, “his reassertion of the ancient conception of the poet as prophet, and of poetry as religion, as an ecstatic expression of faith.”122 In The Spirit of American Literature (1913) John Macy blamed inattention to Whitman’s genius on the country’s educational and publishing establishment: “The middle class thinkers and teachers who manage our schools and our press are undemocratic and ignorant.” Amy Lowell wrote that Whitman helped modern poets to bridge the divides between nature and man and between science and poetry, while Santayana credited him for “being wholly direct, utterly sincere, and bothering about nothing that was not an experience of the soul and of the sense here in the foreground of life.”123 One writer who successfully negotiated this complex cultural terrain and heeded Whitman’s calls for poets to write about modern life in all its complexity in a spirit of comradeship was Edwin Arlington Robinson. A youthful admirer of Romantic poets, the Maine-born poet wanted nevertheless to inject more humor, sympathy, and, if poetry was to assume a more strenuous function, more contemporary themes. He began his career in the 1890s but found little acclaim for his lugubrious, unheroic tales of butchers, clerks, misers, and failures. Unable to find a publisher for his first volume The Torrent and The Night Before, Robinson in 1896 privately printed three hundred copies.124 In The Children of the Night (1897) he detailed the underside of modern life while remaining within the bounds of poetic decorum. The book is replete with references to God, souls, and sorrows, and abounds with exclamation points. It included a poem about Whitman that diagnosed the reasons why Americans ignored his path-breaking work. Whitman’s cadences were “too powerfully pure,/Too lovingly triumphant, and too large.” Albeit, he predicted that Whitman’s popularity would soon increase: “There are some that hear him, and they know/That

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he shall sing to-morrow for all men,/And that all time shall listen.” The poem “Octaves” designated the robust role poets should play in modern society: To get to the eternal strength of things, And fearlessly to make strong songs of it, Is, to my mind, the mission of that man The world would call a poet. He may sing But roughly, and withal ungraciously; But if he touch to life the right chord Wherein God’s music slumbers, and awake To truth one drowsed ambition, he sings well.125 Beauty, Robinson suggested, was about penetrating essential truths. He strove for realism, minimalism, and, in “The Clerks,” monosyllabism: I did not think that I should find them there When I came back again: but there they stood, As in the days they dreamed of when young blood Was in their cheeks and women called them fair . . . Neither editors nor readers in the 1890s, accustomed to the faintly profound and meretricious, knew what to make of such simplicity. It came as little surprise to Robinson when rejection letters from The Atlantic Monthly, The Century, Harper’s, and Scribner’s piled up. The lack of esteem smarted nevertheless. In “Sonnet” Robinson called on poets to “flush Parnassus with a newer light” and “To put these little sonnet men to flight.” He wrote of editorial policies and their torpid output: Oh, for a poet—for a beacon bright To rift this changeless glimmer of dead gray . . . To put these little sonnet-men to flight Who fashion, in a shrewd mechanic way, Songs without souls . . . 126 Robinson confronted the squalor of industrialization and the spiritual confusion of Western civilization in austere and minimal verse. He explained the central “message” of his poetry in a letter

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to his friend William Braithwaite: “I suppose that a part of it might be described as a faint hope of making a few of us understand our fellow creatures a little better, and to realize what a small difference there is, after all, between ourselves, as we are, and ourselves, not only as we might have been but would have been if our physical and temperamental makeup and our environment had been a little different.”127 Charges that his poetry veered too far away from idealism into the realm of pessimism dogged Robinson. Harry Thurston Peck, Columbia University professor and literary editor at The Bookman, lauded the “austere restraint” and “true fire” but cautioned readers about the poet’s pessimism: “His humor is of a grim sort, and the world is not beautiful to him, but a prison-house. In the night-time there is weeping and sorrow, and joy does not come in the morning.” Robinson qualified Peck’s caveat, asserting, “The world is not a ‘prison-house,’ but a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”128 Expanding the boundaries of beauty, Robinson maintained, equipped people with some of the right blocks to comprehend the modern human condition. To do this, poetry could and should reflect confusion and the resulting grief; to ignore it risked courting irrelevance. Other writers also came up against this prejudice against poems that imparted pessimistic themes. The Chicago German daily, Abendpost, offered to purchase George Sylvester Viereck’s “humanistic poems” but not those that dealt with “Weltschmerz” (“world-weariness”). Viereck confided to his diary that, although “Werner finds my poems good, the contents are for him too pessimistic. The beast, man doesn’t like to hear that he is imperfect and not immortal.”129 Editors at The Century, on the verge of accepting Louis Untermeyer’s “Landscapes,” ultimately declined because of the poem’s politics and pessimism. “Your doggone social conscience could have been shooed out of this poem to its benefit,” William Rose Benét explained. “Do you not think that your delight in the world could sometimes be allowed a fling without being pulled back by the masses?” The editor justified his conviction as a practical necessity rather than a deliberate act of willful nonperception: “Probably you will think this extremely absurd of me. But it isn’t a question of blinking the dark side; it’s the fact that the dark side is so overwhelmingly present in most of our good fiction and poetry now that makes us long for a little unspoiled jubilation.”130 In other correspondence, Benét displayed less patience

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and tact. Returning a sonnet, he complained, “It’s merely crass. It has nothing to do with upbuilding this world.”131 The mental, moral, and manual dexterity needed to shift from genteel notions of beauty as uplift to beauty as bewildering proved too difficult for some. Robinson, for example, tried to convince members of Boston’s literary community to expand their horizons and include a wider array of perspectives in their verse. He advised Josephine Preston Peabody to drop “philosophizing” and “twittering at infinities”and instead “Write about things objective.” Peabody, who had been counseled to observe traditional notions of beauty by The Atlantic Monthly editor Horace Scudder, tried to heed Robinson’s advice to no avail.132 As she confided to her diary, “how can I without being D—d pessimistic?” To her, beauty was “the ever-living Presence” that suffered “imprisonment in every human spirit,” and for which she had an “overpowering homesickness.” For a writer “to heap up human discouragement” would be an “almost unforgivable sin.” She made a great, desperate plea for genteel values, saying that the poet always must “give the positive crumb, the positive, the positive! . . . to rescue, rescue, rescue, greet, restore.”133 Peabody worked out her position in a letter to a friend: “What is the Will of God but Ultimate Beauty, Perfection, Peace, Tenderness, Glory, Radiance, Radiance, Truth true enough to be beautiful? . . . [T]he Will of God is that all things shall be full of Love and Truth; we ourselves so full of love and truth as to become a part of the very fabric of divinity.”134 Even George Bernard Shaw perceived this wide-spread, deeply embedded penchant for a culture of uplift over fugues of pessimism.In his 1903 play “Man and Superman” he depicts a young American man named Hector Malone as pleasant but naïve, fashionably dressed but intellectually shabby. Filled with “a penchant for edifying rhetoric (which he calls moral tone),” Hector cannot even countenance hearing people mention the names of Nietzsche and Anatole France, so he counters by invoking Matthew Arnold, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and Macauley.135 Finally, in 1905, Robinson received support from President Theodore Roosevelt. Throughout his life, Roosevelt remained an avid poetry reader. His sister Corinne recalled that, as a young boy, he committed many lines by heart and liked to chant poems by Longfellow, Swinburne, Browning, and Kipling.136 After reading The Children of the Night, sent to him by his son Kermit, Roosevelt proclaimed to Richard Gilder (who was visiting the White House to write an article

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“The President as a Reader” for The Century): “I’ve found a poet.” As a result of the Rough Rider’s compliment, Gilder reconsidered the merits of Robinson’s plain-spoken sketches of characters such as Richard Cory, Reuben Bright, and Cliff Klingenhagen, and accepted “Uncle Ananias” for the magazine.137 Gradually but powerfully, the entire national apprehension of poetry began to change as the confluence of new ideas, inspirations, and institutions that linked poets, readers, and critics permitted a new understanding of what readers and authors could expect both from poetry and from each other. Instead of lying inert by firesides waiting to bring comfort and good cheer, poetry had to be refitted to meet contemporary needs. As Henry Adams charted in his autobiography, Daimler motors, electricity, and the dynamo (technology) more generally had by 1900 become “a symbol of infinity” and “a moral force.” Verse, to be relevant, assumed a more dynamic valence. As the last vestiges of Victorian culture, marked by piety, moralism, and coherence of knowledge, gave way to the fragmentation, unpredictability, and critical rationality of early-twentieth century life, so too did the old coteries of elite brownstone editors, poets, and publishers give way to new poetic communities, complete with their own forms and forums, subjects and values. Members of these various poetic communities that emerged in the first two decades of the twentieth century carried volumes of poetry as they worked to address the profound ethical problems posed by unrestrained capitalism. They agitated for the rights of workers, sought better conditions for laborers and immigrants, and called for federal regulation of business and finance. They also demanded individual responsibility, exhorting workers to honor the Sabbath and practice temperance. They published protests of racially motivated violence, marched for women’s rights, volunteered at Hull House, voted for William Jennings Bryan, Roosevelt, and Eugene Debs, and fought in trenches at Meuse-Argonne. They cherished strong beliefs about the primacy of feeling and imagination in effecting change, and employed a moral vocabulary that thematized Platonic notions of literature. Poetry, they believed, as much as politics, could reform American values.

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2 Reforming Verse, Uplifting Society: The Labor Theory of Poetic Value

The first influence of Whitman was not in form but in ethics, it brought about the social movement in poetry of which Edwin Markham was the first, and remains the greatest, voice . . . poets caught fire from this flame and turned the art to the immediate needs of humanity.1 —Jessie B. Rittenhouse (1915) The man looked familiar. He stood in a rectangular field of sod, stones, and thistles. Legs squared, shoulders rounded, he leaned on a curved wooden handle. As Edwin Markham stared at the farmer in Jean Francois Millet’s painting “The Man with a Hoe,” he recalled the back-breaking chores on his mother’s farm. Years later when he traveled throughout the foothills of the Sierra mountains inspecting schools, he met families who had traveled west to homestead, mortgaged their land to buy provisions, and grew bitter as banks, wholesale distributors, and railroads profited from their labor. Their experience belied the republican agrarian myth about the nobility of working the soil. Ridden with debt, these farmers protested a system that benefited monopolies and barons rather than those who produced goods. The growing numbers of industrial laborers endured the same geometry of grief. In sweatshops, mine shafts, and on factory floors, workers had precious few opportunities to stave off dirt and despondency. Over the years Markham returned to Millet’s portrait. He took notes, wrote down lines of verse, and saw the original painting in person. By 1898, he had an eight-page poem, “The Man with the Hoe.” In simple language and traditional form he described the dilemma of a farmer whose endless drudgery and poverty left him dehumanized; 57

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Figure 2.1 Edwin Markham, 1899, the year he wrote “The Man with the Hoe.” Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

deprived of beauty, he becomes bovine. The poem became a major literary and cultural event because it voiced a discontent that echoed a wider social dissatisfaction. It resonated on an intellectual and emotional level with Progressive reform projects and converged with strategies that appealed to moral sensibilities to bring about social

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regeneration, which tended to souls and selfhood over property and prosperity. Markham combined the positions of the era’s literary heroes—Whitman, Shelley, Ruskin—into a kind of cowboy aesthetics that made the poet more relevant and manly. By broadening the subject matter acceptable in verse, “The Man with the Hoe” marked a turning point in the relationship between American poetry and politics. It also helped to clear the logjam in poetic production and reception, creating a current of verse that inspired poets and excited readers. As a result, the poem became another milestone in the making of the poetry explosion in the 1910s. Markham’s early years augured a life on the rodeo circuit rather than the lecture circuit. After running a tavern in White Pigeon, Michigan, for several years, his parents, Sam and Elizabeth, moved west, heading a caravan of emigrants in covered wagons across the plains through Indian territory and ranging herds of buffalo. Members of the wagon train settled in Oregon City where Elizabeth tended a general store and Sam, with the help of their seven children (four from his previous marriage), ran a ranch. Edwin was born in 1852 and his parents divorced soon after. He moved with his mother, a sister Louisa, and Columbia, his deaf mute brother, to California. 2 Instead of hiring farm help, which she could have afforded with the generous divorce settlement, Elizabeth, an austere Campbellite, pressed her children into work on the one-hundred-and-fifty-acre farmstead. One by one they ran away until only the youngest, Edwin, remained. Beginning at age seven, he worked as a shepherd, farmer, and cattle herder. He spent his adolescence astride a horse riding the five-mile trail to a one-room school house, and sleeping in the California foothills under the stars. Although lonely, Markham drew unstinted pleasure from books, which he had to keep hidden from his mother who worried he would discern a more desirable life beyond the drudgeries of filial duty. Her fears were not without warrant. At the age of thirteen, he happened upon a copy of Lord Byron’s poems and began “dreaming delicious dreams of a rosy future when I should have nothing to do but read books and to write them.” In school, a teacher introduced him to a wider world of literature, including Thomas Moore, William Cullen Bryant, and Lord Alfred Tennyson. At the age of twenty-three, Markham left home after his mother refused to let him attend college.3

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Markham found a way to pursue his education, despite having to live a hardscrabble existence for the next decade. After graduating from the State Normal School in San Jose, he held a series of teaching positions before settling in as principal of a school in Eldorado County, famous as the site of James Marshall’s discovery of gold in 1848. These and later postings in San Francisco and Oakland brought him into direct contact with children of poor and immigrant families, as well as the country’s most powerful labor activists. Markham, who had grown up fatherless, now determined to provide moral, spiritual, and even financial support to the fortuneless. He believed that the first step in alleviating suffering lay in exposing it.4 Markham’s renown as a learned, devoted teacher and administrator grew quickly, and he soon was approached to run for superintendent of schools on the Republican ticket. In this position, which he handily won, Markham’s duties required him to inspect schools throughout the county. He spent long stretches of time riding along trails and reading, finding nuggets of inspiration in radical writings, such as those by Marx, Fourier, Kropotkin, and sympathetic studies of the 1871 Paris Commune, while Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs stirred Markham to the power of literature to illuminate injustice. Consonant with this philosophy, the teachings of mystical poet and utopian communist Thomas Lake Harris exerted a tremendous influence on the young educator. Harris had established the Fountain Grove colony in Santa Rosa where followers worked communally to maintain the grounds and vineyards while imbibing teachings about charity, brotherhood, and the living Christ.5 Living in California, a state with a large number of railroad, mining, and other corporate trusts, Markham became convinced that capitalism exacerbated human greed and perpetuated an unjust distribution of wealth. He also came to believe that the moral power of art could temper avarice and induce charity. Christianity, political philosophy, and poetry were complementary modes of promoting social melioration. Shelley remained a life-long inspiration. “I love Shelley . . . [I] have in me something of that rebellion that stirred thro [sic] his life,” he wrote. But Markham despaired finding like-minded activists: “And yet in these days of protest and prophecy, I seldom find any group to which I seem to fraternize. The Christian Socialists do not quite represent all that my soul asks for.” America lacked a trade union movement and a literati that combined this brand of aesthetics, activism, and religion. Until genteel-modern poetic communities

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formed in the 1910s, it was only in Ruskin’s lectures challenging capitalist valuation, published as Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workman and Labourers of Great Britain, 1871–1878, that Markham found “a frequent voice to my thought.” Although he found in Ruskin “a soul that is all Sweetness and Light,” Markham ran into difficulties balancing the claims of beauty with the demands of justice and support for handicrafts with advocacy of the labor movement.6 Throughout the following decade, from 1886 to 1896, The Century, Scribner’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and Overland Monthly published poems by Markham, but not any that transgressed the prim and patrician ideas of American periodicals. So when Edmund Stedman sent Markham a personal note, the aspiring author wrote proudly to his mother about it: “He says that to him, my poetry is ‘truly and exquisitely poetic.’ Mr. Stedman is admitted to be the greatest living critic in America; hence I feel encouraged to think that I can do work which cultivated minds will admire.” While accepting the tenets of such a powerful cultural authority in public, Markham expressed dismay in private. He found that the canon, as arranged in Stedman’s 1893 edition of Poets of America, granted “too much time and space to the ephemera, the little singers of the hour.” In a letter to Walter Harte, editor of New England Monthly, Markham spoke of the need for magazine editors to publish verse that did more than glorify noble ideals: “There are moments when the shell of our conventional life breaks, and we see the pettiness and fatuity of our mean existence, its office-holdings, its money-gettings, its back-biting, its jealousies, its deceptions.”7 Markham also had to justify his conviction to render the real, as much as the ideal, in life and poetry to his future wife, Anna Catherine Murphy. Secretary of the California Teachers’ Association and poet in her own right, she believed that each individual had the power to build their character and advance their station in life. Markham responded to this individualistic ethos by pointing out structural inequalities, and by questioning her definition of the poet’s role: You are right in saying that the reformers need to reform themselves—to make themselves whole-hearted men. But after all this has been said it still remains a fact that man needs a better system of social justice, a better structure of Social Safety . . . Of course the poet’s offering must always be poetical; but after making that

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stipulation, shall we say that this and this is an interdicted field of thought? Markham acknowledged that “Keats is right: we need the ‘hearteasing things,’ ” yet insisted that life and poetry demanded more than respite from personal grief and the pursuit of private joys. “If you knew me better you would not grieve that I feel this Social Passion, for it is the best and most unselfish thing in my life.”8 In the preface to a prospective volume to be titled either Song of the Labor Muse or Song of the New Humanity, Markham dolefully, and somewhat grandiosely, noted the kind of reception poems supporting Henry George’s Single Tax doctrine, women’s suffrage, or Agrarian protest against land speculation would receive: This Book will be rejected, spit on, cursed The multitude of pigmy souls will pass it by It will be burnt (Burnt in the same fire that burnt Galileo’s books) Still its free soul will live It cannot [die]; its root is God All that’s aspiring in our destiny . . . 9 Dedicated “To the Immortal Memory of Shelley, Poet and Socialist,” the book was roundly rejected by publishers. Eventually, Markham published the pieces as individual selections in various newspapers and magazines. With genteel editors in the States ignoring his political verse, Markham looked overseas, to London, for encouragement, and received it from one of his great heroes, William Morris. In September 1886, the Guild Socialist and poet printed in Commonweal Markham’s “The Song of the Workers,” written to commemorate the “martyrs” of the 1871 Paris Commune who “faced the ancient Wrong in wrath.”10 Markham also found a more welcoming reception outside the rigid world of genteel editors where a widely divergent array of literature flourished. Poems written to be sung during meetings and marches gained popularity among urban workers during the Gilded Age. Between 1865 and 1895, thousands of song-poems circulated in this unofficial culture. The sharp class division in reading audiences prevented working- class poets from readily reaching middleclass audiences.11 In the 1890s, over 2,400 volumes of verse were

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published, the majority by vanity presses. Simplistic poems on rural themes in local dialect predominated. Not far behind were the Kiplingesque “Be” poems: “Be brave,” “Be patient,” “Be cheerful,” “Be true,” “Be kind.” Volumes dealing with domesticity and death also sold well, particularly anthologies of verse about deceased children and dead pets, and “Ernest Willie” Upshaw earned acclaim for his self-titled book of poems about invalids.12 The first edition of 3,000 sold out quickly, with an eighth edition still selling well in 1899. Each region in the country generated such poems in conventional forms on standard themes. Out West, “Breezy Western Verses” tumbled across the frontier, while Southern poets spun romanticized tales about a supposed “Easy World” of antebellum slaves and masters.13 Sentimental humor likewise found a ready audience. The most popular poet of the 1870s, Will Carleton, sold 40,000 copies of Farm Ballads. The “barefoot boy from Indiana” James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916), was able to leave his day jobs as an actor in a patent medicine show and painter for ads on barns to become a full-time poet by following this creed: What We want, as I sense it, in the line O’ poetry is somepin’ Yours and Mine— Somepin’ with live-stock in it, and out- doors, And old crick-bottoms, snags, and sycamores . . . Putt in old Nature’s sermonts,—them’s the best,— And ‘casion’ly hang up a hornets’ nest ‘At boys ‘at’s run away from school can git At handy-like—and let ‘em tackle it . . .14 Riley strove to connect with the reader (“The heart is all”) by creating a sympathetic protagonist in the familiar setting of childhood, family life, or “Days gone by.”15 His life and work covered the time when the country transformed from a nation of mostly rural farmers to one that was largely urban and industrial. In such poems as “The Raggedy Man” and “Little Orphan Annie,” he invoked nostalgic images of hard-working, independent pioneers who lived in simple, stable idylls. In many ways, Riley modeled his career on that of his hero, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who urged readers to pursue cultivation as

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he sifted stories from American history to produce compelling tales; he characterized his approach in “The Day Is Done”: Some simple and heartfelt way, That shall soothe this restless feeling, And banish the thoughts of the day.16 In 1855, the year Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Americans flocked to buy Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, which opened with an intimate invitation to the reader: Ye who love a nation’s legends, Love the ballads of a people, That like voices from afar off Call to us to pause and listen, Speak in tones so plain and childlike, Scarcely can the ear distinguish Whether they are sung or spoken;— Listen to this Indian Legend, To this Song of Hiawatha!17 Riley similarly courted a general reading audience. Lacking much education or money, he had no compunction about writing “to please the masses,” convinced that readers wanted “smiles and wholesome cheer and heartening words,” not “sobs and tears and agony.” As long as “words have poetic strength, if they are fervid, sublime, if they stir the heart, excite the emotions, burn with scorn[,] thrill with hope and promise,” then a poet could be “sure of an audience.”18 When Kentucky poet Madison Cawein solicited his advice on how to increase readers and sales, Riley responded: “Keep ‘em [poems] all sunny and sweet and wholesome clean to the core, or if ever tragic, with sound hopes ultimate, if pathetic, my God! With your own tears baptized and made good as mirth!”19 In his Hoosier dialect poems, Cawein paraded a tableau of good-hearted, common-sensed characters. His fame grew so great that his picture appeared on stationery, souvenir cards, and broadsides. Restaurants were named after him, and the U.S. Postal Service issued commemorative stamps with his image.20 Not everyone cheered Riley’s work. The surly San Francisco columnist Ambrose Bierce declared Riley’s writings “dreary

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illiterature” and “his sentiment sediment.” These remarks cut because, although Riley insisted that “it’s the people who make literature” and that poems the people disliked would “prove to be false, factitious, unhuman documents,” he nonetheless yearned for critical acclaim. Beginning in the 1870s, Riley sent selections to genteel publications even though he knew that they only published writers who wrote long poems that evoked universal themes. He finally found an admirer in Robert Underwood Johnson who wrote to Riley after the publication of The Old Swimmin’-Hole and ‘Leven More Poems to say: “There is nobody present writing who seems, to me, to get so much of the genuine human nature into a short space as you have.”21 The Century published “In Swimming-Time” that year and, after Underwood assumed editorial duties, more followed. After twenty years of submissions from the Midwest poet, The Atlantic Monthly published “The Sermon of the Rose” in 1898. By then, these editors had come to view Riley as an ally in ensuring morally uplifting literature. With them, he believed that “In all genuine poetry there is a poignant quality that strikes at the center of the human heart, and quivers there and thrills us through and through with gentler emotions, higher purposes and yearnings to be better than we are.” Likewise, about the literary realism found in fellow Hoosier Theodore Dreiser, Riley commented: “There is no call for this problem writing. Why don’t these people look around them and see the beautiful things given for their admiration. All this feverish nasty stuff has no right to exist.” Readers faced enough difficulties in life; they did not need to deal with more in art. Riley promised poems that would “lead the human [being] in pleasant places, cheer him by holding up to him only the bright the beautiful and the good.”22 Such commitment to poetry that combined genteel aesthetics with popular appeal made Riley a nationally recognized poet. He recited poems for presidents from Grover Cleveland to Woodrow Wilson, received honorary degrees from Yale (where his fans included Professors Henry Beers and William Lyon Phelps), the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, and Wabash College; and in 1908, with Underwood’s sponsorship, the National Institute of Arts and Letters elected him a member, awarding him, in 1912, the medal for distinction in poetry. James Riley Day became a state-wide celebration in Indiana in 1911 and a national affair in 1915. When he died in 1916, his body was laid in state at the state capitol rotunda, an

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honor granted only to Abraham Lincoln and General Henry Lawton (head of U.S. forces in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War).23 In tone and intent, Markham differed sharply from popular poets of the day. Not surprisingly, it was in newspapers and the cheap periodical press, not the genteel periodicals, that Markham secured outlets for his work. In the July 1880 issue of California Magazine, he published “In Earth’s Shadow,” a poem that reflected his primary concerns. In a letter to his mother he explained his intent in the work: I endeavor to represent the sad spirits of the world, the poor, the broken-hearted, all the children of defeat, the dwellers in earth’s shadow, under the figures of sad petrels . . . At times hope comes to them as a rosy wind, but soon passes on . . . their dream of rest dissolving.24 In another poem from the 1880s, Markham composed an apostrophe to religious and political leaders who focused on doctrine and power instead of serving the poor as the carpenter from Nazareth did: O stewards in the churches and the state Why look you idly on from tower and gate. Where is the Highway you have built for Him, Where is the throne for Christ the Artisan—25 Throughout the 1890s, as Markham struggled to find fellowship and outlets for his more rebellious verse, he contributed feature articles to local papers. For a piece commissioned by The Californian on the 1893 Chicago Columbia exposition, Markham attended the expo’s Literary Congress. A speech by Charles Dudley Warner, Mark Twain’s co-author of The Gilded Age (1873), admonished aspiring writers to cater to the demands of the general audience—a notion Markham condemned as pandering as he believed poets had the insight and moral authority to lead, not merely follow. 26 Markham returned to the theme of poets as Christian stewards five years later in “The Hope of Nations,” a work written in response to the Spanish-American War that foretold Christ’s second coming, when He would rally people with thecry: “Come, let us live the poetry we sing!”27

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By 1896, after a decade of organizing and unrest, the cause of labor faltered on both the poetical and political fronts. Markham had supported the presidential bid of the “Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryan whose defeat that year was followed by a resurgence of free market boosterism as economic recovery, the Klondike Gold Rush, and support for the Spanish-American War effaced the remaining traces of the depression that had begun in 1893. In this environment the cause of labor appeared bereft of support. This all changed on a Sunday in January of 1899 when a Progressive newspaper owned by William Randolph Hearst published a poem that was thirteen years in the making. Markham had originally conceived the work in 1886 when a friend brought to his attention a woodcut of a painting by Jean Francois Millet. Markham regarded the image as a synecdoche for the plight of the honest, powerless poor: I soon realized that Millet puts before us no chance peasant, no mere man of the fields. No; this stunned and stolid peasant is the type of industrial oppression in all lands and in all labors. He might be a man with a needle in a New York sweatshop, a man with a pick in a West Virginia coal mine, a man with a hoe in a London alley, a man with a spade on the banks of Zuyder Zee.28 Markham immediately wrote “field notes” for a poem that blended morality, politics, and aesthetics. Over the years, he maintained a file on Millet, read his biography, and tinkered with drafts. The first lines depicted a farmer as an object of pity, more brother to animal than to man: Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world. Who made him dead to rapture and despair, A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

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The worker’s plight disrupted the natural order and divine harmony of the universe by denying access to eternal ideals. For this “Slave of the wheel of labor,” beauty had no value: . . . what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Laying the blame for this morass on the powerful and wealthy, Markham appealed to their moral sensibilities to secure a remedy: O masters, lords and rulers in all land, Is this the handiwork you give to God, This monstrous thing distorted and soul- quenched? How will you ever straighten up this shape; Touch it again with immortality; Give back the upward looking and the light; Rebuild in it the music and the dream; Make right the immemorial infamies, The question was not rhetorical. The fate of the powerful lay in the answer. He warned: How will the Future reckon with this Man? How answer his brute question in that hour When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores? How will it be with kingdoms and with kings— With those who shaped him to the thing he is— When this dumb terror shall rise to judge the world, After the silence of the centuries?29 With the final version of the forty-nine–line poem complete in 1898, Markham had contemplated submitting it to The Century, categorizing it as he did among his less radical compositions because of its appeal to God and to those in power, rather than to revolution. He used traditional form and content that, while not standard or sentimental, were certainly not shocking. After all, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth, in his famous preface to the Lyrical Ballads, had expressed his desire to write verse about rustic

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folk in accessible language. Robert Burns captured the vernacular of his native Scotland, while in America Victorian writers composed odes about the plight of farmers assailed by drought, locusts, and dust storms, as well as currency deflation, competition from Europe, and Eastern speculators. In sonnets, these poets counterpoised virtuous, healthy farm life with greedy, unsanitary urban existence. Few untoward aspects of life remained untreated in the verse of the socalled age of innocence.30 However, few of those poems had any intimations of class struggle or directly addressed owners of the means of production, and their audience remained limited. At a New Year’s Eve party in California in 1898, guests took turn singing songs and otherwise providing entertainment. Markham took a stack of pages out of his pocket, freshly typed earlier that day, and read “The Man with the Hoe.” Newspaper editor Bailey Millard felt that the poem expressed something new and profound. He prevailed upon Markham to publish it in The San Francisco Examiner, a Hearst newspaper that had already printed exposes of the Southern Pacific Railroad’s unfair rate schedules and the popular “Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888” by Ernest Thayer called “Casey at the Bat.” “The Man with the Hoe” appeared with a full-page treatment in the magazine section on January 15, 1899. In order to draw more attention, Millard commissioned a decorative draughtsman to border the poem with sketches of orchids below a reproduction of the Millet painting and wrote “An Appreciation of Professor Markham’s Virile Verse,” which appeared along with the work.31 The poem became an instant sensation. Equally significant was the way individuals commented on Markham’s masculine qualities. In The Octopus (1901), Frank Norris based the character of Presley in part on the now famous Markham. Presley is counterpoised to other literati in San Francisco, most notably Mr. Hatrath, who has a limp handshake, shoulder-length hair, composes sonnets, accepts patronage from the despised railroad trust, and admits, not without pride, “ ‘I am too sensitive. It is my cross. Beauty,’ he closed his sore eyes with a little expression of pain, ‘beauty unmans me.’ ” When Presley protests the railroad’s conduct (he spends the novel trying to find ways to dismantle its power), Hatrath warns: “If the poets become materialised [sic] . . . what can we say to the people?” Throughout the story, Presley’s efforts to write an epic “Song of the West” is stymied by a sensibility ignorant of suffering: “His convictions had not been aroused; he had not then cared for the People. His sympathies had not

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been touched . . . Now he was of the People; he had been stirred to his lowest depths.” Presley knows he has written a great poem because he responded to criticism by declaring, “I am sincere.” Presley does not publish the poem in a monthly periodical, such as Scribner’s or Harper’s, which were for “the rich,” but in a popular medium: the daily newspaper.32 Norris characterized the poem’s success (in the novel the poem is called “The Toilers”) in this way: It was promptly copied in New York, Boston, and Chicago papers. It was discussed, attacked, defended, eulogised, ridiculed. It was praised with the most fulsome adulation; assailed with the most violent condemnation. Editorials were written upon it. Special articles, in literary pamphlets, dissected its rhetoric and prosody. The phrases were quoted,--were used as texts for revolutionary sermons, reactionary speeches. It was parodied; it was distorted so as to read as an advertisement for patented cereals and infants’ foods.33 This fictional assessment did not stray far from reality. A contemporary journalist observed about “The Man with the Hoe”: The poem flew eastward across the continent, like a contagion. As fast as the mails carried it, newspapers printed it as a fresh focus of infection, first California and the Pacific Coast, then the Mississippi Valley, on into New York and New England, over the line into Canada. Within a week, phrases and couplets from it were on every lip. Newspaper editions containing it were exhausted and publishers reprinted it, together with editorials about it, and the hundreds of manuscripts of comment received from the public. The newspapers, a historian of the day remarked, as a unique phenomenon, “gave as much space to ‘The Man With the Hoe’ as to prize-fights and police stories. The clergy made the poem their text, platform orators dilated upon it, college professors lectured upon it, debating societies discussed it, schools took it up for study.”34 To admirers, a lyrical rendering of one of life’s most pressing problems appeared as a providentially bestowed gift, providing a model for the potential of poetry to become socially relevant. A new generation of aesthetic progressives discovered in Markham’s stark immediacy a way to combine their conscience with culture. Arthur Davison Ficke remembered: “It happened to voice a criticism and an ideal

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which were latent in the minds of the many; and so it touched that hidden spring which controls the great flood of popular emotion.”35 Letters and reprint requests as well as critical praise poured in. Writer Hamlin Garland declared it “a great thing and a beautiful thing, in the sense that a strain from Wagner is great and beautiful.” Fellow Bay Area poet Joaquin Miller likened the poem to “the whole Yosemite— the thunder, the might, the majesty.”36 Eugene Debs memorized it and delivered a prose version of the poem in a speech before the Nineteenth Century Club entitled “The Genius of Liberty.” He wrote to Markham, “Rarely does it fall to the lot of man to arouse as electrifying the world with a single stroke of his genius.”37 Author Joseph Dana Miller lauded the poet’s ability to articulate a social evil in such appealing terms.38 Ridgely Torrence, who would go on to write a series of verse plays about the realities of African-American life, spoke for a generation of aspiring poets when he thanked Markham for providing an American model of poetic achievement: “It means a great deal to a youngster like me to have a master in his art among his own living countrymen; throughout my boyhood I had to look across to Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watson and Mr. Kipling.”39 Others gave more qualified praise. William James deemed the poem, “magnificent” and brimming with “humanity and morality,” but questioned the depiction of the hoe man: “I think myself that he is a happier and better and less terrible creation than it has pleased you to consider him for the purposes of your verses.”40 Another reader complained that getting ahead in a capitalist society simply required initiative and risk. This Horatio Alger-bootstraps mentality held that lack of ingenuity, not oppressive structures, kept individuals mired in meaningless work: The men that the poet would symbolize by “The Man with the Hoe,” in this country at least, have infinite opportunities, and if they still continue to hoe it is because they are fit for nothing else. To champion the cause of their worthlessness shows but a narrow, certainly a morbid, view of modern civilization.41 Edmund Stedman acknowledged that the poem had “certain lasting qualities,” but he balked at the technical deficiencies: Blank verse should not depend merely on its five feet to a line, but even more upon its caesuras. I observe, that with few exceptions,

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you have no breaks or pauses in the middle of your lines, and that only a few lines run over into the lines succeeding them respectively. Your poem, then, is written in a novel, and I may say staccato sort of unrhymed pentameter. It is a series of emphatic lines involving questions or statements each of which might almost be isolated.42 As a self- declared socialist who believed “in leveling up and not leveling down,” Stedman also worried about the poem’s potential for abuse: “Your poem will be seized on by all the social radicals of the world.”43 In a Brooklyn Institute lecture on modern American poetry, the eminent genteel critic Hamilton Mabie similarly characterized Markham’s popularity as an unfortunate, enervating development, though Mabie modulated this criticism with an appreciation for the “virility of his themes,” the “incisiveness of his manner,” and his “high, pure, lyric note.”44 To more severe critics, the text’s treatment of such an unlovely subject as the oppressed worker was not only indecorous, it was outright insubordination. They chafed at the effrontery of a poet who would dare deface art by painting a problematic reality, remonstrance, and disgrace; and, by highlighting injustice, it represented an obvious dereliction of the poet’s duty to enfold and uplift, ennoble and bring beauty. Ambrose Bierce, who had served as a sort of mentor for Markham during his initial years in San Francisco, also objected to the poem’s brand of socialism. He believed that “the greatest man is the man capable of doing the most exalted, the most lasting and the most beneficial intellectual work—and the highest, ripest, richest fruit of the human intellect, is indubitably great poetry.” But he admonished Markham to remember that, “The ‘first cause’ of poetry is beauty; no other is possible.” Poets should traffic in sublimity, not logic: “It is the philosopher’s trade to make us think, the poet’s to make us feel.” He questioned the poem’s veracity in his “Prattler” column of The Examiner: “The notion that the sorrows of the humble are due to the selfishness of the great is ‘natural,’ and can be made poetical, but it is silly. As a literary conception it has not the vitality of a sick fish.” In subsequent columns, Bierce revisited his distaste for the Hoe poem, claiming that only a particular audience, those with “peasant understandings and soured hearts,” found it palatable. Bierce then published a personal attack, scratching out an abrasive image of Markham as a “demagogue,” or worse yet, a “ ‘labor leader’ spreading

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the gospel of hate known as ‘industrial brotherhood,’ ” which sought to invert God’s natural order on earth. The poet’s popularity also provided evidence of corruption. Markham appeared before audiences composed of “ninnies” ignorant of poetry, who camouflaged themselves in beauty while working toward barbarism.45 Bierce’s excoriations notwithstanding, Markham had not directly implicated capitalists in crimes against workers; he had only hinted at some trouble in the dim future, perhaps the day of Christ’s second coming.46 His goal, as he wrote in a private letter, was that his poem “do something, however little, to break the public mind to the great idea de Social Justice.”47 In terms of poetic form, the poem broke no new ground. Like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, it offered up new ideas for a social and economic order without threatening genteel norms and by staying within the realm of moral uplift. As with other turn- of-the century reformers, Markham looked backward while trying to move forward with more progressive ideas. It took William Jennings Bryan to dust off the poem’s residue of the ineffable and to reveal its social implications. Answering a request from William Randolph Hearst to write an explication of the instantly popular poem for the New York Journal, Bryan transposed the lyricism into political protest. “It is a sermon addressed to the heart,” he said, by way of explaining the poem’s appeal. “It voices humanity’s protest against inhuman greed. There is a majestic sweep to the argument; some of the lines pierce like arrows.” Bryan tied specific lines of the poem to general problems in the country, including inequities of wealth, unfair income tax laws, exploitative child labor, and the notorious yet inscrutable trusts: “The extremes of society are being driven further and further apart. Wealth is being concentrated in the hands of a few. At one end of the scale luxury and idleness breed effeminacy; at the other end, want and destitution breed desperation.”48 When the commotion and clamor failed to abate, Markham added his own interpretation of the poem’s protagonist and political implications, stressing the unfair and undemocratic state of the marketplace: The Hoeman is the symbol of betrayed humanity, the Toiler ground down through ages of oppression, through ages of social injustice. He is the man pushed away from the land by those who fail to use the land, till at last he has become a serf, with no mind

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in his muscle and no heart in his handiwork. He is the man thrust back and shrunken up by the special privileges confer[r]ed upon the Idle Few. Markham remonstrated a system that stripped labor of dignity, leaving little opportunity for human flourishing: In the Hoeman we see the slow, sure, awful degradation of man through endless, hopeless, and joyless labor. Did I say labor? No!— drudgery! This man’s battle with the world has been too brutal. He is not going upward in step with the divine music of the world. The motion of his life has been arrested, if not actuallyreversed. He is a hulk of humanity, degraded below the level of the roving savage, who has a step of dignity, a tongue of eloquence . . . The Hoeman is the effigy of man, a being with no outlet to his life, no uplift to his soul—a being with no time to rest, no time to think, no time to pray, no time for the mighty hopes that make us men.49 Exhausting labor in modern industry and agriculture made man “brutish” and threatened to turn him into a “machine.”50 The poem’s sentiment tapped into a wellspring of contemporary Progressive sentiment, stirring since the early 1890s, among a new middle class sensitized to the indignities of the new industrial order. Informed by an incipient pragmatism, these reformers blamed society and environment for the meanness of modern life; shoring up surroundings with practical amenities, Christian ethics, and applied expertise promised comity and a revived sense of community. A historian of the era remarked that the poem became “the tocsin of a generation. Any treatment of the ‘Reform Era’ which does not also cope with it, as poetry as well as reform attitude, is automatically foolish and infirm.”51 Although a bit overstated, the poem’s impact did have a resonance that invited comparisons to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Progressive politicians, such as the mayor of Cleveland, Tom Johnson, and the mayor of Toledo, Samuel “Golden-Rule” Jones, invoked the poem in speeches calling for greater human rights and for legislation to recalibrate the scales of justice.52 The “Man with the Hoe,” while widely anthologized, was not included in any American textbooks until 1918. However, it was widely translated and appeared in school books in Russia, England, Denmark, Austria, Spain, and

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Poland. Mexican human rights protestors and reformist members of the Russian Duma fastened on the poem as a rallying force.53 Not everyone rejoiced at this crystallization of reform sentiment. One of the Big Four railroad builders in the West, Collis P. Huntington, worried: “Are we going to let a mere poem hurl the whole nation into Socialism?” In an effort to bridle the poem’s runaway appeal, he sponsored a contest for a poetic response to the Hoe poem. He recruited Edmund Stedman, Thomas Aldrich, and Charles Dudley Warner as judges, and advertised the competition in The New York Sun. After reviewing 1,000 submissions—many of remarkably low quality—the panel gave the award to John Vance Cheney, head of the Newberry Library in Chicago and a friend of Markham (the two edited the weekly column “Book Land” in the New York Morning American), who had composed the poem in an effort to win the much-needed four-hundred- dollar cash prize.54 Cheney’s hoe man, unlike Markham’s, stood tall “with strength and grace.”55 Despite this opposition, many publishing houses solicited Markham to print a book that contained the famous poem. He went with Doubleday and McClure after they made the best offer, and dedicated the collection to Edmund Stedman, “First to Hail and Caution Me.” By August of 1900, three months after the original publication date, the book had gone into its fourth printing. Markham continued composing verse on traditional subjects alongside poems commemorating Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jewish captain unjustly accused of treason, Cuban patriots, and muckraking articles on such topics as “Wealth-Worship As A Character- Crushing Calamity,” “The SweatShop Inferno,” and “Spinners in the Dark” to reform periodicals. One of the most significant obstacles Markham faced involved the charge of pessimism; poets were supposed to be noble optimists. Some angry readers went further, depicting him as wild- eyed and effeminate and linking him to the urban underclass of immigrants and anarchists.56 A debate played out on the editorial page of The New York Times. Henry Wilson, a resident of the Empire State, confirmed the existence of “such pitiable creatures whom Mr. Markham has made his ‘patrons,’ ” and compared their plight to coal miners and Southern slaves. He defended the poet against charges of pandering to anarchists, contending that “His theme is true and worthy of a poet.”57 Other letter writers defended Markham against charges of pessimism, citing such lines as “Love will outwatch the stars” from the

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sonnet “Love’s Vigil.” “It is plain,” one supporter wrote, “that the poet feels it the duty of all to cry out against these hindrances, and so help make the world divine.”58 Another advocate argued that Markham’s muckraking actually widened the boundaries of beauty: Is it not true that all poetry is more or less exaggerated—that is, highly colored? Are the poets who can see nothing but beauty in this world doing a higher work than he who strives to make the whole world beautiful in reality by exposing and bringing to the light the wickedness and wrongs that have so long held it back?59 Reverend Alexander Fitzgerald from New Haven also defended the poet’s realism, saying “This man holds the mirror up to nature, and nature doesn’t like the picture, and breaks the glass. Markham sees a man sitting on the safety valve of the engine of life and warns him of the danger.” The Reverend compared Markham to the fiery abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison who opened the eyes of Americans to injustice by giving voice to the oppressed. Markham went beyond sentimentalism and he did not stop at the aestheticization of misery; his poetry was an effective form of protest literature. Fitzgerald continued: Millet’s picture was “thrillingly lovely” as a work of art. The dilettantism of Europe and America raved over it as a picture, but when the man with the hoe found speech it was discovered that he was vulgar and pessimistic, and the man who opened his mouth, an outside of Euclid sort of disturber.60 Fitzgerald criticized those who sympathized with the poor only so long as they behaved properly. Nor did he have much regard for poets who rigidly adhered to a form of beauty that was orderly and coherent. In Fitzgerald’s view, Euclid, “the father of geometry” should not provide the only model of aesthetic achievement. Other supporters defended Markham by asserting that the poet tempered realism with optimism. John Talman of St. Paul, Minnesota argued that “beneath the seeming pessimism of Markham may be detected readily an undertone of hope, an undeviating motive and purpose born of righteousness and truth undying” but “his trend is never ignoble. His message is always uplifting if revolutionary.” Talman also appreciated the way Markham’s verse expanded the

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province of beauty: “While other poets merely gratify our love of beauty, approach our ideals of perfected art, or even reach and sway the heart with note[s] of human interest, Markham pierces and shatters . . . error, prejudice, caste, ignorance, narrowness, and convention.” Talman delighted in the direct, intense style of the poet’s pen: “It is for this warrior of song to mount on a chariot of fire and thunder at the very gates of the infinite!”61 Just as the crackle of discontent began to taper, Markham fanned it by publishing a poem called “The Suicide” in the November 1899 issue of Scribner’s, occasioning another round of concerned letters to the editor in The New York Times literary section and questions concerning Markham’s tone and role as a poet. However, the majority of Markham’s output perpetuated standard literary protocols. The verse published alongside the title poem, with their emphasis on intuition, divine immanence, and harmony with nature reflected the spirit of transcendentalism. Fifteen out of seventy-four poems were sonnets that addressed woodlands, birds, mountains, mystic spirits, and deep feelings of the soul. As he wrote in an early lecture, he read poetry in order to “get an inkling of the higher powers behind all science.”62 With its invocations to the essential holiness and grace of poetry, his rhetoric in the essay “The Saving Power of Art,” recalled the kind of sermons heard under tents at revival meetings. “Man is saved” by coming into contact with the beauty found in poetry.63 This communion had the effect of transmuting “animalism into divine manhood,” and elevating individuals “to lofty moods” that were “noble and heroic.” Poetry provided “a vibration of order and harmony, a vibration of the Ideal,” was a “revealer of the beautiful,” and the “chief instrument for realizing this sacredness, this mystery, this wonder.” Poetry “quiets and yet quickens.” As a Wordsworth poem Markham liked to quote declared: “By words / Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep / Of death, and win the vacant and the vain / To noble raptures.” Echoing Santayana, Markham believed that poetry, in its original incarnation, proceeded from religious awe. Yet “all the rubbish of theology and ecclesiasticism” had distorted this pure sensation. Ancient religions, sacred hymns, divine dramas, mystical rhapsodies, and noble ideas sprang not from earthly interactions but from immaculate conceptions: “Gradually the mind of the poet is impregnated from on high with divine ideas.” Similarly, the process of creating a poem resembled midwifery: “Things are born

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and are alive and grow,” rather than “merely made” objects redolent only of the “mechanical and artificial and dead.” In yielding their hearts, minds, and bodies to this divine primitivism, poets achieved a greater consciousness. Building on Emerson, Markham explained that poets became aware “of a rhythmical movement through Creation, as of a deep under-sound and choral dance” and developed a “yearning” to join with “this living harmony.” The insights born out of encounters between the poet and the “living harmony” became poetry; the perceptions “clothe themselves with language,” with the poets’ aid, then carry out their evangelical mission on earth. In February of 1900, Markham published a comprehensive explanation of the origins and intent of his poem in a pamphlet, The Man with the Hoe, With Notes by The Author. He castigated those who denied that workers endured such disheartening conditions. “There are a few who say that the hideous Hoeman does not exist anywhere in the world. Do they hope to dispel this thing by denial?” Markham distinguished between two strands of poverty. The pioneer, though tested at times by Job-like conditions, nevertheless experienced nature directly and could build a better future through individual will. Then there was the hopeless “poverty of the toiler depicted by Millet, lamented by Ruskin, and grieved over by Carlyle; the poverty of the bent drudges in the sweat shops, the factories, the mines.” Drudgery denied contemporary American laborers Garfield’s pluck on the towpath, Lincoln’s resolve at the rail pile, and Ben Franklin’s Thirteen Virtues en route to self-perfection; such travail was ultimately un-American. Markham made clear that he objected not to labor, but to its degradation, not to the presence of trouble, but to the absence of beauty. In a paean that resonated with republican civic virtues, with long-standing notions of dignity, Markham called for an agrarian experience that harkened back to Thomas Jefferson’s notion of a yeoman citizenry where workers fertilized their minds and souls through self-instruction: Farm life can be made beautiful, ideal. Why should not the man who gives bread to nations receive in return the highest gifts of culture and art? Why should not the Prince of the Plow know Shakespeare and Shelley, Schumann and Wagner? There is no need to take any man from his hoe, but there is a deep, imperative, a divine call for his higher recreation, for his spiritual advance. He

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has made many seeds to grow from one. Let us see to it that he has more than the chaff for his reward.64 Markham distanced himself from the pessimists: “So I will take my stand with the Optimists—with those who are willing to trust love . . . not only in the home but also in the larger family of the state.” He ended with a call, not for the workers of the world to unite, but for middle- class Christians to bear their duty: “If ever the lowly are lifted it will be by the concerted action of the men of power in all walks of life, the men of good-will, the men who carry the Christ Purpose in the heart.” Rather than the angry populist, Markham, in “The Man with the Hoe,” sentimentalized the eternal victim—the salt of the earth to be pitied rather than identified with. The trials of laborers deserved representation in poetry. Markham used another strategy to allay charges of radicalism as he worked to establish a new direction for poetry. He regularly mentioned the Bible as his chief source of inspiration and used his celebrity to fashion a non-genteel image of the poet. He advocated repeated exposure to hard labor, urban squalor, and political injustice as a means to teach poets how to withstand, and find inspiration in, dire social conditions. In a series of newspaper interviews, he sought to diffuse disparaging stereotypes of poets by harnessing an image of a hearty cowboy. Writing for the monthly magazine The Literary Era, C. H. Garrett titled his essay, “Edwin Markham, Cowboy and Poet,” and contained long passages about the duties of a ranchman and round-ups, harvesting barley and wheat, and forging metal as a blacksmith.65 Other feature articles on the poet typically began with a description of his impressive appearance. A New York Times journalist, for example, extolled the hardiness of a man whose vigor belied his years. At forty-seven, Markham’s charisma and strength gave him the appearance of someone half that age. Colonel Hinton marveled at Markham’s “noble cranium,” and other “regular and strong” physical features: “The nose is masterful, strong at the base, and broad at the nostrils”; “The shoulders are square and fairly broad; his chest is deep; the limbs are strong, alert, active. A good mountain- climber.” Unlike members of a marginalized group, Markham “impresses one with ease of manner; a lounging grace of movement, which gives evidence of physical freshness.” He struck one not as a shabby pedant but as an erudite cowboy: “The professor is not a precise dresser.

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He has the Western touch in his garb but not one thought of the pedagogue goes with it. ‘Ah,’ an observer would say, ‘An editor or lawyer—who is he?’ ” Indeed, Markham himself insisted, “I am a student; not a bibliophile” (see figure 2.1). This handsome, humble man was “one the passer-by looks after” and was not “a seeker for public power or a platform debator, nor will he range himself with any school.” Markham cherished Christian precepts, stating: “I believe profoundly in religion, though doubtful sometimes of religion,” and crusaded for workers’ rights through peaceful measures and his powers of persuasion, “always urging that the way to joy and peace lies through the gates of social justice and by the path of fraternal life.” Hinton provided evidence of Markham’s conservative approach to social reform by quoting various lines, such as those from “The Desire of Nations,” which foretold the advent of Christ’s rule: He comes to frame the freedom of the Law, To touch these men of earth with a feeling of Life’s Oneness and its worth, A feeling of its mystery and its awe. Markham’s physical and intellectual heritage derived from a pious and principled pedigree that begot rugged and clear verse: This American of the purest stock; nurtured on the Hebrew prophets; and filled with the philosophy of Plato, Hegel, Kant, and Swedenborg, the sociology of Mazzini and Herron, and breathing in an atmosphere all his own. We recall Wordsworth as we read, but it is only an echo. We are reminded of Whitman; still it is but the intonation of his nature-loving, out- of- door democracy. The fine melody of Tennyson is in these verses. The subtlety of Browning, without his cloudiness, are here also. Concluding with the assurance that Markham’s poetry “elevates and ennobles,” Hinton tamed the poet’s more radical and socialist affinities.66 Another journalist, William Wallace Whitelock, after Markham shook his hand “in cordial Western fashion,” began with the familiar invocations to the poet’s appearance: “He is big and hearty in manner” with a “clean- cut, classic profile.” Whitelock catalogued Markham’s furnishings as if they provided a checklist

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of respectability: a picture of Tennyson hanging by the door of a book-lined study; a three-volume edition of Keats near the writing desk. The image of Whitman, however, required some qualification. Just as Colonel Hinton had likened Markham to a desexualized Whitman, Whitelock noted that while Markham affirmed the “many great truths” found in the poet of democracy, he nonetheless lamented that they cavorted too readily with “puerilities.” Whitman may have given voice to ideas that, “as Emily Dickinson said, gives you ‘zero at the bone’ ” but he was not “the prophet for whom America has been looking, the poet of our expectations.” Markham suggested that “The Man with the Hoe” not only fulfilled those expectations, but heralded a renaissance in literature because it opened up “a broader choice of subjects,” “emancipating ourselves from the restriction to the purely so- called ‘literary’ subjects.”67 Markham’s friend and fellow California poet, Joaquin Miller, wrote a similar article, casting the author alternatively as a poet of the people, a cowboy of the high Sierras, and a gentleman of Christ.68 Along with Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edwin Markham was one of the first, and few, poets able to make a living through civic speeches and the anthologizing of his poems. His self-presentation as a virile cowboy espousing Emersonian principles of self-reliance made him a prime candidate for literary celebrity.69 He worked hard to cultivate his loyal audience, touring the country to give popular readings, and writing responses to fan mail. Income from a cross- country tour sponsored by the McClure Lecture Bureau and reprint requests allowed Markham to retire from administrative duties, move to New York, and devote himself full-time to writing.70 Following in the tradition of the popular, but now forgotten, Will Carleton, Edgar Guest, and Eugene Field, Markham tended to his role as public poet by taking measures to establish connections with his readers. He published in popular venues, such as newspapers and high- circulation journals, and acted as a personal critic to aspiring poets. In effusive language, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fans—among them lawyers, housewives, college students, doctors, and established writers—sent letters expressing the power of poetry in their lives and requesting comments on their own compositions. Markham responded with editorial comments and encouragement. In the days before M.F.A. programs, it was not uncommon

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for individuals to turn to their favorite authors for guidance. In his replies, Markham delineated the content of poems and qualities of a poet. To a woman who submitted poems on royalty, he advised: “Kings and queens, as a rule, are merely gilded and idle parasites, cut off from all genuine sympathy with the toiling people.”71 Others had to excise the pedestrian and overly political. “You tell the reader too much directly,” “There is no room around them for the play of the imagination,” “it is too openly didactic,” “too baldly didactic,” “A poem must be more song than sermon.”72 To a deaf man, Markham included a list of books on composition and rhetoric, Stedman’s Nature and Elements of Poetry, works by Ruskin, Carlyle, and Emerson, and assurances that “The first requisite for a poet is a passionate soul. To this should be added a devotion to a lofty ideal.”73 Other important character traits required for sound poetic composition included a “fiery earnestness,” “noble purpose,” “freshness of conception,” and “clearness of utterance.”74 When individuals sent their own poems merely as offerings of gratitude, Markham was effusive in his thanks, and when others wrote in solidarity for the cause of workers, he rallied them to continue their commitment. By 1909 Markham felt more optimistic about the country’s literary production. “There is everywhere a tendency to the common and human life as it really is,” he wrote in a feature for The New York Times. “Our old romanticism has crumbled, and we are finding a new romanticism in the trodden paths of the every day . . . An old woman, leaning with her burden against the wall, is seen to carry more tragedy than all the queens of ancient story.” He concluded prophetically: “We stand at the beginning of a new epoch in the history of literature and humanity.”75 In 1910 Markham lent his celebrity to help aspiring poets by contributing an introduction to The Younger Choir (1910), which showcased the work of thirty-six younger poets. The verse ranged from sensualist George Sylvester Viereck, to the socialist offering of radicals James Oppenheim and Louis Untermeyer. Seeking to lend the enterprise more gravitas, Markham linked the volume with foundational texts, such as Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and serials by Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, which established new literary traditions. Deeming the book’s contributors “the affirmers of beauty and duty, the votaries of the vision” and “the apostolate of poesy,” he promised that “the hope of the world is in its poetry: for religion even is only poetry in practice. Yes, all true culture is only

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an attempt to transform our barren prose existence into the beauty of the lyrical life.”76 Poets, he insisted, were seers with the ability to discern how the world can be “a place for making souls” amidst the scramble for daily needs and financial security. Poets offered moral clarity, ethical grounding, and regeneration, adding “a precious vision to our clay, a vision that reveals to us the eternal verities and values”: All this is good news for the ideal concerns of the nation—good news for those serious spirits among us who are distressed by the hoof-marks and horn-marks of our rampant commercialism, that blind power that is creating a philosophy of cynical fatalism among the strident steps and raucous cries of the marketplace . . . the hope of the world is in its poetry.77 Although Markham inspired and supported the new poetry, his distaste for unchaste verse marked him as a man of the nineteenth century. His introduction went out of the way to assure readers that, indeed, the volume included experiments in form and content but noted with a sigh of relief and assurance that, “above all else, I am glad to observe the moral health of these selected poems. Here are none of the hectic fevers of the decadents—none of the eroticism that mushrooms up out of sodden satiety and diseased imagination.” These poems instead exuded “a wholesome spiritual atmosphere, a poetry that is sweet with the wind and warm with the sun.”78 Markham’s aversion to immodest writing stemmed in part from his commitment to female equality. A staunch advocate of suffrage and women’s rights, he resented literary representations that denigrated women. “The erotic poet sees in woman merely the beauty of flesh, the sensual side; he does not divine any of the mystery in her,” he wrote. Ultimately, poetry had to reflect divinity: “Here is the vital matter in art: body must never be separated from soul; by itself the body is degrading. It is our duty to spiritualize the material, to materialize the spiritual; whenever the two are divorced, there is the rift for the entrance of Lucifer.”79 While the base actualities of economic and social existence could be unveiled in verse, the human body had to remain covered. Markham also promoted the cause of poetry by associating with literary institutions and composing poems for civic occasions, such as the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco where “Markham Day” was celebrated as the poet read his ode on the expo

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before a crowd of 15,000.80 In a spoof of contemporary writers, poet Margaret Widdemer (whose own poem “The Factory” criticized child labor and conditions for women workers) satirized Markham “who, though he had to lay a cornerstone, unveil a bust of somebody, give two lectures and write encouraging introductions to the works of five young poets before catching the three-ten for Staten Island, offered his reaction in a benevolent and unhurried manner.”81 Markham also used his writing and reputation to pursue other social justice causes, crusading for temperance, disarmament, women’s suffrage and education, birth control, and the humane treatment of animals. He urged moving the draft age to twenty- one and ending capital punishment. His work on behalf of children, including a book Children In Bondage, co-authored by Judge Ben Lindsey and George Creel (the Denver reformer who headed the Committee on Public Information during the Great War), earned Markham the presidency of the Child Labor Federation (with duties, he quipped, that required he look “wise” and attend the annual dinner).82 He helped to find foster homes for orphaned children, contributed to socialist magazines, and criticized treatment of Jews in Russia. Having been married twice before meeting Anna Catherine, Markham defended Russian author and Bolshevik Maxim Gorky as scandal broke during the writer’s 1906 fund-raising tour when newspapers revealed that Gorky was not legally married to his female travel companion.83 Markham took the same stand in 1909 when a similar controversy surrounding philanthropist Ferdinand Earle arose. For Markham and those in the new poetic communities that were in the process of assembling, poets in the industrial age had to toe a fine line: engaged in the modern world but maintaining ideal principles; cultivating beauty but moving beyond gentility; and building empathy without suggesting radicalism. In 1910 when the Poetry Society of America was established, Markham was the obvious choice to serve as the first Honorary President.

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3 Curating a Community, Engineering a Renaissance: A New Infrastructure for the “New Beauty”

A NOISELESS, patient spider, I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated; Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself; Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them. And you, O my Soul, where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres, to connect them, Till the bridge you will need, be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul. —Walt Whitman In the fall of 1912, after living in a palatial villa in Florence, Italy, for seven years, the Buffalo, New York-born banking heiress Mabel Dodge sailed into New York’s harbor. Upon seeing the Statue of Liberty, she broke into sobs. “We have left everything worthwhile behind us,” she wept to her young son, John. “America is all machinery and moneymaking and factories—it is ugly, ugly, ugly!” Within a few months, her tears abated as she became involved in staging the Armory Show Exhibit of modern art and determined to make her homeland, if not beautiful, at least more open to art and culture. “I would upset America,” she vowed. Then, a thought hit her. As she recalled in a memoir: “I was going to dynamite New York.” In her Greenwich Village home on 85

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Fifth Avenue she established a salon that brought together a volatile mix of Wobblies and writers, anarchists and artists, bohemians and birth control advocates. “It seems as though everywhere, in that year of 1913, barriers went down and people reached each other who had never been in touch before,” she wrote. “There were all sorts of new ways to communicate, as well as new communications. The new spirit was abroad and swept us all together.”1 While Dodge plotted incendiary ideas to remake America, others laid down designs to institute reforms using less combustible materials. George Sylvester Viereck, who organized a Poets’ Evening for one of Dodge’s weekly gatherings, and Harriet Monroe, who attended the Armory Show, were foremost in the creation of a web of institutions that linked authors and their audiences in new ways. Viereck, one of the most prominent poets and literary mediators on the American scene between 1897 and 1917, was an ethnic German in a direct line of descent from Kaiser Wilhelm I who hailed Kultur as the measure of vitality and vision missing from Anglo-American arts and letters. An early and ardent admirer of Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud, known for his provocative and sexually charged verse, Viereck was frequently criticized for immorality. Yet in his editorial work on Current Literature and organizing efforts at the PSA, he politely welcomed newcomers as well as old-timers. Monroe had a decidedly different temperament, a reputation suited more to the drawing room than the demimonde, and a demeanor more amenable to the middle- class reader than the manifesto writer. As an editor and anthologist, she supported writers whose work veered dramatically from conventional verse, making them more acceptable to polite society. Viereck and Monroe were both poets, both editors and literati, both deeply embedded in the world of writing and the arts, both with a flair for publicity, and both deeply dedicated to the promulgation of poetry. Strikingly different personalities, they realized that for the new poetry to succeed it needed support from new venues— financial and critical—and an informed, appreciative audience. With the founding of the Poetry Society of America in 1910 and Poetry: A Magazine of Verse in 1912, writers now had forums to meet, read, exchange ideas, win audiences and perhaps even a few prizes. To the chagrin of Greenwich Village radicals, the meetings of the PSA and the pages of Poetry reached out to average readers who were open to, though perhaps a bit wary of, modern ideas. By extending their hand

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and by building a framework that supported poets who depart from accepted aesthetic codes, Viereck and Monroe helped to engineer the renaissance in poetry. Viereck’s pedigree traced back to the Hohenzollerns. His grandfather was Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prussia. His illegitimately born father, Louis, was one of the foremost leaders of the German Social Democratic Party who served as a Reichstag deputy from LeipzigLand from 1883 to 1887. Along with August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, Louis journeyed to London to formulate party doctrine with Marx and Engels. At Louis’s wedding Engels served as the witness. In 1878, when Bismarck outlawed the Socialist party, German authorities jailed Louis for taking part in a party meeting. While in prison at Zwickau, he debated party strategy with the leader of the party and fellow inmate, August Bebel. Louis’s commitment to moderate change conflicted with the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat advocated by fellow socialists. After their release, leaders convened a party congress in St. Gallen where they expelled Louis, who soon left with his family for America.2 Shortly after moving to New York, George Sylvester Viereck— Louis’s thirteen-year- old son—published a poem in Hearst’s powerful New York German newspaper, Das Morgen-Journal, which ran under the heading, “Noch so jung und schon so—poetisch!” (“Still so young and already so—poetic!”). Viereck’s renown as a Wunderkind grew with successive publications, including poems attacking Tammany Hall and translations of English verse into German. A fair number of his poems echoed Baudelaire, Swinburne, and other aesthetes preoccupied with carnality, gloom, and an art-for-art’s sake ethos. Nietzsche inspired his atheism and aestheticism, and he found inspiration as well in the verse of Whitman, Poe, Byron, and Shelley. The life of Oscar Wilde, meanwhile, provided a model for artistic living. He confided to his “Youthful Diary,” which covered the years 1899 to 1903: Wilde is splendid. I admire, nay, I love him. He is so deliciously unhealthy, so beautifully morbid, I love all things morbid and evil. I love the splendor of decay, the foul beauty of corruption. What I hate is the inquisitive, cold, freezing rays of the sun. Day is nausea, day is dullness, day is prose. Night beauty, love splendor, poetry, wine, scarlet, rape, vice and bliss. I love the night.3

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The lengthiest passages of the diary concern Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas whose poetry Viereck admired. He initiated a correspondence and the two met for lunch when Douglas visited New York in 1901. Sylvester also wrote to Swinburne, author of Sapphires and Faustrina, who had inspired Viereck’s own “Lesbian Chants” written in the decadent style. While some viewed Viereck’s decadent verse as high poetry, others denounced it as troubling rhetoric. After deriding the morose content, the major newspapers, including The Washington Post, The New York Sun, The New York Herald, The Boston Evening Transcript, and Review of Reviews, praised the innovation found in the pieces. One year later, in 1905, Sylvester’s first book in English, A Game At Love and Other Plays, fared less favorably. The well-known drama critic James Huneker expressed admiration and surprise for the poet who seemed “too young to write so marvelously well.”4 But the critic advised Viereck to excise “all notes of defiance, of rebellion against conventions and write for the many-headed monster of a public.” Although sympathetic to Viereck’s daring, Huneker warned that the public had “its head filled, indeed, packed with the concepts of duty, of love, of religion, of patriotism,” which could not be erased overnight.5 Another German-American, H. L. Mencken, also found the dramas of interest but denounced their bold content. Less politely, The Nation deemed the plays far too replete with “contempt for all the restrictions which prevent human society from relapsing into barbaric animalism.” Viereck’s attempt to reconfigure the topical field of drama had branded him a literary apostate. Viereck attended the City College of New York (CCNY), which required no tuition, from 1902 to 1906. In addition to meeting his own expenses, he had to support his family by writing feature articles on literature for German-American papers, such as the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung and Berliner Tageblatt. Despite hardships, Viereck was extremely competent, confident, and proud of his Hohenzollern ancestry. This bravura pose garnered respect as well as censure. The title of a spoof published in the CCNY Mercury, where Viereck served as literary editor, indicates the ribbing he received from classmates: “The Story of George Sylvester Viereck, By Himself and For Himself.”6 His mannerisms, advocacy of free love, and persnickety fashion style (particularly his brightly colored Oriental dressing gowns) set him apart. Fellow students nevertheless acknowledged his gift for poetry along with self-promotion, and elected him class poet.

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Verses translated into English from Viereck’s first collection in German, Gedichte, formed the basis for Ninevah and Other Poems, which broadened Viereck’s circle of admirers and detractors.7 The imagery in Ninevah, although less explicit than in his dramatic plays in A Game At Love and Other Plays, departed from established conventions and themes. In an introduction to the volume Viereck explained his desire to update poetic form, insisting that “the metric coat” must precisely fit the content: “Men have forgotten that rhyme and metre are only means to an end. In art, at least, the end justifies the means.”8 Traditional techniques, “like ready-made garments, may at times fulfill the requirements; frequently they will not. It then behooves a poet to modify them or, better still, to create new forms intimately adapted to the exigencies of the occasion.” Like a lawyer pleading his case for a wrongly imprisoned client, Viereck argued for the freedom to produce poems of “rhythmic individuality.” In his own verse he sought to extend “the borderland of poetry into the domain of music on the one side, into that of the intellect on the other.”9 Freeing verse from metric scales did not mean he advocated a hermetically sealed art. He still hoped to express “some note in the infinite scale” as Poe did with “Raven,” Markham in “Man with The Hoe,” Dante Rossetti in “Blessed Damozel,” and Wilde with “Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Future poets, he explained, “will wrest new music from the language,” not by refuting the past but by using “the resources already at hand,” putting “to a nobler and broader application the sonant heirloom of the past.” A conflicted brew, Ninevah condemned New York for an inherent sinfulness yet yearned for and indulged in very much the same behaviors and desires. The volume was alternately reverent, decadent, simple, allusive, and, reflecting the author’s own sexuality, contained an underlying hint of homoeroticism. “Consolation,” dedicated to The Century editor Richard Gilder, a man whose advocacy for writers Viereck admired, spoke of the way “the heart-beat of the Universe” ennobled the fleeting nature of life. “A Poet’s Creed” declared “There is no god save Beauty,” while “Hadrian” concluded, “But where to Beauty sacrifice is given/We too shall kneel to worship and adore.” Many poems appealed to God for deliverance from physical desire. Other poems simply flaunt private sin and “Puritan” values. “Love Triumphant,” for example, spoke of “feverish fingers,” “raging flame,” and the “hot desire” incited during a one-night stand. The title poem “Ninevah” depicted New York as a contemporary version of the ancient city Assyria where men roam the streets

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brimming with “blood-red brand of murder flares,” women go down to “shameful death,” and “In every heart there dwells a worm.” The cityscape is lined with mansions “vowed to lust,/Where wantons with their guests make free,” where bodies “Titan-strong” writhe on couches “of sin.” Nonetheless, Viereck blended the raucousness of Ninevah with a fair share of traditional verse. Songs of nightingales and temperate soft breezes receive tribute in “A Spring Blessing.” “Confession” pays homage to nature, while “Sunset” extols the order and harmony of the universe. Several poems are written in free verse (e.g., “Kakodaimon” and “The Three Sphinxes”), and Arnoldian themes of art as redemption, preserver, bulwark against chaos, and as a reflection of God’s image tinge the collection. Ninevah prompted letters from prominent English writers, including Thomas Hardy, Arthur Symons, a leader of the Symbolist poets, and Alfred Austin, Britain’s poet laureate. Closer to home, George Woodberry, Bliss Carman, and Edwin Markham wrote with encouragement, while Richard Gilder interspersed praise with cautionary notes. In 1905, Gilder had published a sonnet written by Viereck in The Century. The two then met over lunch at the National Arts Club in New York, after which Viereck composed and dedicated “Consolation” to the esteemed editor who wrote now with some advice. After pointing to his association with the “unblushing” Walt Whitman as evidence of his “strong stomach,” Gilder expressed in the letter his “sense of physical revulsion,” which he likened to a time when he saw “a man coming out of a house of prostitution,” displaying “self-satisfaction in the parade of a knowledge of vice.” Viereck, it appeared, courted unseemliness as well as respectability, an incompatible pairing according to Gilder: “One cannot associate on mutually respecting terms with the purest and noblest women and men—and at the same time be suspected of vaunting something repulsive in the mind.” He reminded Viereck that “noblesse oblige applies above all to the poet” and urged him to heed Milton’s definition of a “true poem” as “a composition and pattern of the best and honorable things.” Gilder signed the letter, “Yours in the love of Beauty, in Art—and most of all in Poetry.”10 In his response to Gilder, Viereck took pains to distinguish glorification of vice from the representation of vice. “I assure you that the atmosphere of vice is no less distasteful to me than to you,” he wrote. “But far be it from me to exclude from the realm of art, especially my

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art, anything, even evil.” He continued, “In the great circle of human life I strive to express every segment, whether purple or golden, sombre or bright.” As long as a piece was appealingly written, it qualified as art rather than profanity: “It is only vulgarity that I would banish from the domain of letters, not necessarily the descriptions of vulgarity, but vulgarity in the descriptions.” Viereck thanked Gilder for seeing and acknowledging, unlike some critics, that spiritual ideals inspired many of the poems. The letter ended with an affirmation that “We are all instruments in the hand of the unknown God . . . I love beauty even as you love it albeit I may realize it in ways essentially different from yours.”11 Viereck did not advocate a wholesale reconstruction of poetry and its practice, he wanted to renovate its form and content. New verse could make its way onto the modern stage in the company of the old. Among those critics who focused solely on the erotic content of Ninevah was Louis Untermeyer. In a review in The New York Times, Untermeyer disparaged Viereck’s efforts at sexualizing verse and distinguished the young poet’s work from that of Oscar Wilde, with whom he was usually compared; both evinced a fleeting brand of amateur decadent cosmopolitanism. “Decadent though he was,” Untermeyer wrote, “Wilde used sensuality as a color to introduce strange harmonies while Viereck employs the color for its own effect, not as a means to an end.” Even though Untermeyer had some of his own poems rejected for base political content, he leveled similar charges against Viereck: “There is never the refreshing aroma of the green earth in his verse—it is the rank odor of the underworld; it is the taint of decaying garbage rather than the breath from fresh fields and clear heights.” Untermeyer urged critics to discern more precisely the “gulf between genius and precocity.”12 An anonymous reviewer in the same newspaper likewise advised Viereck to forego “verbal voluptuousness, erotic fancies, and pompous pathology.” Nevertheless, the critic acknowledged inherent talent: “Viereck possesses, it must be admitted, a strangely powerful genius in the conceit of alluring fancies and the marshaling of brave words. As to form—he has it in him.” To keep his audience, the article cautioned, Viereck had to be sure to maintain “the grace of sincerity.”13 Viereck’s critical standing received a boost when The New York Times ran a review by the prominent critic William Aspenwall Bradley. While regretting the “cynicism, weariness, disenchantment” that the young poet, still in the throes of Neo-Romanticism

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and decadence, displayed, Bradley nonetheless recognized lyricism, concision, and intelligence. Instead of honing in on the passion and sensuousness, the reviewer preferred “to dwell upon his idealism, upon the manner in which his poems seem to take shape in his mind and spring into life, not through beautiful words or seductive images alone, but through the active operation of the intellect.” Bradley admired the “artistic integrity” Viereck demonstrated, and the fidelity of each poem to “the embodiment of a distinct idea.” “It is this idea,” he continued, “that dominates and controls the poem, dictating its form, gauging the precise degree of passion, the individual shade of coloring appropriate to it.” Audacious and colorful, Ninevah revealed “how the world of moral ideas can be remolded imaginatively without loss of poetic truth.”14 A practicing spiritualist, the poet Elsa Barker wrote a letter in response to Bradley’s critique of Ninevah that highlighted aspects of Viereck’s writing the reviewer had omitted. Barker met Viereck in 1906 and was immediately impressed by his “deep and serious artistic purpose.” He embraced the public role of poet and was adamant about the need for poets to read their works aloud to each other and to discuss such matters as technique and originality. A student of astrology, Barker divined Viereck’s fortune and saw that the alignment of the planets portended fame. She championed the poet’s “fundamental seriousness,” as well as “his airy spires and minarets of imagery and music [that] are always based upon the solid rock of universal human experience.” Grounded in reality, the poems embodied “vitality.” Unlike Bradley, Barker believed the poet’s roots in the decadent tradition lent credibility because “the ideal of neo-romanticism is beauty, and he who takes pure beauty for his guide will meet with truth before he has gone far on the poet’s journey.”15 Besides demonstrating the nebulous condition of contemporary criticism, Barker’s review iterates the preoccupation with beauty as the preeminent benchmark of poetic merit. In the world of Manhattan publishing, Viereck had set a new standard. One writer, William Lengel, recalled the radius of Viereck’s influence: From the time I first came to New York, I heard editors, writers, Greenwich Villagers, the intellectuals of the period and radicals talk about Viereck . . . Most of them talked about him in a sort of

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awesome way and to me he seemed to be a sort of literary knight in armor who was blasting conventions, setting a new path for freedom of expression in America, and generally being a dominant and dynamic individual. He battered down prejudices and opened the way for others.16 Viereck’s celebrity suggests the unsettled nature of the first decade of the twentieth century and the degree to which American poetics had been restructured. In the supposed “twilight years” before the 1912 poetic renaissance, an audience of readers and critics stood ready to hear new voices. For the middle class interested in exploring precincts that their predecessors would have simply avoided altogether, new sights abounded. Under the headline, “Believes He is a Genius,” the conventionally respectable The Saturday Evening Post readily reported the sensation caused by the author of Ninevah: The most widely- discussed young literary man in the United States today is George Sylvester Viereck . . . Not in a decade, perhaps, has any young person been so unanimously accused of being a genius . . . At twenty-two years of age he has produced a volume of verse that has kicked up more controversy and inspired more letters to the editor than any similar book in years. In a way, it is the Keats exception, aptly expressed by Viereck: “I want to be heard while I am living, and I don’t want to starve. I believe in activity, even if it is about myself.”17 This kind of inveterate self-promotion appeared to some as vanity. But Viereck believed that in the absence of any formal publicity mechanism, and in the presence of much public denigration, poets who wanted to be taken seriously as professionals had to market themselves. In 1909 Viereck’s string of success continued with an adaptation of a Schiller play for a Broadway production, reproductions of his verse in prestigious publications, and an appointment to a post as the first American Exchange poet in Berlin.18 The poet and editor now fashioned himself the foremost interpreter of Germany to America. He procured funding from Otto Kahn, Adolphus Busch, Paul Warburg, and other German-American businessmen for each of his publishing ventures, including a German-language version of Current Literature, which he titled Rundschau zweier Welten (“Review of Two Worlds”).

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Figure 3.1 George Sylvester Viereck, ca. 1904, the year he published his first book of poems. Photo courtesy of the University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

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The first issue launched with a front-page letter of support from Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was one of Viereck’s greatest contacts. The old Rough Rider had initiated a correspondence with him after reading his poetry. They corresponded for a year before finally meeting at the National Arts Club.19 The two seem a rather inexplicable pairing, considering the poet’s decadent expositions and Roosevelt’s ethic of strenuous living. But, in the pre-World War I years, the former President was a fan of the vitality (which he thought was lacking in Anglo-American society) found in German education, science, and culture, and admired Kaiser Wilhelm II above the other European leaders. No doubt Viereck’s relation to the Hohenzollern leader added to the interest. In 1912 Viereck became involved in Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Presidential campaign, composing a hymn and serving on the Progressive ticket as Roosevelt’s elector in New York State.20 Roosevelt returned the favor by acting as guest of honor at a dinner designed to raise funds for a magazine devoted to contemporary art and politics Viereck planned on starting.21 That same year Viereck published The Confessions of a Barbarian, a sort of Baedeker of European culture, culled from his recent travels through Germany, which he hoped would help guide his adopted country out of Puritanism. Europeans may hold lax views when it came to sex, he reasoned, but they were far more vigilant in prosecuting corruption in business and in holding corporations accountable to the public good. Americans, in contrast, focused on sexual indiscretions as a way to induce conformity, while casting a blind eye to corporate titans out of a not-so-secret admiration for money-makers. While some of his exploits may have been considered debauched, Viereck felt strongly that a reputation for honesty in both business and writing mattered more. A review of Confessions in The New York Times exemplified the contemporary consensus about Viereck’s oeuvre up to that point: “It [is] impossible to deny the author of this book a measure of genius—undisciplined to a great extent, deliberately perverse in certain aspects, but capable of much when the years have accomplished their mellowing work.” Maturity would bring the youthful Viereck a greater sense of propriety, perspective, and perhaps even a trace of humility.22 Viereck even received an off-handed nod from Upton Sinclair who based the character of Strathcona in his 1908 novel The Metropolis on Sylvester. Calling him “the young poet of Diabolism,” Sinclair depicted him as energetic, humorous,

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and gifted. “He took the sum-total of the moral experience of the human race, and turned it upside down and jumbled it about and used it as bits of glass in a kaleidoscope. And the hearers would gasp, and whisper ‘Diabolical!’ ”23 A review by Hutchins Hapgood illustrated the views of an emerging group of Greenwich Village writers who straddled genteel norms and radical visions. “Our general taste demands a whisper, demands low relief, quietness, grayness,” he wrote. “Mr. Viereck shouts with exultant and careless youth . . . He believes that he is a genius.” Besides the author’s displays of egotism Hapgood objected to the book’s unerring focus on culture. “Writers who are really alive to- day, with relatively few exceptions, express in one way or another our social feeling. That is the distinguishing note of our day.” Viereck needed to heed Wordsworth who advised writers to “care more for the truth than for expression.” Then, “he will be more at one with the Zeitgeist.”24 Similarly, among other Village radicals, Viereck’s confident, often flamboyant, style elicited mixed reactions. A close friend, Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff, who also worked on staff at International and was a frequent contributor to Current Literature, noted: “Not everyone liked Viereck. Many feared him. In this fear of his caustic brilliant tongue and exotic personality, there was jealousy, as well as dislike of his aggressiveness, his glorious assurance, his abundant talents.”25 Another explanation for some of the animosity can be found in the class distinctions noted by several Village chroniclers. While Viereck attended a public college and worked to support his parents, fellow literati remained solidly situated in the middle class and were linked by a shared code of values. Floyd Dell admitted in his autobiography that a hierarchical caste system silently operated among the bohemians. Elites were “high-brows” distinguished by their intellectual prowess and artistic abilities: “Almost everyone, indeed, had a background of the most unimpeachable social respectability.”26 The roster of Harvard graduates living around Washington Square included Hutchins Hapgood (1892), Witter Bynner (1902), Arthur Davison Ficke (1904), Van Wyck Brooks (1908), and Walter Lippmann (1910).27 Another Harvard graduate, the journalist, poet, paramour of Mabel Dodge, and future chronicler of the Russian revolution, John Reed (1910), parodied Viereck’s compositions and comportment: O let us humb-ly bow the neck To George Syl-ves-ter Vi- er- eck

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Who trolled us a merry little Continental stave Concerning the Belly and the Phallus and the Grave It would have almost raised the hair Of Oscar Wilde or Bau- de-laire To hear Mr. Vi- er- eck so frank-ly rave Concerning the Belly and the Phallus and the Grave.28 Even non-Harvard Villagers such as Max Eastman and Floyd Dell deliberately regulated their private lives: “One’s sexual impulses were indulged, not impulsively or at random, but in the light of some well- considered social theory, which might be of almost any kind but had to be thoughtful and consistent.”29 Whether this was a staunchly held principle or simply a convenient rationalization, Dell had learned the hard way that, “considering its reputation,” Greenwich Village was “an extraordinarily snobbish and sanctimonious place.”30 He had fallen in love with a woman designated as a “low-brow” for her supposed intellectual limitations. Their love affair, as a result, “was subjected to a thorough and ruthless ostracism.”31 Inasmuch as remembrances consistently singled out Waldo Frank, a writer on staff at the progressive Seven Arts magazine, for his peculiarity in attending Yale rather than Harvard, Viereck’s more humble background must have colored his reception. His indiscreet banter about love affairs as well as uncouth talk of money most certainly elicited unfavorable notice. And, although initially attracted to Freudian psychology for its promise of adjustment to society and personal liberation from neuroses, these prewar radicals ultimately rejected psychoanalysis in favor of the Marxist aesthetic, with its call to class solidarity and reconstructing society. Viereck, however, was more interested in exploring sublimation than promoting socialism, in reading Freud rather than Marx. An editorial position offered after graduation brought Viereck into closer contact with left-leaning political activists. Leonard Abbott, a friend of Edwin Markham from Socialist circles and an editor of the letters, art, and religion sections of Current Literature, offered Viereck a position as contributing editor. Educated in English public schools, Abbott advocated a utopian commonwealth along the lines advanced by Edward Bellamy and William Morris. Son of a Methodist minister and Prohibition leader himself, Current Literature editor, Edward J. Wheeler, founded the magazine in 1888 as a kind of Reader’s Digest

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in the format of a general news monthly, reprinting articles on politics, science, religion, music, theater, and literature. Wheeler, a selfdescribed evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) socialist, set the tone for literary selections, adhering as he did to a Platonic notion of beauty. “When the poet gives us the truth without the beauty,” Wheeler wrote, “he ceases to be the poet and becomes a pedagogue, and his poem becomes a pamphlet.”32 Viereck’s taste in literature may have fit in seamlessly with the magazines poetics but his offhand pronouncements on sex and money engendered mixed reactions among colleagues. As a writer, Alexander Harvey could compare Viereck’s preoccupation with personal sin to Emerson who looked “into his own heart to understand the foulest crime that ever was committed” and medieval Italians who tolerated “any offense upon the plane of sex.”33 As a socialist, Harvey could not so easily dismiss what he regarded as Viereck’s selfishness: “He is like a true artist in that he is all for self. Fancy his dismissing the socialist ticket with the statement that he does not mean to vote for a party which will make all of his stocks and bonds worthless!”34 Harvey also recoiled from the struggling writer’s preference for cultivating wealthy and influential friends: “He counted a day lost in which he did not make some new and advantageous contact.”35 The “Recent Poetry” section of Current Literature, begun in 1904, devoted three full pages of each issue to contemporary verse. Viereck’s stamp could be discerned by the selections, which conformed to his desire for poetry that was democratic yet intelligent, reality-inspired but not pedestrian, and hospitable to science though ultimately superior because of its kinship to beauty. A typical issue featured a reprint of a traditional lyric on a modern topic by Edith Thomas first published in The St. Louis Mirror, a sonnet by Sara Teasdale (with whom Viereck corresponded) from Harper’s, and excerpts from Ezra Pound’s Provença. Certain writers such as Edwin Markham were published regularly. Witter Bynner, poetry editor at McClure’s who composed poems on modern issues, won kudos for such works as “A Prayer for Beauty” (as the editors commented: “We have ‘got the habit’ of liking everything Mr. Bynner writes”).36 Rudyard Kipling was a perennial favorite for his “vital, genuine, first-hand sort of quality.” Another valued contributor was James Oppenheim who adjured poets to “fall in love with one’s own time and live a life of absorbing interest and glad adventure” because “it is the poet’s function to express his own

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age.”37 The August 1910 issue showcased Oppenheim’s poem, “The Creators”: We have the love of life—that is our glory!— No Hamlets we, no doubting Tennyson, But the young gods of science who have seized Million-huge power, and like genius feel Our possibilities . . . O vision the most beautiful! . . . 38 Viereck compared John Masefield’s sonnets to Shakespeare, his versatility to Kipling, and singled out for praise his Keatsian “Sonnets on Beauty and Life.”39 Vachel Lindsay also received regular notice because, as the editors wrote: “There are in all his work a fervor and freedom that are infectious, and he has a love for beauty that our poets sometimes seem disposed to scorn in these days of insurgency. Mr. Lindsay is something of an insurgent himself and the social passion is strong in his breast; but he never revolts against beauty.”40 Beauty’s “elusiveness and evanescence” formed a motif in the works of Madison Cawein and Charles Hanson Towne, who also earned commendations. Richard Le Gallienne, another regularly featured writer, had used fidelity to beauty as a yardstick in his own review of Viereck’s poetry. Hardly an unbiased commentator (Viereck’s Ninevah was dedicated to him), Le Gallienne applauded Viereck’s intelligence, sense of drama, and force of rhetoric, favorably gauging Viereck’s efforts on the standard benchmark: “After all beauty must continue to be the first and last test of a poet, whatever his theme, whatever his method. There must be magic in his words that got there neither he nor the reader knows how—or why. Nothing can finally take its place.”41 Current Opinion editors remained loyal to this principle as the popularity of poetry increased throughout the decade. They detailed their selection criteria: “We are not looking for any particular brand of poetry. We are not faddists. The old-style poems look just as good to us as those written in vers libre. We are not searching for curios or freaks. What we try to find in a poem is not novelty of form or even novelty of theme, but beauty, vitality, power, sincerity and carrying power.” More writers published in new magazines, they ventured, because “The very essence of good poetry is spiritual freedom,” which can more often be found in smaller magazines that do not represent “a large vested interest.”42

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At the helm of the poetry department, Viereck escorted in a new class of beauty. Introducing a poem by Arthur Davison Ficke, Viereck wrote, “If the mission of the poet is to find the beauty in common things, then the following is not poetry. It is positively brutal, and instead of any attempt to heighten the beauty of the object described, it heightens the ugliness.” If Viereck had stopped there, he would have been casting his lot with genteel critics, but he recognized value in the poem. He continued, “Yet it would take more courage than we have to deny that this is real poetry.” Along similar lines, Viereck quoted from a series of articles by Louis Untermeyer in the Chicago Evening Post that catalogued the qualities of this “new beauty.” “Poetry has once again become democratic,” Untermeyer wrote. “It is again being written so that it may be read by strong men and thieves and deacons, and not by little cliques only.” Poetry was “no longer an escape from life” but “an encounter with it,” including the more unlovely aspects. Beauty was a constant; what changed was the poet’s vision and voice. Viereck agreed: “Every poet has his own way of expressing that beauty, but it is the same beauty that was in the days of Sappho.” Despite the novel themes introduced into poetry, the essence remained: “It is the beauty in Masefield,” Viereck explained, “that will make him live, not the brutality nor the vulgarity.”43 This new definition helped to legitimize poetry. Viereck asked, “In a hard-headed, pragmatic, utilitarian world, what is the use of Poetry?” If poetry were on trial in a death penalty case before a jury of “bankers, brokers, lawyers, and engineers” then Coleridge’s testimony would sway: “Poetry has been to me an exceeding great reward; it has soothed my affliction; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared my solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the Good and the Beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.” But poets need not always declaim about beauty and goodness to achieve this effect. Viereck asserted: “The lover of beauty is sometimes as much enhanced by showing forth the terrible things of life, its despair and gloom and devastating sorrow, as by showing forth its joy and glory and moral sublimity.”44 By revealing the more troublesome aspects of life, the new beauty enhanced an individual’s understanding and sense of compassion. Businessmen ensconced in their daily routines quickly scanning ephemeral newspapers and bold advertisements were at high risk for diminished capacity in these areas, Viereck argued. Extended attention to poetry reading promised to lend protection against

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depletion: “Poetry must be read carefully or it were better unread. Its beauties should be looked for, for the subtlest and sweetest beauties are not those that hit you in the eye. Read carefully and read honestly.” Viereck pointed to Ezra Pound’s “Ballad for Gloom” as an example of “hard reading,” as rough as someone “prospecting for gold mines in the Bad Lands of Montana. It is hard going. There are bruising bowlders [sic] and piercing cacti to be negotiated.”45 Just as Santayana and Markham had advocated a spiritual function for verse, Viereck claimed that the reward of intensive reading practices came in the form of spiritual perception, “passion,” and “magic.”46 In subsequent issues, Viereck returned to the same theme. He printed excerpts from prominent Scribner’s editor Hamilton W. Mabie, who contended that, for twenty years, America had been too busy to take notice of its poetry, but that state of affairs was about to change. “Now that it is learning that wealth without poetry is weariness,” Mabie wrote, “and that the divorce of the senses from the imagination is a spiritual scandal, and a breeder of material scandals as well, it may turn again to the singers who have neither feared nor flattered it, but have refused to be blinded by its prosperity or confused by its resounding activities.” The new poets and “the new poetry” provided “refreshing reading” but, more importantly, “it keeps the old loyalty to the things of the spirit.” The magazine’s editors kept abreast of literary developments at home and abroad. They repeated the results of William Braithwaite’s annual survey of poetry, reported on new theories relating to verse, conveyed information about controversies (such as the attack on Spoon River Anthology as “pessimistic”), and tracked developments in the ongoing poetry renaissance (taking not a small amount of credit for its rise). Harriet Monroe, who complained about the magazine’s “possibly too catholic” selections, nonetheless acknowledged the editors’ contributions to poetry’s increased popularity: “This department of Current Opinion was indeed one of the first gleams on the horizon after a long period of apathetic darkness.” It was, she averred, “perhaps the first authoritative hint offered to the American people that their poets were doing anything worthy of attention and encouragement.”47 Viereck made an even larger impact when he spearheaded an effort to organize an institution devoted solely to the promotion of contemporary poetry, similar to the kind established in Paris and London. He assembled, in December of 1910, a group of poets at the Upper

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East Side residence of a friend, Isaac Rice, founder of the Electric Boat Company, maker of the U.S. Navy’s first submarine, as well as a Chess Master and publisher of The Forum. Viereck wanted to create the kind of salon he found throughout Europe to serve as a forum to support and foster new poets. As an editor at Current Literature, Viereck had called for poems that required “close reading and sustained attention,” for poets to cherish modern inventions and mores, for readers to give sympathy, understanding, and support, and for Americans to acknowledge that poets deserved a living wage for their work.48 By the evening’s end, plans had been made to establish a primary base in New York. Next, Viereck, Markham, Wheeler, and Isaac and Muriel Rice circulated a letter to potential members to announce the idea and invite them to another meeting on February 22nd.49 That get-together ended with a resolve to get beyond poetry societies centered around an individual author—Shakespeare, Browning, Dante—to cultivate the art itself, as well as an intelligent and receptive audience. The final product, the ambitiously named Poetry Society of America (PSA), was founded in large measure on strongly egalitarian notions: that poets of all persuasions should be nurtured and protected, and that poverty should be no obstacle to membership. In the absence of initiation fees and dues, the Society’s most generous members covered expenses. The National Arts Association made contributions, while the National Arts Club donated meeting rooms. A stipulation of this arrangement was that Club members be allowed to attend PSA meetings. This did not pose a problem because the PSA’s own policies allowed non-poets to become members if they chose.50 This approach—a sharp contrast to the requirement of the Poetry Society of Great Britain, founded earlier the same year, that members have at least one book published by a reputable firm—is well summed up in this statement by Viereck: “Certainly the subject of poetry is wide enough, deep enough and vital enough to furnish an adequate basis for such an organization, formed by the lovers as well as the producers of poetry.”51 This recognition of the necessary—and at times complicated—relationship between audience and author was central to the founding of the PSA. Article 3 of the PSA’s Constitution makes this connection explicit: The purpose of the Society is to secure fuller recognition for poetry as one of the important forces making for a higher civilization and

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to kindle a fuller and more intelligent appreciation of poetry, and especially of the work of living American poets, and to do such other acts as may be deemed necessary or appropriate to encourage and foster American poetry and aid and assist American poets. One constituent piece crucial to fostering American poetry involved the repositioning of American poets, in the public mind, as humble stewards of the country’s “best traditions,” aspirations, culture, and humanity. Invited to publicize the inaugural PSA dinner, William Braithwaite reported sympathetically of the gathering in an article for The Boston Evening Transcript, calling it “a spectacle embodying deep and vital spiritual ideals” of the nation.52 This notion of the ennobling and enriching character of poetry had, of course, been around on both sides of the Atlantic since Romantic times and before: Even so diehard a scientist as Darwin, who spent significant portions of his time on the ship Beagle reading Milton, lamented in his later years, “If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry or listen to some music at least once every week.”53 At the moment of the founding of the PSA, there was a particular and acute sense that while America had grown in wealth and international stature, its neglect of culture kept it from achieving greatness—and that poets would rekindle and help to maintain the country’s high ideals. The loss of aesthetic appreciation amounted to “a loss of happiness,” which might “possibly be injurious to the intellect, more probably the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”54 But for poets to fulfill their mandate to uplift and ennoble society, they must be enabled, financially and otherwise, to see their works into print and into the hands of an appreciative audience. At the initial meeting of the PSA, Percy MacKaye spoke about the many poets who turned to careers in law, medicine, and industry for lack of opportunities in literature, and this common complaint led to one of the key platforms of the fledgling Society.55 Edwin Markham lectured on the interdependence of science and poetry. Both men voiced the Progressive belief in information to sway hearts and minds. As Braithwaite reported, “The heart of humanity instinctively turned toward that which was deepest and truest when appealed to convincingly.” In an interview with The Washington Post, Viereck articulated his hope that the organization would not only provide support for poets (in part by enlarging “the circle of appreciative readers of

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poetry” and bringing them “closer to the active life of the present and its themes”), but also actively assist unknown poets to garner publications in well-known newspapers and magazines.56 This obvious and attractive goal in fact depended on several elements, not least that poets should have forums where they could get to know and appreciate each other’s work, and be heard and appraised by editors and other gatekeepers to publication, and that the writing of poetry be made financially viable as a career—through explicit pressure, if necessary, on journals and publishers to modify their payment structure. The PSA built on the nineteenth century salons hosted by members of the genteel poetic community. In Boston Louise Moulton’s hosted “Fridays” for local writers, while in New York Richard Gilder held regular gatherings in his Manhattan brownstone. Along with Brander Matthews, he organized the Authors Club (which required a published volume or professorship to enter) there.57 A few blocks away, Richard Stoddard conducted a salon at his Tenth Street home with Thomas Aldrich and William Brownell. Edmund Stedman had his own gatherings at his famous Sunday Evenings (which lasted until 1889). Harriet Monroe recalled the effect of attending one of his dinner parties on a young poet: “These people in the trade consider one’s aspirations the most natural thing in the world, which is as refreshing as daylight after the catacombs.”58 In the interim period between the demise of genteel brownstone culture and the rise of new poetic communities, Markham had filled the gap. On Sunday afternoons, his Staten Island home became a point of pilgrimage for admirers. Along with his wife Catherine, Markham held open house from noon until four in the afternoon. Novice poets, such as Witter Bynner, Louis Untermeyer, and Sara Teasdale, paid their respects by visiting and presenting copies of their published verse collections. Non-poets also assembled in his home, including legendary actor John Barrymore, Sun Fo (son of the Chinese revolutionary and democratic leader Sun Yat Sen), French philosopher Henri Bergson, and British writers John Galsworthy and G. K. Chesterton. Seeking out camaraderie, a nucleus of poetry readers and writers in Chicago formed among local journalists. Future associate editor of Poetry, Eunice Tietjens—who clung to poetry “as an unchanging value in a shifting world”—remembered the effect of this association

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when she recalled a rare evening of poetry reading with Floyd Dell and other friends: I walked on air, like one warm with champagne, though I had had no alcohol except of the spirit. Poetry, I cried to myself, is not a dead thing, something that is shut in books to dress library shelves and is taught to school children, something to be given away at Christmas or bought shyly and read in one’s own room as one might take drugs, and never, never spoken of because nobody cares. Poetry is a live thing. I am not alone in the world today . . . Poetry is alive! And I danced in the streets and sang to myself . . . from that evening some floodgate had broken in me and I was beginning to be awake.59 The new generation of PSA founders wanted to move beyond the prescriptions of salon culture and build a professional organization that would improve the status of poets. Included among the charter members were eighteen women and twenty-six men, covering a range of abilities, ages, and approaches, from George Santayana to George Woodberry, Edwin Markham and Lizette Woodworth Reese.60 Reporting on the PSA’s inaugural meeting, The New York Sun predicted a renaissance in poetry that would result from the synergy generated by the organization: “Artistic and literary awakenings are brought about by the welding in close association of brilliant minds, by the formation of just such organizations as the new PSA.”61 Interestingly, several newspapers initially roundly derided the PSA, and mockingly likened it to a labor union for plumbers and carpenters— workers who dealt in tangible, practical goods—rather than an organization for professionals, such as the American Medical Association or American Bar Association. In fact, however, both comparisons have some validity. While Society members hoped to secure greater public recognition for their craft (which many of them believed was “the highest of all arts”), they also sought to stimulate the production of “high quality poetry” through the interchange of ideas and the unified cry for a living wage for poets. One of the first actions Edward Wheeler took as PSA President was to conduct a survey among twenty-seven of the leading weekly and monthly magazines to calculate remuneration. He discovered that rates for poetry submissions were on the rise and named several poets who made their living solely by the sales of their verse, including Alfred Noyes, Arthur Guiterman, and Vachel Lindsay.62 As a means to

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encourage and compensate poets, the PSA established a national award through Columbia University, which became the Pulitzer Prize.63 And in fact the Society was remarkably successful in a number of significant ways. By 1913, membership had reached two hundred and fifty, and requests to join or form affiliated organizations poured in steadily. Magazines and newspapers responded to the upsurge in the production of quality verse by increasing copy space; more editors paid upon receipt rather than publication, a move that aided many cash-poor writers.64 New bookstores solely devoted to poetry, such as the Gotham Book Mart, gained popularity, and new dedicated magazines emerged as well, including Poetry, Poet-Lore, and The Poetry Journal. Perhaps most significantly, poets genuinely had a forum in which to mingle as artists and equals. At an early meeting in 1911, for example, Witter Bynner began with a reading of “Helen of Troy” by Sara Teasdale, who sat in the audience with Ezra Pound behind her (his only appearance at the PSA because he returned to England shortly afterward), and the floor then opened up to discussion. In the first few years, Samuel Untermeyer, a legal reformer who campaigned for government regulation of the financial industry and who played a key role in establishing the Federal Reserve, conveyed PSA members via a special railway car to a nature program and dinner at his home near Yonkers.65 Subsequent PSA meetings brought poets who wrote traditional verse, such as villanelles, sestinas, and sonnets, as well as those venturing into vers libre, Vorticisim, and Imagism. British bards, including William Butler Yeats—who delivered a speech before a gathering of two hundred members—and John Masefield gave keynote addresses. Poets from Latin America, South America, India, and Japan also came to lecture, attend meetings, or appear as guests of honor. As Jessie Rittenhouse put it, the organization soon became “a place of comradeship, of stimulus, of interchange of ideas, and especially of aid to the younger poets in bringing their work forward for criticism and recognition.”66 Rittenhouse played an instrumental role in the success of the PSA. When she first received the invitation to discuss the formation of an organization devoted to poetry, she was working as a literary critic at The New York Times Review of Books and had published a best-selling poetry anthology of contemporary verse. In the PSA Rittenhouse discerned an opportunity to create “a center for the art of poetry in America that would gather poets in a closer bond and prove a

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stimulus to those far removed.” In her capacity as PSA Secretary, from 1911 to 1922, she worked to rehabilitate poetry’s reputation.67 Edward Wheeler may have presided over the meetings as president but to many members Rittenhouse “was the Society.”68 She organized monthly meetings, wrote and distributed monthly bulletins to members across the country, took measures to incorporate the writing of living poets into high school textbooks, and fielded hundreds of requests from coast to coast to deliver lectures on the new poetry.69 Before the annual PSA dinners each year, she hosted a preextravaganza “poet’s party” at her apartment on the Upper West Side to provide a more intimate setting for visiting poets to meet their counterparts in the Northeast. Markham and his wife Catherine always put in an appearance. “Nothing could have flourished in New York without the Markhams,” Rittenhouse remembered. When he walked into a room, “it was like admitting a breath of the wet wind—immediately everything was astir . . . Good will—shall one say love?—flowed from him and drew everyone into the warmth of his atmosphere.”70 During Rittenhouse’s tenure, the PSA headquarters in Gramercy Park accumulated a library of publications by contemporary poets. PSA branches were established in almost every state, while colleges and universities organized their own affiliated societies.71 The Poetry Society of America facilitated discussions about content and technique. One of the first meetings addressed the question: “Should poetry be made a vehicle for social controversy?”72 In 1915 Amy Lowell spoke on a rostrum that included lyrics by Cale Young Rice and a debate on one of the most popular books of the year, Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. Lowell addressed the principles of rhythm and cadence in vers libre, and extolled the virtues of Imagism. “Her speech bristled with so much provocative dicta,” Rittenhouse recorded, “that the right wing was stirred to action and primed for reply.” Lowell next recited “Venus Transiens” in which she compared Botticelli’s Venus to the subject of the poem and asked “who is more beautiful?” The answer, that both were equal, resulted in much applause. With the next poem, “Spring Day,” she pressed her luck. It related the typical daily events of a young girl, beginning with a bath. Years later, Margaret Widdemer recalled the audience’s reactions: “There was first a suppressed snicker, which presently rose to a roomful of undisguised laughter. The Poetry Society of America, two hundred strong, was seeing Amy, sans lorgnette and tight maroon cashmere or anything else, kicking in her bathtub.”73

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The majority of members appreciated Lowell’s intellect and willingness to experiment, but they objected to her use of free verse. Instead of composing solely in the standard meter for dramatic poetry used by poets from Shakespeare to Tennyson, and adhering to strict rules of meter concerning the placement of accented and unaccented syllables, free verse applies regular meter or rhyme. Beginning with Whitman and building on Viereck and on Stephen Crane, whose acerbic, aggressive, irregularly punctuated poems stood apart for their originality in the 1890s, Lowell and other modern poets believed that this more readily replicated speech patterns, making it more cognate with reality; freeing poetry to address modern topics required liberation from the tyranny of the regular metric. As much as changes in content, these variations of form provoked alarm among critics and readers who saw in replications of the quotidian an aesthetic of erosion that threatened to corrode poetry’s status as a preserve. For William Marion Reedy, free verse had potential but it risked the coherence and stateliness that art should embody: “I do incline to the traditional forms, since form means constraint, selectiveness . . . And then while I’m for liberty, I’m not for license. There must be order in art and there is in anything worth while.”74 Even Robert Frost, who dramatically rescripted the voices found in modern poetry, likened free verse to playing tennis without a net.75 The PSA’s strong reaction also registered another concern. Lowell lacked the usual reserve associated with women in the public sphere, prompting some of the more conservative members to stand up and question the suitability of a bath as a topic for poetry. “Bedlam was let loose,” Rittenhouse recalled. A volley of opinions lobbed back and forth between the right and left factions. Lowell made an argument for form, insisting repeatedly, “But I did it so delicately!” In public, she made light of the fracas: “I do not know when I have enjoyed myself so much. It was most stimulating and interesting, and the genuine interest shown by the whole audience, antagonistic or not, was the greatest possible compliment.”76 And Rittenhouse declared in her memoirs: “Frank discussion, is the law of the Poetry Society.”77 But at least one witness, Margaret Widdemer, believed the event forever severed relations: “The story went the rounds; and Amy Lowell was the enemy of the P.S.A. and a good many of its members, from then on. For she always paid her debts.”78 Viereck summed up the prevailing consensus among that night’s audience in Current Literature (now called Current Opinion): Despite

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further blurring of the line between prose and poetry, free verse had justified itself as literature, bringing “new ardor” into the “creation of vital literature.”79 Other members cast the evening in equally exuberant tones. Wheeler thanked Lowell for a speech that provided “the liveliest and most stimulating meeting we have ever had.” He added a remark that would be put to the test several years later: “I still live in hopes that I will have to call in a policeman some night to preserve order. Then I will know that the society is a success.”80 He repeated this sentiment in a column for Current Opinion: We have said it before and we say it again—the Poetry Society of America will not be a complete success until a policeman or two has to be called in to preserve order. When the feeling about poetry runs so high as to endanger the peace of the community, then indeed have the days of the high gods come again.81 In 1917, Lowell delivered another provocative lecture on a ticket that included William Marion Reedy and the poet he mentored and published, Edgar Lee Masters.82 Her speech admitted America’s cultural indebtedness to England, but called for complete literary independence. Anglophiles in the audience took offense, demanding unalloyed support for the Allies in their fight against the Central Powers. Viereck’s wife Margaret (Gretchen, as he called her), along with Witter Bynner, stood up to counter criticism of Lowell’s polyphonic poem “Sea Blue and Blood Red.”83 Diplomatically, Viereck later wrote to Lowell, “I liked your speech at the Poetry Society. What I liked especially was your frank acknowledgement of your indebtedness to England, together with a declaration of independence for American letters.”84 Lowell responded appreciatively, saying that she would not forget Mrs. Viereck’s “splendid championship” of her “when the group was entirely hostile. What she said was so simple and so much to the point that it was a pleasure to hear it, even had I not been the subject.”85 One of the most popular speakers to appear before the Poetry Society in its early days was Vachel Lindsay. For years before his reputationmaking appearance in the January 1913 issue of Poetry, when Harriet Monroe published “General William Booth Enters Heaven,” he and Rittenhouse corresponded. They also met in 1908 when she lectured before a Woman’s Club group of two hundred in Lindsay’s native Springfield, Illinois. A self- described “kind of Socialist,” Lindsay,

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like Markham, had been raised in a strict Campbellite household, with daily Bible lessons before breakfast and readings from scripture before dinner. Rittenhouse shared Lindsay’s passion for temperance and included his poem “Upon Reading Omar Khayyam During an Anti-Saloon Campaign in Central Illinois” in her anthology. In front of a PSA audience that included journalist and poet John Reed, Lindsay performed “The Congo” and his popular “Kallyope Yell”: “I am but the Pioneer/Voice of democracy;/I am the gutter dream,/I am the golden dream,/Singing science, singing steam.”86 The Poetry Society soon became a well-respected feature of the New York City cultural landscape. Fornaro, a well-known cartoonist, genially lampooned guests for The Sun. One drawing, “The Poet’s Dinner,” featured a man playing a lyre, bordered by butterflies above a menu that listed “Tomato Broth Unbound,” “Chiffonade Salad A La Wagstaff,” and “Per Verse Cocktail A La Viereck with A Wilde Dash of Oscar” for dinner. Viereck stood out in another character sketch with his hand raised in mid-gesture, an animated smile, and natty tuxedo87 (see figure 3.2). When the war years came, however, the

Figure 3.2 Carlo de Fornaro’s Drawing of Poetry Society of America members at the Third Annual Dinner on January 28, 1913, which featured George Sylvester Viereck front and center. Originally published in the New York Sun on February 2, 1913.

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PSA’s commitment to democracy and tolerance would be challenged and Viereck’s contributions would be censored. Harriet Monroe also set out to create a supportive poetic community and develop a stronger audience, believing that poets would continue to be treated with disregard until a group of powerful citizens took a “special interest in it [poetry], to plead its cause with a planned and efficient program.”88 The story of Poetry magazine and her editorial relationships with emerging poets is well-known. A brief summary, however, will highlight the ways in which her strategy and poetics joined with the efforts of Markham, Viereck, Rittenhouse, and others to construct a new architecture, with new designs that got around the clogged channels of the genteel tradition. Between the time she published her “Columbian Ode” in 1893 and 1911, when she began laying down plans for a new literary journal, Monroe saw few opportunities for poets. Her own meager record of publications during that time offered little consolation. She had to rely on friends to underwrite her debut book of verse, Valeria, and of verse plays, The Passing Show, both released in 1903. To maintain her dignity, she insisted on receiving payment for her next volume and having it published by a reputable press. But Houghton Mifflin editor Ferris Greenslet responded to her query letter by stating it would “be out of the question” for his firm to print a collection of poetry “on any other basis than the commission one.”89 She next wrote to Mitchell Kennerley who did not work on a commission basis, but his reply brought more rejection. “As we all know,” he wrote, “there is almost no sale for books of poems just at present, and I already have in hand more volumes than I can really afford to publish.”90 Fretting over the state of her career and the outlook for poets in general, especially in comparison to the worlds of theater, music, and art, Monroe penned a commentary for The Atlantic Monthly. In “The Bigness of the World” (1911) she outlined a sort of party platform, which showcased the spirit of the age as the new guiding muse. Scrutinizing prevailing editorial practices and the unique problems facing contemporary writers, she contended that poets in previous eras had limited horizons and audiences: Euripides played to the narrow male audience of the Athenian acropolis; Virgil, Petrarch, and Racine addressed coteries in courts and cities; Shakespeare took as his purview London, with Italy providing material for romantic interludes. Not until Robert Burns did a poet try to incorporate a panoply of people, places, and phenomena. Burns was “the first to

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feel the whole passion and thrill of the modern movement.” But, guided by “little old compasses” and “little old tools,” he lacked the gear necessary to navigate his way. “Crushed between old and new,” cobwebs obscured his vision while “ancient tangles” shackled his hands and feet. Burns ended his days drenched in “drink and despair” in large part because of public neglect.91 Such gifted writers needed, and deserved, more support; without it, the complexity of modern life would continue to bewilder and the mysteries of modern consciousness would remain ungrasped. Monroe prescribed a two-pronged strategy for vates, poet-prophets, to drift through the “bigness of the modern world” and capture the experience in masterful verse. They first had to “believe in our vaster modern age” despite the frantic pace, fragmentation, and alienation. Poets had to appreciate technological advances, which promised to abridge hunger and suffering. Such a faculty required strength absent in previous poets. Second, Monroe called for a new poetic community. The same audience that thrilled to news of electricity, X-rays and mono-rails, had to rally at the gifts and messages of the vates: “It must search long for its poet-prophet who shall sing the old era away and usher in the new.” In Monroe’s theory of relativity, the highest art equaled “profound energy of creation” multiplied by “profound energy of sympathy.” As it was, the poet’s love, wit, and wisdom met with whispers, confusion, or a silence that was deafening. Despite this state of affairs, Monroe maintained hope, identifying a growing audience ready to participate in an antiphon: “There are many signs of an awakening of spiritual consciousness in the crowd— confused and scattered signs of far-blown sympathies, exaltations, ideals. Democracy is becoming awake and aware” and is “as keen for truth and beauty as it is to-day for comfort.” It was the poet’s job, she wrote in the poem “To Robert Louis Stevenson,” to provide “Glimpses of celestial things.”92 In an interview with The Chicago Tribune, she argued along similar lines. “The average magazine editor’s conception of good verse is verse that will fill out a page,” she told the reporter. “No editor is looking for long poems; they want something light and convenient. Consequently a Milton might be living in Chicago today and be unable to find an outlet for his verse.”93 At the age of fifty- one, Monroe resolved to establish her own journal devoted to poetry. Emboldened by a financing schedule devised by a friend, the playwright and philanthropist H. C. ChatfieldTaylor, she solicited support from prominent businessmen and art

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patrons. In an April 1912 circular, she detailed the dilemma facing poets: the lack of financial remuneration for work; editorial dictates that slashed, shortened, and otherwise girdled originality; and critics who overlooked or dismissed significant contributions. To make matters worse, America lacked an apparatus to find and promote poets. “In short,” she concluded, ““the vast English-speaking world says to its poets: ‘silence.’ ”94 At the same time, however, William Braithwaite released a circular announcing plans for beginning a magazine called Poetry. With the help of his Transcript colleague, Edward O’Brien, and with backing from some PSA members, Braithwaite planned to issue the first number in October, while Monroe had announced intentions to start publication in December. Monroe wrote to O’Brien claiming priority for the title “Poetry” because she had already secured one hundred subscribers.95 Monroe hurried the premiere issue onto stands by October, forcing the overworked Braithwaite to change the name of his publication (the inaugural copy appeared in December) to The Poetry Journal. While deficits of money and time soon resulted in the demise of Braithwaite’s magazine after only eight months, the rivalry between the two editors would persist. The response to Monroe’s proposed venue surpassed her expectations. She knew enough poets writing in experimental modes and believed an audience existed, but had been less confident about finding support among Chicago’s elite. The one hundred and eight guarantors included educators, businessmen, and lawyers; executives of department stores, meatpacking, steel, and manufacturing, as well as a bank president, a chief stockholder in railroads, a paint manufacturer, an electrical supplier, and Clarence Darrow became “guarantors” by pledging fifty dollars a year for the next five years. “Of course put me down,” Gilbert Porter, a notable attorney told Monroe. “I don’t know any better way to pay my debt to Shelley.”96 She next contacted a roster of poets, requesting help in her “effort to encourage the production and appreciation of poetry” in part by cultivating “a public primarily interested in poetry as an art, as the highest, most complete expression of human truth and beauty.”97 The enthusiastic replies provided a wide array of high quality poems from which to choose. Believing that the world would be restored by the interaction between writers and readers, and that this interplay would foster great art, Monroe appropriated Walt Whitman’s adage, “To have

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great poets there must be great audiences too” as the motto for her new magazine.98 The inaugural issue of Poetry: A Magazine in Verse appeared in October of 1912 with an editorial, “The Motive of the Magazine,” articulating her goal to nourish in America a “great audience” and “a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public.”99 She continued, “We hope to offer our subscribers a place of refuge, a green isle in the sea, where Beauty may plant her gardens, and Truth, austere revealer of joy and sorrow, of hidden delights and despairs, may follow her brave quest unafraid.” Edith Wyatt, a member of the advisory board, called the magazine “a gallery for poems” that would serve “a social value in its power of recalling or creating the beautiful.”100 Poetry, Monroe wrote in the inaugural issue, would “encourage the production and appreciation of poetry, the highest, most complete expression of human truth and beauty.” To accommodate a wide spectrum of tastes, Monroe’s selections ranged gamely from the conservative Arthur Davison Ficke to Ezra Pound’s rebuke-filled “To Whistler, American.” Subsequent issues likewise contained tributes to traditional verse as long as they contained an element of the new. For example, Monroe touted the “sincere feeling,” “emotional earnestness,” and “large sweep of courageous personality” found in these lines by conservative poet William Ellery Leonard: Oh be bold, be free! Strip off this perfumed fabric from your verse, Tear from your windows all the silk and lace! And stand man woman, on the slope by me!101 Richard Le Gallienne, whom Monroe called “the poet laureate of April” for his contributions to the genre of poetry in praise of that month (for which Monroe seemed to have a special fondness), received a favorable review for The Lonely Dancer, and Other Poems. Monroe commended Le Gallienne’s invocations, “the magical interpretation of nature in her more charming moods,” and confessed that the lyric ‘ “Oh, climb with me this April night,/The silver ladder of the moon’ has been my constant companion for years.”102 In an early editorial, Monroe detailed the demands of this “New Beauty.” She had received many manuscripts “whose eager authors seem as unaware of the twentieth century as if they had spent these recent years in an Elizabethan manor-house or a vine- clad Victorian

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cottage.” Even those who rhymed about labor and tenements did so in old forms or moralizing tones. “It is not a question of subject, nor yet of form, this new beauty which must inspire every artist worthy of the age he lives in,” she explained. In her view, poets formed something of an aesthetic elite: “The poet is not a follower, but a leader.” As such, they had to do more than articulate current ideas; they needed “vision,” “passion,” and “courage” to convey that, far from being mere dross, poetry was the “very pulse and heart-beat” of life.103 Luther-like dispensations about the need for “direct and spontaneous” creations to “sweep away all barriers between his soul and the truth” formed a recurrent theme in her editorials, as did Monroe’s tactic of candidly addressing criticisms. The most troublesome complaints, however, derived from the magazine’s foreign correspondent, the ever-irascible Ezra Pound. Even before the first issue hit the newsstands, Monroe had enlisted Pound’s help in soliciting and identifying important work. The many stories of Monroe’s relationship with Pound share a similar focus on the portentous judgments of these two dissimilar individuals. Monroe had initiated a correspondence with Pound after reading Personae and Exultations during a panEuropean and trans-Siberian railroad trip, and felt herself drawn to his Progressive work slogan of “Guts and Efficiency” as much as his posture as avatar of sensibility.104 His “beautiful rhythms” also fit nicely into her portmanteau of poetics.105 Pound, in turn, applauded her plans for establishing Poetry; after all, he had famously left America because it lacked poetic communities with outlets and mediators that supported new writing. He hoped that Monroe’s magazine would teach America that “poetry is an art, an art with a technique . . . that must be in constant flux . . . if it is to live.”106 He shared Monroe’s belief that the ultimate function of poetry was “to create the beautiful image; to create order and profusion of images that we may furnish the life of our minds with a noble surrounding.”107 He believed a renewal of poetry lay just on the horizon: “Our American Risorgimento is dear to me. That awakening will make the Italian Renaissance look like a tempest in a teapot” and vowed to help Monroe “find new American poets—les jeunes who aren’t vitiated with magazine habits.”108 From his base in London he could procure the “best” new work from England and Europe, including his own “modern stuff,” which he deemed to be “objective—no slither—direct—no excess of adjectives . . . no metaphors that won’t

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permit examination . . . straight talk.”109 The partnership with Pound yielded manuscripts and early reviews of relatively obscure poets of the time, such as Robert Frost, Rabindrath Tagore, H. D., and, most famously, T. S. Eliot—an extensive roster of authors who became part of the modernist canon. Pound’s expertise did not come easily. Monroe had to peel through buckets of chaff to get at his usually unerring words of wisdom. His letters were strewn with harangues about the “provincial” poems she published in her “family magazine.” And, although Monroe and Pound both gave money and editorial aid to destitute writers, they diverged in their attitude toward the reading public. Pound wanted her to remove the Whitman motto from the magazine masthead and to replace it with Dante’s Quem stulti magis odissent (“Whom the stupid hate the most”) and affirmed with pride: “I do not love my fellow man and I don’t propose to pretend to.”110 He even criticized one of her most famous poems, “The Turbine,” for its “absolutely literary, bookish syntax,” “vague blobby generalizing [sic] words,” and asked “Have you ever let a noun out unchaperoned???” He continued: I dislike your “Turbine” intensely. I hate a lot of talk about something . . . I want direct presentation. Statement. Uninterrupted by exclamations, “whew!” etc. . . . Objectivity and objectivity and again objectivity, and NO expression, NO hind- side-beforeness. No Tennysonianness of speech, nothing, nothing, NOTHING that you couldn’t in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, ACTUALLY say . . . Every literaryism, every book word, fritters away a scrap of the reader’s patience, a scrap of his sense of your sincerity.111 Fearing another screed as one of her issues went to press, Monroe sent a preemptive letter. “Just a word to explain our May number, which I suppose will make you say ‘damn,’ ” she wrote. “Nothing that has any life in it gets by us. As for some of the stuff, you would dance a can- can if you could see it.” She explained that what appeared on the page was often an improvement on what had shown up in her office: “Frequently our suggestions for emendations result in distinct modernizing of the tone and general improvement.”112 The response to some of Pound’s own poems reveals the difficult balancing act Monroe had to perform. In 1913 Poetry published “Contemporania” and “In A Station of the Metro,” which went on

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to achieve canonical status as an archetype of Imagism. On the one hand, a letter from John Neihardt articulated the revulsion felt by traditionalists: “In your heart you know it is insincere & highly imitative of the worst of Whitman. Yelling isn’t poetry. Billingsgate isn’t beautiful. Rebellion gets nowhere. Only slow growth ever counts. There is no new beauty . . . Important changes are not abrupt . . . Why repudiate sincerity & careful workmanship?” Monroe held her ground: “I think that Ezra Pound is passionately sincere and that some of the poems are extremely beautiful,” she explained. “I think sincerity and careful workmanship are of very little use by themselves.” She also refuted the notion that inclusion of a few poems in one form damned the whole enterprise: “For surely we have been hospitable to all kinds and have not confined ourselves to any one school.”113 On the other hand, Floyd Dell, editor of the Chicago Evening Post Literary Review and a friend of Monroe, gave Pound a front-page salute: “Your poems in the April Poetry are so mockingly, so delicately, so unblushingly beautiful that you seem to have brought back into the world a grace (which probably never existed). You are a creator of the beautiful in a world where only by a divinely creative process does beauty exist.”114 Carl Sandburg called Pound “a new roamer of the beautiful,” making him sound more like a harmless romantic than the whirligig of verbal debris that he was. “The old, old things that are always lovely haunt him, whether they move on the faces of women, petals of flowers, waves of moonlight, or the waters of Venice by night,” which he gives in murmurous lines like these: And the beauty of this thy Venice hast thou shown unto me Until is its loveliness become unto me a thing of tears. Sandburg also pointed to “Ancient Wisdom,” one of Pound’s translations from the Chinese: Beautiful, infinite memories That are a-plucking at my heart . . . The black shadows of your beauty On the white face of my beloved . . . 115

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Figure 3.3 William Rose Benét, “As I Imagine Harriet Monroe Editing Poetry,” 1917, depicts the editor atop a pile of manuscripts balancing the competing dictates of the genteel tradition and modernism. Reproduction courtesy of Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

Monroe received consolation and support from a stable of writers who acknowledged her poise and professionalism in the midst of opposing parties. William Rose Benét sent a sketch of Monroe that captured the dilemma she faced. She is perched atop a pile of manuscripts with the ghost of Ezra Pound in front of her desk and, behind it, a portrait of Bryant (which faces the wall). Above her hangs a drawing of “Spring” while a broken string of “shackles of the past” drape behind her. On the mantel sits an “acid test” bottle, the “works of Whitman,” “Key to Imagism,” and Pound’s “Provencal” (see figure 3.3). Louis Untermeyer also leavened the situation by sending the satirical stanzas “Chant Monroe”: Enough! The cry goes up, enough Of his crack-brained, distorted stuff: If you would be with blessings crowned,

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Deliver us from Ezra Pound! Virile—you say—a thing apart— The acme of the new in art; Profound—well if he be profound, Deliver us from Ezra Pound!116 Words of praise from the likes of Amy Lowell also heartened: “To know that there is an editor who really knows and feels, does make a very great difference.”117 Monroe iterated her commitment to a latitudinarian policy in a 1912 editorial by invoking the metaphor of an art gallery, which sponsored shows for amateurs as well as geniuses. At exhibitions, crowds regularly viewed hundreds of photos without requiring every work be a masterpiece. Likewise, a minor poet might produce a perfect line or invoke a remarkable image and a major poet might go unnoticed or unappreciated for years. As a result, Monroe reaffirmed the magazine’s policy of “The Open Door” and qualified the notion of tradition, arguing that it “ceases to be of use” the moment it hardens into orthodoxy.118 Several months later, when the Armory Show came to Chicago after its New York run, with its mix of traditional and avant garde paintings, sculptures, and crafts, Monroe expressed admiration for the “remote and mysterious symbolism” of the futurists and cubists because they provided a necessary antidote to the Art Institute’s “conservative art.” “We are in an anemic condition which requires strong medicine,” she wrote in a review of the exhibition: For in a profound sense these radical artists are right. They represent the revolt of the imagination against nineteenth century realism; they represent disgust with the camera, outrage over superficial smoothness which covers up weakness of structure. They represent a search for new beauty, impatience with formulae, a reaching out towards the inexpressible, and a longing for new versions of truth.119 Monroe objected to realism because it deceptively depicted subjectivity, language, and culture as unified and coherent; the new beauty acknowledged that plurality—in identity, consciousness, and form— now prevailed. Associate editor Alice Henderson held similar views on the limits of realism, explaining that art does not merely duplicate, but animates. The vision of poets, she wrote, “penetrates the

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object and infuses it with that imaginative life which is the primary and essential quality of life.”120 Henderson played a large role in making Poetry a success. Eunice Tietjens, who took over after Henderson left for health reasons, credited her with finding gems from the slush pile and pushing for “the new, the untried.” When Tietjens complained that she did not understand a poem by T. S. Eliot, Henderson replied: “Do you need to? Neither do I exactly; but it is beautiful, and it opens doors in my head. That’s enough for me.”121 Monroe took a more determined approach in her advocacy of three transitional, yet seminal, Mid-western poets: Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters. Sandburg fused his moral and aesthetic vision, writing and working on behalf of social justice. He traveled the lyceum lecture circuit, speaking about his heroes, Whitman, Lincoln, and Shaw, and their injunctions to find inspiration for art in everyday life. From 1908 to 1910 Sandburg served as an organizer for the Wisconsin Social Democrats, and worked as private secretary to Emil Seidel, the first Socialist elected Mayor of a major U.S. city. In articles for socialist newspapers, he addressed the party’s goals of social welfare, individual dignity, and African-American rights. These themes found their way into his verse as well, as he sought to reconcile idealism and socialism, humanism and pragmatism. “Man does not live by bread alone,” he wrote. “He has a soul. This soul imperiously asks to be fed. It wants art, beauty, harmony.”122 Monroe launched Sandburg’s career in 1914 by publishing six of his “Chicago Poems” in the March issue of Poetry, causing a firestorm for the images of brutality and unflattering sketches of the city. The poem “Chicago” began: 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: Not surprisingly, the conservative journal The Dial complained about the jagged, free verse style: “Such an effusion as this is nothing less than an impudent affront to the poetry-loving public.”123 Another reader jeered at the proto-Jackson Pollock-like style of Sandburg and others: “They like to see dabs of crimson and purple slammed all over the canvas. Also the unmeaning mystery and obscurity seem to delight

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them.”124 Nonetheless, with the help of Alice Corbin Henderson, Sandburg was able to issue his work in a landmark publication, Chicago Poems. Monroe extolled the volume’s songs to democracy and authenticity. “It is a man speaking with his own voice,” she wrote. “This is speech torn out of the heart.” She championed the “primal, fundamental beauty” of such poems as “Used Up”: Roses, Red roses, Crushed In the rain and wind Like mouths of women Beaten by the fists of Men using them. O little roses And broken leaves And petal wisps: You that so flung your crimson To the sun Only yesterday. Nimbly, Sandburg could jump from such rugged symbolism to the playful softness of “yellow dust on a bumble-bee’s wing.” Accordingly, “One would no more question his sincerity than that of the wind and rain.”125 When Monroe, Henderson, and Hobart Chatfield-Taylor sat down to decide on the recipient of the Helen Haire Levinson prize, worth two hundred dollars, Sandburg’s Chicago Poems topped the list. However, Chatfield-Taylor, a member of the magazine’s advisory board, desisted. “That is fine stuff. No question about it,” he said. “But it is not poetry and we cannot give him the prize.” At that point, Henderson asked, “What is poetry?” and looked up the word in The Century Dictionary, which defined poetry as: “The art which has for its object the exciting of intellectual pleasure by means of vivid, imaginative, passionate, and inspiring language, usually though not necessarily arranged in the form of measured verse or numbers.” Chatfield-Taylor, his conscience now cleared, cast his vote for Sandburg.126 Monroe similarly assisted the career of Vachel Lindsay, whom she referred to as “the real thing,” providing him with financial,

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emotional, and professional support.127 In 1914, when Poetry hosted a dinner party for one hundred and fifty guarantors and contributors in honor of William Butler Yeats, Monroe did her best to get the esteemed Irish bard to notice Lindsay’s work. She left a copy of “General Booth Enters Into Heaven” on Yeats’s bedside table. The maneuver paid off. In after- dinner remarks the next evening, Yeats praised the poem’s craftsmanship in words that echoed Monroe’s own poetics: “This poem is stripped bare of ornament; it has an earnest simplicity, a strange beauty, and you know Bacon said, ‘There is no excellent beauty without strangeness.’ ” Yeats also admonished poets to avoid pedagogy because “real enjoyment of a beautiful thing is not achieved when a poet tries to teach.” A poet’s “business” was “merely to express himself.” Poets should channel the “fervor of his life” into verse, combining “the evil with the good.” He ended by acknowledging his debt to Pound who taught him to “eliminate the abstract,” and work toward creating “pictures, sensuous images.”128 The ticket that evening resembled the magazine’s typical table of contents. By way of introduction for Yeats, Arthur Davison Ficke read a poem by Lindsay that ended:129 The song outlasts the singer, Whose breath in the song shall live. The lighted dreams of man remain Though man is fugitive. One things the gods withheld from the world— Beauty—for man to give. The perennially poor Lindsay was able to attend the banquet only by borrowing money from Monroe. She also wrote the introduction for Lindsay’s book that contained this poem, commending his desire to be in closer contact with the audience and to return the genre back to its performance origins in ancient Greece where chants, rather than recitals, were the norm.130 The book found fans even among more cynical radicals. Randolph Bourne, who attended one of Lindsay’s recitations of “The Congo,” penned a highly favorable review in The New Republic. While doubting the prospects for a gospel of beauty, Bourne nevertheless lauded the book for its note of “sincerity” and deemed Lindsay’s work and career “an illumination of the American soul.”131 The third poet that Monroe championed, Edgar Lee Masters, began publishing installments from Spoon River Anthology in Reedy’s

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Mirror in May of 1914. When the book appeared the following year it caused an uproar. While Shelley and Burns provided early inspiration, the concise sketches in J. W. Mackail’s Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (1913) modeled a form for exploring idiosyncratic, imperfect, and highly individual experiences. A friendship with Theodore Dreiser, begun in 1912, revealed how to create literature that was both adulterated and scrupulous.132 The result was two hundred and fourteen epitaphs in free verse, which allowed for a conversational idiom more suited for simple testimonials than traditional blank verse. In a June 1915 Poetry review of Spoon River Anthology, Alice Henderson explained to readers: “Back of the sense of tragedy is a flaming idealism.” However, the book again flared the debate over pessimism in poetry. Teddy Roosevelt told Masters to “show more of the beautiful side of life and more of the finer characteristics.”133 In another journal more chary of innovation The Dial, Raymond Alden opposed the “deliberate unloveliness” of the book. Other critics were less forgiving, declaring the verisimilitude specious and the form egregious. William Dean Howells referred to Masters’s writing as “shredded prose.” To counter the many objections, Masters defended his work in an essay “What is Poetry?” in the September 1915 issue of Poetry. He situated himself solidly in the middle of the poetic community with, on the one side, revolutionists, futurists, and Vorticists, and on the other, composers of sonnets, odes to dead poets, and patriotic yarns.134 Speaking from the opposite end of the poetic spectrum, Pound sided with the evaluation of Poetry editors and shouted, “AT LAST! At last America has discovered a poet.”135 While Monroe had extended the radius of beauty to include a wider array of form and content, she drew the line at propaganda. For many artists, toeing the line between art and politics was a precarious proposition. She clarified the distinction in a review of Edwin Markham’s 1915 The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems. “In The Man with the Hoe,” she wrote, “the passion for social righteousness fuses into a white heat and is molded by the poet into a pure form of austere beauty. Here, as with Isaiah and Ezekiel, social righteousness becomes spiritual beauty, and thus a lofty poetic motive.” However, when combined with undue amounts of the prosaic, poetry deliquesced into vaporous “eloquence,” thereby losing its magic.136 Such criticism found its way into Monroe’s reviews of other poets, whose simplicity, sincerity, even their credentials, would have

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otherwise won her praise. Witter Bynner, who had studied philosophy with Josiah Royce and aesthetics with George Santayana while an undergraduate at Harvard (in the same class as Franklin D. Roosevelt), like Monroe, straddled traditional and modern ideas in both poetry and politics. He wrote for The Advocate after Wallace Stevens had recruited him, and nettled his upstairs neighbor, the legendary Professor Charles Townsend Copeland, with perpetual high-spirited, late-night escapades. After graduating in 1902, Bynner joined Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and Willa Cather at McClure’s where he soon became poetry editor and began friendships with Richard Watson Gilder, Richard Le Gallienne, and Mark Twain. In May of 1911, walking next to John Dewey, Bynner headed the men’s section in the march up Fifth Avenue for women’s suffrage. Afterward, writing in his journal, he echoed Markham’s credo: “Every artifice of inequality and privilege must be broken down . . . To live poetry is the best way to write it. My inner assurance that the more I live by my faith the better I shall write by it reassures me.”137 Despite this résumé, Bynner’s 1915 collection The New World drew only lukewarm applause from Monroe. Building upon his 1911 Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard on multi- ethnic America, the collection celebrated democracy as an emotion. Monroe appreciated the specific examples, “simple diction,” and the “clear and lofty expression of the beauty of human brotherhood, and a prophecy of its universal power in a spiritualized world.” Bynner had also successfully sidestepped “the bogs” of moralizing. However, the democracy it expressed was “the democracy of a sensitive aristocrat who feels through imagination, not that of a hard man of the people who feels through knowledge.” To be genuine, poetry had to spring from everyday experience. Bynner’s work, while filled with “great beauty,” lacked “the breadth and bigness” of Sandburg and Masters.138 Appearing in palpable contrast to this eclectic selection was Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, which was published in fits between 1915 and 1919. Although overlap existed between the two journals, Others was devoted to a more narrow audience. Founder and editor Alfred Kreymborg focused on innovation with free verse, audaciousness, and experimentation manifest on every page, undiluted by anything less than modern: “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens; the Choric School of dance poetry; Richard Aldington’s imagistic “In

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the Tube” (“Antagonism,/Disgust,/Immediate antipathy,/Cut my brain, as a sharp dry reed/Cuts a finger.”); William Zorach’s paeans to pimps, dope-fiends, and syphilitic prostitutes; and Skipwith Cannell’s “Ikons”: I broke a savage bitch who has two tails. I named her ‘Beauty’ from a beast in Mythology.139 Kreymborg devoted issues to women, to the city of Chicago, and, in 1917, to “poems that should not be read aloud.” In 1919 Others careened to its end with a screed by Williams against almost all contemporary critics except Pound.140 Despite these developments in content and context, Monroe stayed true to her commitment to old and new, and middle and highbrow audiences, and continued to print poems by the likes of Richard Hunt (“To A Golden- Crowned Thrush”) and Daphne Kieffer (“An Old Song”). And Monroe’s acceptance of aesthetic innovations had distinct limits. Her conservatism reared while editing manuscripts from aspiring modernists. For example, she omitted offensive words, sentences, or sentiments against Christianity from Pound’s contributions chastised William Carlos Williams for not capitalizing the first word of each sentence, oblique titles, and metric lines that did not scan properly.141 She tried to cajole e. e. cummings into using capital letters and, finding T. S. Eliot’s work intensely disheartening, deleted whole sentences from his submissions. Despite her care in tending to the sensibilities of some of her readers, Monroe, after printing the uniquely, unabashedly modern “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the June 1915 issue, was taken aback by the storm of protest letters. “Eliot’s Prufrock has aroused great contrasts of opinion,” she wrote to close friend Louis Untermeyer. “Poetry has aroused many sarcastic editorials, but never before one in quite this vein. I am at a loss to account for the bitterness of its attack, and for the personal insults to myself.”142 Despite such controversy, Monroe, in the midst of the poetry renaissance, stepped back to assess the contribution of her magazine. She had begun with the hope of melding modernity and the muses, to have poets “express the unprecedented magnificence of this

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modern era, the unprecedented emotion of this changing world.” Just as Markham, Viereck, and Lowell had broadened the boundaries of beauty, Monroe expanded the platform for poets: Poetry has frankly tried to widen the poet’s range, to question conventional barriers, whether technical or spiritual, inherited from the past, and help to bring the modern poet face to face with the modern world. We have printed not only odes and sonnets, blank verse, and dramas and rhymed pentameter narratives, but imagistic songs, futuristic fugues, fantasies in vers libre, rhapsodies in polyphonic prose—any dash for freedom which seemed to have life and hope in it—a fervor for movement and the beauty of open spaces—even if the goal was vague and remote, or quite unattainable in the distance.143 Although Pound cringed at the magazine’s “policy of moderation, tolerance and politeness, and civility” toward traditional voices, it was this catholic strategy that contributed to the magazine’s influence and endurance.144 By continually negotiating tradition and innovation and tending to a broad audience, Monroe made the new verse tractable and saved Poetry from the fate of so many little magazines that appeared in a flash and disappeared just as quickly. By 1915 it may have had a slim circulation of 1,233, but its influence extended exponentially.145 In the Chicago of stockyards and railroads, skyscrapers and wind, Monroe campaigned to have poetry taken seriously by creating a receptive audience and engendering “a reciprocal relationship between the artist and his public.”146 She succeeded not only in bringing poetry to “Porkopolis,” but along with George Sylvester Viereck she helped to facilitate a revitalized American literary culture in the twentieth century.

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4 Rescripting Gender Codes, Redrawing the Color Line: Anthologies and the Dream of Aesthetic Universalism

It is, then, the strife of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of the races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty.1 —W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) For months, he lugged around the alphabet. In his job setting type at Ginn and Company, the sixth largest publisher of textbooks in the country, William Stanley Braithwaite nimbly arranged letters and words, spaces and punctuation marks, into the square three feet by two feet case. Then one morning, in December 1893, while setting text at the company’s newly opened Athenaeum Press on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, fifteen-year old “Willie” (as his boss called him) experienced an “Annunciation.” After placing the last words in the shallow steel box, he stood back to admire his handiwork. The final two lines from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats read: Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. If beauty is truth and poetry is beauty, he reasoned, then it followed that he could advance himself and his race by writing and publishing 127

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poetry. The poem by Keats and then others by Wordsworth and Burns awakened Braithwaite’s sensibilities and set his mind dreaming of more harmonious communities. “Keats was my master. Nay, I worshipped him as a god!”2 From that day forward Braithwaite devoted his life to creating and disseminating poetic beauty. Braithwaite’s decision to pursue poetry came at a time when Americans held writers, readers, and publishers of poems with the same regard reserved for old schoolmarms and spinster aunts surrounded by cats. Later in his career, Robert Frost enjoyed telling audiences of a long and pleasant conversation he fell into as a young man on an overnight train journey. The passenger sitting next to him was a businessman and they talked all night about literature, philosophy, and world affairs. In the morning, just as they were about to part ways, the gentleman asked Frost what he did for a living. When Frost responded that he wrote poetry, the man exclaimed, “My god! My wife writes that stuff!”3 Along these lines, H. L. Mencken liked to relate an aphorism by his Smart Set co- editor, Nathan Haskell Dole, that “poetry in the magazines is read only by women above 38 years and 160 pounds. He says that they begin to snuffle at the 10th line, and can’t read beyond the 20th.”4 As these anecdotes reveal, in the early twentieth century poetry was coded as a trifling and decidedly unmasculine pursuit. Seeking to curry legitimacy for their work, avant-garde poets sought to disentangle poetry from its associations with femininity. They defined themselves against the Victorian tradition, which they considered sentimental and effeminate, and looked to such theorists as T. E. Hulme, who campaigned against the opiate effects of reading Swinburne, searching for “truth,” and equating poetry with religion; such pursuits gave poetry the legitimacy of patent medicine. Hulme called for poetry that was “austere, mechanical, clear cut, and bare.”5 Ezra Pound sought to increase respect for poetry in “The Serious Artist,” claiming that “The arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science.”6 Detached interest, accurate description, and “dry, hard, classical verse” would move the practice of poetry into the modern wards of science.7 While Victorian readers and writers, they contended, remained content to stand in awe of poetry’s mysteries, modernists embarked on a kind of poetic genome project, in which they relentlessly borrowed scientific methods in their quest for precision and knowledge about poetry’s origins in speech, song, and myth.8 As Pound admonished writers

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to “make it new,” he was among a large contingent of men who scrambled anxiously to construct a new masculinity in response to a more visible, and voluble, feminism.9 Avant garde in textual experiments, the modernists reinscribed, rather than undermined, prevailing gender norms.10 During the poetry renaissance, adherents to the gospel of beauty had to contend with such fears as they advanced their cause. They strategically used anthologies to influence a reader’s experience of poems, expectations of the poetic enterprise, and sense of self. The importance of anthologies in the making of poets and creation of a canon has been acknowledged by authors and scholars alike. Frost, for example, cited his discovery in 1892 of Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury (1861) as a moment that changed his life, as did an academic who ranked the encounter as a major event in modern literary history. Listing his “favorites,” Frost identified works by Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning, and “Besides these I am fond of the whole collection of Palgrave’s.” Teaching at Pinkerton Academy, Frost made his students memorize poems from the collection. In later years, he liked to say that he went to England because it was “the land of The Golden Treasury” and in speeches he asserted, “What [do] I think is the height of it all for me? I might sum it up in the word Golden Treasury—lyric poetry. A book almost without animus; all up in the spirit of high poetry; a book all the way up in the high guesses.”11 For writers, anthologies provided a wide audience and the possibility of canonization while, for editors, they held out the prospect of prestige and profits. Until this time, the most popular Victorian anthology was Poets of America by Edmund Stedman, which retailed visions of refinement as it defined a literary form of nationalism.12 During the Progressive era, edited volumes of verse by contemporary authors became a virtual growth industry. Jessie Rittenhouse, Sara Teasdale, Louis Untermeyer, Conrad Aiken, Amy Lowell, Edwin Markham, Alice Henderson, and Harriet Monroe published such collections. Anthologies were also used as a device to reframe reigning notions about gender, race, and values in modern America. The editor who cleared the way and wielded the most influence at this juncture was William Braithwaite. As his career demonstrates, in such a hypermasculine environment, African-American male poets occupied a particularly ambivalent position. To assert a manly virulence risked playing into dangerous stereotypes. The Jim Crow decades between

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Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance witnessed a confluence of legal discrimination and racial conflagration with lynching campaigns, a renewed Ku Klux Klan, and a Southern president in the White House, Woodrow Wilson, who extended segregation in the federal government within a month of taking office. Race riots in Wilmington, North Carolina (1896); Atlanta, Georgia, Brownsville, Texas (1906); Springfield, Illinois (1908); St. Louis, Missouri, Houston, Texas (1917); Tulsa, Oklahoma (1920); and other cities flared across the country—North and South, West and Midwest. To combat this oppression, blacks developed an array of institutions, organizations, and ideologies. In the decades before Harlem was in vogue, black writers had to negotiate between accommodationist tenets laid out by Booker T. Washington and authentic self- expression as advocated by W. E. B. Du Bois, between literature that rendered real, raw aspects of black life and work that reflected the values of an aspiring black middle class. In the struggle for black civil rights, Braithwaite sided with Du Bois by identifying literary culture as a crucial component, but he did so in a manner that brought to mind comparisons with Washington.13 Braithwaite chose to align himself with the genteel tradition—by writing in the nonthreatening form of the lyric and promoting a wide range of voices—in order to rebut racist claims about the licentiousness and aggressiveness of black sexuality. By doing so, he perturbed other African Americans who chafed at his faith in the transcendent power of culture; appreciation of poetry and eliding racial identity, they contended, did not advance the cause of racial justice. Many male modernist poets, and their New Critic defenders,whose masculine ethos and methodology became institutionalized in academia, had their own objections to Braithwaite’s genteel poetry and gentle reviews. Despite this opposition, he maintained that a younger generation of poets had important contributions to make to literature, yet feckless editorial policies dampened initiative. Convinced that enthusiasm, opportunity, and recognition would galvanize the country’s inert literary field, he set about arousing public support. Against great odds and with little money, he relentlessly promoted the cause of American poetry. Beginning in 1905 with newspaper reviews of magazine verse, then with annual anthologies that ran from 1913 to 1929, and with a steady current of letters and lectures, Braithwaite stood at the forefront of a new movement to revitalize the status of poetry and the stature of poets in America.

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This connection between sentimental and feminine, between gender and genre, made the situation tricky for female writers, black and white, who also saw the need to reform public perceptions of poetry. African-American female poets also took to the lyric out of similar concerns becausewhites had stereotyped the black woman as a licentious temptress, uneducated breeder, or a sexless Aunt Jemima. Helene Johnson and Gwendolyn Bennett appropriated romantic poetry as a means to contest such representations, embracing a white- encoded aesthetic dealing with apolitical topics of love and nature in order to refute notions of black inferiority. Their verse honored spiritual values in a materialistic world controlled by whites. They depicted love’s passion as inspiring rather than denigrating, and celebrated emotional bonds between blacks. An exploration of the lyric, as Nina Miller has argued, was also an inquiry into selfhood, the body, and eroticism in an environment that sought to render black women and writing about such matters “silent, asexual, or animalistic.”14 For Jessie Rittenhouse, the need to combat stereotypes was likewise glaringly apparent. At the first official meeting of the Poetry Society in October of 1910, she recalled that the room was filled with “jibes”: “This was still the period when one had to be apologetic about poetry, when the poet was considered a variant from the normal, while there was still a subconscious feeling in the public mind that he was a weakling.” Changes in the status of women, their access to higher education, and the rise of professionalization in the Progressive era allowed Rittenhouse and other female poets to defy gender conventions and agree that good poetry was “masculine” and forceful, but argue that women could participate—with their own compositions, conversations, and criticisms—in the creation of new norms. Rittenhouse stressed the functional, strenuous nature of contemporary poetry: Whereas poetry at the beginning of the century was considered more or less a decorative art, a thing of the drawing room, chiefly a pastime for women, the poet of today finds himself speaking largely to men, and to men active in the world’s work, to that great class of people of both sexes who pride themselves upon adherence to the “practical.” How has this come about? By the fact that poetry itself has become the most practical of the arts, the most concerned with the issues of modern life.15

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Rittenhouse connected the distinctly non-virile Pater with this pronounced masculinity. She and other Progressive poets managed to reconcile into one formulation two competing propensities: a plea for virility and for delicate gemlike beauty, for relevance and irrelevance. Rittenhouse was among the first to foray into the anthologymaking venture. She had discovered a way to channel her reformist impulses by “pioneering for poetry.” The Hills of Song (1895) by Hamilton College professor Clinton Scollard served as the inspiration. Finding the lyrics “fresh and spontaneous and particularly delightful musically,” she was dismayed by the lack of publicity or critical acclaim for the volume. “When I sat down in the wood to read that book, I determined that if poetry as fine as this could be so little known, something had to be done, and I made up my mind to do it.” She wrote to Scollard, then composed a feature-length article on his life and work, and submitted it to the Buffalo Express. The newspaper ran the piece, prompting Scollard’s publisher, Copeland and Day, to send her more books to review, launching her career as a critic. Fearing a lack of volumes to review, Rittenhouse decided to supplement literary criticism with other writings, interviewing luminaries, such as women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony, and visiting dignitaries, including William Jennings Bryan, who came to Rochester for a campaign stop during his first Presidential bid in 1896. A trip to England revealed that the contributions being made by American authors went largely unnoticed abroad as well. “There was a general feeling abroad that poetry [in the United States] was dead,” she lamented. “One who challenged this came up against a blank wall of prejudice.” In order to draw greater attention to the accomplishments of native writers, she assembled and edited her reviews into a collection called The Younger American Poets (1904). The book was less an anthology or a work of criticism than it was, in Rittenhouse’s words, “a declaration of faith in one’s own time.” Rittenhouse’s principle of selection can be likened to a literary version of muscular Christianity. To be taken seriously as integral members of society, she believed, poets had to shed their association with sentimentality, which had been coded as feminine. Poetry had to be sinewy, concerned with practical problems, conditioned by a new, more vigorous beauty, and put in service of spirituality, a necessary aspect of life neglected in the fast-paced modern world. Her

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insistence on positioning poets as masculine was a striking attempt at rhetorical legerdemain. Richard Hovey, she declared, “stands for comradeship,” “for a sane, wholesome lusty manhood.” He “is the poet of positivism, virile, objective,” “an American of the Americans” who wrote “patriotic poems” filled “with national pride.” Hovey’s sonnet “America” was a “celebration of brawn” that “thrills with passionate pride in his country as the deliverer of the weak.” Far from being introspective, neurotic, and withering, Hovey, in Rittenhouse’s depiction, was a model of affability and confidence. He “had the splendid nonchalance that met everything with confident ease, and made his relation to life like that of an athlete trained to prevail.” His writing avoided negativity, vagueness, and servility and was “far removed from the mawkish or effeminate.” In her profile of Frederic Lawrence Knowles “a modern of the moderns,” Rittenhouse discussed the prevailing view that “Art is choking virility of utterance, and that a wholly new order of song must grow from newer needs, songs that shall express our national masculinity, our robust democracy, our enlarged patriotism” and “that labor must have its definite poet.” In “fine, swinging strophes” and “stirring words,” Knowles did this by proclaiming “the modern ideal” from which “a sturdier race of bards must arise”: “In the ink of our sweat we will find it yet,/The song that is fit for men!” Using “stirring words,” Knowles sketched out a new poetic creed that linked virility, democracy, and modernity: It is passion and power that we need to- day, We have grace and taste full store; We need a man who will say his say With a strength unguessed before:— Rittenhouse reappraised women whose verse had been generally viewed as traditional. Louise Imogen Guiney, the Boston writer who revered Recusant poets (she lived the last twenty years of her life in Oxford, England) and was known to declare, “Damn the age, I’ll write for antiquity!,” was depicted in distinctly nonfeminine terms.16 Rittenhouse asserted: “There is sinew and brawn in Miss Guiney’s work; she is not dallying in the scented gardens of poesy, but entering the tourney in valorous emprise. Not a man of them who can meet fate in a braver joust than she.” The collection displayed “no flaccid thought. There is fibre in all she writes; fibre and nerve.” The

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“vigor” and “grasp” of Edith Thomas’s poems likewise did not belie the author’s gender. “There is no internal evidence in these strongly phrased and stirring lines that a woman’s hand penned them,” Rittenhouse wrote. “When the thought demands virility of word and measure Miss Thomas has a vivid energy of style, masculine in force . . . she has all a man’s virility.” Vigor alone was insufficient to the modern age. The average worker and reader needed other elements in the literature they encountered: “They want the primal things, love, hope, beauty, the transforming ideal.” Asked what she believed to be the most beautiful lines ever written, she responded that poetry “to fulfil[l] the highest condition of beauty, must be at once magical and suggestive.” She defined “true magic” as having “the power to entrance, to cast upon one a spell wherein he [the reader] is rapt away from the immediate world to his own inner experience.”17 Beauty shaped by spirituality, poetry that ministered to the inner life: That was the modern credo. In addition to highlighting the potency of the new poetry, then, Rittenhouse showcased the prismatic qualities. She translated Pater’s prescription to “burn always with this hard, gem-like flame” into a metaphor, likening poets to jewelers (lapidaries in particular), cutting and polishing words as gems. As a critic she saw it as her job to gauge the caliber of shimmer. Poets “divine the underlying harmonies of life . . . stimulate and develop the higher nature, and disclose the alchemizing truth that shall transmute the gross ore of experience into the fine metal of character and spiritual beauty.” They do this because “the great class of our strong, sincere, common folk” want to have “the carbon of their daily experience turned to the crystal.” Praising the “calm, sabbatic beauty” of Bliss Carman’s verse in From Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (1903), Rittenhouse directly invoked Pater’s notions about artistic conception, clarity, and precision: “For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplassage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the finished work to be.” Rittenhouse’s invocation to erase subjectivity—whether female or African American—and to link traditional notes with reality appealed to William Braithwaite who pursued a similar mission with the Progressive vigor of the times. He was born in Boston in 1878 to middle- class parents, who benefited from the city’s more progressive attitudes toward race. Although not free of prejudice, Boston, as a center of antebellum abolitionist activism, fostered a more tolerant

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atmosphere for blacks in the postbellum decades. It was home to Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, wife of the first African American to graduate from Harvard Law School and editor of Woman’s Era, the first newspaper published by and for black women, as well as Maria Baldwin, who became in 1916 the first African-American principal of Agassiz High School in Cambridge. In the United States Congress, Henry Cabot Lodge (Republican-Massachusetts) and Senator George Frisbie Hoar (Republican-Massachusetts) spearheaded the fight, unsuccessful though it was, to preserve voting rights for African Americans in the Jim Crow South.18 Braithwaite had to abandon his goal of studying law at Harvard when his father died. He found work delivering papers after school, then, at age twelve, he began full-time employment. More than forty years later, he recalled the sting of this disappointment.19 Braithwaite resolved that intelligence and determination would compensate for his lack of formal education and combat fallacies about racial inferiority.20 He made similar arguments in articles written for William Monroe Trotter’s Boston Guardian, founded in 1901 as “an organ to voice intelligently the needs and aspirations of the colored American.”21 Braithwaite took several very public stands against racial discrimination. He contributed an editorial to The Boston Globe in 1906, “A Grave Wrong to the Negro,” condemning the propagation of “national” and “racial” stereotypes. He also wrote an editorial to The New York World in 1908, shortly after the racial violence in Brownsville, Texas, between black soldiers and white civilians. In the Presidential election that year, he criticized William Jennings Bryan for ignoring the racism replete in the Democratic Party and rallied blacks to vote for a politician “who will concede them as American citizens full civil rights and governmental participation according to their fraction in the total population.” He endorsed Socialist Party nominee Eugene V. Debs as the candidate most likely to pursue justice on behalf of African Americans.22 In 1902 Braithwaite contacted writer Charles Chesnutt with a plan to start his own magazine that featured African-American writing “of a literary standard” in order to “create a backbone for a Negro school of writers in this country,” but the plans never got off the ground. With his efforts to improve the rights and representation of blacks on political and cultural fronts coming to naught, Braithwaite decided to pursue a strategy that extended beyond race. In 1899, the twenty-year- old had completed enough poems to fill a volume. His

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lyrics mused on the sea, the Man from Galilee, and nature’s wonders. Absent from the work was any hint of the author’s race or experience with prejudice. He attributed his style to a question of temperament, talent, and conviction. To him the ideals of “universality of human nature,” “the vision of the soul,” “aspirations of the heart toward God, toward nature,” and “consciousness of human brotherhood” were “holier than patriotism and race—the perfect goodness, the absolute beauty, the divine evolutions of spiritual and physical growth.”23 Other African Americans in the first two decades of the twentieth century accepted this genteel idea of aesthetic universality. Arnoldianism, as the religion of the best, without regard to race, gender, or class, championed humanity in the abstract, a spiritual self not subject to the forces of contingency. As Arnold wrote in this famous passage from Culture and Anarchy: “This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality.” They disseminate “the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time” and strive “to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned.” While democratizing culture they preserved its essence, making it a “true source, therefore, of sweetness and light.”24 To focus on Negro themes threatened to compromise this promise of beauty’s universality. Braithwaite cited The Souls of Black Folk by Du Bois as the cornerstone of a modern poetic tradition because it “profoundly affected the spiritual nature of the race” and “revealed to the nation at large the true idealism and high aspiration of the American Negro.” Only through “intense, passionate, spiritual idealism” can black poets enter into “the only full and complete nationalism he knows—that of the American democracy.”25 By taking this tact, Braithwaite ignored Du Bois’s conviction that no discussion of the universal could ignore the particular trials and contributions of black people.26 African American activists and intellectuals struggled to advance the cultural cause while defending against physical violence. Hubert Harrison, the Socialist Party leader in New York, who shared with Braithwaite a Caribbean heritage, affinity for Latin, and love of poetry, insisted: “When the Negro enters fully into the intellectual life of the white American the customary barriers based on the assumption of his inferiority tend to break down.”27 However, Harrison maintained this conviction while publicly campaigning

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against racial prejudice and class injustice as did Benjamin Brawley, a Christian idealist and minister who taught English Literature. In his own life, James Weldon Johnson abandoned belief in art’s transcending universalism when confronted with the reality of a continual stream of lynchings While working to protect African Americans from a regular barrage of harassment and violence, Johnson toiled away at his writing, asserting that “nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.”28 Braithwaite’s temperament and spirituality turned him away from public political confrontations. He had to reconcile his desire to live a life of repose and respectability, free from racial or financial strife, in a world filled with “the ruthless competition and selfishness with which men pursued their aims for possessions and advantages.”29 Like Edwin Markham, Braithwaite shored his pursuit of justice with religious faith. Preaching the Brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of God, Christ exemplified contemporary chivalry: “He was, incomparably, the first, true Gentleman because He endowed courtesy and manners with grace and beauty.” Braithwaite appreciated the toll of this equanimity, achieved as it was by “a man of sorrows” who was “shaken and baffled by the perversities and the violent lusts for material power in the world.” Braithwaite imagined the Garden of Eden as an idyll of beauty, glimpses of which provided salve: “This sadness is diademed with a joy shining from visions, evoking and manifesting the golden city of the spirit where Peace and Beauty dwell.”30 In Braithwaite’s view, poetry augured a moral compact where ethics and aesthetics join; textual pleasures could induce principled behavior. Instead of priests or prophets, Braithwaite claimed poets as the true descendants of the Redeemer and traced an ancestral line that originated with the Son of God: I set him at the head of that hierarchy of visionaries and mystics who have succored the world. He[,] the royal sovereign of a spiritual dynasty . . . an[n]oint the spirit of Truth and Beauty in the world; becoming the key to unlock the great poetic imaginations, harbinger of Shakespeare’s passions, of Dante’s visions, of Blake’s crystal prophecies, of Wordsworth’s indwelling sense of cosmic unity, of Keats’ golden idealisms.

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Braithwaite expressed his attitude toward beauty in “Sic Vita” (ca. 1898), a poem in strict meter that finds in nature proof of God’s immanence: “All the world to me/Is a place of wonder . . . Just a will of God’s to prove/Beauty, beauty, beauty!”31 When he tried to break into publishing with an angle on advancing beauty, rather than race, Braithwaite’s convictions about the leveling force of culture found confirmation. He approached members of the Boston Authors Club, led by co-founder, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for support. Higginson had a long history in the fight for women’s rights and he was a founding member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Commissioned during the Civil War to command the all-black 1st South Carolina Volunteers, he fought for equal pay for African-American soldiers, who received only three-fifths the pay and allowances of their white counterparts, and became one of the first to chronicle black folk songs and spirituals.32 Higginson had aspired to be a poet, but after Emerson rejected the poems he submitted to The Dial and other editors responded in suit, he decided to be an advocate of more talented authors. The most notable recipient of this aid was Emily Dickinson, whose work finally saw the light of day in a volume arranged by Higginson after her death.33 Higginson also had a hand in helping his co-founder of the Boston Authors Club, Julia Ward Howe. Although known primarily as the author of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Howe had a successful career as a poet and, along with her husband Samuel Gridley Howe, had a long history of activism on behalf of women and African Americans.34 When Braithwaite needed help becoming a published poet, he received full backing from this community. He had made a deal with the well-known vanity press owner Herbert Turner who agreed to publish his collection of poems in book form as long as the poet secured the promise of two hundred buyers, a common arrangement of the time. Higginson, Howe, Thomas Aldrich, Bliss Perry, and Louise Moulton each pledged one- dollar subscriptions for the volume.35 While interracial friendships were not uncommon in this atmosphere of tolerance, there were exceptions. Caroline Ticknor, of the famed Ticknor publishing family, received Braithwaite with the greatest courtesy while at Club functions, yet ignored him when their paths crossed near the Boston Public Library where she worked and he researched (“she saw me but didn’t see me,” Braithwaite remembered) (see figure 4.1).36

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Figure 4.1 William Stanley Braithwaite, frontispiece to his self-published Lyrics of Life and Love, 1904. Braithwaite remarked that his light skin prompted questions about his ethnicity. He was sometimes mistaken to be either Italian or Mexican instead of African American.

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With the initial success of his book Lyrics of Life and Love, Braithwaite approached a publisher with an idea for another book. In true Arnoldian fashion, he resolved to bring before the public the virtues of great poetry by assembling anthologies of English poetry, beginning with Tottel’s 1557 “Miscellany” and ending with the Victorians. Braithwaite dedicated the first in the projected four-volume series, The Book of Elizabethan Verse, to Colonel Higginson “in recognition of a long life spent in the service of humanity and letters.” When it appeared in 1906, Braithwaite received congratulatory letters from Edmund Stedman, William Dean Howells, Brander Matthews, and other genteel writers.37 The volume proved such a success that a New York publishing firm, Brentano’s, contracted Braithwaite to complete the next two books in the series.38 Higginson invited Braithwaite to become a member of the club, an entrée that opened many other doors.39 Through these connections, he realized his dreams of interacting on equal footing with literary dignitaries. At the annual banquet that year, Braithwaite introduced the guest speaker, Thomas Aldrich, and at a Club meeting two years later, he met author Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the niece of one of his greatest heroes, Matthew Arnold.40 To few accolades, Braithwaite published one more collection of his own work, The House of Falling Leaves. Dedicated to the memory of Frederic Knowles, it contained sonnets about Thomas Aldrich and Colonel Higginson and lyrics dedicated to his genteel Boston supporters. The polite but reserved reception provided sufficient proof that his real strength lay in advocating, rather than authoring, poetry. Such a transition came easily. His experience sifting through contest submissions influenced his next scheme to stimulate poetry. In an article summarizing the verse published in 1911, Braithwaite had listed the twenty-five poems worthy enough to form an anthology. Requests poured into the Transcript office for the book, which, of course, did not exist.41 This prompted the literary editor, Charles E. Hurd, to hire him to contribute biweekly articles on poetry. Braithwaite decided to use this forum to bring about a “revival” in poetry.42 To accomplish this, he knew he had to change the American public’s view of poetry’s worth. As one critic at The Dial argued, indifference would be transformed to interest with the birth of a “new belief in poetry.”43 The popularity of Braithwaite’s accessible, affirming approach became apparent through fan letters and a rise in Transcript sales. As his following increased, so, too, did his copy space: from two columns to two

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pages, accompanied by photographs of the poets under review. The initial pay of fourteen dollars per article similarly increased to one hundred dollars.44 Braithwaite shopped around the idea for an anthology solely of contemporary verse, but found no publisher willing to risk money on such a venture. Using his own funds to contact writers and publishers for reprint permissions, contract printers, and publicize the volume, Braithwaite produced The Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913. For the next sixteen years, the “Braithwaites,” as the volumes came to be called, showcased what he deemed as the best poetry published in periodicals by living American authors. With no competitors printing collections solely of contemporary verse, selections that included the traditional as well as the innovative, and with accessible writing that illuminated the value of the poems, his career as a professional anthologist was launched. In an editorial detailing the principles underlying his own practice, Braithwaite argued for criticism that did more than issue judgments, and he distinguished his approach from that of philologists: To the old reliance of criticism upon dry scholarship for authority to censure or praise poetry, there must now be added a more vital and instinctive criterion—a fuller knowledge and sympathy with life; not merely the physical life that records itself upon the progress of the world in actions and events, but the broader and deeper spiritual existence of the race, which lies hidden behind the fleeting manifestations of common experience.45 Poets, too, needed to retool their writing in order to tap into beauty from the Garden of Eden: “Poetry as a substantial function of life . . . holds what is vital to its existence as the seed out of which the perfect flower grows. And in this direction criticism has gone, changing its significance to a creative process, seeking to understand and express what poetry tends to embody and render, rather than what it accomplishes in the effort to communicate.”46 Such aesthetic views were deeply indebted to the theories of Matthew Arnold, who provided a model for literary criticism that avoided close analysis of individual poems in favor of a broad interpretation of the poet’s vision. Arnold believed that poetry should step in to assume the role religion increasingly relinquished. In doing so, “more and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret

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life for us, to console us, to sustain us.”47 Arnold maintained that criticism should serve as an adjunct in this crucial endeavor. Rather than being overly harsh or destructive it should be “sincere, simple, flexible, ardent” and “propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”48 Fellow Boston Authors Club member Louise Moulton also provided a model. A contemporary remembered that “where she could not praise she said nothing.”49 Likewise, William Marion Reedy directed his book reviewers to accentuate the positive. He told Sara Teasdale: “I like reviews that are enthusiastically applausive. You know Swinburne says that the only criticism that is worthwhile is the criticism that praises.”50 In a 1910 series of Columbia University lectures titled “The New Criticism,” Joel Spingarn laid out another tenet: “To have sensations in the presence of a work of art and to express them, that is the function of Criticism . . . to speak about how it affects, what sensations it gives.”51 Along these lines, Braithwaite observed that in the early nineteenth century Wordsworth and Coleridge had “caught the contagion of change,” resulting in poetry that lit humanity’s way for a hundred years, but Victorian sentimentality had “exalted a drab moral standard reflecting the pale light of dreams removed from the contact in the facts.”52 Just as poets needed to become more clear, direct, and contemporary, critics had to focus on the achievements and contributions of authors so that poetry could again exert moral influence. Poets may be born, but good poetry, to find its way to the public, required patronage and encouragement, neither of which is possible “if criticism poisons the art at its root.”53 Braithwaite’s anthologies reflected these concerns: reverence for tradition; respect for change; and a criticism that cheered and won audiences. In the 1913 premier edition, dedicated “To the Poets of America Singing Today/The Soul of Their Country/Truth, Beauty, Brotherhood/Their Names Are Torches,” he laid out the reader’s responsibilities: “Our poetry needs, more than anything else, encouragement and support, to reveal its qualities. The poets are doing satisfying and vitally excellent work, and it only remains for the American public to do its duty by showing a substantial appreciation.”54 Here, and in subsequent volumes, he explained his methodology for choosing selections: The first test was the sense of pleasure the poem communicated; then to discover the secret or the meaning of the pleasure felt; and

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in doing so to realize how much richer one became in a knowledge of the purpose of life by reason of the poem’s message . . . The final test of poetry is its magic . . . This is the haunting quality in poetry, a thing that has no web of reasoning, and whose elements are so unaccountably mixed that no man has yet learned its secret.55 Pleasure played a central role in judging beauty for most readers; for Braithwaite his sense of enjoyment derived from the immediate as well as the enduring impact of the content and rhythms in the stanzas. Poetry haunted, not with goblins, skeletons, or headless horsemen, but with glory, idealism, and hallowed truths. Committed to nineteenth- century notions of beauty, Braithwaite nevertheless wanted to make it relevant to the twentieth century. This entailed retaining particular principles of production because they embodied certain notions of aesthetic value. Thus poems had to be written to fall within certain parameters. No longer frail, overly refined, or escapist, modern beauty used new forms and addressed social concerns but still evoked a “vast and common substance lying about in the world beyond the threshold of [the poets’] subjective experience.” Along with poems in traditional forms on standard themes, then, Braithwaite chose experimental verse on modern issues as long as it purveyed beauty and insight; time-honored lyrics stood alongside more progressive paeans. In the 1914 anthology, dedicated to close friends Louis Ledoux and Edwin Arlington Robinson, Braithwaite explained why he included such innovative poems by Vachel Lindsay and Amy Lowell56: “No matter how revolutionary they attempt to be in expression, there is still in these writers a traditional note imbuing the substance which makes up the significant part of their creativeness.” They did not demure from addressing contemporary concerns: “Poetry endures because it is integrally woven with the warp of man’s real existence.”57 That is one reason why Percy MacKaye’s “The Immigrants” received recognition. He sympathetically portrayed the inner lives of newly arrived immigrants without falling into the trap of socialists who idealized the poor and demonized the rich, and of capitalists who exploited laborers and wallowed in riches. MacKaye recognized that appeals to the “fundamental divinity” of businessmen and industrialists offered more hope: “It is, after all, a question of spiritual pressure, and not one of physical violence in this stage of society’s development that will bring a community like ours to a sense of its responsibility

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and obligations.”58 In a review of Joyce Kilmer’s poetry, Braithwaite asserted another quality to this new beauty: ruggedness. Kilmer’s “To Certain Poets” correctly posited poetry as a sacred duty, not “mere dalliance with ‘women’s hearts and women’s hair’ but of that more pitiable and hardier beauty of stern life.”59 While tolerant of the literary works of certain political insurgents, Braithwaite, like Markham, proved more chary with those who took physical liberties. The limitations this placed on his critical acumen became apparent in his appraisal of two female poets: Sara Teasdale and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Braithwaite applauded the lyrical qualities of Teasdale’s stanzas and the sentiments expressed in “Love Songs” and hailed her as “America’s New Shelley” and “The Poet of Beauty.”60 His praise aligned with the general response to her work. The Poetry Society of America voted her “Songs Out of Sorrow” the best unpublished poem during the 1916–1917 season. When Love Songs appeared, The New York Times welcomed it as a breath of fresh air after the “invasion of vers libre.” Teasdale’s “sincerity” and “beauty” provided welcome respite from “difficult” modern poetry.61 Love Songs quickly went into several editions and received the five-hundred- dollar prize from Columbia University, the forerunner to the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Interviewed for the award, Teasdale told a reporter that students would be served better by learning how to write poetry rather than math because it counteracted the “morbid repression” inherited from Puritan ancestors and deepened “our sense of living.”62 By contrast, Millay received only peremptory notices. Braithwaite first encountered her work when serving as judge for the “Lyric Year” contest sponsored by Ferdinand Earle in 1912. After Braithwaite used his connections at the Transcript and Outlook to publicize the contest, over 10,000 manuscripts and letters poured in, causing Earle to write: “Have you noticed? This year one stumbles over poetry at every turn: even politics are rank with hexameter and rhymes.”63 More than the contest, the controversy caused by the “Lyric Year” became a sensation. Orrick Johns received the five-hundred- dollar first prize for “Second Avenue,” a poem that addressed the plight of immigrants whose brawn built industrial America, whose labor deserved support, and whose “clamouring will” heralded the return of “the mighty to the good.”64 Thomas Daly’s more traditional “To A Thrush” came in second, while George Sterling’s “Centenary of the Birth of Robert Browning” finished third. In the eyes of many,

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though, including Johns, the twenty-year- old poet from Camden, Maine, Millay, deserved to win for her mystical “Renascence,” which opened with youthful simplicity: All I could see from where I stood Was three long mountains and a wood; I turned and looked another way, After literally being buried by the weight of the world’s sufferings, she rose up, borne by “multi- colored, multiform/Beloved beauty.” The two-hundred-fourteen-line poem ended by connecting soul and nature, self and universe.65 Publisher Mitchell Kennerley issued the best one hundred poems, including “Renasence,” from the contest in The Lyric Year Anthology. In his preface to the volume, Earle commended the equal opportunity results of the selections, which included more poems by women than in any previous co- ed anthology—an outcome due, no doubt, to the influence of Braithwaite who regularly reviewed and corresponded with many female authors. The book retailed for two dollars a copy, and quickly went into a second printing.66 Harriet Monroe, Rittenhouse, and Untermeyer each published reviews singling out “Renascence” for its simple diction, originality, and fresh approach, and lamenting that it had not received the first place prize.67 Robert Frost was also sufficiently impressed that he forwarded the anthology to Lascelles Abercrombie in England, commenting on the poem’s economy and naturalness: “I would like you to read ‘Renascence’ . . . It’s a genuinely naïve poem . . . but, to my mind, an amazing thing for any one to have written . . . the result of an un-literary mind and therefore a sincere one . . . It is as if a child had come into the room and said, in a casual voice, something intimate and elemental.”68 Edward Wheeler had served as one of the judges of the contest that produced the volume, and his appreciation of poetry reflecting issues of social justice was well known. So it came as little surprise to members when Orrick Johns’ “Second Avenue” won over “Renascence.” Rittenhouse explained: The social movement in poetry was then at its height; the catchword, the “Time Spirit,” was in everybody’s mouth. Poets were adjured to write of the thing immediately important in modern

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life. The twentieth century came in on a wave of social consciousness inspired by Whitman and crystallized by Markham in “The Man with the Hoe” . . . It is not strange, then, that a social poem should have received attention wholly out of proportion to its poetic merit.69 For his part, Braithwaite had selected “To A Thrush” by Thomas Daly for first place and George Sterling’s ode to Browning for second. While later admitting the mixed quality of the book’s contents, he did not recant his views of “Renascence.” Impressed that such a young woman could compose a poem of such length and intensity, Braithwaite nevertheless felt that the poem’s virtue lay in the talent suggested rather than the ability demonstrated. He praised Millay’s “alluring simplicity and freshness” but found too much redundancy in the long poem.70 Increasingly, as imagists and avant-garde poets sculpted unseemly, uncomfortable, unappealing themes into their work, Braithwaite found he had to speak out for beauty that ennobled and encouraged. In a 1916 review of Louis Ledoux’s latest volume, Braithwaite protested the impact of the newly developing critical attitude: There is no vital ugliness such as modern civilization present[s] through social diseases and industrial tyranny. The queer conceptions which advocate that life can only be discerned and experienced in such conditions has saddened our relation to the world and our fellowmen, and repudiate any attempt to heal our moods by holding the mirror of imagination up to that old world of beauty and grace, is erroneous. Now and then here in America a poet speaks out for the old beauty. The most thoroughly imbued [is] with the classic mood of the younger American poets.71 Braithwaite had moved beyond Santayana’s notion of poets as diviners of the “pure intuition of essence” and Markham’s view of bards as midwives to the ideal by putting authors in service to the social gospel. Poets transcended materialism and competition by modeling the prophet Micah and the chivalric Christ, and they raised awareness about suffering with poems that built empathy and fostered democratic principles. Yet this ecumenical approach prevented him from appreciating innovative writing that made no attempts to draw readers in or to develop a more harmonious and

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egalitarian community. Braithwaite’s inability, or refusal, to alter certain ideas about lyricism surfaced particularly in his review of Edgar Lee Masters, who received only lukewarm praise for his popular 1915 Spoon River Anthology. Recoiling from the realistic representations of such issues as lynching and sex, Braithwaite cautioned the Midwestern poet to omit “a certain aspect of life which it is not pleasant to bring to the gaze of the marketplace.” Braithwaite approved of Masters’s efforts on behalf of suffrage and child labor laws but concluded that the poet did not ultimately achieve “pure lyricism”; he would have to make many changes if he wanted to become “a figure rather than a name in our literary history.”72 Braithwaite reserved his fiercest rebuke for more blatant versifiers, such as Viereck, who, in The Candle and the Flame (1912), conflated passion with vice.73 When Moffat, Yard and Company reissued the German-American writer’s four volumes of poetry in 1913, Braithwaite used the opportunity to censure his carnality, which crossed the boundaries of sensuality into the forbidden territory of vulgarity. Braithwaite cited Viereck for reneging on his civic duties: “A warning to the rebellious youths who have no reverence for life, no respect for the traditions of poetic art. To waste the power one might have used in the good service of literature and life is a moral wrong against the confidence of public feeling.”74 A poet who met these responsibilities and standards, in Braithwaite’s view, was Robert Frost. In his first public reading in Boston, Frost had to share the platform with a local celebrity, the poet Josephine Peabody Marks who, although the same age as Frost, had annoyingly achieved far more fame. Frost presented his ideas on “sound-posturing,” a new technique designed to replace metered diction with more natural speech patterns. While Marks read with command and ease, Frost’s delivery was marked by fluster. The audience watched in discomfort as his mouth trembled and hands shook.75 Embarrassed by his stilted and awkward performance yet anxious to do whatever necessary to win the acclaim that had eluded him for so long, Frost asked Braithwaite to print a version of the speech in his column. They met almost daily for two weeks, either at Braithwaite’s Cambridge home or for walks in the Public Garden. To illustrate his “everyday speech,” with its emphasis on intonation, Frost gave the example of a person listening in on a conversation taking place behind closed doors; unable to distinguish words, the listener can nonetheless grasp the essence of the discussion.76 The

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same principle held true in the rhythms and word placement in his verse. Braithwaite penned two stories complete with excerpts from A Boy’s Will and North of Boston, photographs of the bard, and quotations about his innovative principles of prosody. Just as Braithwaite balanced old and new in his anthologies, so too did Frost in his poetry. William Dean Howell noted this in a Harper’s review: “Amidst the often striving and straining of the new poetry, here is the old poetry as young as ever; and new only in extending the bounds of sympathy.”77 Frost’s poetry had struck a chord with a wide array of readers eager for verse that spoke to contemporary sensibilities and situations in an ordinary, unfettered yet evocative style. Poet Sarah Cleghorn described her response while reading North of Boston: “I began to feel its unforced intensity of feeling rising round me in the silence. I never before had seen a body of poetry at once so faithfully plain and so delicately, thoughtfully beautiful. They reminded me of the few seventeenth century poems I knew well; but these sounded cooler, fresher, more natural and out- of- doors than those; closer, too, to the common lot, and the ‘marvelous hearts of simple men.’”78 As Braithwaite’s anthologies increased in popularity an offer arrived from The New York Tribune, but he resolved to stay at the Transcript: “It gave me a platform on which to make my crusade in behalf of American poets and the art of poetry, and I would feel like something of a renegade if I left it.”79 The local literary elite figured largely in his decision to stay. To the aspiring African-American poet of modest means, Boston’s haute-bourgeois poetic community compared favorably to the hurly-burly environs of New York. As a pivotal critic, Braithwaite enjoyed a prominent role in the literary institutions of the day, garnering cultural, if not actual, capital. As a cornerstone of critical acumen, pillars of the literary establishment now sought out his expertise. Harper’s magazine secured his advice on several projects, while the publishing houses of Harper’s and Huebsch retained him as a consultant.80 Willard Huntington Wright approached Braithwaite, asking for help with the literary book review supplement for a newspaper in California (later, as editor of Smart Set, Wright returned the favor by buying poems from Braithwaite).81 Individual poets, such as Markham, and publishing houses, including Henry Holt Company, sent advance copies of books along with requests that Braithwaite review them in the Transcript.82 Braithwaite dined regularly at the Players’ Club and Twentieth Century Club,

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sometimes with Charles Lauriat, Jr., son of the prestigious bookstore founder, but more often with Louis Ledoux, heir to the Ledoux Chemical Company.83 Now, when Braithwaite visited New York, doors opened wide rather than slammed shut. Publisher Huebsch told Braithwaite’s friend Lawrence Gomme, “Well, Braithwaite is the first man that we have known who has broken down all social barriers in New York.”84 In part, members of the Old Guard felt gratitude for Braithwaite for his fidelity to idealism and for resisting pressure from male modernists to evince a particularly strong form of masculinity. Often held up by the likes of H. L. Mencken as a model of outdated sentimentalism, Princeton professor Henry Van Dyke felt he had found a compatriot in the Boston critic, confiding his frustrations with the narrow focus of “virile” poetry circles in Manhattan: “You’d think that, by gracious, there’s only one concern that man has in this life. And they look down on me as a sort of namby-pamby poet, don’t they? By Jove, I’ll let them know that I’m just as masculine as any of them!”85 Traditionalist Brooke More sent a letter condemning the cult of manliness as merely a screen for pessimism and ineptitude. He suggested that poems be commissioned from Carl Sandburg on the following subjects: “The Odor of Maggots; The Rotten Effect of Cancer; The Raving Idiots of the Planet Mars; The Joy a Cow Feels When Its Throat is Being Cut; The Delightful Twistings of a Maniac’s Guts.” He also criticized what he surmised was Sandburg’s method for choosing words: “Hunting through the dictionary for the coarsest words that are in it . . . that makes it strong and virile . . . Anybody that can shock people as he can, is not effeminate.” He mused on the modernists’ method of poetic method: “I had my feet sticking out of an eighteen-story window the other day and got an inspiration to write a poem like Amy Lowell, as follows: The ocean is violet gray, What is it? It is old, It is green, Your eyes are crocodiles, They are yellow——!!”86 Braithwaite also accrued respect for the scale of organization each volume required. The anthologies contained biographical

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information about authors, lists of articles, volumes, and significant works of criticism published during the past year, all of which entailed reams of permissions requests, stamps, and organization. He became something of a clearinghouse for facts on poets, providing practical services that benefited writers, publishers, and readers. Inquiries from across the country poured in, requesting the dates, birthplaces, addresses, publications, and prizes of particular poets, and for tallies of verse published by African Americans as well as Jewish writers. Clubs inquired about lists of suitable poets for lectures and readings while editors sent checks for poems printed, asking Braithwaite to find the writer’s address and forward the money.87 He was invited to serve as judge for such competitions as the Health Poetry Contest, the Manuscript Club of Boston, and the International Hymn Contest of American Poets. Requests for lectures arrived from libraries and sororities across the country, as well as poetry organizations at Radcliffe College, Mount Holyoke College, and other universities. Lay readers, along with established poets, wrote Braithwaite scores of fan letters, solicited his opinion of their work, and asked for help getting their work published. In February of 1915, the Dial recognized the anthologies as the fulcrum of Braithwaite’s achievements, stating: “He continued year after year until his annual report became an influential contribution to the cause of better poetry in this country and even beyond its borders.”88 That year, his closest friends, including Louis Ledoux, Robinson, Lindsay, Arthur Upson, Percy MacKaye, and George Sterling, arranged for a ceremonial dinner in Manhattan to celebrate his achievement.89 Wheeler, Viereck, Peabody, and others attended.90 Markham thanked Braithwaite for “the great service that you are rendering to the cause of poetry in America,” and invited him to take part in an informal school for discussing poetry.91 Burton Kline toasted him in the Transcript, crediting Braithwaite with providing “leaden-footed Americans the best explanation of poetry, and the best excuse for reading it . . . [he] has forced the whole country—or at least its readers—to recognize the fact that, in spite of its protesting blushes, it is poetic to the core.”92 This letter from a fan, Horace Holley, represented widely held sentiments: The genius of no other country, not even France, has ever coordinated its efforts toward poetry in the manner modern America has done through your Anthology for 1915. Into one perspective

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it brings together both Youth and Age, Tradition and Revolution, the famous and the yet unknown . . . blown upon by the vital breath of appreciation. Through the busy streets of our cities you have made pass a new procession, the singers; to the farthest field and the loneliest hill you have brought the sight of a nation’s vision. For the first time can all the poets of one race become acquainted with one another, thus learning to regard poetry as an ever-larger, ever more varied ministry . . . the seeds of creation strike into friendly soil . . . you have established a relationship with the very sources of life in our race.93 That year Braithwaite drew on his newly established network of contacts to help create an organization for local poets. He recruited Amy Lowell and Robert Frost to aid in the enterprise, and established the New England Poetry Club.94 Braithwaite also became the point person on several other literary journals. The next year, with the help of Lowell, Untermeyer, and Joseph Lebowich, he launched The Poetry Review. The first issue highlighted the magazine’s objectives: “to quicken and enlarge the poetic pulse of this country, to make the public responsive to the creative genius of the poets, to keep the flame of truth and beauty burning in the minds of the people, to offer every possible aid and encouragement to the poet.” It contained imagist poems as well as sonnets, and critical reviews.95 Also in 1916 Braithwaite joined Henry Thomas Schnittkind and Isaac Goldberg in founding The Stratford Journal: A Forum of Contemporary International Thought. The editors held that breaking down class barriers and building up cosmopolitanism required exposure to world literature. “The best way to enable us all to broaden our sympathies,” Schnittkind wrote in the first issue, “is to undertake the public of a periodical which embodies the best thoughts and the best feelings of the finest contemporary spirits of the world.” Expanding Matthew Arnold’s vision to include writers from around the globe, they believed, promised to enhance harmony. In addition to poetry, the bi-monthly printed essays, drama, and “fiction that is virile and soul-stirring, and yet at the same time interesting.”96 As a result of the anthologies, Braithwaite seemed to realize his utopian vision of a harmonious, democratic, race-blind community devoted to beauty, but in the year of his greatest success, he had to contend with recriminations from a contingent of modernists. In 1915 Conrad Aiken launched what would become his annual

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lament at the appearance of the anthologies. A Southerner transplanted to Boston after a family tragedy, he shared with Braithwaite an appreciation for Romantic poets, especially Keats (“probably the most lasting influence on me”) and suffered the occasional bout of “Whitmanitis.” Aiken’s experiences at Harvard, especially two courses with Santayana, reshaped his tastes. The poet-philosopher’s book The Sense of Beauty, Aiken remembered, was required reading for members of the university’s literary clubs and student publication staffs. Reading Nietzsche and a friendship with T. S. Eliot (who was in the class ahead of him) further changed Aiken’s ideas about poetics. When Poetry published “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915, Aiken remembered, “Prufrock stained us all.” 97 While most critics either deprecated or, worse, ignored Aiken’s first book of poetry Earth Triumphant, Braithwaite actually praised the author for his “firm independent technique” and for revealing “the heart of modern life in various phases of youth . . . It is a distinguished first book of poems.” Braithwaite reprinted a selection “Romance” in his 1914 anthology, placing an asterisk denoting “special poetic distinction” next to it.98 Delighted and relieved to find at least one note of praise, Aiken wrote to the anthologist expressing his gratitude. The two met over the next few years, with Braithwaite inviting the young poet to become a founding member of the New England Poetry Club. This association did not prevent Aiken from denouncing Braithwaite for “persistently, and sometimes extravagantly” overpraising mediocre poems.99 In 1916, Aiken paired Braithwaite with Harriet Monroe to excoriate their critical skills and the resulting pernicious impact on American poetry: “Poetry is already, thanks to Mr. Braithwaite and Miss Monroe, too much rather than too little recognized in this country. There is a dead level of praise and recognition abroad which confounds issues, which obliterates all distinctions, which makes it difficult, almost impossible, for the genuinely good to make its way in the chaos.” Instead of providing evidence of riches, the proliferation of poetry during the current renaissance, Aiken charged, was a cause for embarrassment. The following year, Aiken again railed against “confectioners,” “prettifiers,” “the brighteners of life,” and “the lilting ones.” With equal wrath, he reprimanded certain readers, “those who look to poetry for truthfulness and for a consciousness of life always subtler.” Braithwaite and members of the Poetry Society of America, he wrote, acted as

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accomplices to this literary infraction by herding “pygmies” into anthologies and then celebrating their work. Like Pound, Aiken preferred a small community of intelligent writers and readers to a larger one composed of swooning dilettantes. Poetry, he believed, provided a forum for struggle, for airing out life’s dirty laundry; only interpretive nuance could help sort out meaning and value. Braithwaite defended himself against Aiken’s attacks, charging him with trying “to denude poetic inspiration of its mystery and to rationalize its origin according to certain psychological formulas in which the elements of thought and emotion can be reasoned with exactness.” Aiken, he wrote, “imagines poetry to be something as real and concrete as a bar of iron ore which may be analysed by pure science.” For Braithwaite, understanding poetry resembled a telic quest, requiring surrender and sentiment, not dissection or abstraction.100 Harriet Monroe leveled similar charges, even as she moved into the realm of anthology making herself. She had contacted Edward Marsh at Macmillan’s with an idea for an collection called The New Poetry. Only a decade earlier such a proposition would have been dismissed out of hand, but Braithwaite had changed the publishing environment and expanded the audience. As a result, Marsh cautiously consented to the idea, with the caveat that the Chicago editor must include “the best of all schools so that it fairly represents every poetic effort of the day” to ensure broad appeal as well as sales.101 Braithwaite had instituted this formula, setting the yardstick for anthologies of contemporary poets. Monroe, working in close association with Henderson on the project, resisted, insisting on devoting twenty-nine pages of the anthology to Ezra Pound, twenty-four pages to Vachel Lindsay, and twenty-two pages to Edgar Lee Masters. While modernists like Aiken disparaged Braithwaite as an indiscriminate, soft-hearted amateur, African-American critics charged that his success came at the price of ignoring his race and accommodating racial stereotypes. The publication of Vachel Lindsay’s The Congo and Other Poems brought the contending strategies for racial advancement into bold relief. When the book first appeared, Braithwaite wrote a favorable review, believing he had found a kindred soul in the homiletic poet who, after race riots broke out in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, had delivered lectures about the accomplishments of African Americans. Lindsay combined beauty with the genteel sense of spiritual humanity—poetry’s appeal to a better

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self—though he departed from the genteel religion of beauty with a version that was more passionate and less grounded in reason. In addition, Braithwaite admired Lindsay’s full-throttle devotion to poetry, believing that if more followed his example, the country would be a better place. As he wrote in a eulogy years later: “A true realization of man’s necessary obedience to this ideal will solve so many of the most perplexing problems of creed and race that have kept shadowed and disturbing our social and economic relations.”102 After meeting in New York in 1913, the two men became friends; whenever in Boston, Lindsay made sure to visit Braithwaite. Infused with the new currents of vitalism, Lindsay brought his Billy Sunday-like “vaudevillian rhapsodies” to audiences around the country in dramatic readings.103 The eight-page poem, subtitled “A Study of the Negro Race,” included directions on delivery (“A deep rolling bass,” “More deliberate. Solidly chanted,” “With a philosophic pause,” “With a touch of Negro dialect”) and the refrain, “Boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.”104 Lindsay included references to voodoo, Stanley’s African exploration, Joseph Conrad’s fiction, race riots, and Du Bois. Harriet Monroe praised Lindsay’s “concrete touch,” and ability to “unite delicacy and strength.” “Abundantly alive and vital,” she wrote, Lindsay’s “creed of optimistic sincerity” expressed an “instinctively national” sentiment.”105 The book proved more controversial among African-American audiences. Du Bois noted in The Crisis that although “Colored readers may be repelled at first,” by The Congo, it was “in its spirit, a splendid tribute with all its imperfections of spiritual insight.” Joel Spingarn had a less generous reading. In a private letter he explained to a bewildered Lindsay why black readers might find offense. “No colored man doubts your good intentions, but most of them doubt your understanding of their hope . . . You look about you and see a black world full of strange beauty different from that of the white world; they look about them and see other men with exactly the same feelings and desires who refuse to recognize their resemblance.” Central to the problem was Lindsay’s demarcation of a separate kind of beauty based on skin color. Spingarn wrote: Your poetry is wonderfully beautiful, and the poems on black men and women are no less beautiful than the rest. How can we fail to be grateful for all this beauty? But somehow we feel (and I say “we” because in this I share the feelings of the colored race) . . . that

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you do not write about colored humanity as you write about white humanity . . . for you, black men and women are not like others who have been mocked and scorned and wounded, but beings a little different from other sufferers.106 Lindsay’s poem and Braithwaite’s reviews must be seen on another continuum, one that included modern authors whose racial views on a personal level were intentional and far more overtly aggressive. Poets and editors who shared Braithwaite’s goal of popularizing poetry were, nevertheless, quick to issue racial reprisals when he exerted his independence. Braithwaite had to deftly maneuvering his way among the literati. Ambitious, assertive, and confident, Amy Lowell wanted to win the poet- editor’s friendship in order to advance her own fame and agenda, and also to seize him as an ally in her many turf battles. She knew of Braithwaite through his Transcript writings and anthologies. He wrote a favorable review of her otherwise panned 1912 book of poems, A Dome of Many- Coloured Glass, and had positive comments to make on her 1914 Sword Blades and Poppy Seed. With not a little hint of elitism, she had initially cast aspersions on the African American with little formal education until more esteemed writers changed her mind. She wrote to Braithwaite’s rival, Monroe: “It never occurred to me that the man had any standing, with his Magazine anthology, until the other day in New York, when Edwin Arlington Robinson and Louis Ledoux informed me that they thought his opinion carried a great deal of weight.”107 During a lunch at the Twentieth Century Club in Boston where Braithwaite read the preface to The Poetic Year of 1915, she asked Nathan Haskell Dole, poet and brother of Charles Dole, the Club president, for an introduction.108 The friendship between Lowell and Braithwaite seems an odd pairing. His African-American ancestry, humble demeanor, and conservative tastes contrasted starkly with the wealthy, cigar-smoking, lesbian Brahmin of regal manner and experimental poetry. Braithwaite used his position to help the aspiring poet, providing Lowell with a place to publish her verse (she had been rejected by the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s) and suggestions on where to send her poems, and allowing her to use his name as leverage when corresponding with editors. He also served as a loyal ally in her endeavor to reshape Boston’s literary community in order to rival New York’s preeminence. As he later recalled, “I brought ‘Patterns’ out of its obscurity, made the public

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recognize it and accept her as a potential figure of importance in American poetry.” For three years, from 1914 to 1917, Lowell relied heavily on Braithwaite: “Nobody I am certain, pulled her out of so many depressions and discouragements during this period when she was fighting so hard to win the recognition and adulation she craved.”109 Braithwaite, in turn, benefited from Lowell’s extensive contacts in Boston society, enjoying lavish biweekly dinner parties at her Brookline estate, Sevenels, and financial assistance, as Lowell helped to fund several of his publishing ventures. Robert Frost likewise cultivated a relationship with Braithwaite in order to advance his own career but behind the scenes employed racial epithets. The anthologist acceded to Frost’s request for an introduction to Robinson. They went to the poet’s humble Cambridge rooms, where Braithwaite declared, “Frost, when anybody thinks of poetry in America, he always thinks of Robinson as our greatest poet.”110 A few weeks later, Frost wrote to Robinson, “I owe Braithwaite a great deal for our meeting that day.”111 Nevertheless, Braithwaite that day inadvertently made an enemy of Frost, who had nurtured envy toward Robinson since 1905 when Theodore Roosevelt’s admiration for the Tilbury Town poet became a national story.112 Despite Braithwaite’s show of support, which included substituting for Frost at the last minute when he failed to appear for a speaking engagement at Harvard, Frost became increasingly maddened at what he perceived as Braithwaite’s recalcitrance.113 He begrudged Braithwaite for not accepting invitations to visit the family homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire, and for a public disagreement at a meeting of the New England Poetry Club. Debating narrative in verse, Braithwaite had insisted that all poems told a story, while Frost, visibly “testy,” argued that the poet had consciously to construct a tale.114 Frost’s anger dilated again when Braithwaite placed four other poems alongside “The Road Not Taken” in his 1915 anthology as the best poems of the year. In 1916, Braithwaite did not take any of Frost’s work. Frost confided to Untermeyer: “Sometime at a worse season I will tell you what I think of niggers and having said so much to pollute this letter I will break off here and begin over on a fresh sheet which I will mail under its separate cover.”115 Reacting to the 1918 anthology, Frost feigned indifference to his absence : “I have shown not a poem to an editor since I gave The Ax Helve to The Atlantic summer before last. So that lets the nigger out,” he wrote to John Bartlett, a former student of Frost’s at Pinkerton Academy. “Not that I’ve absolutely

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stopped writing. I do a little and let it lie around where I can enjoy it for its own sake and not for what some nigger may think about it.”116 Noting his omission in that anthology, George Sterling vowed to contact Braithwaite with a letter “that will unkink his wool.”117 H. L. Mencken thought that “The Braithwaite coon should be playing with Sam T. Jack,” founder of the Creole Burlesque Company, which featured black minstrel performers. “It is amazing how seriously he is taken.”118 Untermeyer, allied with Frost, also withdrew support for Braithwaite, referring to him derogatively as “that cataloguing Othello.”119 Although there was no love lost between Frost and Ezra Pound, they both resented the power Braithwaite wielded. Looking at the state of poetry in the United States from the vantage point of London, Pound—who had previously expressed his contempt for Braithwaite’s Poetry Journal by declaring it a “Boston Bucket” that “will do for our leavings” and referring to him as “the black man of Beacon Street” who wields “a negroid lash”—now off-handedly acknowledged the anthologist’s stature: “America has disappeared. What does it matter whether one’s books are sent there, or read there or reviewed there. It is Braithwaite’s country not mine. Why shouldn’t he have it. If it likes him.” His racism flared when he learned from Henderson that Braithwaite was an African American: “Sorry [to learn that] Braithwaite is a nigger. I have taken the trouble to be more contemptuous to him than I should have ever thought of being to any one but a man of equal race . . . A Boston coon!! That explains a lot.”120 Harriet Monroe had several reasons to resent Braithwaite. In the first decade of Poetry, and in her first foray into anthology-making, she had to contend with Braithwaite as a competitor. For example, when John Gould Fletcher wrote to protest Monroe’s exclusion of polyphonic poems in her anthology, he warned that without a comprehensive selection of contemporary verse, the collection will invite jeers of “reactionary” and “tedious.” “Only remember,” he cautioned, “you already have Mr. Braithwaite’s anthology in the market ahead of you and you want to outsell him.”121 As a final insult, Fletcher said that he will send his next polyphonic poem to Century, suggesting that the conservative stronghold, more than Poetry, supported imagination and daring. Braithwaite’s criticisms of Monroe’s verse further exacerbated the relationship.122 He did not help matters when he published poems that first appeared in Poetry without giving her due credit. Poets

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with strong ties to her Chicago office, were regularly subjected to Braithwaite’s slightly barbed criticism regarding craft and subject. Sandburg’s “expressions violate all the canons of the art” and Pound was “neither simple nor sensuous nor passionate,” Braithwaite wrote.123 He deemed much of the content as disturbing shock troops of a revolution. While maintaining a cordial face in public, the staff at Poetry privately brandished racial epithets against their rival. His 1916 anthology, with its claim that “the radical influence of Poetry has waned,” was “the instrument of Ezra Pound’s radicalism” and the notion that Sandburg “has not lived up to prophecy” was the last straw.124 Henderson wrote to Monroe from her new home in New Mexico: Braithwaite certainly writes “darky” English. When I was at High School I entered an oratorical contest, in which I won 2nd place and $10. A darky who was working at Mrs. Moody’s got 1st place and $15. He was talking about the future of the “cullud” race, and he talked just as Braithwaite talks about poetry—hardly a trace of logic or sequence and almost less than the ghost of an idea. My family never got over it.125 She continued: Tell Carl Sandburg that he is too big a man to put himself on a level with Brait[h]waite. Sandburg will be remembered when Braithwaite is forgotten. You could not cut out the nigger. That’s justifiable. B. called him a Swedish immigrant. And of course it is rather humorous to think of B, posing as a pilgrim father!126 Henderson told Monroe to ignore the “libelous” reviews of “that fool” who was filled with “putrid remains.” Henderson blamed Amy Lowell as the real puppet master : “B is her tool . . . Amy will raise herself by any means, whether it is a rotten prop like B, or a sound prop like Pound or Fletcher; and once up she will kick the prop aside . . . she could never bear to have Boston’s supremacy supplanted by Chicago.” Henderson enclosed Sandburg’s sketch of Braithwaite. Even though Sandburg eventually went on to write a sympathetic portrayal of African Americans in The Chicago Race Riot (1919), here he referred to Braithwaite as the “flunky” with “kinky Boston ears” and criticized the anthologist’s “rambling, puttering, joyless comments” that

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“sound like the mumblings of a Pullman porter making the bed of a berth occupant who didn’t slip him the req[u]isite twenty-five cents.” Sandburg continued: “Why should the writings of a Chicago Swede wop give any Boston nigger a headache . . . Has B a tapeworm? Or is he ashamed of his blood?” Henderson closed the missive with a poem: It is very like Boston, To accept as poetic arbiter In the cradle of liberty Here in a country where all men Are created free and equal One so obviously handicapped By nature: But tell me this, O ye Guardians Of the stern moral fibre— Have the arts no rights? Sandburg outlined his animosity toward Braithwaite in another letter in which he vowed: “If I had the time for it I would make war on him.” Sandburg resorted to gossip and stereotypes, writing, “From several sources I get it definitely that there is a shame of his blood in him and it is always my aim to corroborate the shames of my enemies, to confirm them in their secret repugnances for themselves.” He continued, “On two points I have a genuine hate, a nourishing hate, for Braithwaite . . . He has a cunning mongrel treachery, a gift for intrigue . . . and classifies as the surest and most definite type of the snob and lackey in American literature.”127 These private comments became public when Henderson wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Transcript, published on November 6, 1916. She derided Braithwaite’s methodology and critical acumen and deflected his charges of decline and radicalism: “Poetry continues as the organ of ‘progressivism’ in verse.”128 She defended the association with Pound because of his innovations and efforts on behalf of new poets. In a letter to Pound, Henderson indicated that she had tried, to no avail, to convince Poetry’s publisher [Mr. Hamill] to sue “the Black Man of Beacon Street” for libel. She joined the Author’s League, which acted as a legal and financial advocacy group for writers, specifically to have them draw up a suit against Braithwaite for using one of her poems without permission. She then tried to organize poets in a boycott against the anthologies.129

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Monroe also shot back, calling Braithwaite “Sir Oracle” in a 1917 Poetry editorial.130 She discouraged her new associate editor, Eunice Tietjens, from allowing Braithwaite to publish her poems in his anthologies.131 She even forbade Transcript editor Edwin Edgett from allowing Braithwaite to review the anthology, The New Poetry, which she had edited with Henderson. A long- distance antagonism Braithwaite could bear, but interference with his duties at the Transcript violated all rules of decorum. He resigned from his post at the newspaper in protest.132 Braithwaite eventually resumed his Evening Transcript duties and continued to publish his reviews and anthologies, and otherwise work for a color-blind community for another decade, despite this glimpse into the limits of the gospel of beauty.

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5 Paring Words, Crafting Images: The Economy of Authorship in the Literary Marketplace

Amy Lowell was their militant leader . . . a born promoter, as masterful as her forebears were, and the shrewdest of salesman . . . seeing that America was giving birth to a first-rate product, she put her shoulder to the wheel and pushed it on the market. The product was American poetry . . . For literary soldiership, or literary statesmanship, America had never seen Miss Lowell’s equal . . . she was the prime minister of the republic of poets . . . The poets had reason to thank their stars that they had a Lowell behind them, for whom editors and publishers were factory hands and office boys.1 —Van Wyck Brooks On a cold, winter day in 1913, Amy Lowell picked up the latest issue of Poetry magazine and found between the covers her true identity and calling in life. She read, with little enthusiasm, the opening poem by Vachel Lindsay, “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven,” the elegiac “Waste Land” by Madison Cawein, and verse musing on happiness, sympathy, love, and the celestial sky. Then she came upon a vividly imagined, late-summer moment in these lines from a poem called “Priapus”: I saw the first pear As it fell. The honey-seeking, golden-banded, The yellow swarm Was not more fleet than I, (Spare us from loveliness!) And I fell prostrate, 161

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Crying, Thou hast flayed us with thy blossoms; Spare us the beauty Of fruit-trees! . . . Instead of adjectives, abstractions, archaic verb forms, or descriptions of emotions, the poem rendered concrete objects and played to the senses of sight and touch. It ended in a hail of the over-ripe and unconsumed: The fallen hazel-nuts, Stripped late of their green sheaths, The grapes, red-purple, Their berries Dripping with wine, Pomegranates already broken, And shrunken fig, And quinces untouched . . . 2 In these simple, unrhymed lines and juxtaposition of vivid images, Lowell found a sensibility keen to nature’s beauties, one that devised the kind of precise, concise, evocative poems free of needless ornamentation and full of relevant detail that she had been trying to produce in her own poetry. The author was identified only, intriguingly, as “H. D.” so Lowell turned to the notes in the back of the magazine to find out more. Poetry editor Harriet Monroe wrote: “H. D., Imagiste,” is an American lady resident abroad, whose identity is unknown to the editor. Her sketches from the Greek are not offered as exact translations, or as in any sense finalities, but as experiments in delicate and elusive cadences, which attain sometimes a haunting beauty.3 Lowell closed the magazine and, in a moment of self-revelation that has gone down in literary history, declared, “Why, I, too, am an Imagiste!”4 Although Amy Lowell has gone down in literary history, she has been cast largely as a caricature: as an obese, cigar-smoking lesbian

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with a herd of sheep dogs, who “stole” the Imagist movement from the heroic Ezra Pound. Few biographies have been written of Lowell, and where she does receive attention it is for her gender or geography, sexuality or scandals.5 She was, in fact, one of the most respected and astute writers of her time. While others viewed the literary marketplace as an oxymoronic yoking of the material and the ideal, she saw that public relations, lecture tours, and marketing campaigns did not detract from the authenticity of literary authorship. She urged poets to approach their careers as a business endeavor: to view their productions as commodities in a market economy; to develop marketing and public relations strategies to sell their work; to be savvy about money and comport oneself as a professional in order to curry legitimacy; and to spur poetic production by awarding money prizes.6 Investigating ideal beauty did not preclude soliciting an audience or earning a profit. Contemporaries acknowledged her contributions. T. S. Eliot famously called her the “demon saleswoman” of modern poetry. Lowell herself proclaimed, “I made myself a poet, but the Lord made me a businessman.”7 “Even my enemies like [William Carlos] Williams,” she wrote, “admit to my having business sense.”8 As with other Progressive poets, Lowell maintained a foothold in two worlds: the late-nineteenth century circle of brownstone editors centered on publications such as The Century Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly, and the contingent of modernist writers who came to the fore beginning in 1912. When discussing her work with other poets, Lowell herself invoked the image of a rebel storming the literary ramparts; yet, despite her genuine delight in controversy, she ultimately cast her lot with continuity rather than outright rebellion. For every Futurist celebrating the beauty of speed, knives, machine guns, and war, she affirmed that there were dozens of poets who tended to the gospel of beauty, caring for art along with ethics and audience. Rather than simply seeing a decisive break with the previous generation of poets, Lowell also highlighted her similarities and continuities with them. She worked herself to an early grave—in conjunction with an accident that caused a recurring hernia and series of unsuccessful operations—writing a two-volume biography of Keats and likened the poetic enterprise to religion rather than to politics. In doing so, she earned the attention and eventual support of more traditionalminded readers, thus enlarging the audience for modern poetry.

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Until this epiphany, Lowell’s poetry replicated the sentiments and stanzas of the British Romantics. She was the youngest child (by eleven years) of the illustrious Lowell textile magnates. The Lowells were one of the wealthiest and most prestigious families in New England with a genealogy that traced to 1639 when British merchant Percival Lowle arrived. In the late nineteenth century, Francis Cabot Lowell, established a cotton manufacturing plant in a city north of Boston (later named Lowell, in his honor).9 The family’s almost royal status was so great that a popular New England saying held that, “The Lowells speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.” Amy grew up in the family estate Sevenels (named for the two parents and five children) in Brookline, Massachusetts. She left school at the age of sixteen and passed her days roaming through the expansive backyard garden and reading through the extensive collections in her father’s library and at the Boston Atheneum. Books formed an integral part of her upbringing: “I have always found the life of the imagination to be more vivid than that of reality,” she later wrote.10 Raised in a household of pious, hard-working men engaged in business, social, and political affairs, and of retiring women (her mother was an invalid afflicted with Bright’s disease) who tended to conventional, domestic duties, Lowell longed for the opportunities cavalierly available to her older brothers. In a world in which femininity was widely associated with weakness and the private sphere, Lowell investigated ways to recode her gender, to allow for strength and public fame. Compositions in free verse instead of strict lyrics likewise suggested to Lowell and her readers an intellect that ranged beyond standard feminine matters and meters. She regarded most of the fin-de-siècle output of the 1890s as stale, effeminate curiosities and considered the new poetry “whether written by men or women” to be “in essence masculine, virile, very much alive. Where the ‘90s warbled, it was prone to shout.”11 Books may also have served as an escape from a reality that had become increasingly arduous. A glandular disorder as a teenager racked her five-foot frame, distending her body to two-hundred-fifty pounds. As a teenager, she was regarded by Brahmin Boston as the peculiar younger sister of Abbott Lawrence, who later served as president of Harvard from 1909 to 1933, and Percival, who, after living in Asia for several years, turned to the study of astronomy, founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and popularized the

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theory of intelligent life forms on Mars.12 Amy’s excessive weight not infrequently elicited private and public censure. Louis Untermeyer recalled that he was “shocked by her appearance.” To assuage any surprised reaction, Lowell met him with the greeting: “Lord, I’m a walking side-show.”13 A private letter Untermeyer received from the writer Edna Ferber exemplifies the kind of comments Lowell received throughout her adult life. “I heard Amy Lowell read her poems today. I wish God had made her less fond of bread and butter and smoked goose-breast, or whatever it is that makes her so fat; but fat or thin, she reads her stuff wonderfully well, and knows it.”14 In letters to Poetry editors, Pound routinely made light of Lowell’s size: “My Arm Chair has never been the same since she sat in it, or rather bounced with glee over some witticism.”15 Self- conscious about her girth, she had black cloths draped over all the mirrors in Sevenels and clung to her poetry and lectures as foundations of her identity. Throughout her childhood, Lowell had longed to be a boy so that she could take part in the exploits her brothers enjoyed.16 She was not encouraged to seek a university education or a professional career herself. When the rigidity of gender coding in the United States began to soften in the first decade of the twentieth century, Lowell’s sense of possibility started to shift as well. Living in Boston, she had many models of career women working as professional artists. In 1854, the city hosted a convention in support of women’s rights, and legislation that passed in 1874 gave women the right to serve on municipal school committees. The city was home to the Arts and Crafts movement, with its appeal to a beauty fastened to moral and social reform rather than to the antiseptic walls of museum galleries. In the period from 1879 to 1940, there was a dramatic increase in the number and power of female artists.17 These sculptors, landscape designers, architects, painters, and metal workers formed a close-knit community that provided support to aspiring female artists and established an educational network that brought their work into public school classrooms. Across the river at Harvard, Ruskin disciple and art historian Charles Eliot Norton disseminated the Arts and Crafts philosophy to students in his Fine Arts courses, providing instruction on the value of art in cultivating “powers of observation and discrimination of human experience, and its worth as one of the chief means for the culture of the imagination.”18 None of these developments were lost

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on Lowell. In 1902, at the age of twenty- eight, she began to pursue poetry after attending a performance by actress Eleonora Duse. Lowell went home and stayed up all night writing “Eleanora Duse” (which she later deemed “seventy- one lines of bad blank verse”). Seeing the actress, she later recalled, “loosed a bolt in my brain and I knew where my true function lay.”19 Lowell’s encounter with H. D. and Imagism in the pages of Poetry had an equally profound impact on her sense of vocation, but with little luck getting her first poems published in established periodicals she plied other routes. She became a guarantor of Poetry, pledging fifty dollars a year for the first five years, and placed several of her poems there. She traveled to New York to meet with the editors of The Century and Scribner’s, as well as those at some of the newer little magazines, such as Viereck’s The International. She wrote to Monroe in Chicago of her triumphs in Manhattan: I had extremely good luck in New York. My “Waltz” was taken by “The International, and the “Century” and “Scribner” have taken many to consider. Mr. Yard of the “Century” and Mr. Varick [sic] of “The International” were both so complimentary that my head is completely whirled around and I feel that the only natural way for me to walk would be backward.20 By 1912 Lowell had a hefty sheaf of poems dwelling on nature, genius, children, and the stars, with herself figuring in several poems as a little boy. She contracted with Houghton Mifflin in Boston to publish a volume, fronting the costs of this first book, A Dome of Many- Coloured Glass.21 The title came from Shelley’s homage to Keats, “Adonais”: “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,/Stains the white radiance of Eternity.” Lowell modeled the book’s format after the first edition of Keats’s Lamia.22 In addition to traditional verse, Lowell included some more experimental offerings. These lines from “J—K. Huysmans” suggest the flair for color and texture that would soon become prominent in her work: A flickering glimmer through a window-pane, A dim red glare through mud bespattered glass, Clearing a path between blown walls of sleet Across uneven pavement sunk in slime To scatter and then quench itself in mist.23

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“A Japanese Wood- Carving,” “A Coloured Print By Shokei,” and “Petals,” inspired by the travels and gifts sent by her beloved older brother Percival, all hint at her later Oriental-themed, haiku-inspired efforts. And the free verse lead poem, “Before the Altar,” reflected the vers libre of the French Symbolists and post-Symbolists that she had begun reading.24 Despite Lowell’s enthusiasm for the contents, the book sold only eighty copies the first year.25 Louis Untermeyer voiced the general critical response, when he wrote that Dome represented “a strangely unpromising first book,” with “conventional” subjects, “trite verses,” a “soft and sentimental” tone, and a mere “trace of personality.”26 To further develop her craft and boost her literary standing, Lowell set out to discover all she could about H. D. and Imagism. The March 1913 issue of Poetry contained an article by Arthur Davison Ficke outlining Imagism’s main principles: direct treatment of the object; use of only necessary words; rhythm of the metrical phrase rather than the metronome. The issue also included the now famous “A Few Don’ts By An Imagist” in which Pound itemized the principles underlying Imagistic composition: “An Image is that which creates an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” The contribution of such poems to individual fulfillment, he argued, was inestimable because they arrested time and space and offered meaning amidst complexity, giving “that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”27 This differed from writings inspired only by the imagination because Imagism combined the skills of the craftsman with those of the scientist. Lowell decided to spend the summer in London to meet this circle of writers and to learn their technique; the experience would change her life and transfigure her poetics. The history of Imagism, from the first Poets’ Club meetings in London in 1909 to the Imagist anthology in 1917, and of Lowell’s subsequent enmity with Pound are well known.28 The movement began with British poet and philosopher T. E. Hulme who rebelled against Romantic optimism and Victorian excess. Hulme combined French Impressionist painting and Henri Bergson’s notion of reality as fluid and penetrable only through intuition to present particular moments of a poet’s mind. Free verse helped to conjure the immediate present of human consciousness because it replicated the rhythm of everyday speech; poets need not pack words in to meet rules of scansion or force each line to rhyme. Imprecise words and ornamental adjectives

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were banished, just like so many bourgeois knick knacks, and current, particular concerns replaced vague matters from the past. An offshoot, to some degree, of the French Symbolist movement, which allied with music, Imagism found its counterpart in the meticulous contours and solid materiality of sculpture. Although Pound had, by 1912, published six books of poems, a work of literary scholarship, and a volume of translations, it was only after he read Hilda Doolittle’s poems that his theories about poetic language, form, and structure, became firmly delineated.29 Her influence can be seen in Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” a poem originally thirty lines long pared down to just two. The title announces a frenetic spot in the city, while the opening line renders commuters more as mournful shadows than mindful citizens. The second line, by contrast, posits a vibrant, solid tree branch draped in beautiful flowers: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Literary scholars debate the poem’s meaning but agree that in the mental jumping from one line to the next lies the art. Just as Georges Seurat placed colors side-by-side, knowing that a dab of blue dotted next to a spot of yellow would appear in the mind’s eye as green, Pound rendered finely- etched images next to each other to create an effect that yielded more than a static representation; in only fourteen words, he managed to evoke a flurry of sounds, sights, and emotions. Explaining the genesis of the poem to a friend, Pound recalled exiting a train station in Paris and seeing one beautiful face after another. “I tried all day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening . . . I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of color.” Pound had combined Bergson’s injunction to transcend temporal “flux” with an experience of synaesthesia to sidestep conventional perception and capture something more elemental.30 Little wonder that Lowell sensed she had come across something powerful. Bearing a letter of introduction from Monroe, Lowell sought out Pound, the self-proclaimed head of the Imagist movement, in London. Once there, she became friends with H. D. and Aldington, and Pound included Lowell’s “In A Garden” in his poorly

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funded, pamphlet-sized anthology Des Imagistes (1914). One night, she invited John Gould Fletcher to her penthouse suite of rooms at the Berkeley Hotel in Piccadilly where he read aloud his collection of thirty-six free verse poems, Irradiations, named because the author radiated his pleasure in nature, using words chosen for their sound and color as much as for their meaning. She immediately declared Fletcher a genius and promised to find him a publisher. As Lowell recalled of that afternoon, the poems “seemed to me to open a door which had always remained closed.”31 The two bonded over similar backgrounds and commitment to poetry. Fletcher also grew up in affluence, in the Arkansas home of a Confederate veteran and New South banker. Shy and of slight frame, Fletcher found refuge in books, particularly those of his “early idol” Poe. On the first page of his journal, begun as a teenager, he expressed admiration for Baudelaire’s poetics as well, writing, “There is but one true religion in this world—the religion of Beauty.” In another entry Fletcher deemed himself “essentially a theologian.”32 After a brief stint at Harvard where he became a disciple of Ruskin’s philosophy and experimented in the free verse “catalogue passages” of Whitman, Fletcher cashed in his inheritance and moved first to Italy then to London in search of a literary community. His reading of Nietzsche, Freud, Durkheim, and Bergson convinced him that the nature of knowledge was fluid and subjective, not a set stock of objective information, and that art was not a didactic matter destined to bring moral uplift, as Victorian positivists would have it, but a play of images and sounds that could infuse meaning into the quotidian.33 Like Lowell, Fletcher found few editors receptive toward his literary efforts. His futile attempts to place poems in literary periodicals left him despairing and bitter. In 1913 he divided his poems into categories and self-published five books, aware of their derivative character but unaware of how to make improvements.34 Instruction soon came from the works of French Symbolist writers, particularly those of founding member Arthur Symons who described their approach: “Description is banished that beautiful things may be evoked magically; the regular beat of verse is broken in order that words may fly upon subtler wings.”35 Fletcher combined this technique with the rule-breaking methods of post-Impressionist painters featured in Parisian galleries, such as Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh; literary Impressionism would

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render isolated experiences with the intent of illuminating hidden realities.36 After attending the historic production of “L’Après-midi d’un Faune” with atonal music by Stravinsky, and flat-footed choreography by Diaghilev performed by Nijinsky, Fletcher walked away determined to “risk everything” and “accept every kind of experiment . . . not to flinch from any novelty, however strange and uncouth it might seem.”37 He wrote in his autobiography that he would henceforth regard his art as a “dance, as a game to be played with life, not as a sermon or as a piece of labored moralizing” and that he now held “with Morris, and Dostoevski, that it was not through morals or dogma, but through beauty, that man could come to perfection and the world be saved.”38 Lowell admired Fletcher’s constellations of assonance that inspired “moods,” such as “Irradiation VII”: Flickering of incessant rain On flashing pavements: Sudden scurry of umbrellas: Bending, recurved blossoms of the storm . . . “Irradiation V” combined seeing and meaning without directly saying—celebrating acoustics more than dictates: Lacquered mandarin moments, palanquins swaying and balancing Amid the vermilion pavilions, against the jade balustrades . . . 39 Lowell convinced editors at Houghton Mifflin to publish Fletcher’s work, composed favorable reviews in newspapers and journals, gave him lodging during his stays in Boston, and loaned him large sums of money with no expectation, or hope, of repayment. Often her benevolence came in the form of encouraging letters. “There is no living poet out of whom I have got so much inspiration as out of yourself,” she wrote to the ever-beleaguered Fletcher, whose wounded feelings had an even lengthier afterlife than Lowell’s.40 But her exuberance often mingled with more conflicted passion. Miscommunications led to fevered recriminations, stridency and clamor followed long bouts of silence. Capricious and insecure, Fletcher would eventually retreat from the most important literary friendship of his life.

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Those same patterns of plenitude and grief played out with Lowell and other associates, including, most notably, Pound. When Lowell recruited several of the contributors for an Imagist anthology of her own, Pound recoiled. He saw in her initiative a threat to his centrality in the concentric circles of poetry experimenters. In a fit of pique, he sneeringly named the movement under Lowell’s direction “Amygism,” and moved on to what he called “Vorticism,” which differed from Imagism in that it aggressively blasted contemporary culture and sought to replicate the dynamic energies of the machine age (which Pound, along with Wyndham Lewis, called the “vortex”). Relevant to this study is the way Lowell characterized the falling out with Pound and the methods she used to promote Imagism. In a letter to Monroe, Lowell insisted that the break with Pound was not the result of a “quarrel,” but a “schism.”41 This semantic move shows Lowell did not see herself as an interloper, arrogating Pound’s discovery, but as a legitimate leader in an important crusade.42 “She believes in the power of words as her ancestors believed in the power of prayer,” one commentator wrote. “And her faith has come near to moving mountains, even as theirs did.”43 It must have given Lowell great pleasure when a writer at The Sun newspaper deemed her “the high priestess of the new poetical cult.”44 When Lowell assumed the mantle as leader of the Imagist movement, she used her position to penetrate territory traditionally open only to males. Her ambiguous relationship to the feminine appeared in “The Sisters,” as scholar Cheryl Walker has noted, where Lowell acknowledged the contributions made by female poets but characterized their attempts as belonging to the realm of men: Taking us by and large, we’re a queer lot We women who write poetry. And when you think How few of us there’ve been, it’s queerer still. I wonder what it is that makes us do it. Singles us out to scribble down, man-wise, The fragments of ourselves.45 In her personal life, Lowell maintained one foot in the genteel world of Boston Brahmins and another foot in radical circles. She dressed conservatively, wearing high- collared, beaded dresses, and a pince-nez perched on her nose, looking very much the fashionable lady of the 1890s, even though it was the 1910s. In 1912 she began a “Boston Marriage” with former actress Ada Russell. No doubt she felt

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empowered by the lesbian literary tradition coalescing in the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Natalie Barney, and H.D.46 She attempted to modulate societal loathing of homosexuality into something more lyrical in such lines as: You sent me a spring of mignonette, Cool- coloured, quiet, and it was wet With green sea-spray, and the salt and the sweet Mingled to a fragrance weary and discreet As a harp played softly in a great room at sunset . . . In “The Foreigner,” she declared, “my heart/Is the heart of a man,” while “Fool O’The Moon” spoke of desire “pounding dully from my eyes” at “a single breast uncovered./The carnation tip of it/Urgent for a lover’s lip.”47 “Clear, with Light Variable Winds,” one of Thomas Hardy’s favorite poems of Amy’s, extolled erotically a woman’s body: Her breasts point outwards, And the nipples are like buds of peonies. Her flanks ripple as she plays, And the water is not more undulating Than the lines of her body.48 “The Weather- Cock Points South” opened provocatively: I put your leaves aside, One by one: The stiff, broad outer leaves; The smaller ones, Pleasant to touch veined with purple; The glazed inner leaves. One by one I parted you from your leaves, Until you stood up like a white flower Swaying softly in the evening wind. “A Bather” follows a nude lady as she walks through a garden: A knee or a thigh, sudden glimpsed, then at once blotted into The filmy and flickering forest . . .

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Cool, perfect, with rose rarely tinting your lips and your breasts, Swelling out from the green in the opulent curves of ripe fruit. Lowell’s homosexuality was well known in literary circles. William Braithwaite’s editor at the Boston Evening Transcript, for example, commented on some erotic lines from Lowell’s Pictures of the Floating World addressed to and from a woman: By the way, Braithwaite, what does this incursion of the Lesbians signify in modern art anyway? Is it the counter-movement to Wilde, Lionel Johnson, Dowson et al; or is it America’s analogue in this great age of forced decadence. Your dear friend Amy is so shameless about it that even I—who don’t wince at the verbatim trial reports of such “causes celebres” as Oscar’s affair and the Crossland proceedings etc—get positively embarrassed at the “candor” of things like the Madonna of the Evening Flowers for instance—And in the North-American Review too!!49 Despite her brazenness, Lowell remained curiously puritan in her attitude toward overt references to sex and gendered fashion norms. This became apparent when she attended a Poets Evening at Mabel Dodge’s salon. George Sylvester Viereck and Edwin Arlington Robinson had been asked to preside over the event. Lowell abruptly left after Viereck’s “startling verses” caused her “to rise and move out like a well-freighted frigate.”50 After receiving a letter from the young writer Winifred Bryher (the pen name of Annie Winifred Ellerman) in London about her penchant for wearing men’s clothes, Lowell sent a reprimand, cautioning her that American mores forbade such brazenness: “The speed with which you would find yourself in the lock-up would really astonish you.”51 Appalled by overt references to sex in Mina Loy’s “Love Songs,” published in Others in 1917, Lowell threatened to withdraw her support from the magazine.52 Lowell also denounced garret living, free love, and artistic posing. Proud of her ancestry, she wrote, “I am Amy Lowell for better or worse and for all that it implies, and I will not fool myself or the public by play-acting over what to me is the most serious thing in the world—my art . . . My experience has been that people who play in Bohemia, and dress as artists, and talk as artists, and are consciously artists every minute never produce any art.” While dazzling to the

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young, Greenwich Village remained home to “a most unsavory, vulgar, and unpleasant sort of Bohemia.”53 This did not mean that Lowell was afraid to startle. She referred to her cohort as “This little handful of disconnected souls, all unobtrusively born into that America which sighed with Richard Watson Gilder, wept with Ella Wheeler Wilcox” who, because of the new poetic communities, could finally break free.54 In private correspondence she discussed the need for poets to write and act with more strength. “I do not believe that the poet is made of sugar candy and melts at the slightest touch,” she wrote to Aldington. “If he is worth anything he is strong enough to endure no matter what happens to him.”55 “Of course we need more beauty in the world,” she told young poet Donald Evans. “But do not let us lisp this creed in a kind of dying languor; let us shout it lustily, and dare to be happy, and dare to be robust, and dare to be a thousand things which mean poetry just the same.”56 In her 1922, anonymously published collection of parodies A Critical Fable, which included an ironic preface to the “Gentle Reader,” she referred to her exploits in the world of poetry as “bronco-busting with rainbows”—indicating that she tended to beauty less as Little Bo Peep and more as Buffalo Bill Cody.57 This masculinist posture resonated with contemporary female writers. A childhood friend, Elizabeth Sergeant, spoke of “that forthright, buccaneering maleness of hers.”58 Jessie Rittenhouse praised the potency of Lowell’s work, declaring “a daring virility distinguishes it, obliterating the feminine appeal.”59 British writer Vita SackvilleWest commended Lowell’s “originality,” “vitality,” and “courage.”60 Assuming male subjects, perspectives, and attitudes allowed Lowell to give voice, in her poetry at least, to the various subjectivities of her life: female, homosexual, obese. Likewise, Untermeyer went from being a critic to an admirer, praising “the vigor, the pugnacity and the power of the sharply cut line,” which he coded as male, that stood alongside great delicacy, which he coded as female. Lowell, he said, blended the two seamlessly: “The intellectual form of her work is hermaphroditic rather than Sapphic. It assumes both sexes with equal dexterity.” He in turn praised the “purely feminine” concept found in “A Gift” and “the point-lace and lavender archness” of “Apology.”61 Fans wrote to Lowell praising her ““vivid, manly, vigorous” poetry.62 A seventeen-year- old boy at Brookline High School

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deemed her work “strong and beautiful poetry; and if a beautiful thing is strong, it is not for this generation alone, but for generations to come.”63 In the midst of preparing Some Imagist Poets, Lowell published in 1914 Sword Blades and Poppy Seed. The book’s preface began by countering the popular Romantic notion that poets were born, not made, and that poems were the product of torrential emotions. She departed from Markham and Braithwaite who viewed poets as vessels of divine inspiration and poetry as an entity removed from the marketplace. “As a matter of fact,” she wrote, “the poet must learn his trade in the same manner, and with the same painstaking care, as the cabinet-maker.” Poems were objects subject to inspection: “A work of beauty which cannot stand an intimate examination is a poor and jerry-built thing.”64 Lowell similarly assured Little Review editor Margaret Anderson: “We Imagists are hard-working, seriousminded people, our theories are not a fad, but a faith to which we are sacrificing our lives . . . Imagism is not a parlour trick or a joke, it is a serious endeavor after an ideal.”65 Writing a poetry column in The Farm Journal, which had a circulation of one million, poet Marguerite Wilkinson sought to weed out similar perceptions. She wrote to Lowell: “I stressed the labor side of your success because I have been writing this series for a crowd that thinks poetry can be picked out of the air and put on paper as easily as raisins can be picked out of a cup- cake.” Wilkinson noted how she had received rebuke “for associating the word ‘work’ with poetry.”66 Drawing on Bergson’s notion that the only way to understand an object is to enter into it, Lowell identified “vividness” as an essential quality of the modern poem. This differed from verse in the era of Tennyson, when melody and writing about an individual, event, or object mattered utmost. “To state a thing in no matter what beautiful terms is not enough; it must impose itself upon the mind’s eye in an inescapable picture,” she wrote.67 Lowell fathomed a more fluid role for beauty, one that represented the plural, diverse, and not unappalling nature of modern life: “I wish to state my firm belief that poetry should not try to teach, that it should exist simply because it is a created beauty, even if sometimes the beauty of a Gothic grotesque.”68 She objected to the notion that literature had to instruct or impart moral lessons in order to claim value: “Art is as much a function of the Universe as an Equinoctial gale, or the Law of Gravitation; and

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we insist upon considering it merely a little scrollwork, of no great importance unless it be studded with nails from which pretty and uplifting sentiments may be objects hung!”69 She proposed a poetics in which individual stanzas and words were valuable in and of themselves and where experiments in form mattered as much as experiments in content. Similarly, the “vigorous” experiments conducted by French versifiers (who had greatly influenced her latest writings) had originated in intense study and resulted in sturdy handiwork. In addition to standard forms, Lowell composed many of the poems in Sword Blades in vers libre, which she defined us “unrhymed cadence”—a rhythmical scheme based on “the speaking voice with its necessity for breathing, rather than upon a strict metrical system.” Although such verse may appear random or facile, it actually was, she insisted, “constructed upon mathematical and absolute laws of balance and time.” The effect, she maintained, still echoed Walter Pater: “The desire . . . to head-up an emotion until it burns white-hot, seems to be an integral part of the modern temper, and certainly ‘unrhymed cadence’ is unique in its power of expressing this.”70 Just as the form and content mingled old and new, so too did the farrago of images; juxtaposition stood in for exposition to render a poet’s impression of an emotion, event, or object. Lowell combined this technique with the innovations of other contemporary poets. “Miscast I,” for example, mixed the brio of Sandburg’s Chicago poems with the tenderness of Pound’s early lyrics: I have whetted your brain until it is like a Damascus blade, So keen that it nicks off the floating fringes of passers-by, So sharp that the air would turn its edge Were it to be twisted in flight. Licking passions have bitten their arabesques into it, And the mark of them lies, in and out, Worm-like, With the beauty of corroded copper patterning white steel. My brain is curved like a scimitar, And sighs at its cutting Like a sickle mowing grass . . . 71

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“After Hearing A Waltz By Bartok” invoked the incantations and theatricality of Vachel Lindsay: But why did I kill him? Why? Why? In the small, gilded room, near the stair? My ears rack and throb with his cry, And his eyes goggle under his hair, As my fingers sink into the fair White skin of his throat. It was I! . . . One! Two! Three! Oh, the horror of sound! . . . 72 Lowell wrote poems that attempted to replicate movements and dissonances found in contemporary composers, such as “Stravinsky’s Three Pieces ‘Grotesques,’ for String Quartet” and “The Great Adventure of Max Brueck.” In “A Lady,” Lowell achieved the poetic condensation that became her trademark: You are beautiful and faded Like an old opera tune Played upon a harpsichord; Or like the sun-flooded silks Of an eighteenth- century boudoir. In your eyes Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes, And the perfume of your soul Is vague and suffusing, With the pungence of sealed spice-jars. Your half-tones delight me, And I grow mad with gazing At your blent colours . . . 73 Sword Blades and Poppy Seed also introduced to the American audience “polyphonic prose,” a form invented by the French poet Paul Fort and adapted by Lowell. This style incorporated the many (“poly”) voices (“phony”) of poetry, including rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and repetition of an idea or image, and it dispelled standard formatting, appearing on the page more as prose than poetry. Lowell likened the rhythmic effect to “the long, flowing cadence of oratorical prose” and the succession of various tones in an orchestra.74 “The

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Forsaken” employed this technique to tackle the issue of pregnancy outside of marriage: . . . Beautiful Holy Lady, take my shame away from me! . . . I have told no one but you, Holy Mary. My mother would call me “whore,” and spit upon me; the priest would have me repent, and have the rest of my life spent in a convent. I am no whore, no bad woman . . . You were a virgin, Holy Mother, but you had a son, you know there are times when woman must give all. There is some call to give and hold back nothing. I swear I obeyed God then, and this child who lives in me is the sign . . . 75 The 1914 publication of Sword Blades and Poppy Seed established Lowell’s reputation. Like Markham and Braithwaite, she now received her share of fan letters. Many of the writers were housewives who wanted to become published authors. Whereas some critics claimed that Lowell’s focus on objects and objectivity elided emotion, the letters she received indicateded a different effect. One woman wrote, “I love you for what you have done for poetry, so refreshing, so new, and above all things so soul satisfying. That is the main thing, to be able to satisfy the cravings of the human soul.”76 After reading Lowell’s 1917 Can Grande’s Castle, another woman declared: “It takes my breath away with its colour,” while another reader went to bed “bright eyed and dreamt of splendors and sudden beauties” after reading Sword Blades and Poppy Seed.77 Another reader remarked on other work. It “has made my heart beat much more quickly than it has customarily done, and the world seems brighter, the sky bluer than ever before.”78 Those who heard Lowell lecture relayed their gratitude. “Though I am quite familiar with the poetry of today,” a woman from Washington wrote, “I have never been able to understand nor appreciate the rhythm; never stumbled upon the cadences—which you revealed to me for the first time last evening and which will enrich all my future reading.”79 Lowell capitalized on her popularity with a series of anthologies, critical works, and cross- country lecture tours. She immediately identified the flaws in Pound’s Des Imagistes, which sold poorly, and resolved to assemble a collection of Imagist work that would be a financial as well as critical success. She decided on an equal allotment of space to every poet, arranged alphabetically, and prefaced with a clear explanation of aims and methods. Each poet would

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decide on her or his selections—a scheme that prompted Pound to scoff, “Democratized”—while Lowell worked to ensure publication by a reputable firm.80 Despite Pound’s interdictions, six of the poets in the original anthology joined her in this endeavor: Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolittle (“H. D.”), Ford Madox Hueffer, John Gould Fletcher, F. S. Flint, and D. H. Lawrence. “The fate of Imagism rises or falls by this Anthology,” Lowell believed.81 When Some Imagist Poets appeared in 1915 it contained the now famous inventory of Imagist tenets, demanding precision, concentration, new rhythms, and contemporary subjects.82 To market the volume she formulated a comprehensive strategy.83 She contracted with Houghton Mifflin to publish an Imagist anthology for three years, convinced booksellers in Boston and New York to accept many more copies of the anthology than they originally intended, and wrangled them into stocking copies in highly visible locations, rather than the dimly-lit corners where works of poetry were usually placed.84 She also advertised the collection in The Poetry Journal, Poetry, The New Republic, and the Boston Evening Transcript. When the book sold well, Lowell took full credit for the subsequent success of Imagism. In her mind, the movement had fluctuated between obscurity and irrelevance until she came along. The Imagists under Pound’s guidance, she wrote to confidante, Louis Untermeyer, “were unknown and jeered at, when they were not absolutely ignored. It was not until I entered the arena, and Ezra dropped out, that Imagism began to be considered seriously at all . . . if I had not done all I did and worked seriously and hard to prove the value of the movement, the thing would never have achieved the recognition it now has.” Lowell shared with Pound visions of grandiosity and both suffered bouts of paranoia. A man of moods, Pound flickered between exaltation and desolation, while Lowell vacillated between feeling triumphant and embattled. Besides her overly honed sense of entitlement, propped up by her family’s fortune, she had an additional advantage that gave her a stronger foothold in the American literary scene. While Pound publicly excoriated adversaries, she knew to be more discreet. As she wrote to a friend, Pound’s “violent diatribes against everything and everybody have served to make him a laughingstock.”85 Therefore, in public, she maintained a cordial face while, in private, she composed jeremiads to friends. To Monroe, for example, Lowell deemed Pound’s poetry “too indecent to be poetical”

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and “too often merely vituperative,” and she had a sneaking suspicion that tuberculosis had attacked his brain, degenerating the quality of his thinking.86 Pound, she maintained, had a reverse Midas touch: “He has ruined everything he has touched.” In her mind, credit for the popularity of Imagism was hers alone: “The name is his, the idea was widespread, but changing over the whole public attitude from derision to consideration came from my work.”87 At the age of forty, Lowell embarked on a nation-wide lecture circuit to extend the audience for experimental poetry. As she wrote to Pound: “I feel that to gain the recognition I deserve it will be necessary to create a public which shall no longer be bound by the Victorian tradition.”88 She explained the merits and nuances of Imagism, and analyzed the works of Frost, Robinson, Masters, and Sandburg. She lectured on “The New Poetry” in Philadelphia to the conservative Contemporary Club and the more liberal University Extension Society. In New York she lectured at the Poetry Society of America, Columbia University, St. Marks in the Bouwerie, and offered a course of four lectures at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences (which were so popular she offered them several times). Her tours swept south through Richmond, St. Louis, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Austin, and west, from Buffalo to Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Des Moines, and Omaha.89 To accompany her poetry readings, Lowell recruited a close friend, the musician Carl Engel, to compose and perform background music. Like Lindsay’s rendition of “The Congo,” Lowell’s recitations of “The Bombardment” (1914) to the accompaniment of bass drums were among her most popular. For a fee of between fifty and one hundred fifty dollars—Lowell refused to speak for free, arguing that poetry was a legitimate profession deserving of recompense just as any other career—she delivered talks on campus at Harvard, Mount Holyoke, Dartmouth, Wellesley, and Smith. The lectures were a success. “I come from a long family of orators, that public speaking is natural to me,” she sonorously affirmed. “It is one side of my genius.”90 She often found the undergraduate students more receptive than the faculty.91 Certainly they appreciated her deft handling of difficult questions posed by professors who adhered to the conservative, idealistic prescriptions of gentility. The future poet and critic John Peale Bishop complimented her for a “victory” that was “complete”: “Princeton undergraduates are, in most cases, open to new ideas. But the faculty—the faculty fought hard—and were demolished to a man. I want to thank you. I don’t

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believe anyone else could have done it.”92 A Bryn Mawr administrator attested: “The undergraduates feel that you have done more to stimulate the writing of poetry in college than any other visiting celebrity.”93 Lowell bragged to friends about standing-room-only audiences at the University of Washington, even though Count Tolstoy was lecturing in a nearby hall, and about Columbia, where so many people were turned away she had to schedule additional appearances.94 With so much of contemporary poetry terra incognita, Amy Lowell decided to announce the arrival of the new poetic community by writing her own volume of criticism, a move that further solidified her literary reputation. In 1917 she collected and expanded her audiencefriendly lectures and reviews into Tendencies in Modern Poetry. She highlighted for those whom she had touched through lectures exactly what kinds of departures and developments had occurred. In mapping out the emerging coastline of twentieth-century poetry she charted three distinct currents, each of which provided “hints of a new beauty” that was “at once realistic and romantic.”95 The “renaissance” in poetry since 1912 represented to her “a re-birth of the spirit of truth and beauty. It means a re-discovery of beauty in our modern world, and the originality and honesty to affirm that beauty in whatever manner is native to the poet.”96 She grouped poets into pairs to explicate how their works “constitute a marching order, from the old into the new,” again underscoring steady development over radical departure.97 Two New England writers, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, marked the first tendency, which extended the discursive field of poetry by observing everyday experiences using clear and direct speech. Whereas Robinson was intellectual, passionate, and realistic, Frost was intuitive, simple, and pessimistic. Whereas Robinson analyzed “the psychology of his characters to the minutest fraction, he splits emotions and sub-splits them,” Frost, a kind of dark prince of pastoralism, paid homage to “leftovers of the old stock . . . slowly sinking to insanity” in a “latter- day New England where a civilization is decaying.”98 Lowell departed from genteel criticism in her treatment of the next pair, Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg whom she defended against charges of obscenity and praised for their handling of topical issues, but in the end inaccurately represented the full spectrum of their innovations. Hailing from the Midwest, Masters and Sandburg represented the second, more revolutionary, tendency in modern American poetry by honing their artistry on “multi-racial” America,

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“a world of flux and recoil, a world of experiments and change” and setting out not to duplicate this discord but “to solidify, to order, the chaos.”99 These poets determined to improve social conditions by irradiating crucial modes of thought and feeling: A poet’s method of ordering a thing is to throw a strong light upon it. To fling it into relief, so that, being seen, it may be attacked and altered, or cherished and protected, as the case may be. A revolutionary poet, a poet bent on revaluing the civilization in which he finds himself, has no stronger weapon than this glare of vivid words.100 Masters and Sandburg reconnoitered topographies of turmoil to draft poems that combined “strength, vigor, vividness” with “coarseness, brutality, cynicism.” Both had provoked outrage for their frankness, but Lowell assured readers that craftsmanship commuted the grimness of their observations: Life is the material of art. But raw life is not art; to become art, it must be fused and transmuted. Also, the professed realists are apt to forget that idealism, a perception of beauty, an aspiration after fineness and nobleness are also real. Mankind would have perished long ago, self-killed from despair, it if had not been for these glimpses of the poetry of existence. To make all such aspirations end in disillusion and death is to have a twisted point of view.101 She did, however, condemn the more graphic sexual episodes. “Mr. Masters is more preoccupied with sex than any other English or American author has ever been,” she complained.102 The Spoon River Anthology was “one long chronicle of rapes, seductions, liaisons, and perversions.”103 Despite this blight, she pronounced that the volume’s importance “can hardly be overstated,” because the author’s insight distilled native perspectives.104 Lowell’s unique, ideological interpretation of the new poets also colored her representation of Sandburg. As with Masters, Lowell depicted Sandburg as an “Apostle of Beauty” dexterous in tender, genteel verse as well as raw, ur-masculine poetry. In Sandburg’s Chicago Poems, with its coarse portraits of the city’s privations, Lowell saw “a powerful imagination, which plays over and about his realistic themes and constantly ennobles them.”105 Strikes, slaughterhouses,

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and factories “all take on a lyric quality under his touch.”Lowell preferred Sandburg’s methodology to that of Masters because it more successfully and subtly advanced poetry: The writer who privileges and protects the tenets of beauty “stands more chance of moulding opinion than he who dims that beauty by turning it to uses for which it is unfitted.”106 Although some critics questioned whether Sandburg’s work should even be considered poetry, Lowell praised the writer for his “beauty” more than any other poet in Tendencies. He was “a true poet, observant of beauty,” whose poems contained “touches of great and original beauty,” and whose work was pervaded by “the spirit of beauty.” The new poetic movement’s final (although by no means finest, Lowell insisted) stage was Imagism. She deemed H. D. “unsentimentally strong and incisive” and “completely sincere,” and likened her poetry to the balance, repose, and charm of classical sculpture. Words stood with the “coolness of marble” and the “clarity of fresh water,” while sharp consonants brought contour and unusually curved cadences imparted harmony.107 Despite her detailed examination of innovations, at too many crucial junctions in Tendencies the loquacious Lowell stood silent before the work of art, declaring certain passages too beautiful for dissection and leaving pages of verse unanalyzed. She had written the book, in part, because a dearth of solid literary criticism existed. When asked by a reporter what American poetry required to reach its potential, Lowell said that she hoped to fill in a gap: “The thing that we chiefly need is informed and authoritative criticism.”108 In a letter to Masters she asked, “Are there any critics? I incurred the wrath of the whole Poetry Society in New York last winter by saying there were none. We have reviewers, but of critics we are sadly bereft, and those that there are have not turned their attention to the new work.”109 In Tendencies, Lowell mentioned, but did not examine Lindsay or Eliot. The omission of Pound propelled Harriet Monroe’s comment that such an exclusion was akin to writing “Hamlet-without-Hamlet.”110 Not unlike Eliot, Lowell was a poet- critic whose sensibility chafed at poetics that clashed with her own aesthetics, morality, and sensibility. She found Eliot’s “The Waste Land” not evidence of genius but proof of effete cleverness. Likewise, she saw no future for Marianne Moore: “a poor little des[s]icated New England spinster, full of inhibitions, with points and angles of mind where she should have rondures and curves. It is through a paucity of emotion, of humanity, of life, that she writes as she does. She is working in ashes and sand.”111

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Cummings needed to stop “revolting against Cambridge and his Unitarian minister father,” and Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams (even though she published the New Jersey doctor in her anthologies) received similarly woeful verdicts.112 After the appearance of Tendencies, Lowell continued to publish reviews and essays in Poetry, The Dial, The New Republic, North American Review, The Boston American, and The New York Times (where she became a regular reviewer in 1920). In each medium— lectures, reviews, readings—Lowell stressed her view that the new poetry formed a logical outgrowth of old poetic traditions. “Art must change or die,” she said.113 For her, the new was as much a rearrangement of the old as it was sheer invention. She went to great efforts to unravel the estranging conception that the majority of the new poetry formed a dramatic departure from tradition. She assured her audiences that she admired old masters: “Long ago in my callow youth, I sat at Matthew Arnold’s critical feet and read everything he ever wrote.”114 In an interview with Joyce Kilmer, who asked about the “lack of reverence” shown by new poets toward “the great poets of the past,” Lowell dismissed the allegation as unfounded and stressed continuity, especially with the “two great poets, Whitman and Poe,” rather than change.115 She warned the socialist writer Clement Wood that the poet’s primary role was not as a voice of protest, but as a “serf to beauty.”116 After reading “The Poetic Puritans” in Texas Review, Lowell sent a rebuttal to conservative poet Stanton Coblentz, insisting, “There is no quarrel between the old poetry and the new, and nobody expects one to supplant the other, and nobody ever did.”117 She favorably reviewed Convention And Revolt In Poetry by John Livingston Lowes for treating the decade’s poetic innovations as a natural condition of growth, and until her death she submitted work to genteel publications as well as the “little” magazines. Lowell cast her critical eye far and wide to admonish authors who ignored the new poetry. To the Boston Evening Transcript, for example, she objected to a feature listing books popular among librarians that largely excluded contemporary verse. “If ever a country needed the refining and mellowing effect of the arts,” she pleaded, “we are that country. But how shall we get it, when even the custodians of our collections do not recognize the difference between art and mechanics in literature? In fact greatly prefer the latter?”118 When the bulletin of the Massachusetts Library Club featured books about

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cooking and citizenship but not about poetry, she wrote to the club president, John Adams Lowe: I beg you to use all your influence to instruce [sic] the librarians of the country that one of the functions of the book is as a container of pure literature. I find here accounts of the book as an aid to the learning of this, that, and the other thing . . . I find hardly any phase of the library’s usefulness unrecorded except the fact that its most important function is to mellow and enrich character through contact with what Matthew Arnold calls “the best that has been thought and said in the world.”119 Lowell emphasized that maudlin poetry had no place in the modern world (“Much good is all our sentimental uplift indeed!”) and urged Lowe to help librarians see the insights inherent in the strong and forthright new poetry. Lowell worked behind the scenes to advance poets and poetry. She gave line-by-line feedback to H. D. on her poems, advice on how to get published (“This getting things placed in the regular magazines is no joke whatever,” Lowell cautioned), and distributed much-needed dividends from sales of the Imagist anthologies.120 For Aldington, Lowell secured a post as English correspondent in a local poetry journal, where she also placed his poems and found publishers for his books. For close friend and fellow literati-at-arms William Braithwaite, she lent financial support for his editorship of Poetry Journal and defended him against critics. For example, in a letter to Little Review editor Margaret Anderson, she wrote: “I am very fond of Mr. Braithwaite, and I admire his attitude of absolute devotion of his work.”121 Lowell sent the impoverished D. H. Lawrence a typewriter (on which he composed Women in Love) and funds, and gave literary criticism, constructive book reviews, contacts, encouragement, and, not infrequently, money to young poets embarking on their careers, including William Rose Benét, Maxwell Bodenheim, e. e. cummings, Malcolm Cowley, Barrett Wendell, Robert Hillyer, and Eunice Tietjens. She secured new subscribers for Poetry and Little Review, found sympathetic reviewers for poetry collections, and provided aspiring writers with letters of introduction. She was not shy about publicizing her efforts. Lowell wrote directly to the adversarial New Jersey Dr. Williams: “There are few people who have tried to do more for young and unknown writers than I . . . I have often

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recommended poems to editors . . . [and] endeavored to show people less well informed than myself who were worthy among the younger group.”122 Lowell’s remarkable sense of self-importance nonetheless bore much truth. She had realized early on that new communities had to be constructed in order for poets to find a hearing. With money, talent, and the force of her will, she painstakingly recruited writers, readers, and critics to her endeavor. As the many fan letters to her indicated, the emergent poetic community constructed itself through the media of new magazines, face-to-face discourse, and personal correspondence. It depended upon imaginative and original responses—mediations among poets, critics, and readers—in a new idiom. Her contribution was to make revolutions in form acceptable, to change—to some degree—the gender codings of poetry, and to professionalize authorship. Lowell’s efforts won her wide acclaim. Fletcher called Lowell “the most picturesquely popular defender” of the new poets.123 Clement Wood marveled that she “had an advertising flair, a publicity sense, almost unequalled. It was she more than anyone else who put the ‘new poetry’ ‘on the map.’ ”124 A close friend wrote: “She loved poetry and was its advocate at a time when poetry was not generally popular. It has always seemed to me that for poets of her day she performed the service of a barker at a circus, as from the lecture platform, in the press, and almost the street corner, she cried aloud, ‘Poetry, Poetry, this way to Poetry!’ ”125

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6 Romantic Individualism, Radical Politics: Lyric Solidarity in Peace and War

The nation in war-time attains a uniformity of feeling . . . other values such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed.1 —Randolph Bourne (1919) As editor of the influential socialist monthly The Masses since 1912, Max Eastman felt he had to act as a mediator of nonsensical battles. Befitting the times, all staff members believed poetry should play a central role in each issue. However, some wanted to advance social justice through realistic exposés of slums, factory conditions, and racism. Pieces that grimly focused on life’s dark side, though, prompted letters of concern. Edward J. Wheeler, for example, wrote to a columnist at The Masses: “I certainly do believe in poetry that is derived at first hand from life, instead of from tradition and books. The tendency I decry is that which seems to confuse brutality with vitality . . . the most lasting poetry is that which conveys a sense of beauty . . . A good many of our modern writers seem to me to confuse life with mere excitement—restlessness—unrestraint— clamor.”2 Others wanted to publish uplifting content that showcased the world’s wonders, but those works provoked disdain. The “gentle anarchist” Hippolyte Havel complained about one of the poems submitted to the magazine: “Nature! Mountains! Scenery! What have they got to do with economic determinism!”3 Along with other Progressive poets, Eastman believed that beauty could facilitate the reflection needed to create moral vision that led to individual virtue and social justice. Emotion and imagination combined with reason and politics to prompt the powerful 187

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to realize the need for fairness, providing protection to the vulnerable. In fact, many of the editorial board members felt that “the artist’s function may well be to correct, but it is, first of all, to conceive, to quicken sensibility so that life takes on a more vivid character, a more active color and energy.”4 In this context one would think that Leo Tolstoy’s activist aesthetics in “What Is Art?” would have provided inspiration but, for this group of “sentimental rebels” (as Louis Untermeyer called them), the Russian novelist only provoked ire. Eastman explained that Tolstoy wrote “without a ray of poetry or joy. The first office of a reformer is to convey in his personality an impression that life is worth reforming.”5 For these writers, romanticism was not a quiescent retreat from life but a literary rejection of modern capitalist, bourgeois society.6 The late-Victorian sensibility that fostered a new literary modernism likewise engendered a radical politics; beauty acted as a catalyst not only to create an authentic self, but to advocate for solidarity on a range of fronts as well. Among the individuals involved in instituting this transformation were a group of poets dedicated to the socialist cause. Unlike radicals in the 1930s or the 1960s whose dogmatism and orthodoxy cast off beauty as bourgeois frivolity, these writers used a strategy of awakening rather than exposition. That is, they wrote verse that appealed to the heart, and prose that engaged the intellect. In this, Waldo Frank concurred with his colleague James Oppenheim: “I agree with you that the people whom we wish to reach will be better met by literary, rounded, expressive methods than by the display method.”7 Oppenheim, Eastman, and Louis Untermeyer, among others, viewed modern poetry as the first move in a twostep process of change because it provided “inspiration.” Scanning their verse, a reader would be hard-pressed to find a statement of ideology. Neither culture nor politics alone could lead to the solidarity required for a liberal, democratic society. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, romantic radicals believed that art could be joined to advances in science, worldliness provided a sturdier base for knowledge than academic scholarship, and a policy of noninvolvement in the European war that broke out in 1914 offered the best hope for protecting liberty and pursuing freedom and justice at home. Eastman expressed the valence that feeling and emotion had to his cohort who worked with him to promulgate change: “We are

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distinguished, we literary and artistic people, by our ability to realize, to feel and express the quality of things. We experience vividly the existing facts, and the revolutionary ideal, and the bitterly wonderful long days of the struggle that lies between these two.”8 Poetry proved essential in cultivating this sensibility in others: “The defining purpose of poetry, as of all art, is to heighten consciousness.”9 Long overlooked in historical discourse, the connections among emotions and experience, and a commitment to beauty were values that shaped the anti-war movement and modern American culture in the Progressive era. Louis Untermeyer was a particularly effective literary instigator. In a memoir, he described his impact on American literary life in the first two decades of the twentieth century: “I did not instigate ‘movements,’ inspire schools, or direct the lives and times of my friends. I see myself . . . as the contact point which sets the mechanism going.”10 Untermeyer had a hand in many of the major literary movements. He wrote poetry, published articles in radical magazines, contributed weekly columns of literary criticism, and edited best-selling anthologies. In a 1919 letter describing his son, Untermeyer inadvertently described himself: “He has a good chance of growing up to be a sort of combined Karl Marx, Percy Bysshe Shell[e]y and Huck Finn.”11 Untermeyer nourished an ethos that combined social justice, aesthetic beauty, and individual spontaneity. Born to a prosperous family of jewelry merchants in New York City, Untermeyer’s parents groomed him for a career in business. However, while in elementary school, he “fell in love” with the poetry of Heinrich Heine and began writing imitative lyrics that reflected a “heart torn with unreal but immedicable woes.” His mother, a transplanted Southerner, encouraged his efforts along these lines and discouraged “anything that challenged sentiment, platitudes, and the status quo.” A chance reading of Shelley’s “The Mask of Anarchy”—a commemorative poem about the British government’s massacre of citizens at Peterloo, Manchester, in 1819— led to an “epiphany,” changing not only the content of his poetry but the course of his life as well. Shelley’s poems revealed that “the good and the beautiful . . . were one . . . sentiment and purpose could bemust be—united.”12 The over four hundred poems that Untermeyer wrote during the next five years, from 1904 to 1909, suffered a fate similar to those by Braithwaite, Monroe, and Lowell, with only twelve finding outlets.

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Untermeyer received counsel from B. Russell Herts, the editor of Moods, a new magazine that supported the work of young writers. Herts introduced him to established poets—hosting a dinner party that included Markham and Viereck—and offered feedback on specific poems.13 Herts also served on a panel of judges for a poetry contest sponsored by The International that awarded Untermeyer’s sonnet “Mockery” the fifty- dollar first prize.14 In return for five shares of stock in The International, Untermeyer went on to serve as the magazine’s poetry critic, an endeavor that soon led to a similar position at the Chicago Evening Post. After making his debut between book covers with “To Chloe” and “The Poet” in The Younger Choir (1909), Untermeyer received more rejections. After the publisher B. W. Huebsch passed on his first collection of seventy-two lyrics, First Love: A Lyric Sequence, because they left the publisher feeling “indifferent,” Untermeyer had his father underwrite publication of the book, contracting Sherman, French, the Boston vanity press, in 1911.15 The volume elicited only qualified praise from readers and colleagues. At The Century, William Rose Benét had faint praise for the poems, deeming them “fresh and unlabored,” with “surprisingly few affections.”16 Untermeyer received a warmer welcome at the Poetry Society of America, where he read a selection from First Love. PSA member Charles Hanson Towne appreciated the volume’s “simplicity” and “directness,” singling out the lines: “If He had swept the stars like sand/Into a corner of the night” to comment, “That is poetry.”17 Writing from Birmingham, Alabama, the state’s Socialist Party organizer Clement Wood saw in the poems “lyric intensity” that brought “a little glimmer of the new social consciousness that has come,” and inspired others to “try to translate our proletarian feelings into a literary expression of them.”18 A letter from editor Dudley Sicher encapsulated the reciprocal relationship of poet and reader that Untermeyer’s poetry conveyed: “I hardly know how to tell you of the joy and feeling of friendliness your poems aroused in me. I say friendship since the test of the true poet is to be able to communicate intimately with his distant but closely sympathetic reader.”19 Other readers still nagged about contraventions of standard form. G. A. Peckham, Professor of Old Testament Languages and Literature at Hiram College in Ohio, for example, wrote to point out Untermeyer’s inaccurate rhymes.20 Luckily, Untermeyer’s work in the family business, which he joined after dropping out of high school at age sixteen, provided an ample

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income. The job at Untermeyer, Robbins and Company allowed him to live a privileged middle- class life with his wife Jean Starr (whom he married in 1907) on the Upper West Side, in an apartment furnished with Polynesian batiks, artwork by Munich Secessionists and Parisian pointillists, and jade ornaments. His taste for the modern and anti-formalist extended to theater, where he attended rehearsals of the Liberal Club, and to dance, where he watched the performances of Isadora Duncan, who once told him that her decision to become a dancer came when, after reading Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the figures, in her mind, “came alive.”21 Untermeyer also became a regular fixture in the emerging literary scene in Greenwich Village, which had not yet solidified into a bohemian mecca. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the area held allure for the low rents, ready accessibility, and a decidedly village feel in the midst of a large metropolis. Untermeyer made important contacts while frequenting Polly Holladay’s, a restaurant located in the basement of the Rand School of Social Science, which was “a cross between a saloon and a salon” and provided a forum for “all utopians, muckrakers, young intellectuals and elderly malcontents,” he remembered. Piet Vlag served up sneers against “bourgeois pigs” along with a plebeian- only menu of stews, spiced eel soup, Haringsla (uncooked herring, apples, beets), and potato salad.22 As editor of The Masses, the Dutch immigrant received a subsidy from a New York Life Insurance executive who was also a devoted socialist. Vlag operated the magazine as a nonprofit cooperative, limiting advertisements to other cooperative ventures, paying no fees to contributing writers or artists, and maintaining a cheap cover price. In the first year, The Masses combined trenchant reportage of labor and social reform movements with high- quality drawings by a group of Ashcan artists, including Art Young, Stuart Davis, and John Henri, and fiction by leading leftist European writers, such as Tolstoy and Emile Zola. When finances faltered and Vlag left for Florida, the board turned to a writer, scholar, and founder of the Men’s League for Woman’s Suffrage, Max Eastman, to revive the magazine. The appointment—which came in the form of a telegram: “You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay.”—came as a surprise to Eastman who, at the time, had just resigned from teaching duties in the Philosophy Department of Columbia University. He had been searching for paid, part-time editorial work that would afford more opportunity to pursue his own non-polemical literary writing, but

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what he found at The Masses was unpaid full-time work at a socialist journal dedicated to politics and economics. The magazine’s masthead proclaimed that it was “A revolutionary and not a reform magazine,” which “called for the conquest of power by those who did not hold it.” Floyd Dell summed up the periodical’s motto: “It stood for fun, truth, beauty, realism, freedom, peace, feminism, revolution.”23 Contributors were united in their dedication to female suffrage and reproductive rights, freedom of speech, pacifism, and socialism as an alternative to capitalism. The son of Congregationalist ministers—both Eastman’s mother and father had spent years traveling through the “burned-out districts” of upstate and western New York—he attended Williams College where he imbibed Emersonian idealism and Goethe’s romanticism, and determined to live a life of “activity and experience.”24 After graduation he moved to Manhattan, eventually moving in with his sister Crystal, a law student at New York University who went on to become an expert on work accidents and workman’s compensation, publishing in 1912 Work Accidents and the Law. It was through a friend of Crystal’s that Eastman was recruited by John Dewey to step in and teach “The Principles of Science” at Columbia University after a professor died suddenly. The two men became close friends—seeing in philosophy a set of tools to improve life rather than a site for endless abstraction—where direct perception, spontaneous living, and scientific methods could improve the human experience. Inspired by his mother, Eastman read Nietzsche and Marx and, in his spare time, ambled through the East Side, attending meetings of socialists, trade unionists, single-taxers, “anybody,” he wrote, “who aspired to make the system better.”25 He contributed articles to leading magazines on contemporary social and cultural developments, including Christian Science and cults, psychoanalysis, and labor strife. Eastman reserved his strongest passion for poetry. As he recalled in a memoir published decades later, “[I] romanticized the whole realm of poetry.” He managed to publish only one poem, “To A Tawny Thrush” in The Forum, which even he admitted was “a stately mausoleum” where outmoded poems were laid to rest on its pages. In his philosophy lectures, Eastman presented Whitman as the consummate ideal man who lived a life devoted to poetry, nature, and natural science. Richard Gilder rejected two of Eastman’s articles analyzing morality in Leaves of Grass on the basis that The Century was “a family

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magazine.” Whitman could be included in the pantheon of poets, but his sensuality and insistent tactlessness ultimately kept him out of the lofty heights of Parnassus. Eastman regarded such conceits as proof positive that poetry languished because of killjoy aesthetics.26 Convinced of the need for optimism, Eastman avoided what he saw as sensationalist writing by muckraking journalists, from the likes of Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Ida Tarbell. The titles for three of his books convey the fact that enjoyment, not exposés, best expresses his approach: Enjoyment of Poetry, Enjoyment of Laughter, Enjoyment of Life. Eastman shared a love of poetry with other members on staff at The Masses. He saw in Louis Untermeyer’s essays on music, literature, and politics for the Friday supplement of the Chicago Evening Post a kindred spirit. Praising his work as “vital and real” Eastman recruited Untermeyer to contribute monthly reviews of books and plays.27 Just as the pragmatist tacked down metaphysics to aid everyday life, so too the poet, a “lover of the adventure of life . . . innocent of the smell of old books” brought sensible aid, but Eastman never pursued it single-mindedly. As he wrote in his autobiography about his decision not to live by his poetry: “The first requirement, I thought, is to be a man, and a man has to earn his living. The next is to be a good man, and a good man doesn’t live entirely to himself.”28 As much as he romanticized the figure of the poet, Eastman cast a cold eye on the attendant precarious garret living, which is why he concentrated more on writing about poetry than actually composing it. To this end Eastman published in April of 1912 Enjoyment of Poetry, which combined his affinity for science, verse, and pleasure. Indeed, the book proved so popular that it went into a second printing within six months, and the publisher issued a “school edition” that sold extremely well. Eastman viewed the book as a brief for poetry, explaining that it offered intimate engagement with all the senses, mitigated sorrow, and had a vehicular function, transmitting ideas through compelling images.29 Images, he argued, had value because, unlike practical language, symbols and evocative language acted as a conduit to help readers “learn by experience”; otherwise, routines, habits, and familiarity threatened to foster estrangement and ennui.30 Through “vigorous idleness” and “the power of lingering with energy,” poetry reading could regenerate tactile awareness of everyday life, a capacity children have naturally but adults—in their rush for material comfort—have lost. For writers, poetic diction

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provided a forum for time-tested, resonant words such as “wraith,” “vigil,” “night-wandering,” “preen,” and “simoom,” as well as standard techniques. As Eastman argued: “No book about poetry is acceptable without a quotation of these lines” from Tennyson: “The moan of doves in immemorial elms,/And murmuring of innumerable bees.”31 For these reasons, socialist activist Mike Gold (who also contributed poems to The Masses) advised Untermeyer to leaven the materialism of his poems. “Your dreams are a little hard and finished, with not enough mist,” Gold wrote. “No one can be an artist without an overwhelming ever-present sense of the cosmos . . . It does not dim rebellion, either, but intensifies, and makes it holier.”32 For Gold, alleviating the suffering of individuals first required an aesthetic appreciation of harmony, order, composition, and empathy; because of their innate sensitivity and devotion to art, poets had the unique ability to cultivate this moral sensibility in others. “What sort of instincts can anyone have who is not seared and wounded by the sight of poverty,” Gold asked. “It is such an offense to the sense of beauty and love which the poet is supposed to have a monopoly on.”33 It was, finally, in the poetry of James Oppenheim that Untermeyer found his aesthetic bearings. Oppenheim, like Shelley, used poetry to address substantial issues of modern industrial society in a style free of cant. In the opening sentence of The Mystic Warrior, his autobiography in verse dedicated to Whitman, Oppenheim identified his primary motivation, “The world was a dream of beauty, an ache of loveliness,” as well as his chief inspiration, Leaves of Grass: “I looked in, shocked, repelled, attracted: a burst of health seemed to envelop/ me.” Whitman improved his well-being while the lives of other great men shaped his sense of vocation: “Gradually I blended my Napoleon, my Lincoln, my Shakespeare, my Wagner/and Jesus/Into a Messiah who should conquer and save the world through song . . . / Nay, more: a Messiah who should be a song.”34 Oppenheim’s poetry combined, as one reviewer wrote, an “unorthodox sense, fresh phrasing, free form and spirit” with standard meter and rhyme. In Oppenheim’s 1914 Songs for the New Age, Untermeyer identified traces of Old Testament psalmists, Whitman, and Freud, and realized, “I was spinning fancies; Jimmie was writing about things.”35 In addition to psychoanalysis, Oppenheim’s interest in Nietzsche inflected the book’s first section, “We Dead,”

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with paeans to self- divinity (“Let Nothing Bind You”), the search for an authentic self (“Self,” “Patterns”), and the creative imperative to embrace angst (“Too Human,” “The Pure”). The poet’s socialist convictions come through only in two poems. “Transfigurations” derided prayer as a solution to social ills, advancing practical public policies instead: “Go wipe out poverty: Then hell will be emptier.” In “Civilization,” which went on to become one of his most famous poems, Oppenheim flayed bourgeois morality as a veneer: “This civilization is mostly varnish very thinly laid on . . . /Take any newspaper any morning: scan through it . . . /Rape, murder, villainy, and picking and stealing:/The mob that tore a negro to pieces, the men that ravished a young girl.”36 Oppenheim continued those themes in War and Laughter (1916), which criticized hypocrisy and greed as rampant values glossed over “with a call to love for mother, for children, for one’s country.”37 Untermeyer considered the collection Oppenheim’s “best work” for the “tremendous sincerity and no little sensuous charm.”38 Fan letters bore out this appraisal. After reading Oppenheim’s collected poems, The Sea, Gladys Baker wrote: “Two nights I have gone over it until dawn came through the window. I am stricken with silence. One can only feel the immensity of the work and stand before it with naked hands, a great humbleness of spirit and a greater gratitude for having been given it.” “It is,” she continued, “as if one had looked brazenly into a man’s soul-utterly stripped, fearless and unashamed. These words born of experience too bitter and too dear-bought almost to be born.”39 After reading the same book, Beverley Kaye wrote: “So very often I turn to one of my most prized possessions, ‘The Sea,’ and am lost in the panorama of beauty you [wrote] so skillfully and with such wealth of understanding.”40 Oliver Jenkins, editor of Tempo, exclaimed after reading The Golden Bird: “I am writing this letter in a state of exhilaration. Only poetry of great rhythm, great emotion, great fire, can set my nerves a-tingling this way.”41 The volume also prompted an experience of synesthesia in to Helen Keller: “As I read the poems eagerly without stopping, the thought came to me again and again, ‘Can words—every day human words—be wrought into such rhythmic power and sensuous sweetness?’ There is an inward rhythm in the verse, and every sound is one with sense . . . What a glad fellowship there is with the sun, the winds, the sea and the Spirit of Beauty that lies beyond the barrier of mortal sense!”42 Several enlisted soldiers stationed in France

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as part of the American Expeditionary Forces contacted the author after reading “Song of the Uprising” in the September 1917 issue of Seven Arts. Edward Townsend Booth wrote: “I have just read it and have been quite carried away in its storm and splendour. Two others in the Unit had the same experience . . . We salute you, Sir!”43 William Braithwaite also liked that, while Oppenheim rebelled against prevailing social norms, he did so with “a quality of mysticism which made his speculations about democracy and individualism something a little finer than a vehement revolt against the idols of sentimentality and conservatism; it lifted his substance to a place of vision that caught the light of a mood that came from the eternal.”44 Braithwaite compared Oppenheim to Shelley, Whitman, and Poe, and declared Songs for the New Age the “most significant” volume of 1914 for combining “wisdom and a beauty reduced to the simplest assertions, and in a far more common and universal speech than any other collection of poetry.”45 Braithwaite placed Oppenheim’s work alongside Percy MacKaye’s genteel, democratic “The Immigrants” and Witter Bynner’s socially conscious “The New World,” which could make one more sensitive to the sufferings of the foreign-born poor and more incensed by the “greedy representatives of international business interests” who preyed on them.46 For similar reasons, Braithwaite came to appreciate Untermeyer’s work. While addressing the ills of the industrial world in the 1914 collection Challenge, Untermeyer believed beauty lay just beneath the travail. To him, beauty soothed, cheered, and helped to ease the commotion of contemporary life: Rising out of all its forms, Beauty, the passion of the universe, And Beauty it was, and keen, compassionate mirth That drives the vast and energetic earth. Even when decrying “torn and hurled” society in “Affirmation,” he avowed, “I shall embrace the world/With joyful fierceness and undying zest.” Braithwaite applauded Untermeyer for remaining resilient and respectful in the face of tribulation, and for poems that displayed sincerity and passion instead of instances of pain or dogmatism.47 An encounter with the work of Robert Frost further cemented Untermeyer’s literary desiderata. In 1913 he read in the London

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quarterly Poetry & Drama Frost’s “The Fear” and “A Hundred Collars” and was struck with the “fresh conversational idiom” that was “unerringly exact and unequivocally American.” Where publishers had for years rejected Frost’s manuscripts as unduly plain and “unpoetic,” Untermeyer found in those works authenticity and form that gave shape to American speech, forging a new direction for American poetry. Frost explained his method: There are two types of realist – the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one, and the other one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I’m inclined to be the second kind. To me the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form.48 Untermeyer inaugurated a friendship by writing a favorable review of North of Boston and soon became one of Frost’s most arduous boosters, marketing his poems to various magazines, writing favorable reviews, devising and procuring lectures, loaning money when necessary, and helping to establish the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College where they eventually taught together.49 Frost acknowledged Untermeyer’s efforts toward galvanizing his fledgling career: “I’m your bonfire that you started without a permit from the fire warden and left burning when you turned your back to go in for lunch.”50 Frost reluctantly consented to his friend’s journalistic work—which he believed hazarded the poetic impulse—because “we need you to fight for us.”51 Just as The Masses had struggled to reconcile socialism and bohemianism, art and politics, Untermeyer sought to calibrate the proportion of harsh reality to beauty in his poetry. He blamed teachers and anthologists for tempering poetic value by reducing encounters with poems to platitudes. As a schoolchild in the 1890s, he recalled, learning poetry entailed writing paraphrases, as teachers asked “Tell what the author means, using your own words.” Untermeyer and his fellow students then “brightly reduced poem after poem (‘the best words in the best order’) to the worst words in the greatest possible confusion.”52 When it came time for Untermeyer to teach readers about modern poetry, he determined to treat texts with more respect and rigor. And, when he was in a position to provide feedback to aspiring poets, he resolved, as did Markham, Braithwaite, and Monroe, that constructive

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analysis and encouragement would more likely foster community than an overly critical and coldly objective approach. In the 1916 preface to “–And Other Poets,” he delineated his philosophy regarding literary criticism, emphasizing that his standpoint was “a personal one, not the aloof and Olympian attitude towards art that is so often supposed to represent the true pose of criticism.”53 The reaction from one such recipient of this gentle diagnostics, Nan Apothrecker, indicates the impact of this strategy: “Your criticism is of real value to me, for it gets at the vital defect of my work, and at the same time strikes a note of confidence and encouragement that was inspiring.” She agreed with his suggestions to anchor her verse in actual events in order to make them “sincere”: “When I wrote them, I really felt them heart and soul; but I realize in re-reading the poems . . . that to an outsider, they must seem extravagant expressions of a chimerical realm, and not of real life.” The difficulty lay in her use of poetry as a refuge rather than as a site of negotiation between reality and the ideal: “I find so much sordidness and pettiness, too. I sometimes become so utterly impatient with the narrow monotony of the business life, that I’ve just got to escape from it, and so, in the precious few moments I get to myself, I try to forget it completely.” As a result, her literary products, she admitted, “have been a kind of safety valve to an effervescent romanticism that the most practical experiences have not destroyed.”54 In addition to providing assessments of writing in private correspondence, Untermeyer continued to publish essays on the new poets in a range of periodicals and newspapers. To some, he was too generous, while for others, Untermeyer was far too impersonal. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who had made her mark in the 1890s with Poems of Passion, Poems of Pleasure, and Poems of Power, censured Untermeyer for promoting modern poets. “They can only experiment with words,” she told him at a 1915 PSA meeting. “The great thing in poetry is beyond them.”55 Conversely, Carl Sandburg bristled at Untermeyer’s review of Chicago Poems, complaining that he wrote “about the new books like sport writers sizing up new ballplayers or trotting horses,” and rendering judgments that “are your own personal impressions and not solemn oracular finalities.”56 Meanwhile, for more radical critics like Randolph Bourne, aesthetic criticism needed to hammer out a clear philosophy and provide a source of resistance to the state and to war.57 Untermeyer chose a middle-way course, toured the country with lectures on the new poetry, and was asked to serve as poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan.

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It helped that Untermeyer had not only the correct résumé but also the preferred comportment. The issue of gender and poetry inspired apprehension across the cultural landscape, which is why the figure Untermeyer cut—as a man of business, belles lettres, and, to some degree, celebrity—allowed him to travel in separate, but overlapping circles: respectable New York society and avant garde cadres; academic scholars and lay readers in the heartland. Lew Sarrett, a Literature Professor at Northeastern University, offered Untermeyer an appointment as poet-in-residence, a position modeled on Robert Frost’s $5,000 salary at the University of Michigan, which required no teaching duties, just his presence on campus (Percy Mackaye had a similar position at the University of Miami). “Many universities are watching the Michigan experiment with interest,” Sarrett wrote. The plan was to promote poetry “by recognizing art in this fashion and placing the stamp of approval by underwriting it.” Untermeyer’s authority derived not only from his balanced and beneficent criticism: “You combine admirably the things a man would need: a reputation for real achievements in poetry (in addition a plus—your literary criticism); ability to meet University men in their own field, literature; you are a mixer; and you’re free from the idiosyncrasies that make some poets a bit freakish in the mind of the corn-fed layman.”58 University of Kansas Professor of Rhetoric Willard Wattles (1888– 1950), whose work appeared in Poetry and Jessie Rittenhouse’s anthologies, similarly approved of Untermeyer’s demeanor: You are not taken in by the shams and poses of the dilettanti. From these things, O Lord, deliver us, the skeptic, the cynic, the sophist, and the dilettante! Hermann Hagedon was here in January, only to confirm some of the opinions I have had of the “green plush” ladies and the “virile” young men. I bet there was a big turn-out when Reginald Wright Kaufmann, or whoever it was, talked on “The Virility of the Poet” at the Poetry Society. I see that Witter Bynner writes in green, and that somebody else is rosy . . . You know, people never begin to talk about virility till they feel it slipping.59 Alfred Harcourt of Harcourt, Brace and Howe commissioned Untermeyer to assemble a “pioneering collection of American verse” for high school and college students. The result was the widely successful The New Era in American Poetry. In preparing the anthology, Untermeyer had to please many constituencies, including an

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editor who wanted a representative sample of approved standards along with the modern poets. Ultimately, Untermeyer’s selection criteria revolved around what he considered to be poetry’s enduring qualities: delight, “the pleasure of recognition, pleasure of surprise”; arrangement, “how common words have made the familiar seem strange or the strange familiar”; and memory, including the associations the poem engendered. For both Untermeyer and Frost, selecting a poem was akin to love at first sight. “The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound,” Frost wrote to Untermeyer. “That he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly.” Attempts at analyzing a poem were likewise futile, as Untermeyer attested, “We can no more account for the essence of a poem than we can explain a color or translate a perfume.”60 By 1919, Untermeyer had made his choice between the demands of art and politics, a decision apparent in the opening pages of A New Era.”61 Published the year of Whitman’s centenary, lines from the bard of democracy prefaced the volume: “ . . . these and more branching forth into/numberless branches./Always the free range and diversity!/Always the continent of Democracy!” Untermeyer criticized his predecessor, claiming that in the encyclopedic An American Anthology, Edmund Stedman, the anthologist, erred “on the side of righteousness rather than beauty.” Stedman and his colleagues at The Century had felt a personal responsibility to protect the morality of their largely female readership. Any hint of immorality or untoward sentiment resulted in an avalanche of protest letters from these women, as well as clergy members, teachers, newspaper editors, and public officials.62 As gatekeepers of culture steeped in the Arnoldian ethos, Stedman and his associates undertook only limited forays into the province of realism, strife, and sex. After all, culture served as a necessary accompaniment to life, providing harmony, reassurance, and familiarity, not anxiety, agitation, or provocation. Untermeyer’s selections meanwhile avoided pontificating and moralizing; although “human, racy and vigorous,” the poems included in New Era derived from the poets’ lives rather than books or legends were “closer to the soil” and thus “closer to the soul.”63 Readers did not need to know archaic words or ancient myths in order to enjoy the content. And, in the postwar world of labor strife and urban race riots, Untermeyer redefined nationalism by stressing the “inherent Americanism,” as well as the democratic spirit and speech of the

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contributors. His inspiration was Whitman “who broke the fetters of the present- day poet and opened the doors of America to him.” Just as Whitman had initiated “the American character” by casting into a crucible “action, theory, idealism, business,” and Frost had refreshened colloquial speech by streamlining language and form, these poets located beauty in the “casual and commonplace.”64 The modern poets in the volume addressed with fascination, not fear, the nation’s diversity of races and ideals, advances in science and liberal thought, and movements toward social democracy, “the whole welter and struggle and beauty of the modern world.”65 Conrad Aiken, who had been championing the need for serious literary criticism for several years, disagreed with the anthology’s balance of old and new. Untermeyer, Aiken complained, included too many poems from “the Old Guard” and too little of the avant garde. “I think you overrate Confectionary and Caviar and Supernaturalism and Romantic Traditionalism.” When Untermeyer defended his decision not to include T. S. Eliot because of his negativity, disillusionment, and lack of emotion, Aiken responded, “Of course I don’t agree with you at all; I think there is quite as much emotion carefully stored up, quintessentialized.”66 Aiken dispensed this advice for subsequent editions: “No easy generalizations . . . not too many stripes, nor too many stars; less of E Pluribus Unum, and more of the pluralistic universe.”67 Sandburg applauded the volume’s contemporary appeal and entrepreneurial spirit of innovation: “Throughout it has the finality of sincerity.” Even though the judgments did not tally with his own, Sandburg admired that Untermeyer was “always opening windows in the house of American literary art—there is a drive of hope, an Edisonian expectation of the future and a Henry Ford faith that the flivver on which Humanity is riding to bigger destinies will somehow find enough gasoline, petrol or whatnot of dynamic juice to keep it going.” Sandburg’s only admonition was that Untermeyer broaden his taste to admit more geographical diversity, including voices from outside Manhattan, and that his companions included “machinists, inventors, engineers” and labor activists, as much as “the Literary Gang.” Doing so would act as a “vitalizing” force on his judgments.68 Sandburg assured Untermeyer that the book had a large, grateful audience in small towns and state colleges across the country.69 Sales figures and the judgment of others confirmed this assessment. John Gould Fletcher identified the anthology’s mix of old and new as a key reason for its success. “I quite agree with you that the

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public (in America, at least) seems to have had enough of novelty for the time being,” but he criticized Untermeyer’s own poetry, encouraging him to probe his psyche more deeply. “You will have to knock the Keats out of your composition. Just as I have to get the better of my Shelley facility,” Fletcher advised.70 Markham, with typical graciousness, praised the book as “needed,” written with “condensed and vivid energy” and selections that “ring with the personality of the poets represented.”71 Letters of gratitude poured in from obscure writers alongside the more notable, such as Hart Crane, Edwin Muir, Leonie Adams, Maxwell Bodenheim, James Rorty, and John Crowe Ransom. Like other Progressive poets, Untermeyer worked behind the scenes to help these poets find publishing venues and secure public readings, along with paying writing gigs. Untermeyer and his colleagues at The Masses viewed their project less as legislative lobbyists and more as “awakeners.” Max Eastman employed this term in his 1918 volume of poetry that sought to reconcile the struggle between social justice, to which he was undeniably committed, and individual freedom, in which his “undivided being” wholly resided.72 Eastman dismissed the notion that an interest in aesthetics detracted from his devotion to the socialist struggle, insisting that only in individual experience, “this faculty of vivid living—besides the ultimate and absolute value it has in itself—contributes something indispensable to the practical movement. It contributes something that we might call inspiration.”73 This approach aligned with the strategy of others in the genteelmodern literary community. It united the left-leaning, politically engaged writers with the more conservative Boston Brahmin Amy Lowell who believed that, in the fight to improve social conditions, an unrelenting focus on problems promised a one-way ticket to despair while “idealism, a perception of beauty, an aspiration after fineness and nobleness” shed light on a route toward individual fulfilment and social harmony.74 It also conformed to the creed expounded by Braithwaite. A poetics that refracted writing on social diseases and industrial tyranny “by holding the mirror of imagination up to that old world of beauty” could foster fellowship and healing.75 Braithwaite praised poets who appealed to the humanity and compassion of the middle classes. To varying degrees, Markham, Monroe, Rittenhouse, and Viereck also developed authorial strategies while simultaneously performing practical work to address modern problems. By doing so, these reformers avoided the blinding orthodoxy of later radicals. They kept alive ave-

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nues beyond political ideology in which to foster solidarity with those left out in the forward march of industrial capitalist progress.

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When war broke out in 1914, the poetic community initially and overwhelmingly supported American neutrality, a position shared by most of their fellow Americans. Indeed, some members castigated poets for previous efforts condoning combat. Alice Henderson spoke for many when she wrote in a Poetry editorial that “The American feeling about the War is a genuine revolt against war.” Monroe called the war being raged in Europe, “a sudden shattering of hope, a brutal denial of progress, a bloody anachronism” and proposed an aesthetic explanation for the origins of warfare in an editorial, insisting that poets shared blame for inciting battle: Poets have made more wars than kings, and war will not cease until they remove its glamour from the imaginations of men. What is the fundamental, the essential cause of war? The feeling in men’s hearts that it is beautiful. And who have created this feeling? . . . [Poets] transmute into sounds and colors and forms of beauty its savagery and horror, to give heroic appeal to its unreason, a heroic excuse to its rage and lust.76 To these writers beauty was a powerful force, serving as a battle cry that stirred hearts and minds as much as dreams of imperialism, nationalism, and ideology. Poets became deeply divided over how best to serve their dual obligations as writers and citizens, as an unbearable tension arose between the freedom to write and the duty to be an American poet—a tension that led to an articulation of a nationalist aesthetic standard. Monroe hailed Sandburg for shedding light on the horrors of war. His poem “Ready To Kill” expressed a desire to smash the bronze memorial of a famous general on horseback outfitted with a flag, sword, and gun, “Ready to run the red blood and slush the bowels of men all over/the sweet new grass of the prairie.” “War will be over,” Monroe concluded, “when such feeling as this possess the imaginations of men.”77 In subsequent numbers, such as the “Poems of War” issue, she again praised poets who reflected “The American feeling about the war” as “a genuine revolt against war.”78 One of the

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poet’s supreme functions was “to keep man in his place, to rebuke his intense and absurd preoccupations with business or power, with love or war or glory, by reminding him of the infinite.”79 Poets could strip man’s dreams of glory in war and replace it with “dreams more beautiful and heroic” and a “demand for beauty.”80 George Sylvester Viereck’s actions during the Great War provided a decisive test case, demonstrating how poets negotiated conflicting loyalties. Beginning in 1914 Current Opinion reprinted a spectrum of responses to the conflict, ranging from mild support to antiwar diatribes. The majority of war-themed verse that found its way onto the pages of the poetry section had first appeared in The Masses.81 This was due in no small measure to the efforts of Viereck who, as a relative of Kaiser Wilhelm II and worried about his parents who were at the time living in Berlin, desired closer relations between the two countries. While Viereck publicly declared his loyalty to America, he also worked to offset negative images of Germany in what he deemed the “British- controlled” press.82 He founded a weekly newspaper The Fatherland in 1914 to promote “Fair Play” by providing coverage of European news from the perspective of Germany. The first three years proved successful, with circulation hovering between 60,000 and 70,000.83 The newspaper became Viereck’s chief source of income and consumed much of his time, leaving little room to meet his duties at The International and Current Opinion. While The Fatherland gave him money and personal satisfaction it also brought him to the attention of the Secret Service. William H. Houghton was assigned, in early 1915, to keep tabs on the GermanAmerican’s activities. Two months after the May 1915 sinking of the Lusitania, the agency caught a lucky break while trailing Viereck as he rode the Sixth Avenue train with Dr. Heinrich Albert, a lawyer and aide to German Ambassador to the U.S. Count von Bernstorff. When Viereck disembarked on the 23rd Street station, Houghton followed. Luckily, the agent had called for back-up. Twenty seven blocks later, Albert, immersed in a book, almost missed his stop. He hurriedly jumped off the train only to remember he had left behind his briefcase. He was too late. Agent Frank Burke snatched the bag and ran off. Spotting his briefcase, Albert took chase, to no avail. The documents were soon in the hands of William McAdoo, Secretary of the Treasury, who shared them with his boss, President Woodrow Wilson. The contents became known when New York World’s August 15, 1915, published a front page story with a picture of Viereck below

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the headline, “How Germany Has Worked In U.S. to Shape Opinion, Block The Allies and Get Munitions For Herself Told In Secret Agents’ Letters.” Viereck’s photo appeared alongside excerpts from his correspondence with Albert. Another article in The Washington Post, “Members of Embassy and Prominent Germans Named in Striking Campaign To Win Over American Thought,” featured a portrait of Viereck alongside the images of von Bernstorff and Dr. von Bethmann-Hollweg, the Imperial Chancellor. The scale of German propaganda activities shocked Americans. The Albert papers revealed that Germany was spending two million dollars each week to influence public opinion. Viereck received a not insignificant chunk of that allocation. Even worse, the documents detailed that, in addition to propaganda, these men had laid out other, more insidious, possible actions. One plan involved secretly seizing control of a munitions factory and encouraging strikes among employees. Another idea was to buy large amounts of chlorine gas and get hold of the airplane patents held by the Wright Company.84 The American public reacted with furor; some citizens even called for the editor’s execution as a traitor. The government, however, could not make a legal case against Viereck, who freely admitted to receiving funds from the German government to publish articles, pamphlets, and books in defense of Germany.85 He deemed such actions as defensible, arguing that his British and French counterparts likewise were well-paid, and as a necessary response to Britain’s severing of the transatlantic cables, which had resulted in a near-monopoly of war information for the Allies, and to similar publicity campaigns of British officials and Anglo-American citizens. Nevertheless, the front-page stories revealing the extent of Viereck’s efforts (and the amount of retainer fees) divided the PSA community.86 Undaunted by public exposure, Viereck continued to work for a more conciliatory American policy toward Germany. All seemed well as the initial public agitation waned over the following months and members of the PSA continued to welcome him at meetings. Markham expressed the feelings of many members in “Outwitted,” an epigram offered as consolation to Viereck: He drew a circle that shut me out— Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in.87

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Viereck’s close friend on the faculty at Harvard University, Hugo Münsterberg, did not fare as well. Münsterberg had attended the initial meetings of the German-American “propaganda cabinet” (of which Viereck was a member) where he urged secrecy regarding their activities, and helped to raise money. In addition, he attempted to revitalize the German-American Alliance. After the sinking of the Lusitania in May of 1915, Münsterberg curtailed his pro- German activities, but long-time friends deserted him for supporting Germany, and Harvard’s President Abbott Lowell censured him for undignified behavior.88 Münsterberg’s death in 1916 resolved the controversy. In a letter to his mother in Berlin, which he wrote after attending the funeral, Viereck wrote poignantly about his late mentor: Although one of the oldest members of the faculty, one of the men who made the psychological department the first in the United States, if not in the world, he never went to a faculty meeting since the war. I asked him why. “Because,” he said, “I do not wish to sit between two empty chairs.” He was ostracized socially and insulted publicly. Even his family had to feel the malice of New England. Thus, several ladies left the Chapel at Harvard when they saw his two daughters were worshipping there.89 Viereck attributed the animus to jealousy and anti- German bias.90 In a statement that may reveal more about Viereck’s perspective and predicament, he wrote that Münsterberg “had the gift of journalism, and for that his many friends never forgave him. His very success made them his enemies.” The campaign of “petty private persecution” was waged against his “strongly pro- German attitude” because of the prevailing chauvinism “especially in Boston” with its strong Anglo- centric traditions and sympathies. Viereck assured his mother that he did not face similar treatment. As a dutiful son, unwilling to provide opportunity for worry, he spoke bravely: Do not, however, imagine that I am subject to any such persecutions. I am not as sensitive as was Münsterberg, and I can take jolly good care of myself. In fact, I have surrounded myself only with friends and admirers. The foe respects me because I know how to take care of myself. I can snap my finger at them, because

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I am independent intellectually and financially. If they have not reviewed my book [Songs of Armageddon] they have not hurt me very much. They cannot take away from me whatever genius I may possess.91 Viereck’s pro- German stance, cast as it was in pacifist rhetoric, earned him little rebuke among his fellow Villagers. The majority of avant-garde writers, poets, and artists advocated American neutrality. Randolph Bourne, Untermeyer, and their colleagues on staff at Seven Arts wrote passionately against the war. The more conservative members of the Poetry Society maintained their neutrality. The May 1916 issue of Braithwaite’s Poetry Journal also gauged the temper of those in the poetic community. Aiken, who protested the war, wrote a lead article denouncing a far graver adversary: free verse. The editors wrote one of the few reviews of Viereck’s war poems collected in Songs of Armageddon. Marked by a “Teuton vigour and aggressiveness impossible to overlook,” the “lusty outcries, full of irony and scorn” belie “a deeper note of sincerity and pathos.” The review praised the author’s facility with words full of “color and swing and imagery.”92 The sea change in the public’s attitude toward poets can be detected in a decree by the Provost Marshal- General of the U.S. Army who declared that poets, among others, “were to be considered as persons ‘engaged in essential industries.’ ” An editorial in the New York Tribune applauded this decision. “In sincerity of feeling, in felicity of construction, in beauty of expression,” poets displayed varying technical skill but, nevertheless, have “had a very genuine effect in uplifting the hearts” and in “stiffening the courage of thousands of readers. Nor is this all. The craftsmen in this essential industry have not asked for exemption from the burdens of the time.”93 After the United States entered into the war in April of 1917, Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which sought to diminish pacifist writings and activities of dissenters. This legislation greatly affected the literary community, which was subjected to the hysteria and threats to personal liberty that ensued. The Masses was suppressed and the editors put on trial. Emma Goldman and other avowed anarchists were arrested. Poetry became a widely used medium to debate the conflict, with poems published daily in newspapers, magazines, and books, and recited in classrooms, public protests, and political speeches. It

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was deployed on the left by members of the Women’s Peace Party, Industrial Workers of the World, and the NAACP, and on the right by the U.S. Food Administration and George Creel’s Committee on Public Information.94 Frost, Untermeyer, and their cohort took key positions in this discursive terrain. They situated their dissent in rhetoric that blended ideas about fairness and authentic individualism with the free play of the imagination; to them, the war represented European decadence and American war profiteering. In prose, poetry, and short stories, The Masses provided a forum for alternative viewpoints to war. The ensuing confrontations between the magazine and government officials are well-known. In 1917 the Post Office ceased delivering the magazine, which ruined the publication financially.95 The federal government then indicted staff members for violating the Espionage Act by “conspiring to effect insubordination and/or mutiny in the armed and naval forces of the United States” and for “conspiring to obstruct enlistment and recruiting.”96 No evidence of conspiracy existed and the government’s case devolved on the issue of free speech. The court trial was, as Floyd Dell later described it, “like a scene from Alice in Wonderland rewritten by Dostoievsky” with an all middle- class jury box and a Liberty Loan Band performing military marches outside the courtroom windows. The judge declared a mistrial and Untermeyer spent the second trial writing poetry and exchanging verses with Jack London, while Edna St. Vincent Millay quoted Elizabethan sonnets and Floyd Dell composed free verse infused with psychoanalysis. The proceedings ended in a hung jury. H. L. Mencken, an opponent of the war, who, as a German-American, had to be particularly cautious in his public statements, wrote consolingly to Untermeyer during the 1917 The Masses trial: “In times of war, democracy always falls into such extravagances . . . to argue anything in such a time seems to me to be as impossible as to stop a stampede by playing on an E clarinet.”97 A similar fate befell Seven Arts, a magazine Oppenheim had founded as a medium to foster a new national culture. He regarded the materialism of modern America, devoted as it was to business, machines, and aggrandizement, as “a new fact on earth,” which required repair: “We cannot perhaps envisage its Culture. The old tricks may not work.” Untermeyer served on the advisory board along with Smart Set editor George Nathan, Van Wyck Brooks, and Amy Lowell who, despite being

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a Boston Brahmin, appreciated the magazine’s effort to revitalize the imagination of readers.98 Oppenheim declared the editorial board’s intent: “All of us here are searching our hearts, struggling, seeking for the thing you say you are seeking—namely, that we be a nation. The Seven Arts is dedicated to the task of bringing to birth a national soul. And up and down the land there is unrest, confusion, longing.”99 But the longing was not for “historic America” with its exploitative labor practices and single-minded pursuit of wealth. As the first issue’s mission statement heralded: “We are living in the first days of a renascent period, a time which means for America the coming of that national consciousness which is the beginning of greatness.” Despite the original intent to steer clear of politics, the Great War intruded. Included already in the initial number was Frost’s “The Bonfire,” which contained the controversial line: “War is for everyone, for children too.” Randolph Bourne published his anti-war essays “The War and the Intellectuals” and “Below the Battle,” along with “A War Diary” and “Twilight of the Idols.” Those articles drew the ire of the magazine’s patron, Mrs. Rankine. “I do not agree with the War policy of the magazine,” she complained. “And do not approve of the war articles which have appeared in the last few issues. I am desirous of withdrawing my support, and severing my connection with the Company as soon as possible.”100 When Untermeyer then solicited support from his friend Lowell, who had contributed poems and reviews, she sent two hundred dollars along with the caveat that “you are to stick to the arts and abandon your policy of criticising the present war policy of the government.” From the beginning, she endorsed the magazine’s cultural mission: “Your magazine is a splendid thing; in fact I cannot exaggerate my enthusiasm about it . . . The honest, straightforward idealism which you infuse into that paper is the thing that makes it what it is.” She followed up this request with another letter pleading for a streamlined focus: “If you believe, as I do, in the saving grace of the arts, and poetry in particular, you will not allow any desire to express your personal opinions upon subjects outside of this scope to interfere with your mission of keeping alive the spirit of poetry and of beauty in this sorely tried country.”101 But Bertrand Russell’s lead article “Is Nationalism Moribund” in the next issue proved that the editors would not exclude politics, and the funding ceased.

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As editor of the pro- German magazine The Fatherland, Viereck similarly became the subject of official, and unofficial, scrutiny. Sales and paid advertisements rapidly decreased despite repeated declarations that The Fatherland was “one-hundred percent American,” and he refused to countenance the charge that his activities to balance reportage conflicted with his loyalty to the United States. As a display of his fidelity, he reserved space for the government to advertise Liberty Bond drives and to reproduce articles provided by George Creel’s Committee on Public Information. Viereck claimed that he helped almost five-thousand veterans find employment, a figure that was most likely inflated.102 Despite those efforts, mobs regularly surrounded his apartment, forcing him to relocate his family from Manhattan to his father-in-law’s home in Mount Vernon.103 Viereck’s standing in the Poetry Society suffered as well. Unlike Aiken and other poets who advocated neutrality, Viereck openly sympathized with the enemy. He did not realize, or would not accept, that his status as a hyphenated American heightened scrutiny of his loyalties. Other German-Americans strategically practiced a transparent and aggressive patriotism. Untermeyer endorsed American intervention while poet Hermann Hagedorn helped to form the “Vigilantes,” a group of poets, authors, and artists who circulated nationalist tracts and patrolled the literary community for writers who ignored the exigencies of a country at war. For citizens of German ethnicity, partisanship became a litmus test for patriotism. In the literary community, fellow poets administered this test. Normally tolerant of free love, experimentation, and open expression, the Poetry Society conformed to wartime pressure to promote upright, clean, patriotic verse. Hagedorn and Lowell policed the PSA and led a campaign to rout Viereck. Hagedorn, a Harvard graduate whose family still lived in Germany, published a poem, “Portrait of a Rat,” while Lowell maneuvered behind the scenes to sear Viereck’s reputation.104 In 1914 Lowell had advocated American neutrality, but her sympathies clearly lay with Britain. When the European hostilities began in August of 1914, she was in London and volunteered her services with Herbert Hoover’s Belgian War Relief board. She guided foreign arrivals to the country to the appropriate agencies, helped Americans secure passage home, and contributed $10,000 to Hoover’s agency.105 Upon returning to the States herself, Lowell wrote poems about the war, many jingoistic (after the war she renounced most of the

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compositions). However, “Patterns,” went on to become one of her best-known poems, particularly these lines: In Summer and in Winter I shall walk Up and Down The patterned garden-paths In my stiff, brocaded gown . . . And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace By each button, hook and lace. For the man who should loose me is dead, Fighting with the Duke in Flanders, In a pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?106 For now, Lowell followed the movements of her nephew, Major James A. Roosevelt, through the French battlegrounds, including Argonne. His death, caused by spinal meningitis, was a great blow to her, as were the 1917 revolutions in Russia, and the strike waves at home that hit especially hard in the textile industries. Bearing the name of the great mill town of Lowell established by her greatgrandfather, she was proud to be “the last of the Barons,” but slept with a revolver under her pillow and surrounded by her seven shepherd dogs out of fear that mobs of workers would storm her house. The mayhem that followed in the wake of the Boston Police strike of 1919—part of a nation-wide protest that affected twenty percent of the country’s workforce—further fueled her paranoia.107 Lowell became convinced that the husband of poet Leonora Speyer, a Jewish aristocrat from England who was pro- German, had become a German agent engaged in espionage. When Braithwaite published a complimentary review of Leonora’s poetry, accompanied by the poet’s picture, Lowell questioned his judgment and tact so aggressively that it contributed to an enduring rift in their friendship.108 Lowell hitched her efforts to those Americans who rallied behind President Wilson in the war for democracy. She believed that, as much as food, humans inherently needed poetry. The conflict heightened this necessity: “I believe that the world need[s] poetry more than it ever needed it. It is absolutely necessary to keep the beautiful going.”109 In a letter to Aldington, who was fighting on the Western Front, she outlined the contributions that women could

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make to the war effort: “We must keep a world going for the rest of you when you come back. We must keep alive the spirit of beauty, of gentleness, and of idealism.”110 Lowell did her “bit” by answering Hagedorn’s request to become a member of the “Vigilantes,” and contributing a series of war poems.111 Various journals published selections from her “Phantasms of War” collection, which she later rationalized as a merely pragmatic action: “I never had any patriotic fervor. I thought it imperative to go out into the back garden and kill that skunk.”112 In her home of the poetic community, Lowell coolly targeted another intruder. Viereck’s disrepute threatened to taint the standing of the young Poetry Society, which against tremendous odds had established a solid reputation in the seven years since its founding. Lowell’s intervention accounts for the actions of the Society’s president, Edward Wheeler, Viereck’s friend and associate since their days together on staff at Current Literature. Lowell helped inspire a letter from Wheeler to Viereck. On April 10, 1918, Wheeler wrote, asking Viereck to save the Society embarrassment as well as a “serious defection” of members, by quietly resigning. The Washington Post reported that the executive committee also detailed his pro- German utterances, his support of pacifist candidates for public office, his promotion of Germany’s overtures to peace, and his purported blood ties to the Kaiser, as reasons for the resignation request.113 When Viereck responded by restating his innocence of any wrongdoing, Wheeler, urged on by a barrage of letters from Lowell, became more insistent. He demanded Viereck relinquish his membership because of “unpatriotic utterances.”114 Viereck reminded Wheeler of his work on behalf of the Agricultural and Industrial Relief project and insisted that a resignation would serve as an impeachment of his patriotism. He also voiced concern about the possible debasement of poetry, “the most liberal of arts,” becoming a “handmaid to intolerance,” and insisted that, “With the same justice I could ask for the resignation of the Executive Committee and of the members who are hostile to me.”115 The Society had no legal justification for ejecting a member. According to the By-Laws instituted in 1913 (which Viereck had helped to write), only nonpayment of dues served as sufficient justification for dismissal. Nevertheless, Wheeler found justification for his actions in Section III, which placed in the Executive Committee

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“the administration of the affairs of the Society.”116 At a monthly meeting, Markham pointed out the injustice of this: There is no ground in our constitution for such a proceeding. Why? Because this is a poetry society and is concerned only with poetry—not in the slightest degree with politics, not in the slightest degree with wars among Nations. If Mr. Viereck had written a bad poem, then we would have jurisdiction . . . [the Poetry Society] has other and more difficult problems to settle—problems that concern rhymes, meters and fresh phrases.117 Wheeler tried to buttress his case by proposing an amendment to the PSA constitution that would allow this action, only to be stalled by an appeal from William Churchill, a staff member of George Creel’s Committee on Public Information in Washington, D.C., indicating that the U.S. government had plans to use Viereck’s writings as American propaganda in Germany.118 For the time being, this staved off any action to expel Viereck but then, when it became known publicly, Creel disavowed any official plans for the use of such writings.119 Viereck responded to renewed hostilities against him with a plea for reason: “In times of stress it is the duty of sane men to oppose, not to yield to, hysteria. This is the attitude of the Attorney General of the United States and of President Wilson.” Yet his hurt and anger came through in the final sentence: “The Executive Committee does not speak for the poets of America, but is permitting itself to be used as a tool of private spitefulness and unbalanced emotionalism.”120 As Viereck fought this battle, he lost others, and was expelled from the Authors’ League and the New York Athletic Club, and “Who’s Who” dropped him from their register.121 Lowell, who had read the exchange in a copy of Viereck’s American Weekly sent to her by the editor, took umbrage. Although the newspaper had only a small circulation, she feared the publicity would tarnish the PSA. In a letter to Wheeler, she denounced the publication of the correspondence as “vulgar,” “blatant,” and “evidence of German tactlessness.” Viereck’s insistence on “intellectual independence,” she argued, was “at variance with the purposes for which any club is constituted.” Most significantly, she regarded Viereck’s continued presence in the Society as “a menace to the entire organization.” Lowell lamented that Viereck did not comprehend the ramifications of his continued membership: “I feel so strongly on the subject of the

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misfortune to the Society in having any one so distinctly unclubable [sic] (to put it in its mildest form).”122 Several days later, her attitude remained acrid. She responded to Wheeler’s expression of sympathy for his old friend by writing: “I am sorry for him, for I quite agree with you that this country is not going to be a pleasant place for him to live in, but, as he has made his bed, so, I fear, must he lie.”123 Viereck had correctly predicted that associates could not take away any “genius” that he may have possessed, but they could certainly take away his status. The Irish poet, playwright, and nationalist, Shaemus O’Sheel, who had himself suffered black-listing for supporting the Easter uprising of 1916 against the English, led an ill-fated attempt to protect Viereck.124 He wrote privately to PSA Secretary Rittenhouse of Viereck’s contributions to the organization: “I know of no member of the Society who has been so consistently an advocate of liberalism in its government, its policy and its membership, as Mr. Viereck. He, my martyred friend Joyce Kilmer, and myself, stood many a time for a broader policy.” The three men took action when the Executive Committee tried to eject a member known to have a drinking problem, pointing out that such a policy would have precluded Poe from membership. The actions against Viereck would make it “elementarily impossible for this Society to pose as a torch- bearer of art and enlightenment, of culture and liberalism.”125 In December of 1918, a month after the war ended, O’Sheel circulated a copy of a letter addressed to Wheeler, along with a proxy authorizing Society members to allow him to cast their vote at the December 28th meeting when Viereck’s membership status would be decided. O’Sheel charged Wheeler with “subverting law and creating anarchy” in the PSA, and complained about members of the Executive Committee who tried to block his attendance at meetings by withholding the Bulletin (which omitted mention of PSA actions taken against Viereck) and the meeting notices. O’Sheel further charged that when Clement Wood asked for full attention to the matter in the November 18th meeting, the Committee scheduled an additional guest in order to restrict the time. Wood, who had moved to New York from Birmingham, Alabama, and was an outspoken proponent of African-American civil rights, argued that they “used the knowledge gained from my attempts at accommodation to conspire with others to suppress free discussion.”

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The Executive Committee desperately tried to avoid a public confrontation. Nevertheless, the kind of raucous meeting Wheeler had hoped for four years earlier took place on November 29th. In an effort to preclude discussion of the issue, the Committee framed a “rule” that no matter could be considered, except upon decision of a majority. When O’Sheel rose to request discussion of Viereck’s status, Wheeler shouted, “Out of order!” Wheeler used this decree to eclipse Wood’s attempt to remind the assembly of the Society’s bylaws. In the midst of the disorder, Wheeler assumed to take a vote that denied O’Sheel’s appeal. O’Sheel accused Wheeler of “arousing the mob spirit of evening- dress hoodlums to a pitch of Lynch law.” Several members questioned the illegal expulsion of Viereck, but a motion to assemble a special meeting to discuss this lost by one vote.126 The Executive Committee did not accept the proxies that O’Sheel had secured from Russell Herts, Ivan Swift, and Marjorie Allen Seiffert, which would have provided a majority. Dr. Guthrie then stood up and called for O’Sheel’s arrest, while Arthur Guiterman, author of humorous verse, advanced aggressively “with the valor of his German ancestry” toward O’Sheel. Wheeler summoned not a policeman, but a “heavy-weight pugilist, presumably a member of the Gas House Gang,” to put O’Sheel out. He exited dejectedly, “Saddened by the sight of a hundred ‘polite’ people, many my old friends, transformed by bigotry into a mob howling against me as I stood for Law and Honor. I left.”127 At the meeting on December 28, 1918, to which O’Sheel was officially barred, Viereck was summarily expelled from the organization that he had played such a large role in founding. He was joined in exile by other poets who resigned in protest. The Honorary President of the PSA who had been appointed by Viereck, Edwin Markham, visited Viereck at his home to express his sympathy.128 Witter Bynner wrote of his disappointment with the events, and inquired about plans to form a new society. Despondent, Viereck replied by saying that it would be impossible to compete with the Poetry Society. Because of the compass of influence it wielded, “anyone who associates himself with me may have to share the taboo!”129 Lowell wrote to Rittenhouse, expressing concern for the Society. From Brookline, she had read of an exodus of members, but believed these were not significant poets: “Most of them I do not think will be missed.”130 Reducing the event first to a whisper, then, over the years, to an almost complete silence, Rittenhouse responded by stating that

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O’Sheel’s letters were misleading because only he and Conrad Aiken had left the Society. The whole matter should be set aside because, after all, “everyone is disgusted with him.”131 She concluded by mentioning her plans to restrict membership to recognized poets by no longer accepting unpublished poets. O’Sheel observed the reforms with chagrin. In a private letter to Rittenhouse, he described an ossified Poetry Society that resembled an autocratic regime more than an association whose members advocated experimentation and open expression. He criticized the Society’s evolution into “self-appointed dictators of opinions and standards” and denounced the “secret and stealthy machinations of a lawless directorate.”132 After the war ended, Poetry likened Viereck’s expulsion to mob tyranny. This was an irony, Monroe noted, given the staunchly individualistic nature of poets. The incident raised questions about freedom of thought, speech, and press, as well as “artistic and spiritual” concerns. Monroe ended with a plea for “more tolerance for conscientious objectors and other recalcitrant opionators.”133 Explaining Viereck’s continued absence in literary circles, Isaac Goldberg explained that it became understood that “a vow was taken never to mention again the name of George Sylvester Viereck.” In fact, the “Vigilantes” had formed a “Never Again Viereck” crusade to expurgate his name from memory. Several literary institutions also contributed to the removal of his name from literary circles. His poems no longer appeared in anthologies, Yard and Company returned all plates of his books, and accounts of the Poetry Society of America published over the years omit mention of Viereck and the role he played in establishing the organization.134 Members scurried to link poetry with unalloyed patriotism in order to curry respect from a skeptical American public that clamored for a univocal stance against enemies. Viereck, with his pro- German sympathies, threatened this project. The project of democratizing poetry, while increasing the audience, brought with it a less than salutary effect on freedom of speech and tolerance. The postwar landscape of nativism, race riot, and demands for “a return to normalcy” hardened this stance.

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Epilogue

Till change hath broken down All things save Beauty alone.1 —Ezra Pound, “Envoi” (1919) Standing between two fluted Doric columns on a platform made of cool, snow-white Colorado-Yule marble, Edwin Markham looked out onto the National Mall. Some 50,000 people had congregated, including Civil War veterans clothed in their blue and gray, with an estimated two million more listening to the ceremonial proceedings by radio. He recited “Lincoln, Man of the People,” originally composed in 1899 and revised for the occasion. Sitting behind the poet on that May day in 1922, was the sole surviving son of the sixteenth President, Robert Todd Lincoln, who, as a young man had served on the staff of Ulysses S. Grant and stood witness to Robert E. Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox Court House, just days before his father’s assassination. Other speakers included President Harding and Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who headed the ceremonial committee. Members of that body also edited the speech prepared by the only African-American speaker on the platform, Dr. Robert Moton—who had taken over as principal of the Tuskegee Institute after the death of Booker T. Washington—excising his criticisms of continued discrimination throughout the country and toning down his note of defiance.2 The event was in many ways a high-water mark for Progressive poets. Just five months after Markham read his civic poem before a national audience in the company of political leaders, the landscape for poetry transformed, irrevocably, with the publication of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”3 Although firmly established now as a foundational work of modernism, the tectonic shift generated by the poem remained imperceptible to many in the various poetic 217

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communities. Harriet Monroe, who preferred nature as a source of artistic inspiration and spiritual renewal, thought the poem represented “the hyper-urban musings of one who had never in his life been outside.”4 Amy Lowell wrote to The Dial editor Gilbert Seldes, who published the poem: “The man is indubitably clever, but I cannot find him poetical. It is as if he laid a fire with infinite care, but omitted to apply a match to it.”5 To Richard Aldington she wrote that “The Waste Land” was proof positive of pathology, not poetry.6 Eliot had to “overcome his mental anaemia,” she wrote to another friend, which seemed “to be a real disease with him” if he had any hopes of achieving greatness.7 Joseph Freeman’s recollections of lectures given during the 1920s before members of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union suggest some of the other reasons why Eliot’s poem did not fire general readers: “When I recited Walt Whitman, the workers always applauded his chants to liberty; when I read aloud Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot, they fidgeted in their seats and looked out the windows of the Rand School lecture hall.”8 Despite this incomprehension, the sensibilities of literary Modernism embodied in “The Waste Land” evoked the postwar mood of disillusion. Instead of sincerity and uplift, Eliot was ironic and deep. He eschewed easy resolutions, offered not moral reassurance but paradoxical, unsettling questions. Modernist writers became even more vocal about their disdain for the stanzas and sensibilities of Progressive poets. As guest editor for the final issue of Others in 1919, William Carlos Williams deemed the likes of Henderson, Untermeyer, and Braithwaite stupid, vacuous, and irrelevant. “The mark of a great poet is the extent which he is aware of his time and NOT,” Williams wrote, “the weight of loveliness in his meters.” Rebutting the essentialist notion that a writer must be a good person to produce worthwhile work and the notion that the best way to address modern problems is by invoking them in representational art, Williams argued for more incisive interrogations of the modern condition: What the hell do I care if a man or woman is or is not passionate or tender with his children or loves his wife or she her husband or whether he is dramatic, lyrical, Whether his lines are short or long, whether he writes of Tahiti or Back Bay, whether he represents the negro race, the Chinese, the river rat? BUT has he a vision into the desolate PRESENT . . . I don’t give a damn about airplanes and

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airplane poetry but I do give a damn about the distraught brain that must find its release in building gas motors and in balancing them on cloth wings in its agony . . . After diagnosing the problem, Dr. Williams prescribed probing the complexities of the human mind as solution: The old poetry will NOT do . . . I am not one damned bit interested in socialism or anarchy but I am interested and deeply interested in the brain that requires socialism and anarchy and brings it on.9 Yet, reading such works was often tough going. Margaret Widdemer disparaged this development, and she deplored critics who regarded poems simply as objects to study. She believed: “That a simple impact of beauty and emotion understandable at a first or second reading was wrong. That elisions and allusivenesses and cryptic references to little-known things and people must be accepted instead.”10 Looking back on this development in twentieth- century art, which privileged difficulty and rigor over transparency and pleasure, scholar Wendy Steiner observed: “In Modernism, the perennial rewards of aesthetic experience—pleasure, insight, empathy—were largely withheld, and its generous aim, beauty, was abandoned.”11 While the Great War and poetic transformations inspired by Eliot represented a death knell to the style and sensibilities of Progressive poets, their work continued to be read in class rooms and periodicals. Markham, Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale, and Edna St. Vincent Millay regularly appeared on stage halls and in periodicals throughout the course of the decade. But the divide in readerships widened as poetry reading gave way to radio serials, movie theaters, dance halls, and a new sensory world of billboards and shopping, and modernist critics assumed positions in colleges and universities. Similarly, while Progressive reformers had achieved key goals, enlarging the role of government in the economy, transforming the tax code, factory regulations, and fiscal policies, the postwar years witnessed a halt to much of their agenda. The poets of the Progressive era continued their efforts, forming new alliances and branches. In 1920 Markham became a councillor to the Poets’ Guild, founded by Anna Hempstead Branch, who started a settlement house for immigrant children. At Christadora House, poets, including several PSA Charter Members—Charles

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Hanson Towne, Cale Young Rice, Witter Bynner—along with Witter Bynner, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Margaret Widdemer, brought verse to New York City’s immigrant children. Whenever Markham arrived for recitals, they ran to greet “The Poetry Man.”12 A staunch reversal came at the decade’s end when the Wall Street crash consumed his savings. The American Academy of Poets, founded in 1934, eventually stepped in with a subvention and he enjoyed a major celebration at Carnegie Hall in honor of his eightieth birthday.13 After the departure of Alice Corbin Henderson and the appearance of competing magazines, Poetry magazine published less experimental verse and did not achieve Monroe’s dream of a self-sustaining subscription base.14 The federal government, nonetheless, recognized her efforts in October of 1948 with the launching of the troopship, the USS Harriet Monroe.15 In the intervening years, the Poetry Society of America (PSA), already a bit staid, became more conservative. After George Sylvester Viereck’s expulsion from the PSA, he managed to cobble together a living by writing nonfiction books, novels, and interviews of leading political figures for Hearst newspapers and middlebrow magazines. In 1923 he traveled to Munich to meet a young political upstart. Over tea at the house of a former Navy admiral, Viereck was the first American journalist to interview Adolf Hitler. Viereck concluded that the man was “an idealist, however mistaken” and predicted: “If he lives, Hitler, for better or for worse, is sure to make history.”16 Viereck continued to write on politics and poetry throughout the decade. In the 1930s, he resumed public relations work on behalf of German interests and foreign officials. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, when the United States entered the second World War, Viereck was jailed for failing to fill out the proper paperwork regarding his work on behalf of foreign countries.17 Both of his sons fought in the U.S. Army: his oldest, George, Jr., lost his life fighting in Italy while the youngest, Peter, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1949. The Poetry Society of America, at the urging of Irish writer Padraic Colum, voted to reinstate Viereck shortly before his death in 1962.18 Meanwhile, Louis Untermeyer’s anthologies continued to sell well. In 1923 he resigned the vice-presidency in his father’s firm to devote his life full time to writing. During World War II, as part of his duties at the Office of War Information, he selected, printed, and shipped books to troops overseas, making sure that at least one of the forty

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titles chosen every month would be a volume of poetry.19 Toward the end of her life, Amy Lowell found herself, at long last, the recipient of elusive literary honors. Her later books, including Pictures of the Floating World (1919) became bestsellers, forcing publishers to scramble to meet demand. She fielded numerous requests for lectures and received several honorary degrees. A botched surgery in 1921 led to debilitation, after which she turned to her first love, John Keats, “my greatest inspirer and teacher” to instruct a younger generation about his versification.20 She had amassed the third largest collection of Keats letters and manuscripts in the United States and completed a two-volume literary and historical biography just before her death.21 On March 2, 1925, Time magazine featured Lowell on the cover and a feature article on her work.22 To the general audience Lowell had made legible the new form of modern poetry; now she sought to reinscribe the influence of an old master. Even Conrad Aiken, who derived intense pleasure from criticizing Lowell’s personality and poetry, had to acknowledge her contributions. At her passing in 1925, he wrote: Amy dead! It’s really impossible. In her absence we’ll be discovering how very much we all depended on her; how much, spiritually, she propped us and goaded us. It was comforting merely to think of her there in Brookline, fulminating and preparing earthquakes, or traveling in July to Texas for a worthless degree. A heroic creature.23 William Braithwaite’s reputation and anthologies did not fare as well. The younger generation of the Harlem Renaissance viewed Braithwaite’s brand of aesthetic universalism as another variant of old-school cowardice. By 1920, even W. E. B. Du Bois publicly criticized this position, writing in a follow-up to The Souls of Black Folk: “So strong is the spell of beauty that there are those who, contradicting their own knowledge and experience, try to say that all is beauty. They are called optimists, and they lie. All is not beauty. Ugliness and hate and ill are here with all their contradiction and illogic.”24 Braithwaite nevertheless held to the promise of poetry’s emancipatory power. His contribution to Alain Locke’s New Negro (1925) stated firmly: “He who slaves and burns with beauty is a more triumphant conqueror than he who slaves with a sword that the victim might break.”25

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222 The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era

After a decade working with other firms to issue the annual anthologies, he founded his own firm, B. J. Brimmer Company, and began in 1923, to print them himself. By then, changing tastes and his growing reputation for nonpayment and disorganization with the herculean task of annual anthology publishing, led to more established writers refusing permission to include their poems. Brimmer went bankrupt in 1927. Two more volumes appeared but, by 1930, the venture had come to an end. Letters and threats from bill collectors filled Braithwaite’s mailbox and the bank foreclosed on his house. Through the intervention of James Weldon Johnson, the historically black southern college Atlanta University offered Braithwaite a position as professor of English and Creative Writing. Until his dying day Braithwaite clung to his faith in the gospel of beauty. Isolation, combined with the calamity of global economic breakdown in the 1930s, convinced many progressive-minded poets that they could not afford to dally with quaint notions about beauty; they had to become more serious, scientific, and directly insistent about reform. No more could they send out poems in the vague hope they would somehow induce a sense of justice in readers. Hippolyte Havel’s protest years earlier—“Nature! Mountains! Scenery! What have they got to do with economic determinism!”—was finally heeded. For those who had previously believed that poetry reading proved a certain elevation of character, that distinction now became suspect, a class marker rather than an indication of moral fiber. Growing up in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Richard Rorty remembers how deeply entrenched the divide between aesthetics and ethics had become. His father James Rorty, years earlier, contributed poems to Poetry and had work included in a Braithwaite anthology.26 By the onset of the Great Depression, James had become a resolute Trotskyite and inculcated in his son “that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice.” He was taught that, in the effort to free “the weak from the strong,” the arts, in their current incarnation, bore the impression not of liberation but of bourgeois frivolity. Richard’s discovery of wild orchids while exploring the woods of northwest New Jersey, which hosted over forty different species, triggered an epistemological dilemma. He loved those orchids, yet they had no tangibly useful function in the struggle against oppression. How could he justify spending time and emotional energy, enjoying “Wordsworthian moments” of wonder?: “I had felt touched by something numinous, something of

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ineffable importance, something really real.” This impasse set off a life-long quest to find, or create, a philosophy that allowed him to admire beautiful flowers while also being “a friend to humanity.” As a Yeats passage that Rorty read one day put it, he wanted “to hold reality and justice in a single vision.” It was, finally, by accepting the contingency of language, selfhood, and the liberal community, by assuming an ironic stance toward knowledge, and by pursuing a “moral obligation to those in pain” that he found a path toward realizing a democratic community. Obligations to other people need not be joined with idiosyncratic passions into a unified vision to achieve solidarity.27 After World War II modernist poets and critics had their own reasons for prying poetry apart from political convictions. In the wake of sixty million casualties and in the face of images of cultivated Gestapo officers reading poetry in concentration camps, claims that poetry heightened moral sensitivity were rendered hollow; receptivity to literature does not automatically translate into empathy for human suffering. Cold War imperatives further reconfigured the design and texture of ideology, as well as literary relationships and institutions. In 1949 the principles and poetics of the communities founded during the Progressive era went head to head with New Critics and New York intellectuals during the Bollingen Prize controversy, when the Library of Congress awarded Ezra Pound a literary prize for The Pisan Cantos despite the volume’s pro-fascist, antisemitic passages. There was also the nagging fact that the former foreign correspondent for Poetry just happened to be committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Insane and under a treason indictment for radio speeches delivered over Rome Radio during the war. The controversy highlighted the distance between modernist authors and the general reading public, and between ethics and poetry. Seeking to preserve the modernist project, New Critics instituted a sola scriptura methodology, effectively cordoning poems off from discussions about authorial intent, ethical valence, or emotional impact. Beyond creating the conditions that allowed modernist writers to become canonical, the institutions and publications Progressive poets put into place endured. The Poetry Society of America and Poetry magazine continue to provide forums for new works and for debates over the role and function of literature, which resurfaced periodically in the ensuing decades, including the Reagan era “culture wars.” The talismanic presence permeating each of these episodes

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was the conviction—held dearly by those who spread the gospel of beauty during the Progressive era—that the epistemic encounter with words, rhythms, and ideas in literature matter to our sense of possibility, experience of everyday life, understanding of others, and identity as individuals and as a nation.

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Notes Introduction 1. Frost to Harcourt, 12 August 1915, quoted in Thompson, Robert Frost, 56. 2. The Critic, 46 (January–June 1905), 263–78. 3. Quoted in Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915– 1938 (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1970), 3. 4. Quoted in Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 131. Ezra Pound published the first American review of Frost’s A Boy’s Will in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1 (May 1913) 2, 72–73. 5. William Braithwaite, “A Poet of New England: Robert Frost, A New Exponent of Life,” BET, 28 April 1915 and 8 May 1915. Jessie B. Rittenhouse, “North of Boston,” NYT Book Review (16 May 1915), 189. 6. Louis Untermeyer, “Robert Frost’s ‘North of Boston,’ ” Chicago Evening Post (23 April 1915), 11. 7. Clement Wood, Amy Lowell (New York: Harold Vinal, 1926), 4. 8. Quoted in James Hoopes, Van Wyck Brooks: In Search of American Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 77. 9. Little consensus exists among historians over the precise meaning of the term “progressive.” I employ it here to indicate an era, ranging roughly from 1893 to 1920, that witnessed culture-wide reform movements to reshape American society by addressing large-scale problems of industrial organization as well as issues surrounding individual rights and responsibilities. While falling under the ideological rubric of liberalism, progressive reform involved a middle class that at times instituted conservative measures. See Daniel Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History, 10 (December 1982) 4, 113–32; John Milton Cooper, Pivotal Decades: The United States 1900–1920 (W.W. Norton, 1990); Maureen Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 10. Vachel Lindsay, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1928 [1914]), 15–17. 11. Lindsay, Adventures, 15–17. 12. Lindsay, Adventures, 184. 13. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1904 [1815]): 34–35. 14. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1913 [1868]), 528; Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (New York: Penguin, 2003 [1889]), 89. 225

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Notes to Pages 6–10

15. Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” Emerson’s Prose and Poetry. Eds. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). Also see Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 17. The phrase “lived experience” and the notion of examining poetry as a means to access what individuals in the past thought and felt about ideas comes from Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen who read this introduction and provided critical advice. Ratner-Rosenhagen uses the phrase and methodology in her essay, “Conventional Iconoclasm: The Cultural Work of the Nietzsche Image in Twentieth- Century America,” Journal of American History, 93 (December 2006) 3, 728–54. 18. Darnton, “The Great Cat Massacre,” 216. 19. See Leah Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” in Book History, Volume 7. Ed. Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 303–20. 20. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 21. My understanding of the intimate relationship between reading and self-transformation has been deeply influenced by Barbara Sicherman, “Reading and Ambition: M. Carey Thomas and Female Heroism,” American Quarterly 45 (March 1993) 1, 73–103, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “ ‘Nous Autres’: Reading, Passion, and the Creation of M. Carey Thomas,” Journal of American History 79 (1992), 68–95. These essays were published in Sicherman, Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired A Generation of American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 22. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993). 23. Daniel Wickberg traces the historiography of sensibility in “What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New,” American Historical Review (June 2007), 661–84. 24. Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 25. Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), Sarah Ruth Offhaus, “Mary Talbert and the Phyllis Wheatley Club,” Buffalo Rising, 19 June 2010, and Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Vol. 2. Eds. Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman (New York: Routledge, 2004), 903. 26. Du Bois, Souls, 109. 27. My thanks to Daniel Albright for his interpretation of this passage. 28. James Oppenheim to James Weldon Johnson, 18 December 1930, JONY. 29. Braithwaite, “Arcturus,” 3 (1942) 1, 40 and 3 (1941) 2, 186. 30. Some book historians speak of quixotic reading and reading protocols as a way to challenge the passive connotations of reading “reception.”

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31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

See Tabitha Gilman Tenney, Female Quixotism, Ed. Jean Nienkamp and Andrea Collins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 2–14. Barbara Sicherman makes this argument in “Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women’s Reading in Late-Victorian America,” where she analyzes the subjective uses of reading among late-Victorian uppermiddle- class women during the Progressive era in transgressing traditional gender expectations. Sicherman quotes “structures of feelings” from Raymond Williams. In Reading in America. Ed. Cathy Davidson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 201–25. Michael Bell discusses the importance of feelings—accessed through an examination of responses to literature—in understanding the past and traces the fate of sentimentalism in Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Angela Sorby, Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (Durham, NC: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005). Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (New York: Princeton University Press, 1999); Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (New York: Beacon Press, 1997); Alexander Nehamas, Only A Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (New York: Princeton University Press, 2007); Denis Donoghue, Speaking of Beauty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Dennis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York: Oxford, 2009); Daniel Borus, Twentieth Century Multiplicity (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (New York: Princeton University Press, 2001); George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Reenchantment of the World (New York: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Eleanore Belfiore and Oliver Bennett, The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Martha Nussbaum, “Education for Profit, Education for Freedom,” Liberal Education (Summer 2009), 12 [6–13], Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1989]), xvi. Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). See also Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2002); John Timberman Newcomb, Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity (The Ohio State University Press, 2004); Michael Thurston, Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Mark Van Wienan, Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Geoffrey Jacques, A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). See also Twentieth Century Poetry. Eds. Dana Gioia, David Mason, Meg Schoerke (New York: McGraw Hill, 2003). Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Paula

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228

38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

Notes to Page 12 Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (New York: Princeton University Press, 2003); Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790– 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Cheryl Walker, Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 5. Floyd Dell, Homecoming: An Autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1939), and Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933). Since then, several revisionist studies examining canon formation have appeared, including Paul Lauter Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in United States Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); and Walter Kalaidjian, American Culture between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Nelson continues to repair the breach through his “Modern American Poets” website at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign, by including the works of neglected poets from the 1900s through the 1920s. Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Susan Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/ Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity, 8 (September 2001) 3, 493–513; Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and Modernisms: 1900–1950. Eds. Steven Gould Axelrod and Camille Roman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). Henry May, The End of Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992 [1959]). “Ugliness” had become a controversial subject since Victor Hugo’s famous 1827 preface to his play “Cromwell,” which aired his fascination with the many types of ugliness. In the 1860s Baudelaire continued this fascination, urging writers to look not to the ancients but to contemporary life in all its strangeness; for him, creating beauty entailed creating ugliness as well. For more information, see Virginia Swain, Grotesque Figures: Baudelaire, Rousseau, and the Aesthetics of Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Robert Crunden, American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885–1911 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xi–xii. See also Malcolm Cowley, After the Genteel Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1937); Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming- of-Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915); Howard Mumford Jones, The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience, 1865–1919 (New York: Viking, 1971); Willard Thorp, “Defenders of Ideality,” in Literary History of the United States. Ed. Robert Spiller et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 809–26; and John Tomsich A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971).

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Notes to Pages 13–14 229 45. George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992). 46. Joseph Freeman, An American Testament (NJ: Quinn and Boden Company, 1936), 85, 270, vii. 47. See Frank Kermode Romantic Image (New York: Macmillan, 1957); Robert Langbaum, The Modern Spirit: Essays on the Continuity of 19th and 20th Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); George Bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Albert Gelpi, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Louis Menand, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Carol Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 48. Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (New York: Princeton University Press, 1991); Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Columbia University Press, 1993); Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Peter McDonald, “Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?” PMLA (January 2006), 214–28. 49. William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959), and Robert Darnton, “What Is The History of Books?” in The Kiss of Lamourette: Ref lections in Cultural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). Roger Chartier argues against the notion that texts have “stable, universal, fixed meaning,” insisting instead that readers construct their own significance. Chartier traces an “order of discourse,” that is, the underlying principles that guide the production, commodification, and reception of books in The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 50. Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Also see Lisa Szefel, “The Creation of an American Poetic Community, 1890–1920” (PhD diss. University of Rochester, 2004). Also see Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid- Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Steven Behrendt, British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Michael Harrington, Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002); and Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry between Community and Institution (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 51. See New Directions in American Reception Studies. Eds. James Machor and Philip Goldstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 52. George Sylvester Viereck, “Recent Poetry,” CO (formerly CL), July 1913, 56.

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Notes to Pages 15–21

53. Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years, 1885–1915 (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc. 1952): 120–21. 54. Quoted in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer. Ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 24. 55. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992 [1978] ), 263–67. 56. Jayne Marek, Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995); Ann Massa, “The Columbian Ode and Poetry,” Journal of American Studies 20 (2001) 86: 51–69 and “Form Follows Function: The Construction of Harriet Monroe,” in A Living of Words: American Women in Print Culture (1995), Ed. Susan Albertine; Robin Schulze, “Harriet Monroe’s Pioneer Modernism: Nature, National Identity; and Poetry: A Magazine of Verse,” Legacy 21.1 (2004): 50–67. See also, John Newcomb, “Poetry’s Opening Door: Harriet Monroe and American Modernism,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 15.1 (2005), 6–22. 57. Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson, 14 October 1916, Folder 7.14, Box 7, AHUT. Letters from the Alice Corbin Henderson papers, reprinted by permission of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Also published in The Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson. Ed. Ira Nadel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 170. 58. Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909–1965. Ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1973), 8, 23–26. 59. As Eastman wrote, they regarded “books as an enemy of life’s real joy” and “rejected cultivation of the mind at the expense of the emotion.” Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 33–34, 58. “Experience is all” Oppenheim wrote in Songs for the New Age (1913), 57. In this, they built on the tradition of Anglo-American Romantics who evinced the superiority of lived experience over book knowledge in their poetry and correspondence. Lord Byron wrote: “The great object of life is sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain.” In an 1817 letter, Keats wrote: “O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts.” In “The Tables Turned,” Wordsworth reflected that: “One impulse from a vernal wood/May teach you more of man,/ Of moral evil and of good,/Than all the sages can . . . Enough of Science and of Art; . . . /Come forth, and bring with you a heart/That watches and receives.” Quoted in Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 43–45. 60. See Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

1 Genteel Designs, Modern Renovations: Poetics and the Poetic Community from Hearth to Dynamo 1. Santayana to Thomas Munro (1928). Quoted by Arthur Danto in “Introduction” to George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. Eds. William Holzberger and Herman Saatkamp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986 [1896]), 110.

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Notes to Pages 22–25 231 2. Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 128–42. 3. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1869), 48–9. Also see John Henry Raleigh, Matthew Arnold and America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). 4. Quoted in Hilary Fraser, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), 112–3. 5. As Ruskin wrote, “Those who have keenest sympathy are those who look closest and pierce deepest, and hold surest; and on the other, those who have so pierced and seen the melancholy deeps of things are filled with the most intense passion and gentleness of sympathy.” Individuals won this insight through imagination, not intellect. Ruskin himself maintained two diaries: one for “intellect” and the other for “feeling.” Quoted in Fraser, Beauty and Belief, 117, 132. 6. Quoted in Fraser, Beauty and Belief, 118. 7. See, for example, Jose Harris, “Ruskin and Social Reform,” in Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern. Ed. Dinah Birch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and John Batchelor, John Ruskin: No Wealth But Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000). 8. Pater quoted in Fraser, Beauty and Belief, 199. 9. Quoted in Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), x–xi. 10. Arthur John, The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner’s Monthly, and the Century Magazine, 1870–1909 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 174. 11. Ellery Sedgwick, The Atlantic Monthly, 1857–1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 7. 12. Sedgwick, Atlantic Monthly, 16. 13. John, Best Years, 257. 14. Historian Arthur John characterized Gilder’s convictions in Best Years, 174. 15. John, Best Years, 147. 16. John, Best Years, 174. 17. Later Years of the Saturday Club. Ed. M. A. DeWolfe Howe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927), 236. 18. Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 28–45. 19. Richard Watson Gilder, Grover Cleveland: A Record of Friendship (New York: The Century Co., 1910), 16–7; John Tomsich, A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), 17–8. 20. The book originated as a series of lectures about poetry at Johns Hopkins University sponsored by Lawrence and Francese Turnball. The first endowed lectureship of poetry in the United States, it was originally

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21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

given to James Russell Lowell, but he died shortly after receiving the honor. Edmund Clarence Stedman, The Nature and Elements of Poetry (New York: Houghton Mifflin,1920 [1892]), viii Stedman, Nature, 72. Rufus Griswold, The Female Poet of America (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1847). Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of America (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1845) was published until the end of the century. Stedman, Nature, 127, 128, 131. See, for example, Lionel Stevenson, Darwin Among the Poets (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963) and Bernard Lightman, Victorian Science in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings. Ed. Richey and Robinson (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 401. John Keats, Lamia (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1885 [1819]), 60. Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, 306. Stedman, Poets, xii. Stedman, Nature, viii, xiii, xiv, 4–28, 297. John, Best Years, 198–202. John, Best Years, 199–201. Tomsich, Genteel Endeavor, 74. Stedman, Nature, 47. Tomsich, Genteel Endeavor, 101–4. John, Best Years, 214–5. William Dean Howells incurred the community’s disfavor when he advocated commuting the sentences for the Haymarket rioters. Tomsich, Genteel Endeavor, 140. Stedman, Nature, 127. See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Mary Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); and Kevin Murphy, Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). John, Best Years, 173. Sedgwick, Atlantic, 293. Sedgwick, Atlantic, 294. John, Best Years, 256. John, Best Years, 173. See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of Culture in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977). The link made by male modernists between sentimentality and mediocrity proved so durable that it was not until the 1980s that that scholars begun to recuperate the contributions made by this genre. Sensational

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47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61.

Designs by Jane Tompkins went a long way toward reestablishing the importance of sentimentalism in American cultural and literary history. Also see Karen Kilcup, Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), and Clark, Sentimental Modernism. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization. Lawrence Oliver, “Theodore Roosevelt, Brander Matthews, and the Campaign for Literary Americanism,” American Quarterly [93–111], 94. Lawrence Oliver, Brander Matthews, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Politics of American Literature, 1880–1920 (Nashville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), xi–xiv. In this monograph, Oliver examines the complicated relationship among progressive ideology, cultural hegemony, imperialism, racial denigration, and Roosevelt’s brand of literary Americanism. Oliver, Brander Matthews, 5, 16, 136. Carlin Kindilien, American Poetry (Providence: Brown University Press, 1956), 26. In 1909 Gilder did publish “In Union Square” about an anarchist killed by a bomb meant for the police. John, Best Years, 114, 174. John, Best Years, 141. John, Best Years, 233–35. John, Best Years, 236. Jessie B. Rittenhouse, My House of Life: An Autobiography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 123. Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age: Three Essays on America (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1934). American Academy of Arts and Letters Handbook of Information, No. 62 (New York, 1927), 6N8. For a complete history of the Institute see A Century of Arts and Letters. Ed. John Updike (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). When elected to the Academy in 1905, William James chose not only to decline but to resign from the Institute as well. He wrote to the nominating committee: “I am not informed that this Academy has any definite work cut out for it of the sort in which I could play a useful part; and it suggests tant soit peu the notion of an organization for the mere purpose of distinguishing certain individuals (with their own contrivance) and enabling to say to the world at large ‘we are in and you are out.’ ” Quoted in Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City (New York: Knopf, 1987), 220. Oliver, Brander Matthews, xi. John, Best Years, 262. In the first nineteen years of its existence, despite pressure from women and blacks, the Institute included only one woman: Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was elected at the age of ninety- one, two years before her death. No African American became a member until the election of W. E. B. Du Bois in 1944. Oliver, Brander Matthews, 80–1. Masters to Monroe, 2 September 1924, quoted in Williams, Monroe, 9.

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62. Sedgwick, Atlantic, 294. 63. Sedgwick, Atlantic, 295. 64. William Vaughn Moody to Robert Underwood Johnson, 25 October 1904, William Vaughn Moody Papers, UVA. 65. Thompson, Frost, 524. 66. “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II. Ed. Leonard Doobs (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978), 91. 67. Pound to Monroe, Spring 1915. Quoted in Williams, Monroe, 7. 68. Pound to Monroe, 11 October 1912 and September/October 1912, HMUC. Letters from the Harriet Monroe Personal Papers reprinted by permission of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. 69. See Max Putzel, The Man in the Mirror: William Marion Reedy and His Magazine (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998). 70. Dudley F. Sicher to Untermeyer, 27 August 1903, Box 8, LUUD. Letters from the MSS 111 Louis Untermeyer Papers, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library reproduced by arrangement with the estate of Louis Untermeyer. 71. Johnson to Louis Untermeyer, 18 November 1912, Box 5, LUUD. 72. Harriet Monroe, A Poet’s Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World (New York: Macmillan Co., 1938), 15–26. 73. Monroe, Poet’s Life, 78–82. 74. Monroe, Poet’s Life, 82; Ethel Kelley (Hampton’s editor) to Harriet Monroe, 24 April 1911, HMPP. 75. Monroe, Poet’s Life, 121. 76. “Suggestions in Reference to Miss Monroe’s ‘Columbian Ode,’ ” Box 15, Folder 1, HMUC. 77. Monroe, Poet’s Life, 117–142, 147. 78. Perry to Monroe, 13 November 1905, HMUC. 79. Tarbell to Monroe, 18 November 1908, quoted in Williams, Monroe, 5. 80. Ethel Kelley to Monroe, 24 April 1911, Folder 8, Box 3, HMUC. 81. Carrie Noland investigates the response of French modernist poets to capitalism and technology in Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (New York: Princeton University Press, 1999). 82. Monroe, Poet’s Life, 34, 146, 193–4. 83. Monroe, Poet’s Life, 180. 84. Monroe, Poet’s Life, 180–1. 85. Sedgwick to Lowell, 11 May 1910, 23 September 1913, 8 February 1911, ALHH. Letters from the Amy Lowell Papers, bMS Lowell 19.1 are reprinted by permission of the Trustees of the Amy Lowell Estate and by Houghton Library, Harvard University. 86. Sedgwick to Lowell, 11 May 1910, 17 May 1910, 8 February 1911, 17 May 1912, 23 September 1913, Box 20, ALHH. “Atlantic” was the first of four sonnets accepted by the Atlantic Monthly in 1910. 87. Braithwaite to Stedman, 2 February 1900, Braithwaite to Howells, 7 October 1899, Braithwaite to L. C. Page & Co., 3 April 1899 in The William S. Braithwaite Reader. Ed. Philip Butcher (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 237–9.

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Notes to Pages 42–45

235

88. Burton to Braithwaite, 5 December 1903. Box 3, WBHH. Letters from the William Braithwaite Papers, are reprinted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 89. Braithwaite, “Arcturus,” Phylon, 2 (1942), 2: 189. Perhaps Braithwaite heeded the advice of his friend, Boston poet, anthologist of humorous verse and American songs, Frederick Knowles (1869–1905), whose article “Some Practical Hints for Amateur Verse-Writers” can be found in Braithwaite’s papers. Knowles suggested poets avoid foreign words because it “shows bad taste.” He argued that newspapers wanted short poems on cheerful themes and “If it tells a story, its chance of acceptance is greater than if it is purely subjective.” Box 11, WBHH. 90. “The Reminiscences of William Stanley Braithwaite,” OHCU. 91. Burton Kline, “William S. Braithwaite,” BET, 30 November 1915. 92. The review, “The Magazines and the Poets: A Critical Examination of Periodical Files for 1905,” appeared in the 14 February 1906 issue of the Transcript. 93. Braithwaite, “The Magazines and the Poets,” 1905 typed manuscript, WBVA. 94. OHCU, 15. 95. Rittenhouse, My House, 3–15, 35, 51, 63, 75–6, 84–93. 96. Rittenhouse, My House , 116. 97. Robert Crunden provides a sketch of Progressive reformers in the realms of music, social science, academia, and the arts in Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1982). 98. Quoted in Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years, 1885–1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1952), 73. 99. See Roger Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). 100. Crunden, Ministers, 91–6. 101. “On Poetic Diction,” Harper’s Weekly, 5 (1909), 6. Similar challenges had been laid decades before in French symbolist poetry, beginning with Baudelaire, and took on greater heft throughout the transatlantic world in the fields of art, architecture, philosophy, psychology, and intellectual life more generally. For investigations of the links among various artistic endeavors, see Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpeant: Modernism in Music, Literature and the Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modern Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Ed. Michael Levenson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 102. Williams, Monroe, 11. 103. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 104. The term “epistemological toilette” is from Jeffrey Nunokawa, “Speechless in Austen,” Humanities Center at Harvard, February 2005. Quoted by permission of the author.

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Notes to Pages 46–53

105. Upton Sinclair, The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), 45. 106. Orrick Johns, Time of Our Lives: The Story of My Father and Myself (New York: Octagon Books, 1973 [1937]), 178. 107. “On Poetic Diction,” Harper’s Weekly (29 May 1909). 108. David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989). 109. Paul Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971); Edward Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005). 110. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 138. 111. Santayana, The Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927 [1900]), v, 10, 256, 270, 289;Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 138. 112. Johns, Times of Our Lives, 129 113. Johns, Times of Our Lives, 199. Contemporary ideas about pragmatism, psychology, epistemology, and aesthetics even influenced Thorstein Veblen’s beliefs about the role of beauty in creating a more egalitarian society. See Trygve Throntveit, “The Will To Behold: Thorstein Veblen’s Pragmatic Aesthetics,” Modern Intellectual History, 5 (2008) 3: 519–46. 114. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass. 1855 First Edition Text (Virginia: Wilder Publications, 2008), 8–10. 115. Whitman, Leaves, 8–10, 13–4, 16 20, 79. 116. Stedman, Poets, 351–94. 117. Kenneth Price, Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xi–xviii. 118. Barbara Hochman, Getting At The Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 12. 119. George B. Hutchinson, “Whitman and the Black Poet: Kelly Miller’s Speech to the Walt Whitman Fellowship,” American Literature, 61 (March 1989): 1, 53 [46–58]. 120. Clarence Brown, “Walt Whitman and the ‘New Poetry,’ ” American Literature, 33 (March 1961) 37, 34 [33–45]. 121. Alice Henderson, “Editorial Comment: A Perfect Return,” Poetry, 1 (December 1912) 3, 88–90. 122. Harriet Monroe, “Walt Whitman,” Poetry, 14 (May 1919) 2: 89–.94 123. Brown, “Walt Whitman,” 37–8. 124. The vanity publisher, Richard Badger, contacted Robinson and reissued the book with sixteen new poems as The Children of the Night. An admirer of Robinson’s, Willie Butler, footed the expense. Hagedorn, Robinson, 106, 112. 125. Robinson, Children of the Night (Boston: Richard Badger, 1897), 85, 63, 91. 126. Robinson, Children, 63. Robinson did have some success finding an outlet for his work. Lippincott’s purchased a sonnet on Poe but failed to publish it for twelve years, while The Critic published two others but

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Notes to Pages 54–63

127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

137.

237

offered no payment, and the Boston Transcript printed “The Children of the Night”; Hagedorn, Robinson, 98, 105. Quoted in Chard Powers Smith, Where the Light Falls: A Portrait of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York: Macmillan Co., 1965), 291. Hagedorn, Robinson, 110–2. Viereck, “Youthful Diary,” EGLC. Benét to Untermeyer, 2 December 1913, Box 2, LUUD. I would like to acknowledge John Gibbs for the phrase “willful non-perception.” Benét to Untermeyer, 29 June 1914, Box 2, LUUD. Sedgwick, The Atlantic Monthly, 237. Diary and Letters of Josephine Preston Peabody. Ed. Christina Hopkinson Baker (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 109, 130–1. Peabody to Mary Mason, 11 February 1901, Peabody, 146. G.B. Shaw, Man and Superman (New York: Brentano’s, 1922), 62. Quoted in the introduction that Corinne Roosevelt Robinson to Roosevelt As The Poets Saw Him: Tributes from the Singers of America and England to Theodore Roosevelt. Ed. Charles Hanson Towne (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), xviii. Hagedorn, Robinson, 212.

2 Reforming Verse, Uplifting Society: The Labor Theory of Poetic Value 1. Jessie B. Rittenhouse, “A Year’s Harvest in American Poetry,” NYT Book Review, 28 November 1915, 462. 2. The biographical information on Markham’s early years comes from Louis Filler, The Unknown Edwin Markham: His Mystery and Its Significance (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1966). 3. Markham quoted in Filler, Markham, 13. 4. Filler, Markham, 35. 5. Filler, Markham, 59. 6. Filler, Markham, 59. 7. Filler, Markham, 63, 65, 75. 8. Filler, Markham, 99. 9. Filler, Markham, 79. 10. Filler, Markham, 79–81, 83, 61. 11. For more information, see Clark D. Halker, For Democracy, Workers, and God: Labor Song-Poems and Labor Protest, 1865–1895 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 12. For more on the genre of dead-pet poetry in Greek epigrams and Victorian verse, see G. Herrlinger, Totenklage um Tiere in der antiken Dichtung, cited in Vertis in usum, Eds. John Miller, et al. (Munich: K.G. Sauer Verlag GmbH, 2002), 191, and Ingrid H. Tague, “Dead Pets: Satire and Sentiment in British Elegies and Epitaphs for Animals,” EighteenthCentury Studies, 41 (Spring 2008) 3, 289–306. 13. Kindilien, American Poetry, 10, 12–19. 14. Kindilien, American Poetry, 56.

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Notes to Pages 63–71

15. Kindilien, American Poetry, 57. 16. Quoted in James D. Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 128. 17. Over 4,000 copies of the book sold before publication in November of 1855. After five months, over 30,000 copies had sold. Hart, Popular Book, 129–30. 18. Elizabeth Van Allen, James Whitcomb Riley: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 10, 12. 19. Quoted in Benediktsson, George Sterling, 63. 20. Riley earned more money than Longfellow, the first American to make his living from poetry, who received $2,000 annually even before the publication of “The Song of Hiawatha.” Van Allen, Riley, 183 and Hart, Popular Book, 127. The only other poet who made comparable money was Kansas poet Walt Mason who received fifteen dollars per poem, except when he sold them in “car-load lots.” He told an interviewer in 1914 that people want “poetry easy to read, poetry with a jingle in it, poetry that treats of the things and conditions they are familiar with, and they want their poetry clean and wholesome . . . the fact that they want it shows that their hearts and heads are all right.” “A Kansas Poet’s Income,” The Literary Digest 48 (14 February 1914), 339–43. 21. Van Allen, Riley, 9, 193, 229. 22. Van Allen, Riley, 5. 23. Van Allen, Riley, 1–2, 6. 24. Filler, Markham, 45. 25. Filler, Markham, 61. 26. Markham denounced the lecture in his notebook. Filler, Markham, 82, 88. 27. The line became the motto for Markham’s bookplates. The poem was published in War Poems 1898 Compiled by the California Club (San Francisco, 1898). Quoted in Filler, Markham, 96. 28. “The Author of ‘The Man with the Hoe’ Gives an Exposition of His Poem,” The NewYork Times, 3 February 1900. 29. Markham, Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (New York: Doubleday & McClure Company, 1899), 15–18. 30. See Robert Walker, The Poet and the Gilded Age: Social Themes in LateNineteenth Century Verse (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963). 31. Bailey Millard, History of the San Francisco Bay Region (New York: American Historical Society, Inc., 1924): 447–58, Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeau, “Ekphrasis and Textual Consciousness,” Word & Image Vol. 15, No. 1 (January—March 1999), 76. 32. Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1901) 316–17, 372, 376–77. 33. Norris, The Octopus, 394. 34. Mark Sullivan, Our Times: America at the Birth of the Twentieth Century (New York: Scribners, 1996 [1936]), 179–80. 35. Arthur Davison Ficke, “The Present State of Poetry,” North American Review (1911) 194, 438 [429–41].

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Notes to Pages 71–80 239 36. Filler, Markham, 102. 37. Debs to Markham, 18 July 1899, EMWC. 38. Florence Hamilton, “ ‘The Man with the Hoe’: The Poem, The Poet and The Problem: The Intellectual Biography of Edwin Markham,” unfinished, unpublished biography, 187, Box 10, FHLC. 39. Torrence to Markham, [n.d.], Folder T (I), EMWC. 40. James to Markham, 17 March 1899, Folder J, EMWC. 41. “Review #10,” 21 October 1899, The New York Times. 42. Filler, Markham, 104–5. 43. Quoted by Florence Hamilton, “The Poet and the Problem,” 181. 44. “Hamilton Mabie on Edwin Markham,” 16 November 1901, The New York Times Saturday Review. Filler, Markham, 105. 45. Benediktsson, Sterling, 65–67. 46. Cary Nelson analyzes Markham’s concerns about organized labor in Revolutionary Memory: Recovering the Poetry of the American Left (New York: Routledge, 2001), 16–21. 47. Markham to Mr. Knight, 1 April 1899, Folder 1882–1905, EMWC. 48. Sullivan, Our Times, 180–81. 49. “Mr. Markham, The Author of ‘The Man with the Hoe’ Gives an Exposition of His Poem,” The New York Times, 3 February 1900, BR10. 50. Quoted in “People Met in Hotel Lobbies,” 12 April 1905, The New York Times. 51. Filler, Markham, 101. 52. Jones also used Millet’s picture and a quote from “The Man with the Hoe” on his official stationery. Filler, Markham, 123. 53. Hamilton, “The Poet and the Problem,” 188. 54. Hamilton, “The Poet and the Problem,” 189. Bailey Millard indicated that Cheney received $750, while Markham received only twenty-five dollars for his poem. Millard, San Francisco, 456. 55. “ ‘The Man with the Hoe’ Competition,” Public Opinion, 8 February 1900, 183–84. 56. See, for example, Howard Pyle’s censures against Markham’s “Pessimism.” 10 November 1900, The New York Times. 57. “Markham’s Pessemism,” 8 December 1900, BR29. 58. E. B. Patterson of Brooklyn, New York, quoted in “Markham’s Pessimism.” 59. Quoted in “Markham’s Pessimism.” 60. Rev. Alexander Fitzgerald quoted in “Markham’s Pessimism.” 61. John Talman, “Tardy Appreciation of Markham,” 29 December 1900, The New York Times Saturday Review, BR16. 62. Hamilton, Box 10, 4, FHLC. 63. The undated essay can be found in Box 10, Folder 2, FHLC. 64. Markham, Notes, 29, 33, 37, 44. The pamphlet, published by Doubleday & McClure Company, retailed for fifty cents, half the price of The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems. 65. C. H. Garrett, “Edwin Markham, Cowboy and Poet,” The Era Magazine (1903), Vol. 11, 181–83. 66. Col. Richard Hinton, “An Author Not at Home,” The New York Times, 12 August 1899, BRA 529–30.

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240 Notes to Pages 81–84 67. William Wallace Whitelock, “Edwin Markham: How He Wrote His Famous Poem,” 7 September 1901, The New York Times, BR12. 68. Joaquin Miller, “Edwin Markham—His Life and His Verse,” 18 November 1899, The New York Times. 69. Loren Glass examines the connections among modernism, mass culture, masculinity, and celebrity in Authors, Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (New York: New York University Press, 2004). See also Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and David Blake, Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity (New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2006). 70. Markham received two-hundred dollars per speech, with McClure’s receiving a fifty- dollar commission. Filler, Markham, 112. 71. Markham to Miss Watson, 2 September 1903, EMWC. 72. Markham to Eugenie Kellogg- Churchill, 22 June 1904, Markham to Mrs. Townsend Allen, 7 September 1903, Markham to Julia Small, 20 November 1904, Markham to Mr. Southworth, 10 September 1903, EMWC. 73. Markham to Marcus Kennery, 8 May 1901, EMWC. 74. Markham to Mr. James, 3 September 1903, Markham to Mr. Beers, 7 September 1903, EMWC. 75. Edwin Markham, “Literature Remade,” The New York Times, 12 December 1909, SMA2. 76. Edwin Markham, The Younger Choir (New York: Moods Publishing Co., 1910), 9–11. The first edition run of five hundred copies included reprints of poems that had previously appeared in such publications as Moods, The Forum, Atlantic Monthly, Century, Independent, Smart Set, The Saturday Evening Post, North American Review, The New York Times, The New York Sun. 77. Markham, Younger Choir, 10–11. 78. Markham, Younger Choir, 12. 79. Edwin Markham, “On Our Younger Writers’ Eroticism, Paganism and Nietzsche,” The New York Times Book Review, 13 October 1912, 578. The volume received favorable notices. In a review of the book, Richard Le Gallienne deemed America “par excellence, the commercial country” and commended The Younger Choir for checking this commercialism by furnishing “the dream-force” that is “forever mysteriously making and remaking the visible world—a visible world not all granite and iron, but also violet and daffodil and face of woman and song of bird.” Richard Le Gallienne, “The Younger Choir,” The Forum 43 (June 1910), 652 [651–60]. 80. Filler, Markham, 158. 81. Margaret Widdemer, A Tree With A Bird In It: A Symposium of Contemporary American Poets On Being Shown A Pear-Tree On Which Sat A Grackle (New York: Harcourt, Brace &Co., 1922), 4. 82. The Hearst International Library published the book in 1914. Filler, Markham, 127, 138, 155. 83. Filler, Markham 133.

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Notes to Pages 86–95

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3 Curating a Community, Engineering a Renaissance: A New Infrastructure for the “New Beauty” 1. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 102, 112. Also quoted in Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village, the American Bohemia, 1910–1960 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 16. 2. As a young man, William had an affair with the Berlin actress Edwine Viereck. Louis von Prillwitz, son of Prince August of Prussia, assumed legal paternity. George Sylvester Viereck, My Flesh and Blood: A Lyric Autobiography with Indiscreet Annotations (New York: H. Liveright, 1931), 3, 236–38; Otis Norman, “Viereck, Hohenzollern?” New York Times Saturday Review of Books, 29 June 1907, 413. Birth records indicate that Prince George of Prussia and Baron Franz von Schick, the Imperial Austrian General of Cavalry, served as godfathers. 3. Viereck, “Youthful Diary,” EGLC. 4. Huneker to Viereck, 13 November 1905, EGLC. 5. Huneker to Viereck, 1 December 1905, EGLC. 6. Elmer Gertz, Odyssey of a Barbarian: The Biography of George Sylvester Viereck (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1978), 40. 7. Ralph Melnick, The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn, Vol. 1 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 94–104. 8. Viereck, Ninevah and Other Poems (New York: Moffat, Yard & Co., 1912 [1907]), xiv–xv. 9. Viereck, Ninevah, xvi. 10. Gilder to Viereck, 24 June 1907, EGLC. 11. “Viereck Writes to Gilder,” The New York Times Book Review, 19 August 1907, 488. 12. Untermeyer, “The Haunted House,” The New York Times, 13 July 1907. 13. “Topics of The Week,” The New York Times Book Review, 29 June 1907, 416. 14. Bradley, “Prolonging Strains of A Dying Song,” The New York Times Book Review, 22 June 1907, 407. 15. Barker to Gertz, 24 May 1936, EGLC. 16. Gertz, Odyssey, 112. 17. “Believes He Is A Genius,” Saturday Evening Post, 31 August 1907. 18. Gertz, Odyssey, 99. 19. Viereck also ingratiated himself with the Rough Rider’s sister, Corinne, who had sent copies of her poems for criticism. While other poets dismissed her as a wealthy dilettante, Viereck crafted diplomatic letters praising her work as “inspired.” He gladly accepted luncheon invitations to discuss her literary development. See, for example, Viereck to Corinne Roosevelt, 8 March 1913, GVHH. 20. Neil M. Johnson, George Sylvester Viereck: German-American Propagandist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 17. 21. In a letter to his parents, who had returned to Berlin in 1912, Viereck relayed the success of his “Million Dollar Luncheon” at which Roosevelt

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22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Notes to Pages 95–99 addressed an audience of literati and businessmen. Within a year the magazine became subsumed under the International, a “liberal magazine of literature, politics, philosophy, and the drama.” The International had been founded by Columbia undergraduates associated with the Socialist League for Industrial Democracy. Unlike CL, International printed original articles. The editors received non-fiction essays from the likes of Charles W. Eliot, John Dewey, and George Cronyn. Walter Lippmann prepared the political notes; Floyd Dell contributed fiction; Sara Teasdale, Louis Untermeyer and many others submitted their verse. B. Russell Herts, Richard le Gallienne, and Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff served as contributing editors. Salon host Mabel Dodge refused Viereck’s solicitation to support the magazine financially, but she contributed articles, and believed that it “had a really emancipating influence on young writers who heretofore had no vehicle for their work.” Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), 160. “The Confessions of a Barbarian,” The New York Times Book Review, 21 May 1910, 5. Quoted in Phyllis Keller, States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals and the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 126. Hapgood, Review of G. S. Viereck, Confessions of a Barbarian, The Bookman (1910), 505. Quoted in Gertz, Odyssey, 102. Floyd Dell, Homecoming: An Autobiography (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1933), 287. Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant- Garde (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), 29. John Reed, “A Gilbertian Ode,” The Day in Bohemia; or Life Among the Artists reprinted in Alex Baskin’s John Reed: The Early Years in Greenwich Village (New York: Archives of Social History, 1990), 70. Dell, Homecoming, 279–89. Such behavior contradicted Dell’s earlier statement that the Village “wanted its most serious beliefs mocked at; it enjoyed laughing at its own convictions.” Dell, Homecoming, 261. Dell, Homecoming, 280. Quoted in Florence Hamilton, “The Poet and the Problem,” 221. Harvey to Gertz, 4 September 1935, EGLC. In the same letter, Harvey attributed the rancor Viereck sometimes engendered to his advanced thinking: “He spoke of sex with a poetical license which in Anglo- Saxon circles was not understood then. Time was to vindicate him. Psychoanalysis had not yet been popularized.” Gertz, Odyssey, 59. Gertz, Odyssey, 59. “Recent Poetry,” October 1913, 271. “Recent Poetry,” September 1910, 334. “Recent Poetry,” CO, August 1910, 221. “Recent Poetry,” April 1916, 282.

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Notes to Pages 99–106 243 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

66.

Review of Rhymes To Be Trades for Bread, August 1913, 128 Review of Viereck, The Candle and The Flame, August 1912, 231. “Voices of the Living Poets,” CO, February 1915, 121. “Recent Poetry,” June 1914, 462. “Recent Poetry,” September 1911, 332. “Recent Poetry,” February 1911, 217–18. “Recent Poetry,” January 1911, 102. “Recent Poetry,” Poetry November 1918, 329. See, for example, “Recent Poetry,” August 1910, 218, September 1910, 334, and November 1910, 568. “The Poets’ Circle and Syndicate Open,” The New York Times, 2 January 1911, 7. ‘Poetry Is A Living Art,’ That Is Why American Poets Have Organized,” The New York Sun, 10. “Recent Poetry,” CL, December 1910, 682. Braithwaite, “The Feast of the Poets,” BET, 31 December 1910. Quoted in “Recent Poetry,” January 1911, CL, 101–2. Ibid., 102. Percy MacKaye was a well-respected poet who led a movement to make poetry more democratic by trying to establish masques, poems as miniplays, to be read before audiences as divergent as African-American high schools, advertising bureaus, and the Industrial Workers of the World. See, “Percy MacKaye Predicts Communal Theatre,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, 14 May 1916, 13. “First Aid To Poets,” Washington Post, 3 January 1911, 6. Members of the Authors’ Club, formed in 1882, appointed Matthew Arnold the first honorary member. Monroe, Poet’s Life, 84–85. Eunice Tietjens, The World at My Shoulder (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1938), 5, 35. See PSA to Teasdale, 23 December 1910, STVA. “ ‘Poetry Is A Living Art,’ ”10. “Boom in Poetry May Make ‘Best Seller’ Fiction A Back Number,” The New York Times, 22 June 1913, SM6. Initially, the Pulitzer committee refused to create the category for poetry. The Society administered the prize in conjunction with Columbia University until the Pulitzer committee changed its convictions about the value of honoring poetry, and assumed control of the award three years later. In her memoirs, Jessie Rittenhouse took credit for this, while in the PSA’s official history, Gustav Davidson claimed that Edward J. Wheeler secured the funds. In Fealty to Apollo. Ed. Gustav Davidson (New York: Fine Editions Press, 1950), 19. Records of the Pulitzer Prize do not provide clarification. “Boom in Poetry,” 6. “Poets in Session in Untermeyer Home,” The New York Times, 10 May 1914, 10, “Poets Woo Spring on Greystone Lawn,” The New York Times, 26 May 1915, 9. Rittenhouse, My House of Life, 227–30.

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Notes to Pages 107–111

67. Viereck stepped down as Secretary after professing that he lacked “the Secretarial mind.” He had no desire to continue in the unpaid position, preferring to use energy pursuing more lucrative endeavors that still allowed sufficient time to write poetry. Rittenhouse herself struggled with the paltry remuneration and her lack of literary productivity during her years as Secretary. 68. Margaret Widdemer in Jessie Rittenhouse, 21. 69. Rittenhouse recalled that “when the so- called New Movement in poetry was just beginning and was still somewhat baffling to the lay mind,” she gave lectures to small audiences of local book clubs as well as at places such as the American Library Associations’s annual convention with over 2,000 librarians. She was also asked to give a series of lectures to members of the Board of Education in New York City. Rittenhouse, My House, 275–76. 70. Rittenhouse, My House, 279–80. When Rittenhouse moved to Florida in 1922, Catherine Markham took over duties as PSA Secretary. 71. Poets Robert Hillyer served as the first President of the college PSA, with Mark Van Doren and Grace Hazard Conkling acting as co-vice presidents. In Rittenhouse, My House, 240. 72. See PSA Notes, 29 December 1911, STVA. 73. Widdemer, Friends, 113. 74. Reedy to Teasdale, 21 June 1915, STVA. 75. William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 117. Pritchard notes that Frost originally directed this remark at Carl Sandburg, a poet with whom he was often compared. Of a visit by Sandburg to the University of Michigan in 1922, Frost satirized the pose of lusty manhood: “He was possibly [three] hours in town and he spent one of those washing his white hair and toughening his expression for public performance.” 76. Lowell to Rittenhouse, 3 December 1915, Box 17, ALHH. 77. Rittenhouse, My House of Life, 256–58. 78. Widdemer, Friends, 113. 79. “Recent Poetry,” CO, April 1915, 273. 80. Wheeler to Lowell, 1 December 1915, ALHH. 81. CO, June 1916, 433. 82. In Amy Lowell: A Chronicle with Extracts from Her Correspondence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), Samuel Damon dated this speech as January 25, 1916, but her correspondence in Houghton Library has congratulatory letters dated 1917. 83. Damon, Amy Lowell, 36. 84. Viereck to Lowell, 3 February 1917, ALHH. Reprinted with the permission of copyright owner Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath. 85. Lowell to Viereck, 9 February 1917, GVHH. 86. Rittenhouse, My House of Life, 293–308. 87. In Fealty to Apollo. Ed. Gustav Davidson (New York: Fine Editions Press, Publishers, 1950), 21, 23. 88. Monroe, Poet’s Life, 242. 89. Greenslet to Monroe, 8 March 1910, Folder 8, Box 3, HMUC.

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Notes to Pages 111–117 245 90. Kennerley to Monroe, 18 October 1911, Folder 11, Box 1, HMUC. 91. Monroe, “The Bigness of the World,” Atlantic Monthly, 108 (September 1911) 3, 372 [371–75]. 92. Monroe, “Bigness,” 373–75. “Cinderella of the Arts,” Chicago Tribune, 19 November 1911, 1. Quoted in Williams, Monroe, 247. 93. “Cinderella of the Arts,” 1. Quoted in Williams, Monroe, 247. 94. Williams, Monroe, 14–15. 95. Monroe to O’Brien, 28 August 1912, HMUC. 96. Monroe, Poet’s Life, 246–47. 97. Williams, Monroe, 20–21. Poets who received the letter included Edwin Markham, Amy Lowell (whose poem “On Carpaccio’s Picture” Monroe had noticed in the Atlantic Monthly beneath her own article, “The Bigness of the World”), E. A. Robinson, Vachel Lindsay, Floyd Dell, and British writers such as W. B. Yeats and John Masefield. 98. Williams, Monroe, 11. 99. Monroe, “The Motive of the Magazine.” Poetry (October 1912), 27–29. 100. Edith Wyatt, “On the Reading of Poetry,” Poetry, 1 (October 1912) 1, 25. 101. Monroe, review of The Vaunt of Man and Other Poems, Poetry, 2 (April 1913) 1, 26. 102. Monroe, review of The Lonely Dancer, and Other Poems, Poetry, 4 (April 1914) 1, 31. 103. Monroe, “The New Beauty,” Poetry, 2 (April 1913) 1, 22–24. 104. Carl Sandburg wrote of this slogan in “The Work of Ezra Pound,” Poetry, 7 (February 1916) 5, 251. 105. Monroe, Poet’s Life, 223. 106. Pound to Monroe, 18 August 1912. HMUC. 107. Quoted in James Longenbach, Stone Cottage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 31. 108. Pound to Monroe, 18 August 1912. HMUC. 109. Pound to Monroe, 11 October 1912 and Sept/Oct 1912, HMUC; Pound to Monroe, October or November 1912, quoted in Poetry Magazine: A Gallery of Voices. An Exhibition from the Harriet Monroe Poetry Collection (Chicago: Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, 1980), 36. 110. Parisi, Dear Editor, 11, 12, 75, 77. 111. Parisi, Dear Editor, 10–22, 178. 112. Parisi, Dear Editor, 59. 113. Parisi, Dear Editor, 43–44. 114. Floyd Dell, “To A Poet,” Chicago Evening Post Literary Review (4 April 1913), quoted in Monroe, Poet’s Life, 310. 115. Sandburg at first hesitated to parse the meaning of Pound’s poetry: “As well should one reduce to chemical formula the crimson of a Kentucky redbird’s wing as dissect the inner human elements that give poetic craft.” But then he likened Pound’s creations to that of a scientist or businessman: “His way of working . . . is more conscious and deliberate, more clear- cut in purpose and design, than might be thought from first glance.” Despite this deceiving ease, Pound actually “works by rules,

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246

116. 117. 118. 119.

120. 121.

122. 123.

124. 125. 126. 127.

128. 129.

130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

135. 136.

Notes to Pages 119–123 measurements, formulae and data as strict and definite as any worker who uses exact science, and employs fractions of inches, and drills in steel by thousandths of millimeters.” Sandburg, “The Work of Ezra Pound,” 249–57. Parisi, Dear Editor, 52. Parisi, Dear Editor, 42. Monroe, “The Open Door,” Poetry, 1 (November 1912) 2, 62, and Monroe, “Tradition,” Poetry, 2 (May 1913) 2, 67–69. Monroe, Poet’s Life, 215. When Monroe initially saw the show in New York, she reacted against the lack of transparency in the paintings of Picasso, Duchamp, and Matisse. “A picture should speak for itself,” she argued. Several months of reflection and discussion helped her to appreciate the contribution made by such artists. Henderson, “Art and Photography,” Poetry, 6 (April 1915)1, 99–101. Tietjens, World, 24. For an analysis of Henderon’s contributions to the magazine, see Jayne Marek, Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995). Quoted in Lowell, Tendencies, 213. Monroe shot back, charging, “What chances has The Dial ever taken? What has it ever printed but echoes?” Monroe, “The Enemies We Have Made,” Poetry, 4 (May 1914) 2, 63–64. Monroe, “The Enemies We Have Made,” 63. Monroe, “Review of Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems,” Poetry, 8 (May 1916), 2, 90–93. Tietjens, World, 39–40. Monroe, “Incarnations,” Poetry, 2 (May 1913) 2, 104. Assistant Editor Alice Corbin Henderson seconded the endorsement of Lindsay: “He is realizing himself in relation to direct experience.” Henderson, “Too Far From Paris,” Poetry, 4 (June 1914), 3. Monroe, “Poetry’s Banquet,” Poetry, 4 (April 1914) 1, 25–28. Ficke, though, denounced the free verse forms that Yeats sometimes employed. In a reverse-Rousseau move, Ficke believed that the poet found freedom only in chains. See Monroe, Poet’s Life, 406. Monroe, “Introduction” to Lindsay, The Congo and Other Poems (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914), v–ix. Randolph S. Bourne, “Sincerity in the Making,” The New Republic, 1 (5 December 1914), 26–27. Herbert Russell, “Edgar Lee Masters,” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 54 (1), 298. Corinne Roosvelt Robinson, Roosevelt, xx. “Poetry is the orientation of the soul to conditions in life,” Masters continued. “Like great waters it may murmur or ripple or roar.” “What Is Poetry?” Poetry (September 1915), 307. Russell, “Edgar Lee Masters,” 302. Monroe, “Review of Edwin Markham, The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems Poetry (September 1915) Vol. VI, No. 6, 308–10.

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Notes to Pages 124–128 247 137. James Kraft, Who Is Witter Bynner? A Biography (Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 1995), 24. 138. Harriet Monroe, “Review of Witter Bynner The New World,” Poetry, 7 (December 1915), 3, 147–48. 139. Others, 2 (February 1916) 2, 156. 140. See Suzanne Churchill, The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006). 141. Monroe to Williams, 3 March 1913, Parisi, Dear Editor, 113. 142. See Monroe to Untermeyer, 20 September 1915, Box 6, LUUD. Conrad Aiken and Ford Madox Hueffer were also instrumental in Monroe’s decision to publish Eliot’s poem. 143. Monroe, “Give Him Room,” Poetry, 6 (April 1915)1, 81–83. 144. Pound to Henderson, 14 June 1917, Folder 8.2 (1917–1949), Box 1, AHUT. 145. This included 790 for paid subscriptions, 254 guarantor copies, 149 for exchange and press, and 40 for advertisers, contributors, and miscellaneous. Williams, Monroe, 296. 146. Williams, Monroe, 20–21.

4 Rescripting Gender Codes, Redrawing the Color Line: Anthologies and the Dream of Aesthetic Universalism 1. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1907 [1903]), 164. 2. Braithwaite, “Arcturus,” Phylon, 2 (1941), 258–59. 3. Poetry Society of America Newsletter, April 1937, 4. 4. Mencken to George Sterling, quoted in From Baltimore to Bohemia: The Letters of H. L. Mencken and George Sterling. Ed. S. T. Joshi (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), 29. 5. Quoted in Lisa Steinman, Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 45. 6. Quoted in Lara Vetter, Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 11. 7. T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism” (1911) and “A Lecture on Modern Poetry” (1908), in The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme. Ed. Karen Csengeri (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 8. Daniel Albright makes clear that the relationship between modernists and science was not without problems or contradictions. D. H. Lawrence, for example, invoked Jewish stereotypes to criticize Einstein, while Wyndham Lewis and Pound found his theories more congenial to the hazy, insubstantial poetry and poetics of the Victorians. “Einstein deeply offended that section of the Modernist movement that doted on solidity, aggressive edges, and Sachlichkeit,” Albright argues. Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13.

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Notes to Pages 129–135

9. Pound did not actually use the phrase “Make it New” until the 1930s. See Kurt Heinzelman, “ ‘Make It New’: The Rise of An Idea,” in Make It New: The Rise of Modernism. Ed. Kurt Heinzelman (Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, 2004): 131–34. In their three-volume study of the role of women in twentieth- century literature, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar document the “sexualized visions of change and exchange”: No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. I: The War of Words (New York: Yale University Press, 1989); Vol. II: Sexchanges (1989); Vol. III: Letters from the Front (1995). 10. In On Beauty and Being Just (New York: Princeton University Press, 1999), Elaine Scarry traces the gendered division of beauty to the eighteenth century when Kant divided aesthetics into two categories, deeming beauty a mere charm, with female associations, and elevating the masculine-associated sublime, with its ability to move individuals. Also see Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 11. Anne Ferry, Tradition and the Individual Poem: An Inquiry into Anthologies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 5, 202–10. Ezra Pound, meanwhile, referred to The Golden Treasury as “that stinking sugar teat Palgrave,” and built his critical opinions in contrast to the book’s contents. Frank Lentricchia discusses Pound’s views of Palgrave in Modernist Quartet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 55–61. 12. See Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), Craig S. Abbott, “Modern American Poetry: Anthologies, Classrooms, and Canons,” College Literature, 17 (1990) 2/3, 209–21, Timothy Morris, Becoming Canonical in American Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), and Gerald Graff, Professing Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 13. For more on black culture in this period, see Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877–1919. Eds. Barbara McCaskill, Caroline Gebhard (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 14. Nina Miller, Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York’s Literary Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 210–11, 216. Marureen Honey makes this argument as well in Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 2–3, 6–7, 20–21. 15. Rittenhouse, My House of Life, 225–26. 16. Guiney was quoting Charles Lamb when she said this. Horace Gregory, Marya Zaturenska, A History of American Poetry, 1900–1940 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946), 83. 17. Rittenhouse to Orton Tewson, 1925, JRVA. 18. In 1890 there were 8,125 African Americans in Boston, which constituted 1.8 percent of the total population. By 1920 that number had increased to 16,350 (2.2 percent), 5,334 of whom lived in Cambridge. A full twothirds of Boston’s black citizens lived in integrated settings. In 1904 the Boston Sunday Herald featured the headline “Boston as the Paradise of the Negro” with quotes from prominent black Bostonians. Mark Schneider,

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Notes to Pages 135–138 249

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890–1920 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), x, xii, 4, 7. Braithwaite, “The House under Arcturus,” Phylon 2 (1941) 1, 132. Braithwaite, “Arcturus,” Phylon, 2 (1941) 2, 135–36. See Stephen Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York: Atheneum, 1970). Butcher, BR, 11–13, 18, 246, 249. Braithwaite to Ray Stannard Baker, 3 October 1907. Quoted in BR, Butcher, 245–47. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Social and Political Criticism (New York: Macmillan Co., 1920 [1869]), 31. Braithwaite, “Some Contemporary Poets of the Negro Race,” Crisis, April 1919. Quoted in BR, Butcher, 53. For a discussion of aesthetics among African-American artists, authors, and academics, see Russ Castronovo, Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Jeffrey Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of the Harlem Renaissance, 1883– 1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 69–72. James Weldon Johnson, Book of American Negro Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922), 18. In 1906 Braithwaite had lobbied unsuccessfully to find a publisher for an anthology of African-American verse; he handed over the idea to Johnson who, fifteen years later, was able to find a publisher and reap a hefty profit. Braithwaite, who worked on the anthology with Johnson for eighteen months, received no financial recompense. Alain Locke to Charlotte Mason, 25 February 1931, Box 69, Folder 1, ALHU. Braithwaite, “Arcturus,” Phylon, 2 (1941) 2, 136. Braithwaite, “Arcturus,” Phylon, 3 (1942) 1, 35. Braithwaite, The House of Falling Leaves: With Other Poems (Boston: John W. Luce and Company, 1908), 61. Howard Meyer, Colonel of the Black Regiment: The Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967), 162. Meyer, Colonel, 296. Although three volumes of Dickinson’s Poems were published between 1890 and 1892 and sold well, the punctuation marks, syntax, and structure were altered significantly. Her influence expanded when Thomas Johnson restored the texts to their original versions in a three-volume edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Belknap Press, 1955). Even those did not convey with complete accuracy Dickinson’s writing. For an examination of Dickinson’s manuscripts, see Betsy Erkkilia, “The Emily Dickinson Wars,” The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson. Ed. Wendy Martin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–29. Gary Williams, Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 1, 136. Toward the end of his life, Higginson sided with Booker T. Washington’s plan for racial uplift through compliance over the strategy of Du Bois. In 1909 Du Bois invited the then eighty-five-year- old Colonel to attend the organizational meeting of what became the NAACP, but Higginson declined.

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250 Notes to Pages 138–143 35. Braithwaite, “Arcturus,” Phylon, 2 (1942) 2, 190–92. 36. OHCU, 74. For a full discussion of the racial issues that colored Braithwaite’s life and career, see Lisa Szefel, “Encouraging Verse: William S. Braithwaite and the Poetics of Race,” New England Quarterly (March 2001), 32–61. 37. Braithwaite to Arthur Upson, 30 December 1906, Box 19, WBVA. 38. The Book of Georgian Verse appeared in 1908 followed by The Book of Restoration Verse in 1909. Braithwaite completed the final volume, on Victorian verse, in three years but could not get it to print because publishers would not grant copyright permission for crucial selections from Tennyson, Arnold, and other writers. Braithwaite to Temple Scott, Brentano’s, 9 June 1909. Butcher, BR, 250. 39. OHCU, 72. 40. Braithwaite to Arthur Upson, 26 April 1908, Box 19, WBVA. 41. OHCU, 7. 42. OHCU, 7. 43. Quoted in Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 255. 44. According to Braithwaite, the Transcript had a daily circulation of 35,000. The Wednesday and Saturday editions, which contained the Magazine section, drew the most subscribers, with the Saturday issue selling 80,000 copies nationwide. OHCU, 18. 45. Braithwaite, “Poetic Criticism,” The Poetry Journal, 1912, 38–40. 46. Braithwaite, “Poetic Criticism,” 38–40. 47. Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold. Ed. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 306. 48. Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Poetry and Criticism, 247, 258. 49. The Poems and Sonnets of Louise Chandler Moulton (London: Macmillan and Co., 1909), xvii. 50. Reedy to Teasdale, 22 October 1912, STVA. 51. Spingarn, “The New Criticism,” Criticism in America: Its Function and Status (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1924), 11. 52. Braithwaite, “The Function of Poetry in the Twentieth Century” (unpublished mss [ca. 1916]), Box 2, WBHH. Braithwaite, “The Verse of Kendall Banning,” BET, 22 June 1921. 53. Braithwaite, “The Year in Poetry,” Bookman, March 1917. Quoted in BR, Butcher, 35. 54. Braithwaite, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913 (Cambridge: William Braithwaite), x. 55. Braithwaite, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1915 (New York: Gomme & Marshall), xxii. 56. After reading Braithwaite’s admiring 1910 review of The Town Down the River (dedicated to Roosevelt), Robinson sought out Braithwaite in Boston, beginning a long and strong friendship. Louis Coxe, Edwin Arlington Robinson: The Life of Poetry (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 82. In 1920, Braithwaite encouraged Robinson to press Macmillan to issue

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Notes to Pages 143–148 251

57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

a collected edition of his verse. Robinson initially desisted but, when Braithwaite insisted, finally relented. The volume sold well and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. Hagedorn, Robinson, 325. Robinson refused, however, Braithwaite’s scheme to get poets and their work onto film. In the 1920s, Robinson came to the aid of his friend several times. Braithwaite recalled that if it were not for the interventions of Robinson, Bliss Perry, and Robert Hillyer, his financial situation would have been completely untenable. Braithwaite to Edith Mirick, 16 January 1930, Box 17, WBVA. Braithwaite, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1914 (New York: Laurence Gomme), xv, xvii. Braithwaite, “Percy MacKaye and the Nation’s Rebirth,” BET, 12 January 1916. Braithwaite, “Three Poets of the New Age,” BET, 19 December 1914. Teasdale self-published her first book Sonnets to Duse (1907) but did not receive wide acclaim until Helen of Troy appeared in 1911. Rivers to the Sea (1915) and Love Songs (1917) both sold well and solidified her reputation. The first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a work of poetry was given to Teasdale in 1918 for Love Songs. “Notable Books in Brief Review,” The New York Times, 21 October 1917, 51. “Miss Teasdale’s Prize,” The New York Times, 16 June 1918, 55. Earle to Braithwaite, 12 September 1912, Box 6, WBHH. The Lyric Year: One Hundred Poems. Ed. Ferdinand Earle (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912), 132–37. Lyric Year, Earle, 180–88. Matthew Bruccoli, The Fortunes of Mitchell Kennerley: Bookman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1986), 59–60. Poetry (September 1913), 131. Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (New York: Random House, 2001), 76, 78–79. Untermeyer to Abercrombie, 18 February 1913, Box 40, LUUD. Rittenhouse, My House of Life, 250–51. Braithwaite wrote this in a review of Millay’s Renascence and Other Poems, “A Poet of Renascence,” BET, June 1918, 6. Braithwaite, “The Fine Art of An American Poet,” review of Louis Ledoux, The Story of Eleusis, BET, 28 October 1916. Braithwaite, “The Soul of Spoon River,” BET, 1 May 1915; “The ‘Spoon River’ Man Takes Our Measure,” BET, 21 August 1915; “More Hot News from Spoon River,” BET, 29 March 1916. Braithwaite, “Viereck! His Latest Book of Self- Complacent Verse,” BET. Braithwaite, “More Recent Verse,” BET, 1913. Thompson, Frost, 72. Braithwaite, “Robert Frost, New American Poet: His Opinions and Practice—An Important Analysis of the Art of the Modern Bard,” BET, 8 May 1915, 4. W. D. Howells, “Editor’s Easy Chair,” Harper’s Magazine, 131 (June– November 1915), 635.

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252 Notes to Pages 148–152 78. Quoted in Lawrence Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915– 1938 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), 5, 519. 79. OHCU, 26. 80. Letter from Harper’s magazine editor to Braithwaite, 4 May 1914, WBVA; and OHCU, 142–43. 81. OHCU, 85. Wright created the SS Van Dine mystery novels. 82. Some of the requests can be found in Box 12, WBVA. 83. Ledoux had studied with Columbia Professor and poet George Woodberry who, like Braithwaite, viewed the poet as a vessel of inspiration, passion, and emotion, a passive intermediary between earth and the eternal. George Woodberry, The Inspiration of Poetry, 225–30. Braithwaite named one of his sons after Ledoux and the others after the poets he loved: Fiona Lydia Rossetti, Katharine Keats, Edith Carman, Arnold, Francis Robinson. His third son was William, Jr. The sinking of the Lusitania hit Braithwaite especially hard because Charles Lauriat, Jr. had been on board, returning from one of his semi-annual trips to England to buy rare books. OHCU, 160–61. 84. OHCU, 148. 85. OHCU. Braithwaite noted, however, that the professordid not use such gentle words. 86. More to Braithwaite, Braithwaite Papers, Box 13, WBVA. 87. See, for example, Braithwaite to Harold Pulsifer, editor of The Outlook, 4 May 1926, Box 3, WBVA. 88. “Casual Comment,” 1 February 1915, 73, quoted in Williams, Monroe, 7. 89. Percy MacKaye to Braithwaite, 13 January 1915, Braithwaite Papers 8990, Box 9, Folder 195, WBVA. 90. Widdemer, Friends, 39. 91. Markham to Braithwaite, 3 February 1916, Box 12, WBHH. 92. Kline, “William S. Braithwaite,” BET, 30 November 1915. 93. Holley to Braithwaite, 2 December 1915, Box 7, WBHH. 94. OHCU, 108–9. 95. The Poetry Review lasted from May 1916 to February 1917. Lowell had secured five subscribers to pay for the editor’s salary and printing costs. But Braithwaite, stretched thin already with his anthology work and BET duties, could not keep his commitment. He had agreed to the position only because he needed the money to support his wife and their eight children. 96. H. T. Schnittkind, “The Aims of The Stratford Journal” (Autumn 1916), 3–4. The journal was published from 1916 until 1925, though Braithwaite’s work on it was limited. See also Lorenzo Thomas, “W. S. Braithwaite vs. Harriet Monroe: The Heavyweight Poetry Championship, 1917,” in Aldon Nielsen, Reading Race in American Poetry: “An Area of Act” (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 84–106. 97. Edward Butscher, Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 86, 92, 110, 149, 157, 469. 98. Buetscher, Aiken, 216–17. 99. Braithwaite, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1915, xvii.

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Notes to Pages 153–157 253 100. Braithwaite, Anthology . . . 1918, ix, x. 101. Marsh to Monroe, 27 May 1915, HMUC. 102. Braithwaite to Olive Lindsay Wakefield [Vachel’s sister], 18 June 1945, in Butcher, BR, 292. In the letter, Braithwaite also criticized Edgar Lee Masters’s biography of Lindsay: “I don’t think Masters’ cynical temper had either the sympathy or understanding to interpret or portray Vachel’s art or spirit.” 103. Ibid. In an obituary note, Sinclair Lewis described Lindsay as “a sort of Billy Sunday in rhyme.” Miscellaneous Files: Za Lewis, W-Z, 9 January 1932, MFBY. 104. Lindsay, The Congo and Other Poems (New York: Macmillan Co., 1915 [1914]), 3–11. 105. Monroe, “Review of Vachel Lindsay, The Congo and Other Poems,” Poetry, 5 (March 1915) 6, 296–99. 106. Quoted in Walter Daniel, “Vachel Lindsay, W. E. B. Du Bois, and The Crisis,” The Crisis (August–September 1979), 292 [291–93]. For critical readings of the poems, see Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 87–97, Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 140–43. 107. Quoted in Kenny J. Williams, “An Invisible Partnership and an Unlikely Relationship: William Stanley Braithwaite and Harriet Monroe,” Callaloo 10 (Summer 1987), 520. 108. In his Columbia Oral History, Braithwaite indicated that they met after he read the introduction to his 1916 anthology, but their correspondence suggests they met at least two years earlier. OHCU, 106–7. 109. Braithwaite to Mrs. Chenery, 12 April 1926, Box 3, WBVA. 110. OHCU, 124. 111. Quoted in Thompson, Frost, 46. 112. Thompson, Frost, 43. Braithwaite later learned that he had made a fatal error, and remarked in his taped memoirs, “So I introduced them, and I don’t think Frost ever forgave me.” OHCU, 124. 113. Harcourt to Braithwaite, 20 March 1915, Box 7, WBHH. 114. OHCU, 136. 115. Frost to Untermeyer, 22 December 1915, quoted in Thompson, Frost, 64, 535. In the published version of the letter, however, Untermeyer changed “niggers” to “Braithwaite.” Letters to Untermeyer, 19. 116. Frost to John Bartlett, 20 December 1920, Box 5, RFVA. 117. Sterling to H.L. Mencken, 1 March 1919, Sterling, From Baltimore, 54. 118. Sterling, From Baltimore, 55, 254. 119. Untermeyer to H. L. Mencken, 20 December 1918, Reel 64, HMNY. 120. Pound to Henderson, 14 October 1916, Folder 7.14, Box 7, AHUT; Pound included a note “Please destroy this last sheet” at the end of the letter. Pound to Henderson, 16 January 1913, Folder 7.14, Box 7, AHUT; Pound to Henderson, 16 January 1913, Folder 7.14, Box 7, AHUT. Also published in Letters, Nadel: 18, 170, 15,

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254 Notes to Pages 157–162 121. Fletcher to Monroe, 29 January 1917, Box 32, Folder 8, HMUC. 122. Braithwaite, “Five Women and the Muse,” BET, November 1914. 123. Braithwaite, “The Emergence of a Chicago Versifier,” 13 May 1916, and “An American Poet: The Work and the Message of Ezra Pound,” BET. 124. Braithwaite, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1916 (New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916), xiv–v. 125. Henderson to Monroe, June 1916, Box 33, Folder 5, PMUC. By permission of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. 126. Henderson to Monroe, 1 December 1916, Box 33, Folder 6, HMUC. 127. Sandburg to Henderson, 30 December 1916, Folder 9.2, Box 9, AHUT. 128. Henderson to Burton Kline, 6 November 1916, BET. 129. In a 27 November 1917 letter to Henderson, Sandburg granted his support to this scheme, saying “A pathetic personage has been permitted to grow into a fungus mistaken for what it grows on. The popery and kaiserism of it, the snobbery, flunkyism and intrigue, I’m on to it. All I can do is put up with it . . . I can only await a day of reckoning.” Folder 9.3, Box 8, AHUT. 130. Poetry 9 (January 1917): 211–14. 131. Tietjens wrote to Braithwaite: “Harriet Monroe seems to feel that as an associate editor of Poetry I ought not to appear in the magazine of a man who knocks us officially.” She counselled him to see the bigger picture: “The cause of poetry is so much bigger than what any of us can do as individuals that it seems to me rather ridiculous and petty to quarrel among ourselves.” 31 January 1917, WBVA. 132. Kate Buss reviewed the anthology for the Transcript. Amy Lowell wanted to use her connections with the paper’s owner to have the Transcript’s editor replaced, but Braithwaite did not want that. He rejoined the newspaper two months later. OHCU, 32. Further evidence that Braithwaite left his position because of Monroe’s interference with his newspaper duties comes from a letter Agnes Lee wrote to Braithwaite: “What you say about the Transcript reviews is quite a blow. I can hardly believe that Harriet Monroe had anything to do with it, however, unless you know positively . . . ” 26 March 1917, Box 11, WBVA. Ledoux’s advice was instrumental in the decision to return. He wrote, “If your decision to give up your work there is irreparable it will be such a loss to those of us who write poetry—I am thinking selfishly of E. A. and myself—that I had hoped you would have made up your mind to overlook this one disagreeable incident.” Ledoux to Braithwaite, 20 April 1917, Box 11, WBVA.

5 Paring Words, Crafting Images: The Economy of Authorship in the Literary Marketplace 1. Quoted in Jean Gould, Amy: The World of Amy Lowell and the Imagist Movement (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975), 199–200. 2. H. D., “Priapus,” Poetry, 1 (January 1913) 4, 118.

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Notes to Pages 162–163 255 3. Harriet Monroe, “Notes,” Poetry (January 1913), 135. 4. Neil Roberts, A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 133. 5. See, for example, S. Foster Damon, Amy Lowell: A Chronicle with Extracts from Her Correspondence (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966 [1935]) and Gould, Amy. In Amy Lowell (New York: Harold Vinal, 1926), another contemporary, Clement Wood, not exactly her friend, disparaged Lowell’s abilities as a poet and critic, concluding that her death would necessarily be followed by “silence,” not acclaim. Also see Melissa Bradshaw and Adrienne Munich, Selected Poems of Amy Lowell (2002) and Amy Lowell, American Modern. Eds. Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Melissa Bradshaw, “Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self- Commodification,” Victorian Poetry (Spring 2000), 141–69; and Amy Lowell: Selected Poems (New York: Library of America, 2004) with an introduction by Honor Moore. 6. Historians have begun to pay more attention to the market-savvy strategies used by writers, intellectuals, and artists in building an audience. Important contributions to this understanding as it relates to modern poetry include Marketing Modernisms. Eds. Dettmar and Watts; Aaron Jaffe, “Adjectives and the Work of Modernism in an Age of Celebrity,” Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (2003). For more on the relationship between print culture and commerce, see Daniel Borus, Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); James West, American Authors and the Literary Marketplace since 1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); and Christopher Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985). Susan Coultrap-McQuin analyzes the connection between women and noncommercial values such as love, hope, and charity in Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Convictions about the divide between literature and commerce may reflect what some historians of print culture refer to as a belief that mass culture led to “extensive” rather than “intensive” reading. That is, the reading revolution of the nineteenth century led to a focus on quantity rather than quality of reading; instead of lingering over texts, individuals consumed them much as they did toothpaste. For more on this division, see David Paul Nord, “Religious Reading and Readers in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic (Summer 1995), 241–72. Nord also provides a taxonomy of reader response in Chicago during the 1910s and an analysis of the role played by interpretive communities in “Reading the Newspaper: Strategies and Politics of Reader Response, Chicago, 1912–1917,” Journal of Communication (Summer 1995), 66–103. 7. Gould, Amy, 304 and Lesley Lee Francis, “A Decade of ‘Stirring Times’: Robert Frost and Amy Lowell,” New England Quarterly (December 1986), 511 [508–22].

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256 Notes to Pages 163–167 8. Lowell to Fletcher, 26 December 1916, Box 9, ALHH. 9. Wood, Lowell, 16. 10. Lowell wrote this in response to a letter by Howard Cook, an editor at Moffat, Yard & Co. who inquired about the books she read as a child. The series of Rollo books, Grimm’s fairy tales, Hans Christian Anderson, Lord Braebourne, Thackery, Ruskin, and Cooper were among her youthful favorites. As a teenager she relished the works of Dickens, Trollope, Scott, and Charlotte Bronte. Lowell to Cook, 9 August 1919, Box 6, ALHH. 11. Quoted in Walker, Masks Outrageous, 29. 12. Christopher Benfey analyzes Percival Lowell’s interest in Asia and Mars in The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan (New York: Random House, 2003). 13. Louis Untermeyer, From Another World: The Autobiography of Louis Untermeyer (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939), 102. 14. Edna Ferber to Untermeyer, 8 March 1916, Box 4, LUUD. 15. Pound to Henderson, 5 May 1916, Folder 7.14, Box 7, AHUT. 16. Gould, Amy, 34. 17. See Erica Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870– 1940 (Boston: MFA Publishers, 2001). 18. Quoted in Marilee Meyer, Inspiring Reform: Boston’s Arts and Crafts Movement (Wellesley, MA: Harry Abrams, Inc., 1997), 20. 19. Gould, Amy, 78. 20. Lowell to Monroe, 16 February 1914, Box 15, ALHH. Viereck published Lowell’s “The Basket” and “Stupidity” in the October 1914 issue. 21. The “commission arrangement” obligated the author to pay manufacturing and advertising fees. The publisher received a fifteen-percent commission of the proceeds, with the author receiving the remainder. The newly appointed editor at Houghton Mifflin, Ferris Greenslet, who left The Nation to assume the post, cautioned Lowell: “I gather you have no illusions in regard to the possibilities of sale for poetry in this inattentive age.” Greenslet to Lowell, 12 April 1912, Box 11, ALHH. 22. Gould, Amy, 98–99. 23. Amy Lowell, A Dome of Many- Coloured Glass (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 75–77. Lowell switched from Houghton Mifflin to the Macmillan Company, publishing with them from 1916 to 1919, then returned to Houghton Mifflin. Macmillan issued an edition of the collection in 1915. 24. The poets who influenced Lowell’s free verse experiments were Albert Smain, Paul Fort, Henri de Regnier, Remy de Gourmont, and Emile Verhaeren. They served as the subjects for her critically acclaimed and widely read Six French Poets: Studies in Contemporary Literature (1915), which, by 1916, had gone into three printings. 25. A Dome of Many- Coloured Glass went into a second printing in 1915 as Lowell’s popularity increased. Gould, Amy, 105, 110. 26. Louis Untermeyer, The New Era in American Poetry (New York: Henry Holt, 1919), 140–41. 27. Arthur Davison Ficke, “Imagisme,” Poetry, 1 (March 1913) 6, 199 and Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts By An Imagist,” 200–206.

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Notes to Pages 167–172 257 28. See Stanley Coffman’s Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951); Cyrena Pondrom, “H. D. and the Origins of Imagism,” Sagetrieb, 1 (Spring 1985), 73–97; William Pratt, The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963); and Pratt’s translation of Rene Taupin, The Influence of French Symbolism on Modern American (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1985), Timothy Materer, “Make It Sell! Ezra Pound Advertises Modernism,” in Marketing Modernisms (Dettmar and Watt), 17–36. 29. Cyrena Pondrom makes this argument in “H. D.” My interpretation of H. D.’s “Priapus” is indebted to this article. 30. Pound quoted in Selected Letters of John Gould Fletcher. Eds. Lucas Carpenter et al. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996): 13. Daniel Albright discusses synesthesia and modern poetry in “Exhibiting Modernism: A View from the Air,” in Make It New: The Rise of Modernism. Ed. Kurt Heinzelman (Austin: Harry Ransom Center, 2004): 42. 31. Lowell, Tendencies, 261, 268, 280, 297. 32. Ben F. Johnson, Fierce Solitude: A Life of John Gould Fletcher (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 20, 43. 33. Johnson, Fierce Solitude, 35. 34. The books Fletcher published were: The Book of Nature, The Dominant City, Fire and Wine, Fool’s Gold, and Visions of the Evening. 35. Quoted in Johnson, Fierce Solitude, 17. 36. Johnson, Fierce Solitude, 48. 37. Fletcher, Life Is My Song, 68. 38. Fletcher, Life Is My Song, 72, 110. 39. Lowell, Tendencies, 300–302, 327. 40. Lowell to Fletcher, 15 October 1916, Box 9, ALHH. 41. Lowell to Monroe, 15 September 1914, Box 15, ALHH. Lowell insisted the break occurred in large part because she refused to contribute $5,000 to Pound’s endeavor to create a literary journal in France, rather than because of any gaping artistic differences. 42. In a letter to Richard Aldington, she articulated her belief that, “If one plays poetry like politics, one must expect to be treated like a politician. I do not believe people succeed, in the long run, who do not take poetry as religion.” 7 December 1917, Box 1, ALHH. 43. “The New Movement in American Poetry,” The New York Times (7 January 1917). The unsigned author admired Lowell for “extracting beauty to its last drop from reluctant matter.” 44. Quoted in “The High Priestess of Vers Libre,” Literary Digest, 8 April 1916. 45. Walker, Masks Outrageous and Austere, 20. Also see Betsy Erkkila, The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 46. For more information on H. D. and her literary circle, see Georgina Taylor, H. D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers, 1913– 1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Diana Collecott, H. D. and Sapphic Modernism, 1910–1950 (New York: Cambridge University

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258 Notes to Pages 172–174

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

Press, 1999); and Cassandra Laity, H. D. and the Victorian Fin- de- Siècle: Gender, Modernism, Decadence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Walker, Masks Outrageous, 27, 31, 41. Quoted in Walker, Masks Outrageous, 143. Lillian Faderman was the first scholar to analyze homosexual themes in Lowell’s writing. See “Warding Off the Watch and Ward Society: Amy Lowell’s Treatment of the Lesbian Theme,” Gay Books Bulletin 1 (Summer 1979): 23–27 and “Writing Lesbian” in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Perennial, 1998). For more on Lowell’s lesbian identity, her tracing of a female, homosexual lineage for modern poetry, and the use of vers libre to evoke a lesbian erotic sensibility, see Mary Galvin, Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1999), particularly chapter 2, “Imagery and Invisibility: Amy Lowell and The Erotics of Particularity.” Also see Paul Lauter, “Amy Lowell and Cultural Borders,” in Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers. Ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 288–96. Edward O’Brien to Braithwaite [n.d.], Box 9, WBVA. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers (New York: Harcourt Brace), 1936, 91. Lowell to Bryher, 7 January 1919, Box 4, ALHH. Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 191. Lowell to Bryher, 7 January 1919, Box 4, ALHH. Quoted in Walker, Masks Outrageous, 29. Lowell to Aldington, 11 August 1918, Box 1, ALHH. Lowell to Evans, 7 June 1918, Box 8, ALHH. Lowell, however, turned down a 1918 invitation to speak to an all-male organization called “The Writers,” that requested she speak on “The Woman Writer—Professional or Parasite?” A Critical Fable (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922). Quoted in Walker, Masks Outrageous, 19. Rittenhouse continued: “Her phraseology is graphic, arresting, often repulsive, sometimes grotesque, but always individual and frequently beautiful.” Rittenhouse, “A Year’s Harvest in American Poetry,” The New York Times Book Review (28 November 1915), 462. Vita Sackville-West to Lowell, 1921, Box 20, ALHH. Untermeyer, New Era, 144. After reading Untermeyer’s review Lowell initiated a friendship that grew in strength over the years. A gift of some pins prompted a letter from Lowell that revealed her consistent views about beauty. Asked if she would wear the pins in public Lowell replied: “No, my child, one does not spoil a thing of beauty for utilitarian purposes.” She would place them on a mantelpiece to serve their “proper purpose of being a delight to the eye.” Lowell to Untermeyer, 30 December 1915, Box 20, ALHH.

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Notes to Pages 174–179 259 62. See, for example, Philip Ainsworth Means to Lowell, 4 February 1920, Box 16, ALHH. 63. Marshall Schacht, 3 March 1923, Box 20, ALHH. 64. Lowell, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (New York: Macmillan Co, 1914), vii. 65. Lowell to Anderson, 1 February 1916, Box 1, ALHH. 66. Wilkinson to Lowell, 29 January 1919, Box 20, ALHH. 67. Lowell, “A Consideration of Modern Poetry,” North American Review (January 1917). 68. Lowell expressed the same principles in a letter to Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick: “I personally feel that art should be true, sincere, and beautiful, even if sometimes with the beauty of a Gothic grotesque.” Lowell to Sedgwick, 2 April 1914, Box 18, ALHH. 69. Lowell, Sword Blades, viii. 70. Lowell, Sword Blades, xi. In 1893, Pater had declared in his famous conclusion to Renaissance that logic and theories detracted from the power of art and poetry. He deemed as successes those individuals who could “burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy.” The brief moments of splendor offered by beauty promised a curative effect: “While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend.” Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 189. 71. Lowell, Sword Blades, 89–90. 72. Lowell, Sword Blades, 155–57. 73. Lowell, Sword Blades, 42–43. 74. Amy Lowell, Can Grande’s Castle (New York: Macmillan Co., 1918), xiv–v. 75. Lowell, Can, 227–31. 76. Mary Brewerton DeWitt to Lowell, 18 November 1921, Box 7, ALHH. 77. Ellen Carter to Lowell, 15 October 1918, Box 7 and Leighton Rollins to Lowell, 30 September 1921, Box 19, ALHH. 78. Mabel Loomis Todd to Lowell, 4 August 1922, Box 19, ALHH. Todd and her husband were friends with Lowell’s brother Percival. 79. Virginia Livingstone Hunt to Lowell, 21 February 1916, Box 12, ALHH. 80. Moore, Amy Lowell, xvi. 81. Lowell to H. D., 23 November 1915, Box 1, ALHH. 82. Lowell also cited Symbolist Remy de Gourmont’s epistemological stance: “The sole excuse which a man can have for writing is to write down himself, to unveil for others the sort of world which mirrors himself in his individual glass . . . He should create his own aesthetics; and we should admit as many aesthetics as there are original minds, and judge them for what they are and not for what they are not.” Amy Lowell, Some Imagist Poets (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915).

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Notes to Pages 179–182

83. Lowell had encouraged Harriet Monroe to do the same, suggesting that she arrange with the International News Company to stock Poetry in railway book stalls and to issue posters with each issue to place in book shop windows and on newsstands. To prove her methods, Lowell secured subscriptions from acquaintances and local bookstores. Lowell to Monroe, 15 September 1916, 16 September 1916, Box 15, ALHH. 84. In 1917, the publisher wanted to renew the contract for the anthology but, by then, Aldington was fighting in France, overseas mail had been limited, and Lowell felt the series “has done its work.” Lowell to Florence Wilkinson, 29 May 1917, Box 8, ALHH. 85. Lowell to H. D. 13 October 1916, Box 1, ALHH. 86. Ibid. 87. Lowell to Untermeyer, 30 August 1918, Box 20, ALHH. 88. In the same letter Lowell enclosed one hundred dollars as a wedding present to Pound and his wife. Lowell to Pound, 7 April 1914, Box 16, ALHH. 89. Lowell kept her trips to the South at a minimum. “To this day the Southern accent fills me with terror,” she wrote. Born in 1874, the Civil War, although over for nine years, permeated her home. “I was surrounded by stories about it, and feeling in my family still ran high although the war was over. I was brought up on war songs, and the whole thing assumed at once the horror of actual happening and the mysticism of a legend.” Lowell to John Drinkwater, 11 October 1919, Box 7, ALHH. 90. Lowell to Fletcher, 4 February 1920, Box 9, ALHH. 91. Lowell to May Becker, 7 July 1923, Box 3, ALHH. 92. Bishop to Lowell, 22 January 1917, Box 3, ALHH. 93. Katharine Sergeant Angell to Lowell, 28 February 1920, Box 2, ALHH. 94. Lowell to George Brett [an editor at Macmillan’s], n.d., Box 4, ALHH. 95. Lowell appropriated the phrase “at once realistic and romantic” from an essay by Professor Dowden who wrote that Heinrich Heine had worked toward an art that combined the two strains, but never quite achieved this synthesis. Lowell, Tendencies, 142. 96. Lowell, Tendencies, 237. 97. Lowell, Tendencies, 343. 98. Lowell, Tendencies, 80–136, 181, 343. 99. Lowell noted this in the section about Masters, but argued the same thing, in different words, about Sandburg. Tendencies, 157. 100. Lowell, Tendencies, 158. 101. Lowell, Tendencies, 175. 102. Lowell, Tendencies, 174. 103. Lowell, Tendencies, 175. In making this declaration, Lowell had to account for the output of her good friend D. H. Lawrence. Although she admitted that he was also “greatly preoccupied with sex,” she deliberately tried to derail comparison by maintaining that in Lawrence’s work, “there is a certain rapture, sex is treated as a burgeoning of the mental and physical life, he throws over it the transparent and glittering cloak

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Notes to Pages 182–186

104. 105.

106.

107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115. 116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

261

of joy.” Lowell, Tendencies, 174–75. Also see Lowell’s survey of Lawrence’s poetry, “A New English Poet,” The New York Times, 20 April 1919. Lowell, Tendencies, 184. Lowell and Sandburg also commiserated together about public intellectuals who ignored poetic developments. Sandburg wrote to Lowell: “I am ready to serve notice on Walter Lippmann that a booby prize for aimless cleverness is due him. His nostrils are keen for the revolution everywhere except in literary style. In an electric motor age he writes like an early steam engine. He defends or justifies violence and sabotage in the labor movement while gesturing desperately at identical tactics of non- conformity in the sphere of action where new methods of reaching human thought and emotion are being daringly experimented.” Sandburg to Lowell, 2 April 1916, Box 20, ALHH. Lowell, Tendencies, 201–2, 214, 216. Lowell enjoined Sandburg to help her recruit like-minded writers: “What we need in American poetry and American literature is to can the pose, and be honest, and straightforward, and sincere.” 10 December 1917, Box 18, ALHH. Lowell, Tendencies, 218, 222, 232, 261, 268. Quoted in Kilmer, “How Does the New Poetry Differ from the Old?” NYT Magazine (26 March 1916), Lowell to Masters, 20 July 1917, Box 15, ALHH. Monroe, Poet’s Life, 401. Lowell to MacLeish, 25 June 1924, Box 14, ALHH. Lowell to MacLeish, 14 March 1925, Box 14, ALHH. Quoted in Braithwaite, “Miss Amy Lowell on Our Coming Shelleys,” BET, 2 June 1915. Lowell to Irita Van Doren, 16 July 1920, Box 20, ALHH. Lowell expressed her admiration for Arnold in other letters, interviews, and books. Ellery Sedgwick sighed with relief when he read this in Lowell’s 1917 Tendencies in Modern American Poetry: “I consider it quite wonderful . . . that you should be fond of such poets as Arnold.” Sedgwick to Lowell, 31 December 1917, Box 20, ALHH. Joyce Kilmer, “How Does the New Poetry Differ from the Old?” 8. Wood, Amy Lowell, 31. Lowell cited as further proof her work on a biography of Keats. Lowell to Coblentz, 16 April 1924, Box 5, ALHH. She responded to many other reviewers, acclaimed and obscure, nearby and far afield, to further explain and clarify the new poetry. Lowell to Editor, BET, Box 4, ALHH. Lowell to Lowe, 27 October 1919, Box 12, ALHH. Lowell to H. D., 23 November 1915, Box 1, ALHH. Lowell to Anderson, 17 July 1916, Box 2, ALHH. Lowell to Williams, 13 October 1916, Box 21, ALHH. Fletcher, Life Is My Song, 148. Wood, Lowell, 34. Eleanor Belmont, Ada’s Russell associate from her days in the theater, wrote this in her 1957 autobiography. Quoted in Gould, Amy, 177.

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262

Notes to Pages 187–192

6 Romantic Individualism, Radical Politics: Lyric Solidarity in Peace and War 1. Randolph Bourne, Untimely Papers (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1919), 145–6. 2. Wheeler to Untermeyer, 2 June 1914, Box 11, LUUD. 3. Untermeyer, From Another World, 48–49. 4. Untermeyer, From Another World, 46–47. 5. Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 304. 6. Also see Michael Loewy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), and Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990) 7. Waldo Frank to James Oppenheim, 17 August 1916, Box 1, Folder 1, JONY. 8. Milton Cantor, Max Eastman (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1970), 60. 9. Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Living (New York: Harper & Bros., 1948), 434. 10. Untermeyer, From Another World, 8. 11. Untermeyer to Mrs. Asbury, 3 April 1918, Box 9, LUUD. 12. Untermeyer, From Another World, 15, 17, 34, 36. 13. Untermeyer sent a copy of his first book to Viereck, who responded with the condescending reply: “It is my invariable habit to treat minor poets and their verses with kindess. I am glad that I made no exception in your case. Two or three lines in the ‘Ballade’ were truly beautiful . . . There is a certain music in those lines which, no doubt an echo of my own, nevertheless seems sweet to my ears in spite of the fact that some lines are clumsy in construction and lacking in poetic merit.” The animosity between the two men increased as the decade progressed. Viereck to Untermeyer, 20 December 1911, Box 9, LUUD. 14. The committee received 354 submissions. According to Hert’s estimate, The International had 2,500 subscribers plus newsstand sales. Herts to Untermeyer, 25 October 1911, 10 January 1912, Box 5, LUUD. 15. B. W. Huebsch to Louis Untermeyer, 13 March 1911, Box 5, LUUD. 16. Benét to Untermeyer, 19 January 1913, Box 2, LUUD. 17. Charles Hanson Towne to Untermeyer, 1 January 1911, Box 8, LUUD. 18. Wood to Untermeyer, 17 May 1913 and 2 May 1913, Box 10, LUUD. 19. Sicher to Untermeyer, 26 July 1918, Box 8, LUUD. 20. G.A. Peckham to Untermeyer, 25 April 1912, Box 7, LUUD. 21. Untermeyer, From Another World, 255. 22. Untermeyer, From Another World, 37–39; Untermeyer, Bygones, 31. 23. Quoted in Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, 559. 24. Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Living (New York: Harper & Bros., 1948), 292. 25. Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 269.

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Notes to Pages 193–197 263 26. Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 301, 312. 27. Eastman to Untermeyer, 12 September 1913, and April 1914, Box 4, LUUD. 28. Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 32, 313. 29. Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 11, 135, 148, 152. 30. Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, 193–97. 31. Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, 174–77, 158–60, 161. 32. Gold to Untermeyer, [n.d., ca. 1916], Box 4, LUUD. 33. Gold to Untermeyer, [n.d., ca. 1916], Box 4, LUUD. 34. James Oppenheim, The Mystic Warrior (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921). 35. Untermeyer, From Another World, 81–2. 36. James Oppenheim, Songs for the New Age (New York: The Century Co., 1914), 10, 52. Oppenheim dedicated the book to, among others, Louis and Jean Untermeyer, Clement Wood, and Dr. Beatrice Hinkle, his psychoanalyst and translator of Carl Jung’s The Psychology of the Unconscious. 37. Oppenheim, “Report on the Planet, Earth,” War and Laughter (New York: The Century Co., 1916), 54. 38. Untermeyer to Mrs. Asbury, 3 April 1918, Box 9, LUUD. 39. Gladys Baker to James Oppenheim, [n.d., ca. 1924], Box 1, Folder 1, JONY. 40. Beverley Kaye to James Oppenheim, 10 June 1930, Box 1, Folder 2, JONY. 41. Oliver Jenkins to James Oppenheim, 19 February 1923, Box 1, Folder 2, JONY. 42. Edna Ferber and Oppenheim bought Keller a copy of The Golden Bird with a braille inscription. Keller to Oppenheim, 7 January 1924, Box 1, Folder 2, JONY. 43. Edward Booth to Oppenheim, 11 November 1917, Box 1, Folder 1, JONY. 44. Braithwaite made this remark about Oppenheim’s 1914 Songs for the New Age in a 28 May 1921 Transcript review of the poet’s verse autobiography The Mystic Warrior (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921). 45. Braithwaite, “Three Poets of a New Age,” BET, 1914. 46. Braithwaite, “Percy MacKaye,” 12 January 1916. 47. Braithwaite, “Review of Louis Untermeyer’s Challenge,” BET, 26 September 1914; and Braithwaite’s review of Untermeyer’s 1919 anthology The New Era in American Poetry in BET, 5 April 1919. 48. Untermeyer, Bygones, 49, and From Another World, 209. 49. The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer. Ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1963), 8. 50. Letters of Robert Frost, 292. 51. Letters of Robert Frost, 52. Carl Sandburg also warned Untermeyer against such writing: “One cannot be a journalist and know the eternal things!” Sandburg to Untermeyer, July 1920, Box 7, LUUD. 52. Untermeyer, From Another World, 24.

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264

Notes to Pages 198–204

53. Louis Untermeyer, —And Other Poets (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1916), vii. 54. Nan Apothrecker to Untermeyer, 9 January 1913, Box 1, LUUD. 55. The Letters of Robert Frost, 5. 56. Sandburg to Untermeyer, 8 June 1916, Box 7, LUUD. 57. Christopher Kamrath, Randolph Bourne’s Malcontents: Cultural Politics, Democratic Practice, and the Domestication of War, 1917–1918 (New York: Routledge, 2009). When Bourne made a call for discriminating criticism that linked poetry to the “larger movement of ideas and social movements and the peculiar intellectual and spiritual color of the times,” Monroe shot back with a warning that “Movements pass, but beauty endures.” For the exchange of ideas, see Monroe, Poet’s Life, 407–11. 58. Lew Sarrett to Untermeyer, 18 November 1921 and 10 December 1921, Box 8, LUUD. 59. Willard Wattles to Untermeyer, 10 May 1917, Box 10, LUUD. 60. Untermeyer, From Another World, 330–31. 61. Frost to John Bartlett, 8 December 1913, Box 5, RFVA. 62. John, Best Years, 138, 153. 63. Untermeyer, The New Era In American Poetry (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1919), 9–10. 64. Untermeyer, New Era, 11–12. 65. Untermeyer, New Era, 14. 66. Aiken to Untermeyer, 22 December 1919, 9 January 1921, Box 1, LUUD. 67. Aiken to Untermeyer, 20 February 1923, Box 1, LUUD. 68. Sandburg to Untermeyer, December 1916, Box 7, LUUD. 69. Sandburg to Untermeyer, January 1920, Box 7, LUUD. 70. Fletcher to Untermeyer, 24 November 1919, Box 4, LUUD. 71. Markham to Untermeyer, 6 September 1921, Box 6, LUUD. 72. Max Eastman, Colors of Life: Poems and Songs and Sonnets (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918), 13, 99. 73. Cantor, Eastman, 71. Social critic Hutchins Hapgood (whose favorite term was “the real thing”) as one scholar has noted, “was more determined to open minds than enact public policy.” Robert Dowling, “Hutchins Hapgood,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 303, 193–95. 74. Lowell, Tendencies, 158, 175. 75. Braithwaite, “The Fine Art of An American Poet,” BET, 28 October 1916. 76. Monroe, “The Poetry of War,” (September 1914), 237. 77. Monroe, “The Poetry of War,” (September 1914), 238–39. 78. Monroe, “Poetry and War,” Poetry (November 1914), 83. 79. Monroe, “Various Views,” Poetry (June 1916), 144. 80. Monroe, “New Banners,” Poetry (August 1916), 251–53. 81. For an analysis of war poetry, particularly verse composed by members of the IWW and Woman’s Peace Party, and its effect on public opinion, see Van Wienan, Partisans and Poets. 82. For more on the use of coercion and propaganda in the buildup to the U.S. entry in the war, see Christopher Capozzola, “Uncle Sam Wants You!” World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Notes to Pages 204–207 265 83. Johnson, Viereck, 23. The Fatherland changed names over the course of the war to Viereck’s then, after America’s entry into the war, to The American Monthly. The content likewise changed to indicate the weekly magazine’s support to American soldiers and efforts. 84. Neil Johnson, George Sylvester Viereck: German-American Propagandist (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959): 36–42. For more on German espionage activities in America during the Great War, see Jules Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany’s Secret War in America, 1914– 1917 (New York: Algonquin Books, 1989). 85. Neil Johnson’s biography of Viereck and Phyllis Keller’s States of Belonging provide a full account of his activities as a propagandist. Keller’s book rely on Freudian psychology to examine Viereck’s influences and motivations, and do not discuss his literary endeavors. 86. “Members of Embassy and Prominent Germans Named in Striking Campaign to Win over American Thought,” Washington Post, 15 August 1915, 2–3; “Viereck Got $100,000 from the Germans,” The New York Times (26 July 1918), 1. 87. Originally published in The Nautilus, “Outwitted” was reprinted in CO, October 1914, 353. In Markham’s first book of poetry after the war ended Gates of Paradise and Other Poems (Doubleday, Page & Co., 1920), he evinced his anti-war stance: “I am a man of peace: War, in general, is one of the huge madnesses of men, and it can be cured only by the divine forces of love and justice.” 88. Keller, States, 103. 89. Letter dated 19 December 1916, EGLC. 90. In the decades preceding World War I, German-Americans were in the vanguard, promoting progressive social legislation and new ideas in philosophy and literature. They constructed a national network of newspapers and cultural societies as a forum to discuss such currents. In 1914 there were over eight million German-Americans in the United States. Over two million belonged to the German-American Alliance, which was formed in 1901 to help newly arrived immigrants assimilate into America. When the United States entered the conflict in May 1917, such an insubmissive posture became increasingly difficult to maintain. The German-American press was demolished and German-language instruction was slashed. For more information, see Erik Kirschbaum, The Eradication of German Culture in the United States, 1917–1918 (Stuttgart: Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz Akademischer Verlag, 1986) and Charles Johnson, Culture at Twilight: The National German-American Alliance, 1901–1918 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). 91. Viereck published Songs of Armageddon and Other Poems with Mitchell Kennerley in 1916. The collection included paeans to “Wilhelm II, Prince of Peace,” “The Iron Chancellor,” and “Deutschland, Deutschland, Land of All Lands.” 92. Braithwaite, “War Poems and Otherwise,” The Poetry Journal (May 1916), 197–99. It helped, of course, that Viereck’s friends, Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff and Edmund Brown, served on the editorial board. Because Braithwaite had overextended himself, writing bi-weekly reviews for the

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266 Notes to Pages 207–211

93.

94. 95.

96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104.

105. 106.

BET and compiling an annual anthology, the enterprise folded after only five issues. Quoted in “Recent Poetry,” CO, December 1918, 397. Monroe applauded Aiken’s refusal to enlist in the military under this Class II exemption. Under the Work- or-Fight Law, Aiken argued, poetry could not be classified as a nonproductive vocation along with billiard-making or speculation on theater tickets. With the help of his publisher, the Four Seas Company, Aiken presented formal evidence to the draft board that, even though he did not have regular hours of employment or an annual salary, he nevertheless was engaged in regular occupation as a writer. See E. R. Brown to Aiken, 29 July 1918, CAVA. See Van Wienen, Partisans and Poets. For a discussion of The Masses trial and useful bibliography, see Elliott Parker, “The Government’s War against Dissent: The Masses and the First Amendment,” AEJMC Conference Papers, 94 (August 1996). Letters of Robert Frost, 55. Untermeyer, From Another World, 201, 189–90. The two had become friends after Mencken wrote a letter, rife with his usual barbed wit, disapproving of Untermeyer’s first book of poems. A writer and book reviewer at the Baltimore Sun as well as co- editor of Smart Set, Mencken in 1911 had begun scouting out poetic talent. His own debut came with the publication of Ventures into Verse, a collection of ballads, rondeaux, quatrains, and odes. It was Mencken who introduced Untermeyer to the work of lyric poet Sara Teasdale. “Some of her lyrics come very near It,” Mencken wrote. Oppenheim to Seward Collins, editor of The Bookman, 13 January 1930, Box 1, Folder 1, JONY. Oppenheim to Arthur Spingarn, 11 December 1916, Box 2, Folder 1, JONY. Annette Rankin to Oppenheim, 22 August 1917, Box 2, Folder 1, JONY. Lowell to Oppenheim, 17 September and 20 September 1917, Box 1, Folder 4, JONY. Viereck reported this figure in a letter to Edmund Wheeler, dated 21 May 1918. Reprinted in Viereck’s American Weekly, July 1918, 1. “Citizens Want Viereck Ousted,” Washington Post (11 August 1918), 2; “NYAC Expels Viereck,” The New York Times (16 August 1918), 12. Viereck’s wife Margaret fainted after being stripped twice by British naval and military authorities, then left alone naked for several hours while en route to Berlin in 1916. “British Disrobed Her,” Washington Post, 1 March 1916, 2. Hagedorn, “Portrait of a Rat,” New York Evening Sun (22 November 1917). Despite his denunciation of German belligerence, Hagedorn, who had never been able to support himself financially, continued to receive $25,000 annually from his father in Berlin. Keller, States, 231. Gould, Amy, 136. Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology. Eds. Lowell, et al. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 77–81.

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Notes to Pages 211–215 267 107. Gould, Amy, 261, 268, 270. 108. Sir Edgar Speyer had to leave England for refusing to take the government’s loyalty oath. He had helped to finance the Scott Antarctic expedition and contributed financially to Lord Asquith’s premiership and did not believe he needed to demonstrate loyalty with an oath. OHCU, 118. 109. Lowell to Fletcher, 16 July 1917, Box 9, ALHH. 110. Lowell to Aldington, 7 December 1917, Box 1, ALHH. 111. Lowell to Hagedorn, 21 April 1917, Box 10, ALHH. 112. Lowell never published these poems in book form because, by the time they were ready for press in 1919, she feared the jingoism would cause her embarrassment. At the time, however, she regarded them fondly. In a letter to Sara Teasdale, Lowell wrote, “I regard these poems . . . as the best part of my ‘bit’ for my country.” Damon, Amy Lowell, 719. 113. “Poetry Society May Drop Viereck,” Washington Post, 28 June 1918, 9. 114. Viereck reprinted the exchange of articles in his magazine, renamed again Viereck’s American Weekly on 10 July 1918. 115. Viereck to Wheeler, 21 May 1918, quoted in Viereck’s American Weekly, July 1918. Letter dated 3 June 1918, Viereck’s American Weekly, July 1918. 116. Wheeler to Viereck, 7 June 1918, quoted in Viereck’s American Weekly, July 1918. 117. Quoted in Hamilton’s unpublished biography of Markham, 288–89, FHLC. 118. “May Drop Viereck,” 9. 119. “May Drop Viereck,” 9. 120. Viereck to Wheeler, 19 June 1918, in Viereck’s American Weekly, July 1918. 121. “Viereck Expelled By Authors’ League,” The New York Times, 26 July 1918, 20. 122. Lowell to Wheeler, 15 July 1918, ALHH. 123. Lowell to Wheeler, 23 July 1918, ALHH. 124. Believing that Braithwaite would be sympathetic despite his support of the Allied war effort, O’Sheel wrote, asking for help: “I suppose that your sentiments with regard to the War are all that mine are not, but you cannot approve of my economic assassination because of my political ideas . . . I am powerless to obtain justice. My family has had to resort to the charity of my wife’s Mother, and I have money enough to keep starvation away for just one month. Can you suggest anything to me in the publishing way?” O’Sheel to Braithwaite, 4 June 1916, Box 14, WBHH. 125. When Rittenhouse failed to respond, O’Sheel circulated this letter to PSA members. O’Sheel to Rittenhouse, 31 October 1918, Box 14, ALHH. 126. Untermeyer and his wife Jean questioned Lowell’s tactics in private. At dinner one evening, Untermeyer joked about her poem “The Cornucopia of Red and Green Comfits” published in the November 1917 issue of

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268 Notes to Pages 215–218

127. 128. 129.

130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

the Independent, which repeated claims that German aviators delivered sweets laced with poison to the famished children in Bar-le-Duc. Jean remarked, “You and the magazine weren’t exactly upholding the Court of Reason, Amy,” to which Lowell hysterically responded: “You don’t know what you’re talking about . . . Times are changing—we’re all of us in danger.” Quoted in Gould, Amy, 269–70. After O’Sheel left, he was suspended from the Society. Viereck to Elmer Gertz, 25 April 1935. EGLC. Viereck to Bynner, 1918, BYHH. Letters from the Witter Bynner Papers, bMS AM 1891, are reprinted by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, and The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, Santa Fe, New Mexico. The acquaintance between Viereck and Bynner began when they exchanged books in 1907. Viereck had written in a painfully frank manner to Bynner: “I have never realized why some people object to my free form until I found something like it in your book.” Their friendship prevailed over differences in literary opinion. Viereck to Bynner, 7 August 1907, BYHH. Lowell to Rittenhouse, 25 November 1919, ALHH. Rittenhouse to Lowell, 8 December 1919, ALHH. O’Sheel to Rittenhouse, 31 October 1918, SSVA. Harriet Monroe, “The Viereck Incident,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 13 (February 1919) 5, 265–67. Isaac Goldberg, “Viereck Redivivus,” Stratford Monthly, Autumn 1924, 183–86.

Epilogue 1. Ezra Pound, Poems, 1918–1921 (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921), 62. 2. Christopher A. Thomas, The Lincoln Memorial and American Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), xxvii–xxviii, 156–57; Adam Fairclough, “Civil Rights and the Lincoln Memorial: The Censored Speeches of Robert R. Moton (1922); and John Lewis (1963), Journal of Negro History, 82 (Autumn 1997) 4, 408–16, “Harding Dedicates Lincoln Memorial, Blue and Gray Join,” The New York Times (31 May 1922), 1–2, Scott Sandage, “A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory,” Journal of American History, 80 (June 1993) 1, [136–67]. 3. Markham continued to compose poems for civic occasions, including the Boston Tercentenary in 1930, where he recited his work before an audience of 10,000. See Jane Holtz Kay, Lost Boston (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006 [Houghton Mifflin, 1980]), 285. 4. Harriot Monroe, “The Great Renewal,” Poetry, 324. 5. Lowell to Seldes, 1 November 1922, Box 18, ALHH. 6. Lowell to Richard Aldington, 4 April 1923, Box 23, ALHH. 7. Lowell to Archibald MacLeish, 14 March 1925, Box 14, ALHH. 8. Golding, From Outlaw to Classic, 7–18.

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Notes to Pages 219–221 269 9. William Carlos Williams, “Supplement,” Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, 5 (July 1919) 5: 25–32. 10. Widdemer added that this attitude had solidified by the 1940s when “The reading public, cowed by now, bowed its head and—in majority— stopped reading it while meekly admiring.” Widdemer, Friends, 43. 11. Wendy Steiner, Venus In Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth Century Art (New York: The Free Press, 2001), xv. Also see Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty (New York: Open Court, 2003) and Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward A New Aesthetics. Ed. Bill Beckley (New York: Allworth Press, 2001). 12. The Guild issued annual anthologies that retailed for one nickel. Anna Hempstead Branch, Smith Alumnae Quarterly (November 1920) 57–59. Widdemer, Friends, 208–11. 13. FHLC, 387. 14. Parisi, Dear Editor, 12, 187. 15. The announcement appeared in the October 1948 issue of Poetry, 31. 16. George Sylvester Viereck, “Hitler, The German Explosive,” The American Monthly (October 1923), 235–38. 17. Gertz, Odyssey, 272–75. 18. Widdemer, Golden Friends, 52–53. 19. Untermeyer wrote the introduction to each of the volumes. It proved to be the largest publishing venture undertaken during the war, with approximately 122 million Editions for the Armed Services were distributed to soldiers over the course of four years. Untermeyer, Bygones, 147–54. John Hench examines the U.S. government’s publishing initiatives during and after World War II in Books As Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1910). 20. Lowell to Jeanette Marks, 24 January 1918, Box 14, ALHH. 21. Margaret Homans investigates Lowell’s affinity for Keats as it influenced her sexuality and identity in “Amy Lowell’s Keats: Reading Straight, Writing Lesbian,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14 (2001) 2: 319–51. 22. “Keats + G525,” Time (2 March 1925). 23. Aiken to Untermeyer, 28 May 1925, LUUD. 24. Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (NY Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 247. 25. Braithwaite, “The Negro in Literature,” The New Negro: An Interpretation. Ed. Alain Locke (A. and C. Boni, 1925), 208. Braithwaite wrote to Nella Larson about a project anthology of black poetry: “This work will stun the country into a recognition and acceptance of the spiritual and cultural equality of the Race . . . [it] will do more than all the politics and propaganda that has been in action for a generation towards the solution of the so- called ‘problem.’ There is no problem where the spirit is concerned, where Beauty burns away all barriers.” Overwhelmed by the bankruptcy of B. J. Brimmer in 1928 Braithwaite never finished this anthology and the “Braithwaites” ended for similar reasons with the 1929 edition. Butcher, BR, 279–80, 284, Braithwaite to Miss Robinson, 3 January 1930. See Locke’s letter to Charlotte Mason, Box 69, Folder 1, ALHU.

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270

Notes to Pages 222–223

26. James Rorty, “The Conquerer,” Poetry, 14 (September 1919 ) 6, 306–7, James Rorty, “California Dissonance,” in Braithwaite, Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1921 (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1921), 136–38, and James Rorty, “The Bell Ringers,” “End of Farce,” Poetry Society of America Anthology (New York: Poetry Society of America, 1969 [1946]), 185–86. James Rorty included a chapter “Beauty and the Ad-Man” about the exploitation of beauty in the advertising industry in Our Master’s Voice–Advertising (New York: John Day, 1934). 27. Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and Wild Orchids,” in Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 35–36 [31–50]. Also see Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.

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Index

Abbott, Leonard, 52, 97, 206 Abendpost (Chicago German daily), 54 Abercrombie, Lascelles, 145 Adams, Henry, 56 Addams, Jane, 40, 44, 47 Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (Lindsay), 3–4 African Americans, 8–10, 15, 17, 42, 51, 71, 120, 129–31, 134–39, 148, 150, 153–55, 157–58, 214, 217, 233n60, 243n55, 248n18, 249n26,28 female poets, 131 and hypermasculinity, 129–31 reading practices of, 8–10 and Whitman, 51 Aiken, Conrad, 47, 129, 151–53, 201, 207, 210, 215–16, 221, 247n142 Alden, Raymond, 123 Aldington, Richard, 124, 168, 174, 179, 185, 211, 218, 257n42, 260n84 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey (1836–1907), 24–25, 29–30, 33–34, 75, 104, 138, 140 Alighieri, Dante, 102, 116, 137 Altgeld, John Peter, 4, 45 American Academy of Arts and Letters, 36 An American Anthology (Stedman), 42 American Magazine, 3–4, 23, 40, 42–43 American poetry “renaissance” (1910–1920), 1–19 and audience, See audience and morality, See morality and the New Critics, See New Critics poetry as ignored, 1–3, 11, 14–15 reception of, 6–7, 10–11, 13–19, 24–25 and race, See racism roots of, 12–13 and women, See gender See also the “Gospel of Beauty” Anderson, Margaret, 175 anthologies, 2, 6, 10, 15, 17–18, 25–26, 42, 50, 63, 74, 81, 86, 106, 110, 123, 129–30, 132, 140–43, 145, 148–60, 167–69, 171, 178–79, 184–85, 189, 197, 199–201, 216, 220–22, 235n89

and Braithwaite, 130, 140–43, 145, 148–60 purpose of, 129 and Rittenhouse, 132 The Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913, 141 Anthony, Susan B., 132 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 40 Aristotle, 4, 9 Armory Show Exhibit, 85–86 Arnold, Matthew, 8, 17, 21–23, 27, 32–33, 35, 55, 90, 136, 140–42, 151, 184–85, 200 Arts and Crafts movement, 165 The Atlantic Monthly, 1, 23–25, 30–31, 33, 36–37, 39–43, 53, 55, 61, 65, 111, 155–56, 163 audience, 1, 6–7, 10–11, 13–14, 18–19, 29, 33–34, 37–38, 62–64, 66, 69, 72–73, 81, 86, 91, 93, 102–03, 106–14, 122–29, 142, 147, 153–54, 163, 177, 180–81, 184, 201, 216–17, 221, 241n21, 243n55, 244n69, 255n6, 268n3 Austen, Jane, 44 Author’s Club, 25 avant-garde poets, 14, 17, 46, 128, 146, 207 Baker, Gladys, 195 Baker, Ray Stannard, 42–43 Barker, Elsa, 92 Barney, Natalie, 172 Baudelaire, Charles, 12, 87, 97, 169, 228n42, 235n101 Bebel, August, 87 Bellamy, Edward, 73 Benét, William Rose, 54–55, 118, 185, 190 Bennett, Gwendolyn, 131 Bennett, Paula, 11 Bergson, Henri, 51, 104, 167–169, 175 Berman, Marshall, 12 Bible, 79, 110 Bierce, Ambrose, 64–65, 72–73 Bishop, John Peale, 180–81 blacklisting, 204–16 Bollingen Prize controversy (1949), 223

271

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272

Index

“The Bombardment” (1914) (Lowell), 180 The Bookman, 54 Boston Authors Club, 138, 142 Boston Evening Transcript, 2, 43, 88, 103, 113, 140, 144, 148–50, 155, 159–60, 179, 184, 250n44, 254n132, 263n44 The Boston Globe, 1, 135 Bourne, Randolph, 122, 187, 198, 207, 209 A Boy’s Will (Frost), 2, 148 Bradley, William Aspenwall, 91–92 Braque, Georges, 12 Braithwaite, William Stanley, 2, 9–10, 17–18, 42–43, 53–54, 101, 103, 113, 127–30, 134–60, 173, 175, 178, 185, 189, 196–97, 202, 207, 211, 218, 221–22 and anthologies, 141–43, 148–60 biography of, 134–35 and Frost, 156–57 The House of Falling Leaves, 140 and Keats, 127–28 and Lowell, 155–56 Lyrics of Life and Love, 139–40 and Monroe, 157–58, 160 and Oppenheim, 196 photograph of, 139 on poetry, 141–42 The Poetry Review, 151 and Pound, 157 rejections of work of, 42–43 and Sandburg, 158–59 as typesetter, 127 Brawley, Benjamin, 136–37 Brooks, Van Wyck, 15, 35, 96, 161, 208 Brownell, William, 104 Browning, Robert, 10, 51, 55, 80, 102, 129, 144, 146 Bryan, William Jennings, 56, 67, 73, 132, 135 Bryant, William Cullen, 51, 59, 118 Burns, Robert, 69, 111–12, 123, 128 Burton, Richard, 42 Bushnell, Horace, 5 Bynner, Witter, 47, 96, 98, 104, 106, 109, 124, 196, 199, 215, 220, 268n129 California Magazine, 66 Can Grande’s Castle (1917) (Lowell), 178 The Candle and the Flame (1912) (Viereck), 147 Cannell, Skipwith, 125

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capitalism, 3, 6, 15, 21–22, 25, 28–29, 45, 51, 60–61, 71, 73, 143, 192, 203, 234n81 Carleton, Will, 63 Carlyle, Thomas, 8, 78, 82 Carman, Bliss, 134 Carnegie, Andrew, 3 Cather, Willa, 124 Cawein, Madison, 64, 99, 161 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia (1876), 40 The Century Dictionary, 121 The Century Magazine, 1, 23–25, 28, 31, 33–34, 36–40, 42–43, 53–56, 61, 65, 68, 89–90, 163, 166, 190, 192–93, 200 See also Scribner’s Cézanne, Paul, 169 Challenge (1914) (Untermeyer), 196–97 Chatfield-Taylor, H. C., 112–13, 121 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 9 Chesnutt, Charles, 135 Chicago American, 39 Chicago Evening Post, 2, 100, 117, 190, 193 Chicago Poems (Sandburg), 120–21, 176, 182, 198 Chicago Tribune, 39, 112 The Children of the Night (1897) (Robinson), 52, 55–56 Christianity, 4, 10, 50, 60, 66, 74, 79–80, 125, 132, 137, 192 Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) (Rauschenbusch), 4 “Chromo-Civilization” (Godkin), 22 City Beautiful Movement, 16 Civil War, 21, 23, 33, 138, 217, 260n89 class, 28–30, 62–63, 96–97 See also middle class Cleveland, Grover, 25, 65, 74 Coblentz, Stanton, 184, 261n117 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 28, 100, 142 “Columbian Ode” (Monroe), 111 The Confessions of a Barbarian (Viereck), 95 The Congo and Other Poems (Lindsay), 153–54, 180 Copeland, Charles Townsend, 124 Cotkin, George, 13 Cowley, Malcolm, 185 Crane, Hart, 202 Crane, Stephen, 33, 108 Crisis monthly magazine, 10 Culture and Anarchy (1869) (Arnold), 22 cummings, e. e., 125, 184

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Index Current Literature, 2, 86, 93, 96–98, 102, 108–09, 212 Current Opinion, 99, 101, 108–09, 204 Daly, Thomas, 144, 146 Darnton, Robert, 7 Darrow, Clarence, 113 Darwin, Charles, 14, 23, 44, 103 Debs, Eugene V., 135 Defence of Poetry (1819) (Shelley), 5 Dell, Floyd, 44, 96–97, 105, 117, 192, 208, 241n21, 242n30 democracy, 3–4, 6, 8–10, 15, 17, 22–23, 28–29, 44, 49–52, 73, 80–81, 87, 98, 100, 104, 110–12, 120–21, 124, 133, 135–36, 146, 151, 179, 188, 196, 200–01, 208, 211, 216, 223 Des Imagistes (1914) (Pound), 168–69, 178 Dewey, John, 124, 192, 241n21 The Dial, 42, 50, 120, 123, 138, 140, 150, 184, 218, 246n123 Dickens, Charles, 44 Dickinson, Emily, 81, 138, 249n33 dissent, 204–16 Dodd, Lee Wilson, 30 Dodge, Mabel, 8, 85–86, 96, 173, 241n21 Dole, Nathan Haskell, 45, 128, 155 A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (Lowell), 155, 166–67, 256n23,25 Doolittle, Hilda (H. D.), 116, 162, 166–68, 172, 179, 183, 185 Dostoevski, Fydor, 170 Dreiser, Theodore, 33, 65, 123 Du Bois, W. E. B., 9–10, 47, 127, 130, 136, 154, 221, 233n60, 249n34 Dubedat, Louis, 46 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 42 Duncan, Isadora, 40 Duse, Eleanor, 40 Earle, Ferdinand, 144 Eastman, Max, 18–19, 47, 97, 187–88, 191–94, 202, 230n59 Edgett, Edwin, 160 Eliot, Charles, 24 Eliot, George, 44 Eliot, T. S., 1, 47, 116, 120, 125, 152, 163, 183 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 5–6, 23, 48, 51, 78, 81–82, 98, 138, 192 empathy, 3, 11, 46, 84, 146, 194, 219 Engels, Friedrich, 87 Enjoyment of Poetry (Eastman), 193

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Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (1913) (Mackail), 123 Espionage Act (1917), 207–08 Evans, Donald, 174 Farm Ballads (Carleton), 63 The Fatherland newspaper (Viereck), 204, 210 Fauvism, 12 Ficke, Arthur Davison, 70–71, 96, 100, 114, 122, 167, 246n129 “Fireside Poets,” 51 First Love: A Lyric Sequence (Untermeyer), 190 1st South Carolina Volunteers (Union), 138 Fitzgerald, Alexander, 76 Fletcher, John Gould, 157, 169, 179, 186, 201–02 Flint, F. S., 179 Flower, Roswell, 28 Fornaro, Carlo de, 110–11 Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workman and Labourers of The Golden Treasury (1861), 129 Fort, Paul, 177 Fortnightly Review, 40 The Forum, 102 Frank, Waldo, 97, 188 Franklin, Ben, 78, 124 Freeman, Joseph, 13 French Impressionism, 167–70 French Symbolists, 167–69 Freud, Sigmund, 86, 97, 169, 194, 265n85 From Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (1903) (Carman), 134 Frost, Robert, 1–2, 37, 47, 108, 116, 128–29, 145, 147–48, 151, 156–57, 180–81, 196–97, 199–201, 208–09 and University of Michigan, 199 Fuller, Loie, 40 Fuller, Margaret, 5 A Game At Love and Other Plays (Viereck), 88–89 Garrett, C. H., 79 Gauguin, Paul, 169 gender, 7–8, 11, 17, 26, 30–31, 36, 62, 127–36, 163–65, 173, 186, 199, 227n31, 248n10 “The Genteel Tradition” (Santayana), 12 German Social Democratic Party, 87 Gilded Age, 25, 62 The Gilded Age (1873), 66

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274

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Gilder, Richard Watson (1844–1909), 24–25, 28–30, 33–34, 36, 39, 43, 55–56, 89–91, 104, 124, 174, 192, 233n51 Ginn and Company, 127 Glasglow, Ellen, 33 Godkin, E. L., 22 Gold, Mike, 194 Goldman, Emma, 207 Gomme, Lawrence, 149 Gorky, Maxim, 84 “the Gospel of Beauty,” 3–4, 14, 122, 129, 160, 163, 222–24 “The Gospel of Wealth,” 3 Great Britain, 1, 8, 22, 25, 44, 61, 90, 102, 104, 106, 164, 167, 174, 189, 204–05, 210, 245n97, 266n103 Great Britain, 1871–1878 (Ruskin), 61 Great Depression, 222 Greenwich Village, 14, 85–86, 92–93, 96–97, 173–74, 191 Griswold, Rufus, 26, 50 Guiney, Louise Imogen, 133, 248n16 Guiterman, Arthur, 105 Haiku, 18 Hall, David, 47 Hampton’s Magazine, 39–40 Hapgood, Hutchins, 96, 264n73 Hardy, Thomas, 90, 172 Harlem Renaissance, 130, 221 Harper’s Weekly, 1, 24, 34, 37–38, 43, 53, 70, 98, 148, 155, 235n101 Harris, Thomas Lake, 60 Harrison, Hubert, 136 Harte, Walter, 61 Harvey, Alexander, 98, 242n33 Havel, Hippolyte, 187, 222 Haymarket affair (1886), 4, 45 Hearst, William Randolph, 38–39, 67, 69, 73, 87, 220 Heine, Heinrich, 28, 189, 260n95 Henderson, Alice Corbin, 52, 119–21, 123, 129, 153, 157–60, 203, 218, 220, 230n57, 246n127, 254n129 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 138, 140 Hitler, Adolf, 220 Hochman, Barbara, 51 Holland, Josiah, 24 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 23, 30, 51, 55 Hope, John, 9 Houghton Mifflin, 170, 179 Hovey, Richard, 133 How The Other Half Lives, 15

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Howe, Julia Ward, 138 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 138 Howells, William Dean, 33, 42, 123, 140, 232n36 Hueffer, Ford Madox, 179, 247n142 Hugo, Victor, 60 Hulme, T. E., 128, 167 Huneker, James, 88 Huntington, Collis P., 75 Hurd, Charles E., 140 The Idiot (1868) (Dostoievski), 5 idealism, 12–13, 15, 21, 32, 46–47, 54, 92, 120, 123, 136–37, 143, 149, 182, 192, 201–02, 209, 212 imagination, 3, 5–6, 11, 14, 19, 26, 35, 47–48, 50, 56, 82–83, 101, 119, 124, 137, 146, 157, 164–65, 167, 182, 187, 202–03, 208–09, 231n5 Imagism, 18, 107, 117–18, 124, 126, 166–71, 175, 179–80, 183, 193–94 immigrants, 3, 15, 29–30, 49, 56, 60, 75, 143–44, 158, 191, 196, 219–20, 265n90 Impressionism, 167–70 individualism, 5, 18–19, 46, 51, 187–216 industrialization, 3, 5, 10–12, 14, 22, 29, 34, 40, 46, 50, 74, 85, 126, 171, 201, 208, 218–19 Ingersoll, Robert, 44 instrumentalism, 14 International Copyright Law, 25 An Introduction to the Study of American Literature (Matthews), 32 James, William, 48, 71 Japanese tanka, 18 Jefferson, Thomas, 78 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 172 Jim Crow, 8, 32, 51, 129–30, 135 Johns, Orrick, 46, 48, 144 Johnson, Helene, 131 Johnson, James Weldon, 137, 222, 249n28 Johnson, Lionel, 173 Johnson, Robert Underwood, 36–38, 43, 65 Johnson, Tom, 74, 249n33 Keats, John, 5, 9–10, 26–28, 31, 62, 81, 93, 99, 127–29, 137, 152, 163, 166, 191, 202, 221, 230n59, 261n117, 269n21 Keller, Helen, 195 Kennerley, Mitchell, 111, 145, 265n91

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Index Kilmer, Joyce, 144, 184, 214 Kipling, Rudyard, 40, 42, 55, 63, 71, 98–99 Kline, Burton, 43 Knowles, Frederic Lawrence, 133, 140, 235n89 Kreymborg, Alfred, 124–25 Ku Klux Klan, 130 Labour party, 7 labor poems, 62–67 “Lamia” (Keats), 26–27 Lauriat, Jr., Charles, 149 Lawrence, Abbott, 164 Lawrence, D. H., 179 Le Gallienne, Richard, 99, 114, 124, 240n79 Lears, Jackson, 45 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 33, 49–50, 64, 192–94 Ledoux, Louis, 143, 146, 149–50, 155, 252n83, 254n132 LeMoyne, Sarah Cowell, 39 Lengel, William, 92–93 Leonard, William Ellery, 114 Library of America (Stedman), 42 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 87 Lincoln, Abraham, 4, 44, 48, 65–66, 78, 120, 124, 194, 217 Lincoln, Robert Todd, 217 Lindsay, Vachel, 3–4, 14, 99, 105, 109–10, 120–22, 143, 150, 153–55, 161, 177, 180, 183, 219, 253n102,103 Lippincott’s, 24, 43 Lippmann, Walter, 96, 241n21, 261n105 The Literary Era (Garret), 79 Literary World, 50 Locke, John, 46 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 28 London, Jack, 34, 44 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 10, 30, 33, 51, 55, 63–64, 81, 238n20 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 73 Lowe, John Adams, 185 Lowes, John Livingston, 184–85 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot), 125 “Love Songs” (Teasdale), 144 Lowell, Amy, 1–2, 8, 10, 18, 41–42, 52, 107–09, 119, 126, 129, 143, 149, 151, 155–56, 158, 161–71, 173–86, 189, 202, 208–13, 215, 218, 221, 252n95, 254n132, 255n5, 256n10,21,23–25, 257n41,43, 258n48, 259n82

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appearance of, 164–65 biography, 164–66 and “The Bombardment,” 180 and British Romantics, 164 Can Grande’s Castle, 178 A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, 155, 166, 256n23,25 and Eliot, 183 and Fletcher, 169–70 homosexuality of, 162–63, 171–4, 258n48 as Imagism, 161–62, 166 and Masters, 181–83 and Monroe, 179–80 and “novel” subjects, 41–42 “Patterns,” 211 Pictures of the Floating World, 221 and Poetry, 161, 166 and Pound, 171, 179–80, 183 and Sandburg, 181–83 Some Imagist Poets, 175, 179, 259n82 stereotypes about, 162–63 Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, 175–78 and Tendencies in Modern Poetry, 181, 183–84 and “vividness,” 175–76 and World War I, 210–13 Lowell, Abbott, 206 Lowell, Francis Cabot, 164 Lowell, James Russell, 23, 26, 30, 51 Lusitania, sinking of (1915), 204, 206 “Lyric Year,” 2, 144–45 The Lyric Year Anthology, 145 Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1802) (Wordsworth), 26, 82 Lyrics of Life and Love (Braithwaite), 139–40 Mabie, Hamilton, 72, 101 Mackail, J. W., 123 MacKaye, Percy, 103, 143, 150, 196, 199, 243n55 Macy, John, 52 “The Man with the Hoe” (Markham), 57–59, 67–78, 81, 89, 146 The Man with the Hoe, With Notes by The Author (Markham), 78 The Man Who Laughs (Hugo), 60 Markham, Catherine, 104, 107, 244n70 Markham, Edwin, 15, 44–45, 57–62, 66–84, 97–98, 101–05, 107, 109–10, 111, 123–24, 126, 129, 137, 144, 146, 148, 150, 175, 178, 190, 197–98, 202, 205–06, 213, 215, 217, 219–20, 237n2, 238n27,

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Markham, Edwin—Continued 239n46,54, 240n70, 245n97, 265n87, 267n117, 268n3 and children, 84 and Christianity, 79–80 and cowboy aesthetic, 59 early years of, 59 education of, 60 “Lincoln, Man of the People,” 217 and pessimism, 75–79 photograph of, 58 and the poet’s role, 61–62 and religious awe, 77 and Shelley, 60 The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems, 123 on Viereck, 205–06 See also “The Man with the Hoe” Marks, Josephine Peabody, 147 Marsh, Edward, 153 Marx, Karl, 60, 87, 97, 189, 192 masculinity, 11, 15, 30–32, 69, 128–34, 149, 164, 174, 182, 240n69, 248n10 Masefield, John, 99–100, 106 The Masses (magazine) (1911–1917), 2, 18, 187, 191–94, 197, 202, 204, 207–08, 266n95 Masters, Edgar Lee, 36, 107, 109, 120, 122–24, 147, 153, 180–83, 246n133, 253n102, 260n99 Matthews, Brander, 32, 104, 140 May, Henry, 12 McClure’s, 34, 42–43, 98, 124, 240n70 McKay, Claude, 9 Mencken, H. L., 16, 45, 88, 128, 149, 157, 208 The Metropolis (Sinclair), 95 middle class, 23, 28, 30, 48, 51–52, 74, 79, 86, 93, 96, 130, 134, 191, 202, 208, 225n9, 227n31 Mill, John Stewart, 46 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 144–45 Miller, Joaquin, 81 Miller, Kelly, 51 Miller, Nina, 131 Millet, Jean Francois, 57–58, 67, 69, 76, 78, 239n52 Milton, John, 9 Mirror (Reedy), 38 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 10 Modernism (20th century), 6, 11–14, 16–19, 21, 29, 45–47, 116, 118, 125, 128–30, 133, 149, 151, 153, 163, 188, 217–19, 223, 232n46, 234n81, 240n69, 247n8

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roots of U.S. literary, 12–13 See also Imagism Moody, William Vaughan, 36–37, 47 Moore, Marianne, 183 Moore, Thomas, 59 Monroe, Harriet, 2, 8, 16–17, 38–41, 45, 52, 86–87, 101, 104, 109, 111–26, 129, 145, 152–55, 157–58, 160, 162, 166, 168, 171, 179, 183, 189, 197, 202–03, 216, 218, 220 and Bynner, 124 cartoon of, 118 “Columbian Ode,” 111 and Lindsay, 121–22 and Masters, 122–23 and modern subjects, 40, 45 and “New Beauty,” 114–15, 117, 119 “Poet Laureate” of World Exposition, 39 and Poetry magazine, 114–26 on realism, 119–20 and Sandburg, 120–21 youthful success of, 38–40 morality, 3–5, 7, 10–11, 15–16, 21–24, 27, 36, 45, 47–48, 55–56, 58–60, 65–68, 71, 73, 83, 86, 92, 96, 100, 103, 115, 120, 124, 137, 142, 147, 159, 165, 169–70, 175, 183, 187, 192, 194–95, 200, 218, 222–23, 230n59 More, Brooke, 149 Morris, William, 23, 62, 97, 170 Moulton, Louise, 104, 138, 142 Muir, John, 28 Munsey’s Magazine, 34 Münsterberg, Hugo, 206 Murphy, Anna Catherine, 61–62 The Mystic Warrior (Oppenheim), 194 The Nation, 32, 88, 256n21 National Arts Association, 102 National Arts Club, 102 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 9, 207–08, 249n34 National Institute of Arts and Letters, 35–36 The National Magazine, 42 National Poetry Week, 17 nationalism, 204–16 The Nature and Elements of Poetry (1892) (Stedman), 25, 82 Nehamas, Alexander, 11 Neihardt, John, 117 Nelson, Cary, 11

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Index “The New Criticism” (lectures) (Spingarn), 142 New Critics, 11–12, 130, 142, 223 New England Monthly, 61 The New Era in American Poetry, 199–202 The New Republic, 1–2, 122, 179, 184 “New Woman,” 3, 30 The New York Sun, 75, 88, 105, 110 The New York Times, 1–2, 75, 77, 79, 82, 91, 95, 106, 144, 184 New York World, 39 Niagara Movement, 9 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 5, 55, 87, 152, 169, 192, 194–95 Ninevah and Other Poems (Viereck), 89–93, 99 Norris, Frank, 69–70 North American Review, 38 North of Boston (Frost), 1–2, 148, 197 Noyes, Alfred, 105 Nussbaum, Martha, 11 O’Brien, Edward, 113 O’Sheel, Shaemus, 214 The Octopus (1901) (Norris), 69–70 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 5, 127, 191 Oppenheim, James, 9, 18, 51, 82, 98–99, 188, 194–96, 208–09 Others: A Magazine of the New Verse, 124–25, 173, 218 Overland Monthly, 61 The Pisan Cantos (Pound), 223 Pan American Exposition (1901), 9 Panic of 1893, 15, 30, 32 Pater, Walter, 23, 44, 131–32, 134, 176, 259n70 “Patterns” (Lowell), 211 Peabody, Josephine Preston, 55 Peck, Harry Thurston, 54 Pendleton Act (1883), 28 Perry, Bliss, 30–31, 40, 138 philanthropy, 3, 84, 112 Phyllis Wheatley Clubs, 8 Picasso, Pablo, 10 Pictures of the Floating World (1919) (Lowell), 173, 221 Pilgrims and Other Poems (1907), 45 Plato, 5–6, 24, 47, 49, 56, 68, 80, 98 Poe, Edgar Allan, 10, 87, 89, 169, 184, 196, 214, 236n126 Poems on Slavery (1842) (Longfellow), 33

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poetic communities, 2–3, 56, 60–61, 84, 104, 115, 174 “The Poet” (Emerson), 6 Poets of America (1885) (Stedman), 25–26, 61, 129 Poets’ Club (London), 18 The Poetry Journal, 106, 113, 179, 265n92 Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (Chicago), 2, 16, 18, 52, 86, 114–26, 152, 157–59, 161, 223 founding of, 114–26 and Lowell, 161 The Poetry Review, 151, 252n95 Poetry Society of America (PSA), 16, 84, 86, 94, 102–8, 110–11, 113, 152–53, 190, 198, 205, 210–16, 220, 243n63, 244n70,71, 267n125 and audience connection, 102–03 birth of, 102–08 national award, 106 and wartime politics, 210–16 Pound, Ezra, 1, 16, 17–18, 37–38, 51, 98, 101, 106, 114–19, 122–23, 125–26, 128, 153, 157–59, 163, 165, 167–68, 171, 176, 178–80, 183, 217–18, 223, 225n4, 245n115, 247n8, 248n9,11, 253n120, 257n41, 260n88 “Ballad for Gloom,” 101 and Braithwaite, 17, 157–59 and Des Imagistes, 178 Exultations, 115 and Imagism, 18, 163 and Lowell, 165, 167, 171, 178–80 and Monroe, 115–19, 122 The Pisan Cantos, 223 Personae, 115 on poetry, 115–16, 128–29 praise of, 117–18 Provença, 98 and the PSA, 106 on rejection, 37–38 “To Whistler, American,” 114 and Whitman, 51 pragmatism, 48–49, 74, 100, 120, 193, 212, 236n113 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800) (Wordsworth), 5, 68–69 Progressive poets, 5–6, 12–13, 15, 46, 49, 132, 163, 187, 202, 204–08, 217–24 Proust, Marcel, 12 Pulitzer Prize, 106, 144, 220, 243n63, 250n56, 251n60

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278

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racism, 3, 8–10, 17, 30–32, 36, 56, 130–31, 135–39, 153–58, 181, 187, 233n49, 249n34, 250n36 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 4 Reed, John, 96–97 Reedy, William Marion, 38, 108–09, 122–23, 142 Reese, Lizette Woodworth, 105 “Renasence” (Millay), 145 Repression and Recovery (Nelson), 11 Rhymes To Be Traded For Bread (Lindsay), 3 Rice, Cale Young, 107, 220 Rice, Isaac, 102 Riis, Jacob, 6, 15 Riley, James Whitcomb, 63–66 Rittenhouse, Jessie B., 2, 8, 16, 35, 43–44, 57, 106–11, 129, 131–34, 145, 174, 199, 202, 214–16 “The Road Not Taken” (Frost), 156 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 52–56, 143, 150, 155–56, 173, 180–81 Romanticism, 5, 13, 18, 19, 27–28, 32–33, 38, 46, 52, 63, 82, 91–92, 103, 111, 117, 131, 152, 164, 167, 175, 181, 187–216 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 124 Roosevelt, James A., 211 Roosevelt, Theodore, 28, 31–32, 55–56, 95, 123, 156, 233n49 Root, John Wellborn, 40 Rorty, James, 202, 222 Rorty, Richard, 11, 222–23 Rose, Jonathan, 7 Rubin, Joan, 13–14 Ruskin, John, 10, 21–23, 34, 44–45, 59, 61, 78, 82, 165, 169, 231n5, 256n10 Russell, Ada, 171 Sackville-West, Vita, 174 The San Francisco Examiner, 69, 72 Sandburg, Carl, 2, 36, 44, 117, 120–21, 124, 149, 158–59, 176, 180–83, 198, 201, 203, 244n75, 245n115, 254n129, 261n105,106, 263n51 Santayana, George, 12, 47–48, 52, 77, 101, 105, 124, 146, 152 Sarrett, Lew, 199 The Saturday Evening Post, 93 The Saturday Review, 1 Scarry, Elaine, 11, 248n10 Schiller, Friedrich, 46 Schnittkind, Henry Thomas, 151

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Scribner’s Monthly, 1, 23–24, 34, 37, 42–43, 53, 61, 70, 77, 101, 166 See also The Century Magazine Scollard, Clinton, 132 Scudder, Horace, 55 The Sea (Oppenheim), 195 The Sea Wolf (London), 34 Sedgwick, Alexander, 37–38, 41–42 Sedgwick, Ellery, 259n68 Sedition Act (1918), 207 Seurat, Georges, 12, 168 Seven Arts, 2, 9, 97, 196, 207–09 sexuality, 30–31, 47, 50, 81, 86, 89, 91, 95, 97, 130–31, 163, 172–74, 182, 258n48 Shakespeare, William, 9, 38, 78, 99, 102, 108, 111, 137, 194 Shaw, George Bernard, 46, 55, 120 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 5, 9–10, 27–28, 39, 45, 59–60, 62, 78, 87, 113, 123, 129, 144, 166, 189, 194, 196, 202 The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems (1915) (Markham), 123 Sinclair, Upton, 46, 95–96 Sklansky, Jeffrey, 5 “The Slump of Poetry” (The Critic) (1905), 1 The Smart Set magazine, 45 Smith, Adam, 46 Social Democrats, 87, 120 Social Gospel movement, 4, 146 socialism, 3, 15, 18–19, 21, 72, 80, 82, 84, 87, 97–98, 120, 143, 184, 187–88, 191–92, 194–95, 197, 202, 219 Some Imagist Poets (Lowell), 175, 179, 259n82 The Song of Hiawatha (Longfellow), 64 Song of the Labor Muse or Song of the New Humanity (Markham), 62 Songs for the New Age (1914) (Oppenheim), 194–96 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 9, 136, 221 Spanish America War (1898), 32, 66–67 Spingarn, Joel, 142, 154–55 The Spirit of American Literature (1913) (Macy), 52 Spoon River Anthology (Masters), 101, 107, 122–23, 147, 182 Stedman, Edmund Clarence (1833–1908), 25–26, 39 Steffens, Lincoln, 124, 193 Stein, Gertrude, 10 Sterling, George, 144–46, 150, 157 Stevens, Wallace, 47, 124

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Index Stevenson, Robert Louis, 112 Stickney, Trumbull, 31, 47 Stieglitz, Alfred, 10 The Stillwater Tragedy (1880) (Aldrich), 33 Stoddard, Richard, 104 The Stones of Venice (Ruskin), 23 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 74 “The Suicide” (Markham), 77 Susman, Warren, 45 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 10, 21, 55, 71, 87–88, 128, 142 Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914) (Lowell), 175–78 Symons, Arthur, 90, 169 Talbert, Mary, 9 Talman, John, 76–77 Tarbell, Ida, 40, 124, 193 Taylor, Bayard, 25 Teasdale, Sara, 98, 104, 106, 129, 142, 144, 219, 241n21, 251n60, 266n97, 267n112 Tendencies in Modern Poetry (Lowell), 181, 183–84 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 9, 27, 51, 59, 80–81, 99, 108, 116, 129, 175, 194, 250n38 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 44 Thomas, Edith, 98, 133–34 Thoreau, Henry David, 5, 48 Ticknor, Caroline, 29–30, 138 Tietjens, Eunice, 104–05 Tolstoy, Leo, 45, 181, 188, 191 Tompkins, Jane, 11 Torrence, Ridgely, 71 The Torrent and The Night Before (Robinson), 52 Towne, Charles Hanson, 99, 190, 219–20 transcendentalism, 5–6, 11, 48, 50, 77 Trotter, William Monroe, 135 Tubman, Harriet, 9 Twain, Mark, 66, 124 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 74 Underwood, Francis, 23 University of Michigan, 199 Untermeyer, Jean Starr, 191 Untermeyer, Louis, 2, 18, 38, 54, 82, 91, 100, 104, 106, 118, 125, 129, 145, 151, 156–57, 165, 167, 174, 179, 188–91, 193–202, 207–10, 218, 220 biography, 189 Challenge, 196–97

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demeanor of, 199 employment of, 190–91 First Love: A Lyric Sequence, 190 and Frost, 197, 200 The New Era in American Poetry, 199–202 and rejection, 189–90 and World War II, 220–21 Untermeyer, Samuel, 106 “uplift” literature, 8, 17, 33–34, 36, 39–40, 45–48, 55, 57, 65, 72–74, 76, 103, 169, 176, 185, 187, 207, 218, 249n34 Upshaw, “Ernest Willie,” 63 Upson, Arthur, 150 USS Harriet Monroe, 220 Van Dyke, Henry, 149 van Gogh, Vincent, 169 Victorian genteel tradition (late 19th century) (1860s–1900s), 7–8, 12–15, 19, 21–35, 41, 45, 48, 56, 69, 114–15, 128–29, 140, 142, 167, 169, 180, 188, 227n31, 247n8, 250n38 Victorian Poets (1883) (Stedman), 25 Viereck, George Sylvester, 14, 16, 38, 54, 82, 86–103, 108–11, 126, 147, 150, 166, 173, 190, 202, 204–07, 210, 212–16, 220 blacklisting of, 204–07, 210, 212–16, 220 The Confessions of a Barbarian, 95 education, 88 expulsion from PSA, 215, 220 The Fatherland, 204, 210 A Game At Love and Other Plays, 88–89 and “genius,” 93, 95, 214 on Hitler, 220 Hohenzollern ancestry, 87–88, 94 Ninevah and Other Poems, 89–93, 99 photograph of, 94 and Roosevelt, 95 and Wilde, 87–88 See also Poetry Society of America Vlag, Piet, 191 Vorticisim, 106 Wagstaff, Blanche Shoemaker, 96, 110, 242n21, 265n92 Walker, Cheryl, 11, 171 Warner, Charles Dudley, 66, 75 Washington, Booker T., 51, 130, 217, 249n34 The Washington Post, 103, 205, 212

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280 Index “The Waste Land” (Eliot), 183, 218 Wattles, Willard, 199 Wheeler, Edward, 107, 145, 150, 187, 212–15, 243n63 Whitelock, William Wallace, 80–81 Whitman, Walt, 15, 24, 33, 49–52, 57, 59, 64, 80–81, 85, 87, 90, 108, 113–14, 116–18, 120, 146, 152, 169, 184, 192–94, 196, 200–01, 218 as “America’s poet,” 51 on audiences, 113–14 criticism of, 50 and democracy in verse, 49–50 and ethics, 57 ideal poet of, 49–50 popularity of, 51–52 See also Leaves of Grass Whittier, John Greenleaf, 30, 33, 51 Widdemer, Margaret, 84, 107–08, 219–20 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 174, 198 Wilde, Oscar, 12, 32, 45, 86–89, 91, 97, 110, 173 Wilhelm I of Prussia, 87 Wilhelm II, German Emperor, 95, 204, 212 Wilkinson, Marguerite, 175

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Williams, William Carlos, 125, 163, 184, 218–19 Wilson, Woodrow, 65, 130, 204, 211, 213 women, See gender Wood, Clement, 2, 184, 186, 190, 214–15 Woodberry, George, 105 Wordsworth, William, 5, 9, 26–28, 68, 77, 80, 82, 96, 128, 137, 142, 222, 230n59 World’s Fair in Chicago (1893), 33–34, 39 World’s Fair Literary Congress (1893), 66 World War I, 188, 203–16, 219 World War II, 220–21, 223 Wright, Willard Huntington, 148 The Writer Magazine, 30 Wyatt, Edith, 114 Yeats, John Butler, 2–3 Yeats, William Butler, 1, 2, 106, 122, 223, 246n129 Yerkes, Charles, 39 The Younger Choir (1910), 82 The Youth’s Companion, 1 Zorach, William, 125

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