G E N D E R S, R AC E S A N D R E L I G I O U S
C U LT U R E S I N M O D E R N A M E R I C A N P O E T RY,
–
In Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry,
Rachel Blau DuPlessis shows how, through poetic language, mod-
ernist writers represented the debates and ideologies concerning
New Woman, New Negro, and New Jew in the early twentieth
century. From the poetic text emerge such social issues of moder-
nity as debates on su
ffrage, sexuality, manhood, and Afro-
American and Jewish subjectivities. By a reading method she calls
“social philology” – a form of close reading inflected with the
approaches of cultural studies – DuPlessis engages with the work of
such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot,
William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and
H.D., as well as Vachel Lindsay, Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred
Kreymborg, and Langston Hughes, writers, she claims, still mar-
ginalized by existing constructions of modernism. This book is an
ambitious attempt to remap our understanding of modern poetries
and poetics, and the relationship between early twentieth-century
writing and society.
is Professor of English at Temple
University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Writing Beyond the
Ending (
), H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (), The Pink Guitar:
Writing as Feminist Practice (
); she is also editor of The Selected
Letters of George Oppen (
), and coeditor of both The Objectivist
Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (
) and The Feminist Memoir Project
(
). She is a widely published poet.
Editor
Ross Posnock, New York University
Founding editor
Albert Gelpi, Stanford University
Advisory board
Nina Baym, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University
Ronald Bush, St John’s College, Oxford University
Albert Gelpi, Stanford University
Myra Jehlen, Rutgers University
Carolyn Porter, University of California, Berkeley
Robert Stepto, Yale University
Recent books in the series
. .
Poe and the Printed Word
. .
The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study
.
Writing America Black: Race Rhetoric and the Public Sphere
.
Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature,
–
.
Blacks and Jews in Literary Dialogue
.
Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Inc.
. Afrocentrism, Antimodernism, and Utopia
. Blackness and Value: Seeing Double
. Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority
. Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine
.
Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American
Literature and Culture
. .
Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in American Literature
G E N D E R S, R AC E S, A N D
R E L I G I O U S C U LT U R E S I N
M O D E R N A M E R I C A N
P O E T RY,
–
R AC H E L B L AU D U P L E S S I S
Temple University
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge
, UK www.cup.cam.ac.uk
West th Street, New York, –, USA www.cup.org
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, Madrid, Spain
© Cambridge University Press
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published
Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
hardback
paperback
To Robert Saint-Cyr DuPlessis
Contents
Acknowledgments
page xi
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender
ideologies of lyric
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern
representations and politics
“, , ”: some episodes in the construction of
modern male whiteness
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and
white poets
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
Notes
Works cited
Index
ix
Acknowledgments
A full-year research and study leave from Temple University in
–
helped this book into being; I am very grateful for it.
The remarks and responses of audiences to some of these materials
were instructive; I would like to acknowledge such sites of my continu-
ing education as University of Maryland, College Park; the Columbia
University Seminar in American Studies; University of Kansas; Tulane
University; Université de Montréal; Drew University; St. Mark’s Poetry
Project; University of Wisconsin; more than a few meetings of the
Modern Language Association, and the inaugural conference of the
Modernist Studies Association (
). Temple University’s graduate stu-
dents in modern and contemporary poetry were lively co-conspirators
for some of the ideas in this project.
Susan Stanford Friedman, my friend and long-distance colleague,
deserves deep thanks for her sustaining remarks and vision, her encour-
aging sense of the contribution this book might make, and for an inci-
sive one-word mantra. She took time from her unremitting schedule to
give the first chapter a crucial reading. Both Lorenzo Thomas and Aldon
Nielsen o
ffered informative encouragements to my explorations of
Africanist representations. I am also indebted to serious scholars of
Mina Loy, among them Carolyn Burke, Roger Conover, and Marissa
Januzzi (as well as being indebted to Loy herself for three of the chapter
titles). An anonymous reader of this book for Cambridge University
Press jostled me in several important ways, and provoked me whether I
tried to assimilate or had to resist the remarks o
ffered. Ross Posnock
deserves my gratitude and respect for his approval of this book as the
guard changed. I also owe a note of thanks to Susan Chang who first
acquired this book and special thanks to Ray Ryan, the editor at
Cambridge on whose watch this was finally published.
At Temple University, I have drawn upon the wisdom and theoretical
incisiveness of several of my colleagues in the English Department.
xi
Lawrence Venuti gave a penetrating and discerning reading to the first
chapter. Miles Orvell read an early version of chapter
and offered
warm and pointed comments. Daniel O’Hara reminded me of a refer-
ence it would have been rather odd to forget. Lynda Hill and I have
talked fruitfully about African American traditions.
As for the person to whom this book is inscribed, my partner in so
much, on a long and spirited journey, I thank him with deep gratitude
and love, with this dedication.
A number of these chapters were published in an earlier (sometimes
more discursive) form, with thanks to readers and editors, especially
Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, Kathy Mezei, Cathy Davidson,
Michael Moon, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and Ralph Cohen, as well as an
anonymous reader for American Literature. None of these colleagues is
responsible for my ways of proceeding. All of the chapters have been
first considerably revised and expanded, and then reduced and cut
severely, since their first publication.
Chapter
. “‘Corpses of poesy’: modern poets consider some gender ide-
ologies of lyric” in an earlier form as “ ‘Corpses of Poesy’: some modern
poets and some gender ideologies of lyric,” in Feminist Measures: Soundings
in Poetry and Theory, eds. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller. Ann Arbor,
Mich.: University of Michigan Press,
: –. In Chapter , there
are a few elements from “No Moore of the same: the feminist poetics of
Marianne Moore.” The William Carlos Williams Review (special Marianne
Moore issue, ed. Theodora Graham),
, (Spring ): –.
Chapter
. “‘Seismic Orgasm’: Sexual Intercourse, Its Modern
Representations and Politics.” As the seed article for this book, this work
went through two permutations in its prior forms, first as “ ‘Seismic
orgasm’: sexual intercourse, gender narratives, and lyric ideology in Mina
Loy,” in Studies in Historical Change, ed. Ralph Cohen. Charlottesville, Va.:
The University Press of Virginia,
: –. Subsequently, and con-
siderably revised, as “ ‘Seismic orgasm’: sexual intercourse and narrative
meaning in Mina Loy,” in Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British
Women Writers, ed. Kathy Mezei, University of North Carolina Press,
:
–. This also appears in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, eds. Maeera
Shreiber and Keith Tuma. National Poetry Foundation,
: –.
Chapter
. “‘, , ’: some episodes in the construction of
modern male whiteness” appeared in an earlier form as “ ‘
, ,
’: some episodes in the construction of modern whiteness.” American
Literature
, (December ): –.
xii
Acknowledgments
Chapter
. “‘Darken your speech’: racialized cultural work in black and
white poets” appeared in an earlier form as “‘Darken your speech’:
racialized cultural work of modernist poets,” in Reading Race in American
Poetry: “An Area of Act”. Aldon L. Nielsen, ed., Urbana, Ill.: University of
Illinois Press,
: ‒.
Chapter
. “‘Wondering Jews’: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts”
contains material on Eliot from my “Circumscriptions: assimilating T. S.
Eliot’s Sweeneys,” in People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish
Identity. Je
ffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, eds, Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press,
: –.
Grateful acknowledgement is given to the following publishers, holders
of copyright and estates for permission to cite from the following works:
Gwendolyn Bennett. “To Usward,” in Maureen Honey, ed., Shadowed
Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. Rutgers University Press,
, Copyright © by Rutgers, The State University.
Countee Cullen. Poems are not cited beyond fair use – three or four
words per poem. They were originally published as follows: “Incident,”
“Yet Do I Marvel,” “Heritage,” “Tableau”: from Color by Countee
Cullen. Copyright ©
by Harper & Brothers; copyright renewed
by Ida M. Cullen. “Colors” and “Uncle Jim”: from Copper Sun by
Countee Cullen. Copyright ©
by Harper & Brothers; copyright
renewed
by Ida M. Cullen. “To Certain Critics”: from Black Christ
and Other Poems by Countee Cullen. Copyright ©
by Harper &
Brothers; copyright renewed
by Ida M. Cullen.
T. S. Eliot from Collected Poems,
– by T. S. Eliot, copyright
by Harcourt Brace & Company, copyright ©
, by T. S. Eliot,
reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Excerpts from “Ballade pour la grosse Lulu,” from Inventions of the March
Hare, Poems
–, by T. S. Eliot, text © by Valerie Eliot,
Editorial matter and annotations copyright ©
by Christopher
Ricks, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.
H.D., Collected Poems
–, Copyright © by The Estate of
Hilda Doolittle, reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing
Corporation.
Langston Hughes from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Edited by
Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel. Alfred A. Knopf,
.
Acknowledgments
xiii
Copyright ©
by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by per-
mission of Alfred A. Knopf and Faber & Faber, Ltd.
Helene Johnson, “Bottled,” pp.
–, Maureen Honey, ed., Shadowed
Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. Rutgers University Press,
, Copyright © by Rutgers, The State University.
Citations from Mina Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover
(Jargon Society
), by permission of Roger L. Conover, for the Estate
of Mina Loy and Jonathan Williams for The Jargon Society.
Citations from Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker (Farrar Straus Giroux,
), by permission of Roger L. Conover, for the Estate of Mina Loy
and Farrar Straus Giroux.
Permission for the quotations from Observations by Marianne Moore
(The Dial Press,
) granted by Marianne Craig Moore, Literary
Executor for the Estate of Marianne Moore. All Rights Reserved.
From Ezra Pound, Personae, Copyright ©
by Ezra Pound. Material
by Ezra Pound used by permission of New Directions Publishing
Corporation.
Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America. Copyright © Random House,
.
Boston: Beacon Press,
.
Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens,
and Opus
Posthumous,
. Copyright © and by Alfred A. Knopf and
Faber and Faber, Ltd.
William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems
–, Vol. I, copyright
©
by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Copyright © ,
by William Eric Williams and Paul H. Williams. Material by
William Carlos Williams used by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corporation.
Louis Zukofsky, Complete Short Poetry, pp.
–; lines, Johns Hopkins
University Press,
. Copyright © Paul Zukofsky.
xiv
Acknowledgments
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American
poetry
It’s a very long and di
fficult job . . . to see how, in the very detail of
composition, a certain social structure, a certain history, discloses
itself. This is not doing any kind of violence to that composition.
It’s precisely
finding ways in which forms and formations, in very
complex ways, interact and interrelate.
Raymond Williams (
), The Politics of Modernism,
This book situates itself within modernist studies, trying one way of
relating modernism to modernities.
1
Propelled by the scintillating criti-
cal practices from feminist, ethnic, and other materialist critics and
poetic communities, my reading of poetry within modernist studies
probes works of art by people struggling with formations entitled new –
New Woman, New Black, New Jew.
2
Part of the “newness” of moder-
nity lies in its representation of the urgencies and contradictions of these
modern subjectivities. By a method I call social philology, I propose a
reactivation of close reading to examine in poetry the textual traces and
discursive manifestations of a variety of ideological assumptions, subject
positions, and social concepts concerning gender, race, and religious
culture. It is the purpose of this book to o
ffer reading strategies that can
mediate between the historical terrain and the intimate poetic textures
of a work.
Certainly the materials and themes of poems involve discursive ele-
ments (allusions, diction, tropes) and depict issues traceable to particu-
lar social subjects. But this book will also propose that modern poets
construct cultural narratives and articulate social debates around
emblems and idioms of subjectivity, within the texture and using the
resources of poetry – line break, stanza break and other segmentivities,
caesurae, visual image and semantic image, etymology, phonemes,
lateral associations, crypt words, puns – including translingual puns, its
own particular genres, the diegesis with its actors and pronouns, and the
whole text with its speaker or persona.
Within modernity, some people entitle themselves “New,” articulating
entitlement, the right of claim to full personhood, full citizenship, and
some control of their deeds. These “new” social subjectivities engage
with various projects of emancipation and possibility, hoping that in
modernity there can be a “qualitative transcendence,” a time “better
than what has gone before” (Osborne
, , ). “New entitlements”
are formations compounded of social claims for change in the legal,
political and economic status of a given group that, while incomplete in
the time frame this book concerns (about
–), were nonetheless
motivating and transformative, with many cultural implications.
3
New
Woman, New Black, New Jew constitute emergent formations and
diverse sites of con
flict and affirmation in the modernizing projects of
modernity. The subject locations entitled “new” sum up a considerable
amount of social desire, political debate, and intellectual ferment, con-
tributing, for instance, to passionate politics of recti
fication in the
su
ffrage or the anti-lynching campaigns. These new subjectivities are
also spoken in and through literature.
The formations entitled new do not begin simultaneously: New
Woman is talked of before “New Negro” and is reemergent during the
teens and twenties; New Jew, a person modernizing Judaism through
nineteenth century Enlightenment thinking (Haskalah), is still active in
the immigrant populations in the U.S. and Britain. These liberatory dis-
courses put clear pressure on the manifests of a United States democ-
racy: the New Black in emerging from slavery and serfdom, the New
Woman with claims for su
ffrage and for sexual and professional inde-
pendence, and the New Jew, provoking, as did other immigrant popula-
tions, many anxieties about di
fference and the issue of surfeit and
containment of access to the United States. The formations New
Woman, New Black, New Jew also engage with, debate, and help give
shape to discourses of maleness/masculinity/manhood, homosexuality,
virility, whiteness and “souls of white folk” (in Du Bois’ phrase), pre-
Enlightenment Jew, and Christian/Gentile; these formations also
emphatically occur in modern poetry and are often part of the entitle-
ment of poets (Du Bois
, ).
One might take some closely
fitted dates in the s to be symbolic
indicators of these entitlements and their debates.
4
The crisis about sex-
uality and gender, about forms of masculinity in debate was focused in
, as the Oscar Wilde trial both opened and endangered debate
about sexual
fluidity; the so-called “invention of heterosexuality” in rela-
tion to the newly articulated homosexuality has been wittily dated, by
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
Jonathan Katz (
), to . Women’s modernity within modernism,
their social struggles and intellectual debates were focused by the term
“New Woman,” coined in
by Ouida from a phrase by British nov-
elist Sarah Grand, a descriptor for a variety of emancipatory reforms in
the female condition: higher education, living wages, changes in mar-
riage law, access to the professions, woman su
ffrage, and sometimes birth
control (Fitzsimmons and Gardner
, vii; Tickner , ).
5
Indeed,
by
, “the New Woman has been in poetry and drama and fiction for
close to sixty years,” and could be seen, fondly – or not – as the “Old
‘New Woman’” (Kenton
, ). Social and ideological struggles
about elements of New Woman subjectivity and gender ideologies of
masculinity as refracted in poetry are the subject of two of my chapters.
6
A cluster of “incipit” dates in the
s marks the formation of a black
modernity. One point of origin for a New Black stance within moder-
nity and modernism was the militant campaign against lynching begun
by Ida B. Wells in
. The debate over citizenship for Americans of
African descent was focused by the Supreme Court decision of
,
Plessy versus Ferguson, designating a legal second-class quasi-citizenship
for those de
fined (no matter their visible color) as black; this decision
gave forceful mandate to discrimination and racial segregation for at
least another half century. Given this “dismantled Reconstruction,” “the
‘newness’ of the New Negro, then, stemmed largely from an aggressive
claim to political inclusion, economic and cultural participation, and
fundamental equality” (Sanders
, xi). As Du Bois proposed in intro-
ducing the
anthology The New Negro (Locke ), the “new” for-
mation involved changes of consciousness and incentives to cultural
production interdependent with social struggle and political agency. The
“New Negro” was, as Houston Baker argues (
, ), a formation well
underway in Booker T. Washington’s
Atlanta address, making the
Harlem Renaissance of the
s the culmination of political, social and
cultural debates about the status of blacks in the U.S.
This black entitlement evoked a complex of responses. A Wallace
Stevens letter of
shows identification with black troops leaving for
World War I; he resists and consciously comments upon the patronizing
attitudes of most white observers (Stevens
[May , ], ). And
yet two years later, he remarks sourly of the sight of his hometown
Reading, “It was much like returning from the wars and
finding one’s
best beloved remarried to a coon” (ibid. [May
, ], ). This text
indicates the di
fficulty Euro-Americans had in consistently acknowledg-
ing the “New Black” as social citizen. Sociologist Charles S. Johnson
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
remembers the postwar period as the “reassertion with vigor of the old
and shaken racial theories” from the “gaudy racial philosophy” of the
time immediately post-Reconstruction, allegations of the inferiority of
“the Negro and other darker peoples,” restrictions of immigration,
“race riots, dark foreboding prophecies of the over-running of the white
race by the dark and unenlightened hordes from Asia and Africa, in
Lothrop Stoddard’s [
] Rising Tide of Color” (C. Johnson, in Lewis,
, , , ). My two chapters involving the New Black subjectiv-
ity will discuss the poetic marks of insurgent African-American political
and cultural presence in relation to Euro-American uses of racialized
discourses.
African-American modernity was faced with a suppurating pseudo-
science about race di
fferences affecting at least blacks and Jews, but also
Irish, Slavs, and Italians. In both Britain and the United States, immi-
gration in the
s of Jews displaced by the pogroms in Russia sharp-
ened debates about “mongrel races.” The year
focused a general
Gilded Age anti-Semitism because of a public health crisis in New York
caused by highly contagious diseases attributed to Jewish immigrants
(Markel
, –). The New Jew, an enlightenment figure of Jewish
modernity, was caught among assimilation, secularization, and a variety
of Semiticized and mongrelizing discourses. For example, Ezra Pound,
in a
letter to William Carlos Williams, mentions “mixed race,
Semitic goo,” intermingling mongrel and Jew as part of a discussion of
race, poetry, and his proclaimed transnationality (Pound
, ). My
chapter called “Wondering Jews” discusses mongrelization, and notes
the aggressive claims for order and Christian civilization that capped
modernism in the late
s and early s.
Modern poetries process many elements of these “new” social insur-
gencies involving race, gender, nationhood (and nativism), religious
culture, and class. Poetry is the repository and expression of subjectivity,
a site where the materials of social subjectivity are absorbed and articu-
lated, where pronouns, personae, speaking positions are produced.
Poetry does not necessarily construct a seamless subjectivity, consistent
between the inside speakers and the poet’s artifact (the enounced and the
enunciations), but a subjectivity whose very articulation in language
reveals organized multiplicities, contradictions, and projections.
7
Many
modern poets were fascinated with these newly entitled subjectivities;
some modern poets hold these positions, some appropriate them, some
struggle with them in parody and resistance, others claim them, but also
critique them, and still others want to work in a contradictory site of
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
engagement and resistance. This book is not about a postulated
fit
between persons and identity. Indeed, a productive tension within the
“New” social subjects between embodying group identity and enacting
an individualist separation, between allegiance and resistance to cate-
gory marks the work of many writers discussed here. One sees this
tension in Loy’s interpretations of both the New Woman and the New
Jew position, in Cullen’s negotiation with New Black. Other writers
claiming some relationship to galvanic “New” subjectivities produced
irruptive and grotesque identi
ficatory works: Lindsay’s “The Congo,”
Eliot’s “Sweeney Agonistes,” and Pound’s “Yiddischer Charleston
Band.”
The productive and critical consolidation of a period and
field of
study called “modernism” during the
s through the s or s was
made, and was maintained as virtually gender and race exclusive (Elliott
and Wallace
, , ). This book stands with many others to demolish
that inadequate paradigm. It became increasingly clear through such
feminist studies as the pioneering work of Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar and work on individual authors – Jane Marcus on Woolf, Susan
Stanford Friedman on H.D., Carolyn Burke on Loy, that “modernism’s
stories of its own genesis” were deeply
flawed by significant exclusions
of women writers, and of such issues and
figures as the New Woman
(Ardis
, ). For example, Gilbert and Gubar argue that modernism
can be recon
figured around the “woman question” and around a variety
of responses – they emphasize the intemperate and misogynist – to the
newly emergent authority of the woman writer (Gilbert and Gubar
, , ).
8
Before the gynocriticism of the
s and s, we knew so little about
women writers and how social di
fferences could manifest in cultural
products that much work was needed to bring women writers up to judi-
cious and informed scrutiny. A parallel point can be made about the
resurgence of cultural studies concerning ethnicity and African-
American writers. As Griselda Pollock has argued, there is no linear
progress out of early forms of feminist analysis, but rather a “synchronic
con
figuration” of feminist critical practices (Pollock , ; see also
Friedman
, ). Gynocriticism is not an outdated or surpassed move
in its goals of formal, biographical and textual recovery, nor in its goals
of exploring female agency in texts and in their creation, but its critical
assumptions and thus its
findings have now to resist, or use with greater
self-scrutiny, the gender binarism on which it was originally built. So too
the tendencies in such criticism toward identi
ficatory readings mirroring
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
oneself need to be tempered. Situationist reading, what Susan Friedman
has called “locational feminism” will argue instead that “subjectivity is
not only multiple and contradictory, but also relational” and that any
“axes of identity are not equally foregrounded in every situation”
(Friedman
, , , ).
9
“Gendering modernism” is one crucial act
in producing some enriched and transformed literary histories of mod-
ernism. Yet one might want to distinguish between the interpretative
finding of a “female modernism” and the interpretative position held in
this book exploring diversity within modernism by encouraging feminist
reception and gender-oriented analyses of all producers.
However, why would one want only to “gender” modernism, without
“sexing” it, “racializing” it, “Semiticizing” it, “classing” it? While gender
has certainly done powerful service, it is not alone as an ideological nexus
and materialist and culturalist practice. Indeed, modernist studies, or
modernism under the rubric of cultural studies, forwards contextualiza-
tions of all kinds. These involve a variety of critical engagements. A
critic might discuss the materiality of texts, involving bibliographical
and editorial studies, construction of editions and the various presenta-
tions of text as a physical (and aural) object.
10
There are strong and
widespread critical practices contextualizing the nature of speci
fic works
– their interior themes, images, narratives, and the social, personal, his-
torical debates they encode, pursue, and hint at; this is an engagement
generally most comfortable with prose
fiction and its poetics.
11
Finally,
critics have studied institutions and interactions enabling the short- and
long-term production, reception, and dissemination of texts – including
such modes and mechanisms of literary assertion as muses, geniuses,
groups, manifestoes, editing practices, publishing houses, “little” maga-
zines, avant-gardes, and critical interventions.
12
For example, poet-
critics writing from the contemporary practice of language poetry (and
its surround) have, in their critical writings, developed acute analyses of
the politics of literary reputation, of dissemination and its institutions,
and of the forging, stabilizing, and destabilizing of a literary hege-
mony.
13
Critics have recently studied the nature and social control of
“canon” and “cultural capital” in the politics of reception, have dis-
cussed the various “social transactions” surrounding the reception of a
text, and have scrutinized the longer-range institutions of dissemination,
such as universities, anthologies, translation practices, critical schools,
“masterpieces,” and critical texts such as this one (Kalaidjian
, xii).
14
The potential weak point of any kind of contextualization is its thin
textual speci
ficity. Contextualization and cultural studies sometimes do
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
not resist an extractive attitude to texts and may elide or erase the spec-
i
ficity of linguistic texture. This issue is particularly acute and meaning-
ful where poetry is concerned. There the challenge is both to
contextualize poems and to mediate between their historical and social
dimensions and their textual speci
ficity, so that a critical, culturalist
reading attends to the detail and can analyze dissonances, slippages,
a
ffirmations, and quirks within a range of verbal acts from discourses
and semantic layering to the phoneme. That is, one wants any study of
poetry to engage with poetry as such – its conventions and textual mech-
anisms, its surfaces and layers – and not simply to regard the poetic text
as an odd delivery system for ideas and themes. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle
reminds us in his theory of the opacities of the “remainder” (
, ),
there are culturally evocative, apparently excessive materials beyond the
semantic meaning created by a word.
15
These ideas about the density
and layeredness of texts point to a post-formalist, yet formally articulate
cultural analysis of poetry.
There are readers of poetry who have pioneered the kind of analysis
a
ffirmed in this study. Certain critics, notably Jonathan Monroe and
Jerome McGann, and sometimes Marjorie Perlo
ff have found in the
texture of a text questions about the “interplay of lyric poetry” with its
historical situation – for example, the technological revolution of the
twentieth century itself impressed through advertising images on a com-
munity of consumers (Perlo
ff , xii and , on Oppen). Discussing
the prose poem as a genre, Monroe has located the ways its language
“does not serve merely to ‘re
flect’ ideological and material struggles in
society; it is itself the very locus of such struggles” (
, ). Jerome
McGann has continuously proposed a subtle, exacting “materialist her-
meneutics” showing, for example, “how the Cantos executes its historical,
political, and ideological meanings” in part through the rich allusiveness
of its material text (McGann
, ).
Certain poet-critics have long o
ffered post-formalist contextualizing
theories of the poetic text. Barrett Watten has foregrounded the idea of
a cultural poetics as a reading and production strategy. In Total Syntax, he
proposed to reread and reposition Russian formalism, claiming it back
from neo-formalist New Criticism for a critical practice of articulating
the relation of text to context through formal inventions and precisions
(Watten
). He also calls for a thoroughgoing examination of the
meanings and de
finition of the phrase “cultural poetics” in its potential
and implications both for producers and for consumers and critics of
poetry (Watten
, ). Watten also introduced the suggestive coinage
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
“social formalism” in the title of an
article, locating how “the social
exists in and through its [textual] forms” (Watten
, ). Charles
Bernstein has articulated similar propositions, so that “the project of
particularizing, historicizing, and ideologizing the interpretation of
poetry must especially, even primarily, address itself to the stylistic fea-
tures of the work”; this would involve a way of reading “the formal
dynamics of a poem as communicative exchanges, as socially addressed,
and as ideologically explicit” (Bernstein
, , , and also in
Bernstein
). He too sums this up as a “social formalist” position
(Bernstein
, ).
We can appreciate that the study of literature must involve the dialec-
tical analyses of texts and “social processes” intersecting in their
material, ideological, discursive, and historical import (Wol
ff , ).
This is the proposition of the anthology Aesthetics and Ideology, edited by
George Levine (
): to develop – citing Stephen Greenblatt – a “cul-
tural poetics”/“poetics of culture.” Yet despite Greenblatt’s generalized
use of the term poetics, poetry, with many conventional exemptions built
into our sense of the genre, is rarely read with these claims in mind.
16
Poetry, most particularly the lyric, has generally been construed (in its
university and critical reception) as opposite to society and its discourses.
As a mode (and a conglomerate of genres), poetry is often positioned as
untainted by the social, in pursuit of higher things, a bastion of transcen-
dence and the aesthetic, privileged by the expression of timeless, univer-
sal emotions, set apart by speci
fic conventions in its language, and, in its
versions of romantic subjectivity, by non-participation in, non-compli-
ance with historical debate. Poetry serves expressivist goals in which the
apparently ahistorical speaking subject is explored and exposed.
Culturalist readings of poetry must struggle deeply and continuously
against these institutionalized paradigms concerning both the nature of
poetry and its critical reception, in which poetry is widely perceived as
not, or only crudely, assimilable to contextualizing critical positions.
Therefore few people attempt “historicizing a poem’s deployment of
arti
fice,” not as a formalist narrative only, nor as a social narrative only,
but in some conjunction (Bernstein
, ).
17
These ahistorical, anti-culturalist assumptions about poetry are dis-
cussed in Theodor Adorno’s famous argument against the separation of
poetry and social forms.
18
Adorno shows how most critics of poetry have
maintained a traditional resistance to any analyses of any poetry’s politi-
cal and ideological representations. Indeed, as he proposes, it has seemed
critically gross to think otherwise, a symptom of a lack of re
finement and
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
reading nuance when faced either with the
finesse and charm, or with the
complexity and irreducibility, of poetic texts.
Adorno’s position is further complicated because he makes an argu-
ment that dialectally assimilates (and thus half-agrees with) the assump-
tion he also questions. Thus he says indeed, yes, lyric poetry leverages
you out of the real world, evoking a life free from constraint, contin-
gency, and materiality, and, moreover, that this evocation of pure
untrammeled spirit is its social meaning. Material constraints and the
real world are “imprinted in reverse on poetry,” so the poem is a site of
in-gathering negativity, an other side obdurately resistant to the social
claims that pressure it, yet marked by its own historicity (Adorno
/ ). A lyric poem is a utopian site, reacting to reification and
commodi
fication; it is a protest against the world and it foreshadows a
changed world, as if a tiny post-revolutionary or predictive spot in a pre-
revolutionary situation.
This towering and compelling argument for a poem’s utopian
Otherness, for the way it makes a social protest ontologically, by its very
being-a-poem, seems curiously to argue against its real analytic propo-
sitions. The way Adorno deploys assumptions of a transcendent
“beyond” of art – in the suggestive term negativity – clings to lyric and
shorter poetry making it di
fficult to see any cultural work done by poems
except a generalized resistance (“renunciation” or refus:
/
). And except for something quite interesting, if also general: a use in
poems of erotic narratives as encodings of social stories proposing a
“free humankind” by virtue of the idealized Self-Other relations in such
works, a proposition that cries out for feminist critique (
/ ).
Reading poetry over the past
fifty-plus years of literary studies in the
U.S. was so thoroughly an activity mandated by the formalist elegances
of New Criticism that contemporary context-oriented moves, however
synoptic and brilliant, are decidedly wary of the texture and the nature
of poems and are much more comfortable with narrative. Many of the
people who o
ffer materialist readings show how fiction represents histor-
ical contradictions and contesting social ideologies in clashes between
characters, or in rifts and
fissures in a text – positions exemplified by
Raymond Williams, Jameson, Macherey, Eagleton, and Said.
19
How then can one make culturalist readings of poetry? Since this
question was apparently blocked by anti-contextualist strategies of close
reading developed within the era of New Criticism, it appeared to some
as if one needed to get “beyond new criticism” in order to engage this
issue (Arac
, see , ).
20
One path is a reading strategy for poetry
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
intertextual with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the rejection of total-
izing metaphysics in general that Richard Machin and Christopher
Norris characterize by the rubric “post-structuralist readings of poetry.”
In their anthology, they have also made the polemical claim against New
Criticism more intense by providing readings of hyper-canonical poems.
Christopher Norris emphatically rejects formalist propositions: that
poetry emanates from a “sovereign” autonomous language rather than
using discourses the ways other
fields and arguments do, that poetry pre-
serves a special literariness, creating “a self-sustaining allegory of aes-
thetic transcendence,” and that poetry occasions a transhistorical
meeting place of poetic minds, a “purely synchronic cultural order”
(Machin and Norris
, , , ). Thus the anthology speaks for
a concept of poetry as impure, historical.
21
This is both useful and
helpful, yet a further step needs to be taken. For just rhetoric and narra-
tive do not account for all the e
ffects a poem may produce, and “ideol-
ogy” as an imagined conglomerate speaker must still choose speci
fic
poetic means, like line break.
In an earlier anthology “beyond New Criticism,” and in the after-
word, critically situating the anthology that claimed, but did not fully
achieve, that move “beyond,” Jonathan Arac challenged critics to
discuss ways in which poetry is related to “sociocultural codes” and
called for an enhanced and strategic use of historical scholarship in crit-
icism. Noting that rhetorical
figures and genres can hardly be assumed
to have transhistorical meanings or functions, he proposes the develop-
ment of a “historical semiotics” bound to a Bakhtinian examination of
“the historical study of the orders of language,” or “interdiscursivity”
to see how poetic genre, rhetoric and textual materials relate and
respond to “sociocultural codes” (
, –). Arac’s call opens the
possibility of understanding poetry by an exploration of its social dis-
courses. At the same time, one must
find in these observations a way of
factoring in the codes of poetry, its panoply of forms, its own generic
conventions.
Hence my reading strategy does not reject the rich formal investiga-
tions and textual intimacies of New Criticism, but rather repositions
them. A remark by the romanticist Susan Wolfson sums up the interests
at stake: “‘close reading,’ as a practice of attention, need not be com-
plicit with the methods and agenda of the New Criticism in which its
skills were
first exercised and refined”; hence she proposes to study “the
construction of forms in relation to subjectivity, cultural ideology, and
social circumstance” (
, ; , ). She means by poetic form pre-
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
cisely what I will propose here: “the events of form – rhyme, wordplay,
syntax, and the play of the poetic line” (Wolfson
, ).
22
All in all, this book wants to join these and other readers “to see how,
in the very detail of composition, a certain social structure, a certain
history, discloses itself,” as Raymond Williams says; it wants to accom-
plish this task by enhancing, not draining our sense of “the composition”
(Williams
, ). Hence this book is animated by a specific assump-
tion in method: social meanings and debates, textual irruptions of sub-
jectivities, contradictory or self-consistent, must be examined not just in
poetry but as poetry. I will call this attentiveness to “the events of form”
– in the service of social identi
fications, social entitlements, and possibly
ideological critique – a “social philology.”
Nothing, it has appeared, could be less appropriate as a critical tech-
nique than philology. Students of modernism generally reject, with
Pound, “the slough of philology” – those “rags of morphology, epigra-
phy, privatleben and the kindred delights of the archaelogical or ‘scholarly
mind’” (Pound
, v). The hell-bent crime of “obscuring the texts with
philology” – Pound’s charge in Canto
– reminds us that the word is
under heavy suspicion. Students of a materialist approach have had a
similar revulsion from philology, construed as the study of “dead,
written, alien” languages and “isolated,
finished, monologic utterances”
(Volosinev
, ). An “intrinsic” study of literature such as New
Criticism emerges in large part to resist scientistic and positivist philolo-
gies, and the terse one-paragraph “obituary” of philology, written by
Wellek and Warren at the beginning of chapter
of Theory of Literature,
apparently rejects the term as being too “divergent” and various in
meaning, but this is a pretext for a strategic encirclement to choke o
ff its
in
fluence (Nichols , ; Welleck and Warren, , ). Julia
Kristeva (
, –) could not be more dismissive of the philological
undertaking in part because its positivist
fixing of meaning, and in part
by the “obliteration of the density” of both sign and speaking subject.
Modern reading strategies, and modernist readings of modernism
began by the displacing of the philologist by the literary critic (Guillory
, –). But perhaps a “philology” that enhances the understand-
ing of the social density of both sign and subjectivity can be constructed.
For philology begins, etymologically, in “love of words” and their
density; the method examines what words do contextually, what they
gather up, what they layer, how they are gapped and positioned syntac-
tically, and what is suggested by speci
fic structural trajectories. As Karl
Uitti has observed in his history of philology, the development of a high
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
level of critical and textual philology (in editing, for instance) and the
Viconian use of texts and documents as primary to the human sciences
o
ffers the stances of intellectual “skepticism” and interest in “particu-
lars” that are part of the discipline I propose (Uitti
: –). When
in “What is the history of literature?” Jonathan Arac (
) tries to
balance the dialectical claims of the political and literary, the national
and aesthetic (
), he hints that a repositioning reassessment of the tasks
summarized by the word “philology” would not be amiss (
–). To
claim back an enhanced and modi
fied philology is one motive for this
book.
23
I use the word philology in order to sum up a concern for the tex-
tures and
fibers of poetic language, for the “detail of composition,” “the
events of form,” the “deployment of arti
fice,” for “the remainder.”
A social philology claims that social materials (both speci
fic and
general politics, attitudes, subjectivities, ideologies, discourses, debates)
are activated and situated within the deepest texture of, the sharpest
speci
ficities of, the poetic text: on the level of word choice, crypt word,
impacted etymologies, segmentivity and line break, the stanza, the
image, diction, sound, genre, the “events” and speakers selected inside
the work (enounced), and the rhetorical tactics of the thing on the page
(enunciation). All the materials of the signi
fier are susceptible of a
topical/topographic reading in a social philology. The attentiveness that
poetry excites is a productive way to engage ideologies and contradic-
tions in texts, while honoring the depth and complexity of poetry as an
intensive genre. So by a social philology, I mean an application of the
techniques of close reading to reveal social discourses, subjectivities
negotiated, and ideological debates in a poetic text.
In this articulation of the word “social” with the word “philology,” I
must, with all respect, keep this position distinct from the “return to phi-
lology,” proposed in
by Paul de Man. His essay, in part an intra-
Crimson struggle, enlists the New Critical, pragmatic practice of
“reading texts closely as texts” by Reuben Brower as a literary engage-
ment comparable to the later poststructuralist theory that de Man
defends from Walter Jackson Bate (de Man
, ). How can close
reading and poststructuralism possibly coincide? They are both seen by
de Man as pre-ideological, since “in practice, the turn to theory
occurred as a return to philology, to an examination of the structure of
language prior to the meaning it produces” (
). But it is unreasonable
to seek that moment “prior to meaning,” or even to claim to have found
it, since any such moment is already
filled with expectations and prac-
tices. It is a tempting, if impossible emptiness. Rather than postulate that
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
there exists any blank spot prior to meaning, or claim the critic as tabula
rasa upon whom language simply wields its witchcraft, I would hardly be
alone in assuming that a “rhetoric and a poetics” can never be “prior to
a hermeneutics and a history” (
, ). What I would therefore mean by
a “social philology” is precisely the opposite of de Man’s wish that close
reading can be separated from social inscriptions. Instead, as Terry
Eagleton has noted with reference to Walter Benjamin, any “individual
phenomenon [of text] is grasped in all of its overdetermined complex-
ity as a kind of cryptic code or riddling rebus to be deciphered, a dras-
tically abbreviated image of social processes which the discerning eye
will persuade it to yield up” (Eagleton
, ).
Social philology draws on pragmatic cultural materialist analyses
identifying debates, discourses, and relationships sedimented in formal
features of poems in the “sociological poetics” that Bakhtin/Medvedev
propose in The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: a Critical Introduction to
Sociological Poetics (Eagleton and Milne
; Bakhtin and Medvedev ,
).
24
This perspective
first insists that all authorship participates in the
creation and extension of ideology, but that formalist critics correctly
articulated the key issue: “How, within the unity of the artistic construc-
tion, is the direct material presence of the work, its here and now, to be
joined with the endless perspectives of its ideological meaning?”
(Bakhtin/Medvedev
). The mediating concept to link “the material
presence of the word with its meaning” is “social evaluation” (
).
Every utterance articulates values and evaluations; each word choice is
filled with social understandings; conventions are read through the map
of prior uses; discourses are not static but have di
fferent valences in
changing historical location and function.
In a key formulation: “Every concrete utterance is a social act. At the
same time that it is an individual material complex, a phonetic, articu-
latory, visual complex, the utterance is also part of social reality . . .
When the poet selects words, their combination, and their compositional
arrangement, [s/he] selects, combines, and arranges the [social] evalu-
ations lodged in them as well” (Bakhtin/Medvedev
, , ).
25
Note the emphasis on agency of the maker. Evaluation involves judg-
ment motivated by an implicit argument or debate; choices have
complex motivations, including struggles, resistances, confrontations.
The acts of selection and combination (rhetorical and intellectual activ-
ities creating the poem) that Roman Jakobson pinpoints are already
social and ideologically motivated practices.
26
This evocation and
arrangement of social evaluations (ideologies, assumptions, judgments)
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
inside speci
fic words and syntaxes are cues to historical discourses and
debates. These emerge in a poetic text not only in theme (signi
fied) but
also in technique and rhetoric (signi
fier), not only as communication, but
also as inscription (Venuti
, ). And, as Bakhtin and Medvedev inti-
mate, not only words, but any textual forms used in poetry – line break,
diction/word choice, imagery, syntax, stanza organization, punctuation,
spaces – could be analyzed as the arrangement of social evaluation. This
enhanced kind of close reading with culturalist aims is what I mean by
a “social philology.”
A social philology is also informed by the poetics of the detail in
Walter Benjamin. His poetics of the detail is, perhaps, too deictic for
explanatory critical practice, given its ecstatic apostrophe to simply
showing or exhibiting the odd bits of matter (with an end, in Benjamin,
of constructing a montage of citations). His moving call to examine “the
trivia, the trash” is, however, evocative and inspires the politics of my
critical practice: a philological look at signi
fiers, in order to “build up the
large constructions out of the smallest, precisely fashioned structural ele-
ments,” although I shall be agnostic as to whether the critic can or
should “detect the crystal of the total event in the analysis of the small,
individual moment” (Smith
, ).
27
Benjamin’s “dialectical images”
that “de
fine both the form and the content of historical knowledge” (as
Richard Sieburth explains) are part of the inspiration for such a study
(Sieburth
, ).
A social philology will attempt to articulate the layering of ideologi-
cal nuance in particular statements in poems; it can do this by attention
to the historical discourses that poetry summarizes, condenses, and
arranges. Social philology is, then, also indebted to a British and mate-
rialist practice of close reading later absorbed into a more neutralized
United States New Criticism, excluding, pedagogically, issues of context,
biography, discursive formations, and even notably, overt political/ideo-
logical statement, at least from the pedagogy of reading texts.
28
That is,
such a work as William Empson’s The Structure of Complex Words (
) sug-
gests, with its enlargement of the Freudian sense of condensation, that
words can indicate “compacted doctrine” as if they were the presenting
symptoms of certain social histories that had been squeezed tight within
them, and whose implications and resonances create the aura of
meaning (
). It is clearly true that such a method – itself poised febrilely
between the social and the aesthetic – would want to seek precisely the
way poetic forms (and not simply statements in poetry) become sources
of knowledge, the ways poems become acts of cognition.
29
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
Adorno’s essay “Lyric poetry and society” notes that that in every
poem the relationship of subjectivity in its historical form to society in
its historical form can be found (
/ ). (He says in the lyric; I
shall now silently expand, possibly against his intent, and use the word
poem.) The relationship of subjectivity to historical moment is crystal-
lized as “a social antagonism”; that is, social debates and cultural narra-
tives pressured through and pressuring a subjectivity speak through the
poem as texture (
/ ). “Thematic elements” and “formal
elements” interpenetrate; “it is only by virtue of such interpenetration
that the lyric poem actually captures the historical moment within its
bounds” (
/ ).
30
Because form helps to produce the poem’s
historical information such materialist analyses must, in Adorno’s words
“lead not away from the work of art but deeper into it” (
/
).
The essays of Antony Easthope o
ffer a penetrating encapsulation of
the issues of subjectivity in poetry. Easthope articulates, drawing on
Roman Jakobson, an apparently stolid, but potentially
flexible, staging of
four points in the poem’s makeup to which I shall have occasion to turn
(Easthope
, –; see Jakobson , –). These are the narrated
event(s) inside the poem, that is, the poem’s diegesis, and the speaker of
and participants in these events (any characters and pronouns inside the
poem). In the somewhat weighty terminology applied, this set is called,
respectively, the enounced (“narrated event”) and the subjectivity of the
enounced. Then one turns to the whole speech act or speech event as a
work or text within language – what one might call the extradiegetic, the
thing on the page. Following Easthope and Jakobson, this is sometimes
called the enunciation. This may be anything about the poem aside from
its interior action; it might be a stanza break, or a pun. There is also a
“participant of the speech event . . . whether addresser or addressee”
(Jakobson
, ). The semi-imaginary person articulating the total
statement as object is called by Easthope the subjectivity of the enuncia-
tion; I am not just willfully trying to avoid the simple word “poet,” but
trying to honor fabrications and productions, the dramatic construction
of voicing made in any individual poem. Further no poet uses all of
herself in a particular poem; that portion that speaks is the subjectivity of
the enunciation. In many poems, there is a con
fluence between the sub-
jectivity of the enounced and of the enunciation, as the poem’s speaker
(inside the diegesis) seems to be the poet making the words of the enunci-
ation. Easthope sees this con
fluence as creating the humanist illusion of
personable presence – a poet really speaking to us directly.
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
Presumably, but temporarily, the subjectivity of the enunciation was
once some part of the poem’s author, but in the actual processes of
repeated reading, the author is not crucial. Easthope follows Jakobson
and Benveniste in extending that privilege of enunciation to the
reader/addressee, that is, to whomever produces that work by reading it
in the present, a present that is always alive, potential, and shifting. This
privileging of the reader is of special interest to Easthope, as it indicates
his commitment to the speci
ficity and historicity of reception. However,
it comes at a cost, the relative loss to this theory of the social subject as
author, the loss of the
first creator of the signifieds. There is agency
within discourse and ideology, within a social space acting to make any
particular poem as such; there is, I mean, agency that produces in the
first place what used to be called the “speaker” or “persona” of the poem
and here would have (antiseptically) to be called the subjectivity of the
enunciation. And there is a third space – the subjectivity of the agent
making the work, itself not necessarily coterminous with the subjectiv-
ity of the enunciation. Further, as Lawrence Venuti has argued in his
closely reasoned elucidation of the mechanisms and politics of “symp-
tomatic reading,” any materialist reading necessitates a theory of sub-
jectivity that does not hold the author to being “determined” but also
“determining” in relation to material conditions and the medium (
,
–).
But Easthope is rather disinterested in individuals as authors. He is
emphatic on the rejection of “the unnecessary and impossible search for
a transcendental subject – the ‘real man’ ‘behind’ the text” (Easthope
, ); this is presented as an attack on the humanist privileging of
“presence” in Easthope’s “Poetry and the politics of reading” (
,
–). Yet not all (authorial) subjectivities producing texts aspire to
uni
fied, ahistorical, universalizing subjectivity; they just, let us say, aspire
to some positions that function validly, that have necessity. Hence, while
hardly claiming “real” anyone as its
findings, this book will not deem-
phasize agency so forcefully as Poetry as Discourse does by its concerted
attack on biographical impressionism and by its post-Foucauldian burial
of individual authorship.
31
First, for me, discourses and thematic state-
ments are not free
floating atmospheres (unattached to situation), but are
tools, sometimes quickly, and even contradictorily, grabbed by persons,
whether in the spirit of intellectual system or of bricolage. I maintain
interest in agency and authorial choice: the “career of that struggle”
constructs authorship as ongoing struggle with the social materials
forming authors and their production, and forming reception and dis-
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
semination, as well as a struggle with the materials of the text, including
the semiotic materials semiconsciously emerging (DuPlessis
).
32
Indeed, “dead author” or “author function” claims seem to be made
precisely to ignore the social and material relations of literary produc-
tion, the issues of dissemination and reception that are foregrounded by
feminist, ethnic and other materialist social criticism. The “dead
author” claim is a way for the critic to avoid noticing or commenting on
those relationships of dissemination that still make certain texts, like
Orwell’s famous pigs, more hegemonic than others. In any event, writing
is made by the engagements and choices of people who, with various
motivations, conscious and unconscious, create speaking
figures and
subject positions, who propose in their work (to echo Fredric Jameson’s
extension of Marianne Moore) imaginary solutions to real and invented
con
flicts, doing so precisely by concerted choices, mixes, articulations,
and appropriations of words, syntaxes, and discourses.
An example of a reading based on these principles might look at
Countee Cullen’s “Incident” from his
first book Color (). The poem
is a three-quatrain ballad about the trauma of racial naming for a
child.
33
The title word means event, but an event contingent upon or
related to another, one small or minor occurrence which implicates or
precipitates a public crisis. The word is used precisely to link personal
and political meaning; the personal meaning is the blanking out, or
blocking out, from memory of any other thing that happened one
summer in Baltimore, once the decisive rupture of happiness has
occurred by the ferocity of the white gaze. The political trauma is blank-
ing or blocking because of blacking. Because it means “something con-
tingent upon or related to something else,” the title also links the subjects
of the enounced (two boys) and the narrated incident inside the poem
with the subjectivity of enunciation, creating only a “minor” poem.
The poem presents the blow of social learning of one’s place in a
racial/racist order, a moment discussed in many autobiographical and
fictional materials – by Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and
James Weldon Johnson – as a turning point for black children. This
moment is usually unmarked in white writing. Cullen’s central quatrain
proposes the equality of the children in size, demeanor, and in age,
indeed, in every way but one. The stanza, as is well known, contains a
notable insult, as it moves from smile, to rude tongue gesture layering
“poke” as thrust and “poke” as a blow struck,
finally to a name calling
that interpellates both children into the racial system of the U.S., to the
despair of the one and the satisfaction of the other. When the word
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
“nigger” is spoken, it is carefully quoted from the white child; it is not in
free indirect discourse. Cullen has engineered a pause before the deci-
sive word, to call our attention to its being spoken (it is capitalized), to
freeze-frame it. This moment of racialization is a sociopolitical equiva-
lent of oedipalization, for it creates two unequal racial castes from poly-
valent children, as oedipalization creates two gender castes. The space
issues of the central quatrain further represent this social inequality:
each child owns one of the
first two lines, but in the second two lines of
the quatrain, the black child then only possesses a hemistich, while the
white child takes up a line and a half. This stanza emphasizes the nar-
rated event (the enounced), and the other subjectivity of the enounced
(“I”) has been
fixed by the derogatory word of the white child (Easthope
, ). But the poem, as an enunciation (speech event created by
Cullen), struggles against this derogatory term, by o
ffering a different
speaking subject, one in retrospective control of the narrated event.
Cullen does so by proposing, in the texture of the poem as enunciation,
a suggestive confrontation of the overt, low word “nigger” and the more
muted, elegant one, “whit.”
The word “whit” examined by a social philology is the point at which
cross both lateral metonymic associations and a vertical semantic coring
to make a sedimented argument against the subjectivity ascribed to the
African-American child. The word means a particle or iota: one child is
not a bit bigger than the other – they are equals in size. The word is a
variant of “wight,” which means a person or human creature. Hence the
buried narrative or crypt narrative that etymology o
ffers in whit/wight
is the a
ffirmation of the full personhood and equality of both children
denied by the incident. Additionally, “wight” means “valor” or bravery,
a meaning that evokes the ethical evaluations of courage/cowardice at
play here, especially insofar as valor for the black child may involve
(unspoken, unnarrated) repression of the urge to
fight or answer back,
leading perhaps to an anger or pain so intense as to create a trauma of
memory. Hence this incident is all that the speaker remembers of this
sojourn.
Horizontally, “whit” also irresistibly suggests both “white” and “wit.”
Though the white child is no whit bigger (and no bigger in “wit” –
another connotive slide), his social power gives him a bigger impact. To
describe white as socially bigger than its obnoxious rhyme word, although
no whit/wit personally or morally larger is indeed a compressed politi-
cal allegory tamped into the word choice, the rhyme choice, and the
finality of the quatrains. The negative word, offering a subject place for
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
African-Americans, was, incidentally, common enough in white writing
in this period, including in works by Carl Van Vechten, Sherwood
Anderson, Mina Loy, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos
Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and many others; its dangerous impact on
African-Americans is registered in a poem countering the epithet with
brave black heroes – Frank Horne’s “Nigger: A Chant for Children.” In
this reading of Cullen’s “whit,” I hunted shadow words “behind” the
statement, coring down into etymologies, pursuing metonymic associa-
tions, sound shifts, and denotive auras, reading visual suggestions, and
identifying the narratives and metaphors buried in the texture of a work
that allowed for a simple, belittled subjectivity of the enounced and a
fierce, proud, judgmental subjectivity of the enunciation. These read-
ings of the signi
fier (by association, etymology, syntax, connotation,
denotation, segmental position) in relation to the discursive and political
field is some of what I mean by social philology. It is allegorically appro-
priate that my poetics of the detail has been exempli
fied by a word –
“whit” – that means particle or iota, and has involved allusion to a very
derogatory word – indicating that words and their “social evaluations”
are no small matter.
A second example of a reading based on a social philology draws on
Gertrude Stein’s “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” (written in
– or
; published in ), a work of resounding poetic prose repetitions.
34
“She was gay there, not gayer and gayer, just gay there, that is to say she
was not gayer by using the things she found there that were gay things,
she was gay there, always she was gay there” (Stein
, ; Stein ,
). The much repeated word “gay,” with its condensed, implosive
meanings brought under the scrutiny of a social philology, suggests three
directions, three discourses, three possibilities, and the open pathways
between them; all involve seeking pleasure and all are sexually sugges-
tive. These meanings are not sortable and remain in permanent slippage
across the work, by conscious manipulation on Stein’s part.
The
first meaning of “gay” is mirthful, charming, brilliant, showy,
joyous; this is also the meaning of the word gai in French, a language on
which Stein repeatedly draws for everything from verbal nuances to
translinguistic puns. Women become “gay” as they enter social space
and leave the dour family house, a site emphatically “not gay.”
Department stores attract them, shopping and the urbane pleasures of
city life are enticing. As women, they are supposed to be gay: not too
serious about “cultivating” their talents, but consciously cultivating their
decorative
flair, their consumerist bent, their personal pleasure.
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
In “cultivated” Stein takes up the question of work for women.
Cultivate is a term with two prongs – toward tilling the soil, and toward
educational re
finement and formation. The women never became pro-
fessionals in their cultivation: “The voice Georgine Skeene was cultivat-
ing she did not cultivate too much. She cultivated it quite some. She
cultivated and she would sometime go on cultivating it and it was not
then an unpleasant one . . .” (Stein
a, ; , ). The flux of
the diction – between “not too much” and “quite some” and “go on cul-
tivating,” and then the creating of “a quite richly enough cultivated one”
– does suggest that some debate about female professionalism has been
encoded as a socially shifting condition. How much e
ffort is consistent
with personal pleasure, with not being bored, with being part of a com-
munity in which “there were many cultivating something,” with the pos-
sibility of working further to perfection are questions all in
flux (Stein
a, , also ).
The second, related, meaning of “gay” (dating from about
, well
within early “New Woman” discourse) is fast or sexually active. The “gay
life” was a euphemism for prostitution, or, softened, for a sexually active
life without marriage, as in “gay divorcée” or “Gay Paris,” the city of
sexual access; a “gay blade” or “gay dog” is used as an indicator of a
male seducer or gallant. This meaning of the word “gay” is someone
(gender unspeci
fic) who conducts a nonmarital sexual life, but the word
has a special punch when applied to women, for it indicates sexual pro-
miscuity as opposed to some understood sexual standard of (premarital)
chastity and/or (postmarital) monogamy. The culture of sexuality,
sexual expressiveness, sexual experimentation, and sexual knowledge
grew in general importance in the early twentieth century; the “modern-
ization of sex” was a remarked upon phenomenon: “the modernists
were sexual enthusiasts” (Evans
, –; Robinson , ). This
second meaning of gay as (probably hetero)sexual liberation is drawn in
a section in which Miss Furr and Miss Skeene “sat with . . . dark and
heavy” men: “They were regular then, they were gay then, they were
where they wanted to be then where it was gay to be then, they were reg-
ularly gay then” (Stein
, ; , ). This second use of the word
“gay” marks public displays of sexuality – lack of chaperones, sexual
expressiveness, seduction rituals, brazen behaviors.
The third meaning of “gay” is homosexual, a thoroughly plausible, if
not thoroughly provable, denotation.
35
It is di
fficult to identify beyond
doubt whether this usage is applicable to a work written in
, with dic-
tionaries drawn up within the gay community dating the word rather
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
earlier than not.
36
Indeed, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene”’s use of “gay”
(dated
– or ) may be registering, in a seismographic flutter, the
moment when the lesbian bond was factoring o
ff from female friendship.
But the ambiguity of usage is also important. Stein moves “Miss Furr
and Miss Skeene” forward by nuance and innuendo, exchanging and
substituting among meanings of gay. Certain sentences might be para-
phrased: it’s not gay (amusing, joyous, blithe) to live in a certain place as
a woman because you can’t be gay (sexually active, and/or lesbian
and/or happy) there. Despite publishing this work, three months later
(in October
), the magazine Vanity Fair also set out, as Laura Behling
has shown, a parodic advertisement based on Stein, an advertisement
whose insistence on heterosexual conformity (“When Helen Furr got
gay with Harold Moos”) suggests that Vanity Fair and its audience well
knew, at least in
, what the word “gay” might imply, and wanted to
pare down those meanings to heterosexual sexuality and sophisticated
charm, excluding lesbianism (Behling
, –). Could Mr. Moos
give our heroine a “cow”?
Sexual boldness, sex-radical thinking, sex as health are all part of a
certain strand of New Woman thinking. Certainly sexual expression by
these “Misses” (whether alone, with male partners, with each other) is
not lurid, criminal, demonized, a torment, a punishable o
ffense, a sin, a
disgrace, a fall, an outrage, nor does it issue in any formerly conventional
accompaniments: psychic anguish about loss of chastity, pregnancy,
venereal disease, social opprobrium, death.
37
Stein wittily extends health
to all forms of sexuality, and expresses this in two names, that, as
Marjorie Perlo
ff points out, suggest the sensual: “fur and skin” (,
). Further, gay existence (as a predicate adjective) creates more gay
activity, both sexual and pedagogic. The
final line is: “[Miss Furr] told
many then the way of being gay, she taught very many then . . . and was
telling about little ways one could be learning to use in being gay, and
later was telling them quite often, telling them again and again” (Stein
, ; , ). Not content with being it, or doing it, Miss Furr
must proselytize and teach it, a tongue in cheek comment upon the
spreading of various socially bene
ficial gospels by settlement workers
from the new female educated cohort.
38
The word “again,” pronounced by some with the second a empha-
sized and lengthened, is therefore an extension of the word “gay” into
“gain,” a strong assertion. The transegmental drift of gay to gain infuses
Stein’s own rhetorics/poetics of repetition – of “beginning again and
again,” as she later outlines in “Composition as Explanation” (Stein
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
, ). “A gain” is also a word that suggests the fruits of gainful
employment. It is one of two words deep in the linguistic texture of the
work that links the optimistic ethos of striving and achievement – the
New Woman success story – to gayness. The other word is “regular.”
“They were regular in being gay, . . . they were gay every day, they were
regular, they were gay, they were gay the same length of time every day,
they were gay, they were quite regularly gay” (Stein
, –; ,
). If to be “gay” is “a gain,” if one does it “regularly,” and “for the
same length of time each day,” “gay” is like employment. So a cluster of
associations about work for women is evoked,
flirtatiously, comically –
and applied to sexuality in general, and lesbian sexuality in particular.
Stein a
fforded pleasure as her work.
The insistence on “regularity” and the habitual strongly suggests that
sexual activity for women as an important, positive, necessary part of all
adult life (Robinson
, ). In a letter to New Freewoman, a (perhaps
staged) correspondent remarks on the “sexual needs” of women, decid-
ing we must “perform with reasonable regularity all our animal func-
tions,” ending with the ringing statement: “God save us from sexual
constipation!” (February
, ). Given the texture of her poetic prose,
Stein is surely saved from this fate. “Regular” is a very important concept
in this work, for the issue with the varieties of “gayness” is as much its
regularity as its object choice. Insofar as Stein depicts sexual pleasures
for female characters without marriage, (in this work) without domestic-
ity, and sometimes without men, the normalcy and health implied in the
word “regular” – customary and usual, methodical, correct, and proper
– takes on a robustly critical dimension. The word “regular” is the site
at which bourgeois regulation is spoken semi-ironically. To discharge
one’s responsibilities, to do one’s duty, to act correctly are notions witty
enough when applied to non-normative sexuality (masturbating, sleep-
ing around, lesbian sexuality, oral sex), but the solemnity of these dis-
charges of duty is further disturbed when anality and regular bowels
hover in the background.
39
A third point about the uses of a social philology must be noted. We
learn from Frank Lentricchia’s exploration of a “decisive scene for
modern American poetry” that a poet – Wallace Stevens – can cross and
double cross his gender and class allegiances in the making of his career,
“the author as economic as well as sexual transvestite” (Lentricchia
,
). “Modernist poetics in Stevens is a feminization of the literary life
motivated by capitalist values, and, at the same time, a struggle to over-
come this feminization” because it trivializes literature (
).
40
To extend
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
this reasoning, one might see that many cross-vested investments can be
made by poets; other “conglomerate titles” are possible. As William
Carlos Williams said to Marianne Moore in
, putting the title Al que
quiere! in Spanish appealed to his “mixture of two bloods, neither of
them particularly pure” (Williams
, ). He meant Puerto Rican and
English, but he also amusingly proposes himself as both aristocrat and
democrat, adding a class component to the mix. To the de
fiant message
of the Spanish, he added an English phrase, remarking “Now I like this
conglomerate title!”
“Architecture,” a notable early Stevens poem predicting the poetic
career, o
ffers evidence that poetry involves a “conglomerate title” to a
variety of suggestive social materials, not necessarily
fixed by one’s most
obvious social subjectivity, whatever that is thought to be (Stevens
,
–; ). “What manner of building shall we build?” Stevens asks;
and “In this house, what manner of utterance shall there be?”; “And how
shall those come vested that come there?” The word “vested,” like the
word “titled,” o
ffers assumptions of proprietary authority in the poetic
act. “Architecture” designs, builds, and enjoys a shimmering, metaphoric
edi
fice of multiple (different, yet coexisting) social locations and tones –
for example “heavenly dithyramb” and “niggling forms of gargoyle
patter.” The edi
fice has a playful phallic part in which towers are
“push[ed] up . . . to the cock-tops” and another part where “our chiefest
dome [is] a demoiselle of gold.” The poet speaks from an already exec-
utive space of designer and contractor, though he also imagines hewing,
as a worker. The illustrative patches of language linked to a conglomer-
ate architecture (domes, shafts, kremlin, plazas, chastel, pillars, blocks,
and nicks) are each suggestive of a particular country, style, or form all
of which are playfully, but imperially, available to Stevens. This poem
shows how one’s sense of entitlement may sometimes come by seeking
a conglomerate title to poetic authority, mixed between, or investigatory
of, more than a single subject position.
There are other readers of poetry using a reading strategy similar to
social philology. I would like to signal a few of the contemporary critics to
whose readings I feel indebted and with whose projects I feel allied. Garrett
Stewart, exhibiting an intense, resolute, and catholic ear, constructs
shadow words laterally, by “pronounced defects” (e
ffects) and “rhymed
treason” (reason): a “phonemic reading . . . a double taking, one sound
overtaking another in sequence.” He names this “trans-segmental drift”
(Stewart
, ix, ). For Stewart these phonemic slippages, the “micro-
particulars of the poetic word,” seem to be a deconstructive property of
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
the literary itself, an otherness of eccentric meanings created by any text
“in excess of semantic necessity, sometimes of semantic capacity” – pre-
cisely like Lecercle’s concept of “the remainder” (
, ). This kind of
reading will bring out third words created in an elision of the two the
author wrote, will catalogue resistance in “phonic counterplays,” will
notice buried puns sparking across, mocking, invigorating surface mean-
ings, may incorporate a countertext of commentary of the poet on the
work, can emphasize thematic problems and crises, and in general will
create enrichments to the
field, a “junctural pressure upon lexical struc-
ture” (
, , ). “Thirst unslaked” for example, has a concealed,
thirst-quenching lake; the gaze is evoked, for in the shadow behind
“Behold her” is the word beholder (
, ). Stewart argues that these
e
ffects create residual meanings or forms of overload that, in effect, can do
anything, even contradictory things, with semantic meaning – can under-
cut, dissolve, or complicate it – so the refractions of sound are studiedly
ludic and anti-reductive, although they may also create “micropoetic
drift” that is linked to plot, structure, paraphrasable meaning, or to what-
ever issues occur in a given work (
).
Given these bravura deconstructions via motivated overreadings for
their own sakes as telling what the medium language can do (and does
do – had we ears enough to hear), it seems plodding and unimaginative
to wonder whether there is any more function or reason for these con-
structions than the sheer excess of the untransparent possible. With all
respect for the labile solicitations of Reading Voices, for the extreme
charms of its contrarian readings, and for the dissolution of poetry’s
authors into language itself, I will treat instances of transegmental drift
in relation to the social philology proposed here, although Stewart prob-
ably would not.
Also indebted to Stewart’s idea of “phantom locatives,” and to a
psychoanalytic study of the “crypt” (trauma and its potentially masked
expression) by Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, John Shoptaw has
proposed a technique of “studying the impact of unwritten words and
phrases” which involves reading for “crypt words” and “crypt phrases”
in a poem (Stewart
; Shoptaw , ). Recently, Shoptaw has
used the cryptographic tactic as a form of “productive reading” that
“renovates close reading” (Shoptaw
; See also Shoptaw , ).
This position has resonance and connection with mine; it has helped me
to focus the claims here.
41
The strength of Shoptaw’s suggestion lies in
its simultaneous apprehension of a textual fact (the compact detail), a
rhetorical representation (often at least a double meaning), and a bidi-
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
rectional but “chemically” fused motivation – from “psychology” of the
author and from “social history” of the author’s location.
An example of a crypt word might be Ezra Pound’s attentiveness to
the trauma of the Somme (in which
, soldiers were killed on the
first day of battle) by the pedal-point repeat of Somme turned into
“some”: “Some quick to arm, / some for adventure, / some from fear of
weakness, / some from fear of censure . . .” (Pound
, ) – the point
is from Margot Norris (
, ). “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” also con-
tains a passage
filled with venom and grief about the sacrifices of young
men in World War I to the allegorical female Britannia (a
figure subsum-
ing male political power and “old men’s lies”). They have died “For an
old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization” (Pound
, ,
). A reading via a social philology finds that Pound vividly maneuvers
the aural drift from “bitch” to “botch,” whereupon the undertone Boche
– a contemporaneous disparaging term for German –
floats up to excor-
iate all.
42
Such a reading would argue that the verse uses sound and
appositive construction to propose that “old bitch” is the presenting
symptom of the “botch / Boche.”
43
A poet’s motivation for such a crypt
phrase may range from the discovery of a shifted or deepened meaning
emerging from that shadow word; a psychological revelation – not nec-
essarily hidden or concealed; a deliberate misrepresentation for reasons
of both concealment or revelation; a political encoding.
Michael Davidson is also one of the critics of twentieth century poetry
who has engaged with social and textual nuance together. In Ghostlier
Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word (
), Davidson puts into
circulation the umbrella concept of “palimtext” (his own invention,
merging the words text and palimpsest) to focus discussions of the material
text, visible/visual page, and typographical interventions, as well as a
whole set of paratextual practices including marginalia, gloss, document,
and translation. He sees the material manifestations of palimtexts as part
of the “objectivist continuum” in modernism: “the sense that language
is fatally connected to (even constitutive of) social materiality” (
). He
too seeks to understand the “ideologies of form” in poetry, “the socially
and culturally coded meanings attached to formal features” (
). These
critics are precursors and partners in social philology to the degree that
they pursue culturalist interpretations that arc among the psychoanalytic
and the biographical through to the social and historical without forego-
ing a sense of the irreducibility and quirkiness of the signi
fier.
In this book, I shall situate the poems by using contemporaneous
debates in texts of a variety of sorts: social comment, social prescription,
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
banalities and analysis. Some of these texts will appear in the same jour-
nals in which the poets showed their work: The Dial, Nation and Atheneum,
Others, Blast, Crisis, New Freewoman, and Egoist. Some of the books will be
the normal, or sometimes trend-setting work of semi-analytic fare.
Sometimes the reading can proceed by identi
fication of historical crises,
some local and small in scale, some based in larger trends, like the
fluc-
tuations of the struggle for women’s su
ffrage in England. A third way to
identify social text in poetry is to read ancillary writing by the poets
themselves (letters, manifestoes, essays) to try to identify the “ideological
lexicon” on which they draw (Spivak
: ).
I generally make a “Perlo
ffian” claim to resist the consideration of
“poetry” as synonymous only with the lyric poem or the romantic ode
(Perlo
ff ).
44
The book will thereupon re
flect upon a variety of ana-
lytic lyrics: problem poems, in the manner of problem plays. For this
reason, the book draws mainly on the “logopoeic” aspects of modern-
ism, and does not engage particularly with what Suzanne Clark has
called “sentimental modernism” (
). Since this book is concerned
with the intersection of two “news” – the rhetorical/stylistic (modern-
ism) and the ideological/political (modernity) – it engages with writers
who tend to stylistic innovation. Hence, although both exempli
fied a
New Woman elan, I will err on the side of Mina Loy rather than Edna
St. Vincent Millay. But even within its “logopoeic” category, I have made
motivated choices, trying to rebalance our attention by bringing under-
scrutinized texts and authors into some relation to more scrutinized
ones. It is already amply clear that this work is not a history or survey but
a suggestion of reading strategies for poetry, to o
ffer a way of engaging
the social meanings imbedded in poetic texts not only thematically, but
in the deep texture. Its
findings should be applicable to poets whose work
is not discussed here.
This book is mainly about United States poetry, but saying it that way
makes for some intellectual discomfort.
45
This book is neither national
nor nationalist; the poets themselves varied in their attitude to nation.
But the uncontingent consideration or placement of a writer by national
origin or
first citizenship might do some damage to Eliot, Loy, Pound,
Stein, H.D. and sometimes Williams and Hughes. Many spent their
adult years living, by choice, in countries other than their national birth-
place, drawing upon the art and culture of those places for their work.
Some of them had fanatasies about other societies, as Stevens did about
Cuba (Eric Keenaghan
). All of those writers responded culturally
to and participated in at least two societies, including the United States,
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
but also British, French, Mexican, and Italian societies, and Caribbean
and African milieus. When Pound responds to a speci
fic suffrage strug-
gle, it is the British community that is his reference point. And if one
addresses the material, quotidian impact of racial prejudice, other
national allusions if not allegiances might save you. James Weldon
Johnson once acted Cuban, in a “Jim Crow” situation of enforced seg-
regation and menace on a United States railroad, using his
fluency in
Spanish to pretend that he was a foreigner in his own country (Johnson
, –). Mina Loy, British by birth, an American citizen in
after many decades of living in the United States, suggests the bicultu-
ral Americanness that I am suggesting is characteristic of this period in
U.S. writing. This book resists using national boundaries as analytic bar-
riers, for in talking about contexts, backgrounds, in
fluences, impacts,
tracked through biographical and intertextual evidence, one can some-
times discern sedimentary layers of social stu
ff from two nations or
more.
It appears, then, that “national” literature is a concept only partly suit-
able to modern writing, no matter the speci
fic allegiances and hopes of
the writers themselves.
46
Though it is certainly a sorting, discussing,
receiving and curricular device, it is also certainly a kind of
fiction. Thus
to say Modern American Poetry (in the title to this book), means a kind
of nomadic shimmer inside speci
fic civic and political locations, some of
which might not be the United States. Hence I am o
ffering the notion
of a creolized “Unitedstatesness,” or of bicultural displacements and
engagements to mark the place in this study that is usually reserved for
a discussion of – or just an assumption of – National Culture. But since
a book, joining others in a library, must be
filed under some existing (that
is, hegemonic) rubric, I have used “American” in the title, but with, as T.
S. Eliot has averred, a chuckle spread from ear to ear.
Another critical rule worth questioning is the
firm segregation by
genre. Critical studies of poetry are usually limited to poems and poets
and poetics. Yet people whom we may emphasize as poets worked in
several genres: Williams, H.D., Lawrence, Loy, Hughes, Stein, Cullen,
Edna St. Vincent Millay, e.e. cummings, and James Weldon Johnson all
wrote novels, stories, and
fiction-like texts, and several wrote what may
be similarly
fictional – that is, their autobiographies. Further, some of
the authors of poetry – Stevens, Loy, Eliot, Kreymborg, Stein, Hughes,
H.D., Williams, Millay – also wrote poetic theater: plays, masques,
Socratic dialogues, Senecan closet drama, puppet plays, artsy symbolist
drama. Then too, poets did not segregate their reading of, their interest
Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry
in, envy of, in
fluence by, or concern for other genres. For these reasons,
I will, upon pragmatic occasion, incorporate some discussion of
fiction,
poetic
fiction, or poetic drama in a book predominantly on poetry.
So to begin. The ways the modernist poem traverses the new entitle-
ments in culture, society, and subjectivity, and the pertinence of social
philology as a reading practice are what I shall pursue.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender
ideologies of lyric
Speaking in the
s of his poem “To a Young Housewife,”
William Carlos Williams states “Whenever a man sees a beautiful
woman it’s an occasion for poetry – compensating beauty with beauty”
(Williams
, ). The genre “poetry” activates notable ideologies,
myths and implicit narratives around sexuality and gender (Barthes
). Certainly poetry is always to be beautiful, and in these beauties
linked to the beauties of Woman. Love, also, will be poetic. One of the
key narratives that constructs traditional lyrics is “masculine, heterosex-
ual desire,” with its interests in a silent, beautiful, distant female object
of longing (Homans,
, ).
1
Inside the enounced, there is often a
triangulated situation in the lyric: an overtly male “I,” speaking as if
overheard in front of an unseen but postulated, loosely male “us” about
a (Beloved) “she” (Grossman
, ), articulating a homosocial trian-
gle (Sedgwick
). This foundational cluster concerns voice (and the
silent), power (of appropriation, envelopment, transcendence), pure
beauty (not formation and culture), gaze (framing, specularity, fragmen-
tation), and the sources of poetic matter – narratives of romance, of the
sublime, scenes of inspiration, the muse as conduit (Vickers
). And
as lyric poetry positions female
figures in the feminine, it resists the pos-
sibility of e
ffeminacy. While other aspects of lyric exist, this cluster con-
tributes to the “political unconscious” of poetry in general, and of the
romantic lyric in particular (Jameson
).
2
This cluster of foundational materials has also been central to de
fini-
tions of poetic vocation. That is, poets committing to their vocation take
up some position in relation to these materials. These lyric ideologies are
not timeless; positions and investments in genders and sexualities are
learned and reinforced. If these materials are recurrent in romantic
lyric, it is because they have been, like any ideology, renewed and reas-
serted. To deploy, examine, reassume, investigate, play with (jocularly,
happily, critically), to select from this cluster, or to comment on these
materials would be acts motivated by a particular poet’s sense of cultu-
ral responsibility and vocation and by a poet’s attitude toward debates
about gender. Pound jokes about this cluster in a young letter to Williams
from
as the “list of facts on which I and ,, other poets have
spieled endlessly,” emphasizing “
. Men love women. (More poetic in
singular, but the verb retains the same form.)” (Pound
, ). The
parodic tone hardly conceals the self-positioning (
).
At the same time, these poetic covenants were confronted by the his-
torical emergence of new entitlements around gender and sexuality:
debates over the nature and theory of sexuality, the rise of sexology as a
scienti
fic study, a show trial of an English homosexual, increasing defi-
nitional and psychological interest in the “intermediate sex,” “transi-
tional men,” and same-sex object choices, a heritage of mannered,
deliberate gender
fluidity and effeminacy in the work of the “decadent”
Victorian poets, a newish subject position called the “New Woman,” agi-
tation about controlling births and other debates on sexuality without
reproduction, divorce legislation, and
finally a militant feminist cam-
paign for the vote in both the U.S. and Britain (Weeks
).
3
Poets work
out the contradiction between foundational covenants of the romantic
lyric and historical militancy from certain new entitlements; in this
chapter, the poems studied cluster around
. Some of these contra-
dictions emerge thematically, in poetry; but by the reading strategy I call
social philology, I shall emphasize those also inscribed in poetic texture
– as poetry.
H.D.’s “Sheltered Garden,” a signature poem from Sea Garden (
)
(H.D.
), critically defines beauty as rupture with the contained fem-
inine. The desirable concept of beauty for the female or gender-neutral
speaker comes in an explicit rejection of the bounded, cosseted “border-
pinks” of the feminine. The poem functions as an allegory of female
education to ladyhood, of female literary education as poetesses, and of
a forced ripeness for consumption in the marriage market.
4
Fruits in this
garden are “wadded” and “smothered” with protection against frost, not
allowed to ripen naturally, not allowed to develop the bite or kick that
natural ripening would give them. For social philology, the crypt words
“wedded” and “mothered” create psycho-social protest in the layered
poetic language. The speaking character of the enounced opens the
poem with a cry of su
ffocation, declaring that protected “beauty” must
be rejected: “for this beauty, / beauty without strength, / chokes out life”
(H.D.
, ). The dramatic action in the poem, indicated by the pile-
up of verbs in the penultimate stanza (“break,” “scatter,” “snap o
ff,”
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
“
fling,” “hurl”), is the future plan to smash the garden with a storm,
crushing the
flowers with torn tree limbs. The aim is “to find a new
beauty / in some terrible / wind-tortured place” (
).
It is an ideologically motivated protest against the foundational lyric
cluster to make harsh “beauty” substitute for loveliness. H.D.’s speaker
does not reject beauty – the concept is quite important to H.D. – but she
alters its nature and function. Of the myriad
flowers in H.D.’s first book,
Cassandra Laity argues that hard-edged, resistant
flowers (like “Sea
Rose” and “Sea Poppy”) are a gender-ambiguous version of decadent
aestheticism, a kind of cruelty in beauty (Laity
, –). In this par-
ticular poem, making a more modern beauty out of fragmentation, dis-
sociation, and even destruction is like a futurist explosion in the
feminine. To move the female over into a place of gender ambiguity (as
a rejection of “Woman”) seems one keen motivation; another might be
a New Woman critique of smothering femininity and containment. But
after the pile-up of action verbs, H.D.’s apparently weaker, though cli-
mactic verb is “blot,” in the apostrophe “O to blot out this garden” (H.D.
, ). The word “blot” suggests the power of the foundational
cluster; for although the denotation of the word “blot” includes to oblit-
erate, hide, or obscure, the connotation is ink spills and erasure by a dark
stain. To say this attacks literary convention is not, however, to minori-
tize the concern: it is precisely the force of gender ideology within the
foundational cluster of poetry that H.D. confronts.
Williams’ poem “Transitional” (
), shows his critical interest in
gender and his wary elucidation of the scene of writing. The opening of
the poem, “First he said: / it is the woman in us / That makes us write”
is an attention-grabbing proposition; one friend argues to the other (a
WCW, or “I” is the more dubious) that their writing is enabled by gender
mobility and doubleness. “Dare you make this / Your propaganda?” is
the shocked response (Williams
, ). Provocatively: “We are not
men / Therefore we can speak.” “We” are “conscious / (of the two
sides)” – gender being imagined as a binary formulation that artists
weave together selectively and androgynously. “We” are accurate (like
men, not women); we are “unbent by the sensual” (as women would be).
This third space is “transitional” – that is, built of an oscillatory move-
ment across terms, combining the bene
fits of maleness and the powers
of femaleness. Bruce Clarke suggests that “Transitional” alludes to the
subtitle of Edward Carpenter’s Intermediate Sex: a Study of Some Transitional
Types of Men and Women (
). Such a subject place is a gender “tertium
quid” that has a good deal in common with the vitalist and evolutionary
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
androgyne of Dora Marsden and some of her Freewoman contributors
(Clarke
, – and ).
The disturbing force of a man who says “we are not men” and the
anxiety about e
ffeminate, third, or new sex subjectivity are expressed, for
social philology, in the etymological reaches of the word propaganda,
which, down through propagate and disseminate, returns to issues of
sexual authority, spiritual power (the Catholic Church has a speci
fic arm
called Propaganda), heterosexual manhood, and ability to inseminate.
The interlocutor brings himself into being with Yawehesque
flair, “Am
I not I – here?” but the question of potency remains. For a man to iden-
tify as and with women, or with the feminine, was both powerful and sus-
picious; this poem dramatizes (in the enunciation) the startled stalemate
between two positions held by the two characters in the enounced: tran-
sitional androgyny and traditional fears of any mobility across gender
binaries, fears of erasing the “binary” itself. Yet the shifts of gender posi-
tionality in the enounced are part of the labile attractions of early
Williams. He makes crossovers to “the female in us” but depicts gender
mobility only in situations in which heterosexuality and homosociality
are elaborated or taken for granted.
This split identi
fication – and its tension between sex and gender – is
seen in a January
Williams letter to Viola Baxter Jordan: “What am
I? I am to a man what you are to a woman – one might say an autoglove
inverted; the inside, skin-side, outside” (Williams
, ). With the bold
image of “inversion,” of whose meaning in sexology Williams could not
be ignorant, Williams proclaims his gender dualities exposed. However,
in his sexual identity, he emphatically resisted feminine identi
fications
(male “inversion”). Phallic manhood is richly bigendered until sexual
expression is at issue. Conglomerate titles have a limit in Williams; the
limit is fear of, and a sometimes tolerant, but more often contemptuous
pity for homosexuality (seen as e
ffeminacy). Williams’ position parallels
a debate in Freewoman, in which two men discuss the propositions of Otto
Weininger. One of the two “informs” the other “Genius is androgynous,
but it is never homosexual. A man of genius may be feminine, but he
must not be e
ffeminate” (Clarke , ; quoting Freewoman I, [Jan.
, ], ).
H.D.’s assumption of authorship involved female resistance to a
certain gender position inside the lyric seen as a site of weakness, minor-
ity, and compliance; Williams’ assumption of authorship could claim a
“conglomerate title” to enriched gender positioning (Williams
, ).
Thus Williams works through a double female and male subjectivity for
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
the speaker of some of the poems, a gender mobility under the sign of
heterosexuality. The cluster female–feminine–woman has di
fferent
meanings to the poets: a woman poet is more likely to
find, in the femi-
nine, various problems. Williams’
statement about “The Young
Housewife” indicates some of his long-term investments in the founda-
tional cluster central to poetry: that beautiful women often inspire the
poetry that it is men’s task to create. H.D. early modi
fied this issue: some
beauty is still important, but it is the dramatic, violent beauty that
emerges when femininity as a site is ripped apart. This creation of an
“anti-feminine” position is generally not sought by the male poets;
judging from Williams, they want a pro-female (possibly pro-feminine)
but anti-e
ffeminate position.
Williams suggests that, for male writers, poetry is a reparation to
women for their beauty, which is culturally appropriated by men for their
poetry via the mechanism of “the gaze” (Mulvey
). This polemical
concept of gaze, itself the product of the hyperbrave binarist stage of
gynocritical thought, may have serious uses for the analysis of lyric
poetry in helping to identify elements of the diegetic relations depicted.
Mulvey proposes two key moves, both of which have their analogue in
many poems in Western culture: voyeuristic investigation/demysti
fica-
tion of the female
figure, and overvaluation of the figure turned into a
fetish.
5
Williams in general demysti
fies women, a tough-minded, realist
strategy, but the possessive and appropriative aspects of “poesy” inter-
mingle with demysti
fication in a poem such as “The Young Housewife”
(
) (Williams , ).
In this poem, by virtue of his responsibility of compensation, a male
speaker is paradoxically both freer and more constrained than the
depicted woman. He has the power to resist, yet remark on, the sexual
undertext when she, “uncorseted” and “in negligee,” “comes to the curb
/ to call the ice-man,
fish-man. . . .” In a sense, she hails these chapmen
into their position of (semi-sexualized) service to her, but the
speaker–observer then “calls” her into her new calling as housewife. For
of the wispy young female, the Williams-speaker states – with great
power in his deliberateness and connoisseurship – “I compare her / to
a fallen leaf.” The “fallen leaf / fallen woman” image, read via a social
philology, indicates social debate. The “fallen leaf ” metaphor of use and
loss is a poetic post carpe diem allusion, a link of woman to nature, fatal-
istic in implication. But it also draws upon the late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century tendentious comparisons of marriage to “parasitism
and prostitution” (in Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner, for
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
instance, and echoed in Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto”). This “leaf ”
metaphor also follows from “the wooden walls of her husband’s house,”
sympathetic lines suggesting her mild imprisonment and the husband’s
clumsy stolidity.
Williams proposes the fate of that one leaf in an implacable image of
destruction (corresponding to Mulvey’s
findings that one punishes the
demysti
fied object), as
The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.
(Williams
, )
The speaker, destroying her for her evocation of sexual desire in him,
has the control of two subject places, both the destructive “wheels of my
car” and his rueful dismissive nod from within it. The poignancy of tra-
ditional gender cluster undergirding poetry has been rea
ffirmed in this
work about the relation of female beauty to male power.
Female beauty, vulnerable beauty exert a magnetic force in another of
the seminal poems of modernism. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”
(
), occurs, he explains, when in Paris he “saw suddenly a beautiful
face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child’s face, and
then another beautiful woman, and I tried all day to
find words for what
this had meant to me, and I could not
find any words that seemed to be
worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion” (Pound [
] , –).
The terms of the inspiration are well within the foundational cluster:
beauty/woman/child/lovely/[poetry], plus the sentimental choking up
at his inadequacy, but Pound resists and attempts to erode the tactic of
“symbolist” and “representational” art and their gender ideologies by
the invention of an abstracting tactic that resists the gender materials.
6
The poem from this struggle between realism/symbolism and
abstraction is well known; in my analysis, the formal poise of the poem
– its haiku confrontation of one line against another, seen through the
lens of social philology, is motivated by a dual answer to debates about
the gender cluster in poetry.
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals, on a wet, black bough.
(Pound [
] , )
7
The
first noun, “the apparition” condenses the bidirectional tension of
this poem; the word ranges between its transrealist meaning of specter
or ghost (and the corresponding etymological charge from the abstrac-
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
tion – epiphany), and its meaning of a sudden or unusual sight, a realist
observation. “These faces in the crowd” is a realist evocation of urban
multiplicity. The symbolist or metaphoric leap is “Petals, on a wet, black
bough” equated with faces. The word “Petals” may be said to deliver the
“feminine”; at least it evokes all the loveliness and vulnerability of faces
seen by chance. Two discourses – documentary/social (which is abstract
or realist) and lyric/poetic (symbolist) are brought into one con
figuration
and are made to interact. “The ‘one-image poem’ is a form of super-
position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another” (
). One idea
is that beauty/the feminine matters in the construction of poetry; the
other is that it does not. Hence part of the force of the juxtaposition that
constructs this brief work comes from the simultaneous a
ffirmation and
denial of the foundational cluster in a poised contradiction.
Pound (like Williams) develops a variety of attitudes to the gender
cluster and narratives of conventional poetry. The most striking poems
in Lustra (
) have an energetic absolutely anti-effeminate sexual nar-
rative. The “lustrum” or expiatory o
fferings for sins, made by censors,
are ironically twisted with the title allusion to “lust,” for if censors typi-
cally disapprove of lust, in Pound it is lack of lust that is the real sin.
Poems, his Pan-like o
ffspring, are “impudent,” and they “dance the
dance of the phallus” (Pound
, –).
8
Lustra is punctuated with
apostrophes to their de
fiant attractions and to their capacity for épatisme.
The readers, presumed to be shocked, are placed by Pound in a femi-
nine–squeamish role as “timorous wench”
fleeing from “centaur” –
mythological male – or “centurion” – historical man (
). Note how the
detail of the poetic text delivers masculinist a
ffirmation: the sound-pun
lengthens one with the other. The timorous “people” inside the
enounced are taxed repeatedly with prudishness, while in contrast the
songs and their speaker own up to their sexuality with fervor. The real
audience for the poems are the “free kind” who indulge in free love;
unwilling readers (in “their virgin stupidity”) and those critics who
“procure” them are rejected, a confrontation between free love, freely
chosen, and marriage market/prostitution. The extended trope of this
work links mating (heterosexual intercourse) with reading, and makes
writing a lusty practice of exposing “verisimilitudes.” Good modern sex
and good modern poems work together; this involves a critique of
“poesy,” for these realist poems stand “without quaint devices” and
“with nothing archaic about them,” a way for them to avoid both med-
ievalism and e
ffeminacy ().
Unlike the male
figure who can accommodate being both centaur and
centurion, the female
figures depicted in Lustra cannot be both attractive
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
and sexually aggressive. For some female
figures, even their “satieties”
makes their souls “delicate” (
). When the female figures are urban and
contemporary, they are shown with a cinematographic clarity by Pound
as obliquely expressing sexual yearning or tension about “the new
morality” (
). One might say that the poems of Lustra are frank and
modern with their enunciation (the poem as such), but the total impact
of the enounced (the narration inside the poem) often reinforces the
double sexual standard. The poems argue that no moderns should
exhibit sexual repression or the “enslaved-by-convention,” yet they also
assiduously appreciate the Women waiting for the poet’s sexual freedom
to free them (
).
Indeed, the sexual narratives of Lustra make a decisive claim for the
masculinity of the poetic enterprise. Despite rejecting the “stupid” ele-
ments of the masculine for the feminine, Pound says in “The
Condolence” that he and his works get more virile, more red blooded.
Happy condolence! By poetry a male becomes even more manly than
he was (Pound
, ) All Pound’s “songs” help make a compound,
homosocial male subjectivity inside the enounced: his songs, addressed
“We, you, I!” – are “Red Bloods” – boon rough-rider companions in the
quest away from asinine maleness. Hence this kind of male poet may
break with “male stupidity” (unglossed in “The Condolence”) and play
in feminine
fields of delicacy and imagination. It is a strong position to
be both male oneself, masculine, and sometimes identifying with the
feminine in one’s writing, but avoiding three dangerous places of writing
practice – the “male but stupid,” the feminist, and the e
ffeminate.
9
When in
, in “Sacred Emily,” Gertrude Stein first announces
“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” “Rose” emerges charged up sexually:
“Pussy pussy pussy what what” (Stein
a, ). The “rose” motto also
appears in the extended appreciative epistle about orgasm, “Lifting
Belly,” from
– (Stein , ). Stein’s famous tautological defini-
tion punning on “Eros,” “arrose” (French: to water, sprinkle, spray), and
“arouse,” was sometimes typographically presented in a circle, which is,
as the old word has it, a “poesy.” In a re
flection on poetry and on this
phrase, about twenty years later, Gertrude Stein discusses the founda-
tional cluster of poetry. “Poetry and Grammar” expands her “rose” to a
de
finition of the relational plot that drives poetry.
Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with
denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that
always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing
nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what
kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. (Stein [
]
, )
She proposes that all genres of poetry (not just the lyric) involve intense
erotic attention, making love (“caressing”), and a passionate calling of
nouns (“more violently more persistently more tormentedly”) as if each
were the name of a beloved (
; ). Love, sex, and poetry are certainly
hitched in Stein’s theory, but in her passage, the object of attention is
neither man nor woman, but any noun and all nouns. The subjectivity
speaking inside the work is twin: the caressing “I” is sometimes a lover
but sometimes “Poetry” itself, loving nouns.
Stein provides an x-ray of the ideological mechanism of poetry.
When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry
and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and
addressed a noun.
(
)
The rhyme of “caressed” and “addressed” in the enunciation clari
fies
the link between the romance plot and poetic vocation, but the object of
attention is a grammatical unit. For social philology, “address” shows a
dynamic taking of linguistic power. The “courteous attentions, or
wooing” that show “skillfulness and tact” (to cite the dictionary) also
move in transegmental drift between a dress and un dress, shadow words
adding to the female site and its sexual possibilities. Stein concludes that
“any poetry all poetry” is like this, and “anybody” can see it, thus calling
attention to the common knowledge (ideology) of poetry as a genre, as
based fundamentally on the sexual activity of caressing nouns. One
might debate whether, by making the caress lesbian, Stein does or does
not secede from the foundational cluster.
Stevens’ poem “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate” (
) is a rather dis-
a
ffected probing of a male response to the foundational cluster love, sex,
woman, poetry. Stevens resurrects a gigantic female
figure out of the
tomb, whose parts, as listed, suggest a blason (“the lashes of that eye and
its white lid”) (
, ). Stevens’ poem chips apart the female, going all
the way down to “the bundle of the body and the feet,” in an apprecia-
tion that scatters now impotent power, with an Ozymandian irony,
“
finger after finger” across the landscape. The poem also leaves the
sonnet to which it alludes in its nine lines in fragmented condition. But
his tone is hardly worshipful; it mocks poetic habit.
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
The name of this monster tells much to a social philology:
Badroulbadour. Must we still drag forth (or wheel out – roule) the
figure
that makes of us bad troubadours? Is this the “rule” for the male poet?
Or alternatively, given the title, must we still act like “worms” digesting
and composting the corpse-like, neo-Baudelairean woman, and perpet-
ually pulling her forth again and again? But as well the “troubadour”
function is in contestation. Her name may encode a teasing response
(“bad troubadour”) to women writers who teem with “the genius of that
cheek.” For this poem may be Stevens’ engagement with the
Women’s Number of Others and its interest in seeing women “play trou-
badour,” in Kreymborg’s eager words.
10
The [male] pregnancy of the
persons who bring this female
figure out of the tomb (she is “within our
bellies”) suggests a male appropriation of all creative functions, yet only
as servants of this giant female corpse. Stevens’ image of joining other
males in transepochal worship of Woman evokes the homosocial basis
of this convention. But the very pageantry of gigantism in Stevens’
poem re
flects a situation in which the monstrous woman dwarfs the
female’s handlers.
Because poetic conventions about gender are in some contradiction
with the entitlements of New Woman thinking, an intellectual, analytic
poetry (logopoeia) was invented by Moore and Loy, and appre-
ciated/assimilated by Pound as a signi
ficant modern solution. Often and
correctly approached as the desire to bring into poetry the density of
social analysis in the “prose tradition” (from such writers as Flaubert and
James), or to translate the heteroglossic urban blues of a Laforgue, logo-
poeia can also be approached as originating in an intense debate with
the cluster of gender materials foundational to poetry. Logopoeia began,
in Loy and Moore, as an attack on the gender narratives of lyric poetry:
femininity, beauty, a certain gaze on female objects, female assumption
of the role of poetess, unironic sexual yearning and the denial of female
aggression or judgment, the underlying lyric narrative of romance.
11
That is, logopoeia originated in a feminist analysis of the gender
assumptions of lyric, a critique of the foundational cluster of poetry
itself. I discussed Pound’s
review of Loy and Moore in the article
on which this chapter draws; I will not include this material here, but
rather emphasize the critique of the gender covenant of the lyric in
which social philology can be exempli
fied.
12
The New Woman position in poetry was, historically, formed in oppo-
sition to the romantic lyric and to the female role as poetess – excessive
display of feeling, lack of genius, infatuation with love (or, in Svetlana
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
Boym’s words “excessiveness, obsessiveness, and passion”); a resistance
to normal poetic pleasures was its most radical e
ffect (Boym , ).
The desire not for beauty or femininity but for diagnosis – a diagnosis
that undercuts “poesy” – is most imperiously a diagnosis of poetry’s own
gender assumptions. But it is crucial to see logopoeia playing with senti-
mentality (expressions of yearning, outcries) as one of its discourses;
“feminine” excess is not extirpated but surrounded, exposed, and some-
times sympathetically explored.
Logopoeia continued, in Pound and others, as an analytic lyric, but
one that erased the feminist critique. When Pound absorbs logopoeia, it
is also reframed by him, especially in the long poem “Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley” (
), to reposition women, the feminine and traditional
beauty, as a vibrant source for poetry. Putting the challenge of Loy and
Moore to Pound in its chronological place makes clear that “Mauberley”
was written to soften a feminist critique of the lyric, not only to sti
ffen
(as it were) a mushy and feminized imagism blamed on Amy Lowell.
13
In this work, the critique of social institutions and the sexual implica-
tions of writing still ends by eulogizing beauty, whether at the end of the
poem’s
first section, “Envoi,” (dated ) “Till change hath broken
down / All things save Beauty alone,” or at the second ending,
“Medallion,” that describes an exquisite woman singing an exquisite
song as the absolute talismanic object (Pound
, ). The appeals to
beauty at the end of each section are not ironic, but are the only value
to recuperate from a dying civilization. The aftermath of the failures of
political power represented by World War I involved a turn back to tra-
ditional gender values in which men were men (and the poem shows
male struggles with impotence and e
ffeminacy) and women were beau-
tiful. Pound’s reframing meant that the critique of romance and gender
relations, and the challenges to the beauties of poetry as a genre did not
remain constitutive of logopoeia; this critique became contested terri-
tory within logopoeic practice.
Seen through the lens of a social philology, this cultural dialogue about
gender and poetry is brilliantly played in “Mauberley”’s management of
rhyme, for Pound accomplishes multiple instances of “feminine” rhymes
without falling into lightness, inconsequence, or comedy, and he contin-
uously rhymes masculine (monosyllabic) and feminine (polysyllabic) syl-
lables with each other, or as cross-rhymes in one stanza in such a way as
to bring the polysyllabic diction under the authority of the “masculine”
monosyllable. Rhyme functions to clinch the case being made, so Pound’s
sociology of culture, in verse, uses verse form to establish order and to
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
reorder the relation of male to female. It is also notable that the only free
verse in “Mauberley” occurs in the two sections mourning the war dead,
as if the vers libre line were a contributor to the social decay that sent young
men to the trenches.
My title phrase, “corpses of poesy,” comes from “Poe” by Mina Loy
which constructs a logopoeic critique of poetry’s foundational cluster via
Edgar Allen Poe’s remarkable statement “. . . the death, then, of a beau-
tiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (Poe
, ). In his essay, this conclusion is a triumphant synthesis, with the
glue being Woman, of some of the emotional and thematic markers of
poetry – death, melancholy, and beauty. Best poetry draws (with vam-
piric precision) on best death. Loy’s poem “Poe” comments
a lyric elixir of death
embalms
the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves
on moon spun nights
sets
icicled canopy
for corpses of poesy
with roses and northern lights
Where frozen nightingales in ilix aisles
sing burial rites
14
This poem is a parodic examination of the accouterments and props of
conventional lyricism. Loy’s poem is both imitative of a sentimentalized
funeral scene and satiric of it, for the phrase “corpses of poesy” means
female
figures traditional to poetry, but both killed and eulogized by it.
The archaic “poesy” is, of course, an especially loaded choice of diction.
It is a poetical or literary term for poetry, and in Loy “poesy” satirizes
the inadequacy of the dual conventions of the literary and sexual gender
materials that fuel the lyric. As a romantic – indeed, as a Keatsean word
– its use cuts into a whole religious romance about poetry worshipping
female
figures. Williams echoes the Keatsean use in his early sonnet,
“The Uses of Poetry,” (
) which was possibly written to H.D. “For I
must read a lady poesy / The while we glide by many a leafy bay” it
begins, and continues “On poesy’s transforming giant wing, / To worlds
afar . . .” agreeing that courtship, archaic diction, and sexual/imagina-
tive voyages are part of the institution of poetry (Williams
, ).
Mocking and rejecting “corpses of poesy,” Mina Loy opens poetry to
analytic and ironic considerations that unmask some gendered institu-
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
tions on which “poesy” is built. In the poem “Lunar Baedeker” (written
before
), the moon – patron of women, poetry, the night, and sexu-
ality – is examined, anatomized, and found to be a modernist cabaret
stage upon which many genders in several combinations play out many
sensual dramas that realign the foundational materials beauty–love–
sex–poetry–Woman (Loy
, –). The imagery is decadent in a
mannered, circusy way, as if the phases of the moon (on which the poem
is arguably based) are best imagined as a sequence of amoral poses: “A
silver Lucifer / serves / cocaine in cornucopia // To some somnambu-
lists / of adolescent thighs / draped / in satirical draperies” (
).
There are a number of puns and portmanteau constructions read
through a social philology that o
ffer critique. The work’s discontinuous
flashes, fanzine snapshots or “flock[s] of dreams” take as model the
flashing neon lights of advertising (“— — — Stellectric signs”). These
signs make “beauty” something urban, commercial, and modern, ver-
bally fusing the “Stella” or woman of poetic tradition, “stellae” or stars
in nature, and the word “electric.” This has the e
ffect of ripping apart
the association in poetry-as-usual of woman and nature, substituting
woman and modern technology.
15
“The eye-white sky-light / white-light
district / of lunar lusts” are lines that acknowledge sexuality and its
undersides in terms that deromanticize it familiarly, decadently (i.e. not
love, but lust; not purity, but prostitution – punning on the red-light dis-
trict of sex workers). In the lines “Delirious Avenues / lit / with the chan-
delier souls / of infusoria / from Pharoah’s tombstones // lead / to
mercurial doomsdays,” Loy o
ffers an apocalyptic history of the world,
with the word “mercurial” removed from questions of love to questions
of species survival.
16
Here, as elsewhere, Loy tries to assimilate the
find-
ings of Darwin into love poetry, challenging the poetic with theoretical
findings of sexual selection and survival of the fittest for an environment,
ideas that de-idealize sex and love.
A key move of the critique of this foundational material of poetry is
made at the end, in the
final four stanzas.
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the
flight
of Eros obsolete
And “Immortality”
mildews . . .
in the museums of the moon
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
“Nocturnal cyclops”
“Crystal concubine”
— — — — — — —
Pocked with personi
fication
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes — — —
(
)
It should not be forgotten that “bird” is British slang for young woman,
and that “ornithologists” are “bird-watchers.” But their gaze has, in this
retracking, been directed away from “Odalisques.” Unlike the female
figures most characteristic of the languid and orientalized image (like
Man Ray’s Kiki picture, “Le Violon d’Ingres,” roughly contemporane-
ous with the poem, and like Matisse’s endless paintings of “haremized”
women), here, “in the oxidized Orient” sharpened by wit, the
Odalisques are not being looked at, but are looking – like scientists or
journalists watching trends. They are neither gazing inwardly upon their
own beauty, nor being gazed at by the bird-watchers. Together the
former denizens of the romance plot, its signi
ficant male and female
characters, study “Eros obsolete.” The whole complex of romance and
the conventions on which their very names draw are done for, passé.
Although the moon is scarred (“pocked”) by the personi
fications of it,
the conventions surrounding poetry and art (fame, or “Immortality”)
“mildew” at the very site in which they used to
flourish – ”the museums
of the moon,” a phrase that suggests muses and traditional art. Although
Loy has a thoroughly demysti
ficatory project, she rarely states her cri-
tique of the cluster around Woman–love–romance–beauty–lyric–sex
without marking her complicity and quondam attraction to that same
conventional plot.
The moon is described as male and female, cyclops and concubine,
parodically phallic, parodically available, and virginal as well. The moon
is variously gendered and sexually interested at various phases, ambigu-
ously desiring, desired, disinterested, and uninterested. This multidirec-
tional, “cubist” quality of the object of sight arrests the one point
perspective of male-looks-at-female specularity on which “poesy” gen-
erally rests. The “moon” becomes the cosmic androgyne, a new modern
subjectivity. The very plurality, discontinuity, and un
fixability of the
descriptors of the moon suggest Loy might be discussed under the
Irigarayan rubric of plethora or “heterogeneity” which is Irigaray’s
theoretical response to the term “castration,” and suggests how “‘the’
gaze” might be modi
fied in another economy of understanding (Irigaray
a, ).
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
It is clear that logopoeia verges dangerously on being “anti-beauty,”
or, to cite the Pound review of Loy and Moore: it has “an arid clarity,
not without its own beauty . . .” (Pound
, ). Pound finds challeng-
ing the lack of conventional beauty (in melody, in diction), but he does
see a rare intellectual precision in their work. He thinks of these women
writers as intelligent, educated, cool customers. “If they have not
received B.A.s or M.A.s or B.Sc.s they do not need them.” Notice how
the hard-won higher education of females is both a
ffirmed and dispar-
aged. Pound links the educated woman and this poetic resistance to the
feminine. The New Woman, entering historical time (with social agita-
tion and political claims) was the opposite of the mythic and archetypal
Woman who was often to be proposed by male modernists as a solution
to the problems of sexuality, of emasculated men, and so on. One can
construct, reading early modernism, a sub rosa struggle between women
and men poets over the ideologies of poetry, beauty, the feminine, and
the female
figure. Transitional Men writing poetry attempt to depict
Women as naturally feminine, while versions of New Women poets
torque, criticize, or reject the link of the feminine with women. As T. E.
Hulme remarks (before
), evaluating the periods of achievement and
decadence throughout literary history, the period of decay, or “imitative
poetry” is a time in which “women whimper and whine of you and I
alas, and roses, roses all the way. It becomes the expression of sentimen-
tality rather than of virile thought” (Hulme
, ). The establishing
of e
ffective “virile thought” is an unconcealed motive: one must avoid
e
ffeminacies and keep women in the feminine while making moder-
nities. Given that some of the modern is (arguably) born out of a con-
juncture of entitlements of the New Woman and the New Homosexual,
Hulme’s remarks are proactive. Thus he argues that women writers
“own” the sentimental downside of this foundational cluster in allegedly
starchless, mizzling verse. However, a glance at cummings or Millay as
opposed to Loy and Pound shows that sentimentality in poetry is hardly
coded by gender.
Pound began noticing Moore in
, mainly positively, and began
corresponding with her in
. The Moore he read included pert
poems anatomizing various people, usually addressed to “you,” or to
animals (“My Apish Cousins,” later called “The Monkeys”) and
expressing a lot of resistance to being overrun or colonized. In
, he
produced an amazing statement for her (a statement that later in
flu-
ences material in his Cantos) comparing the male and the female in no
uncertain terms:
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
The female is a chaos,
the male
is a
fixed point of stupidity, but only the female
can content itself with prolonged conversation
with but one sole other creature of its own sex
and of its own unavoidable species
the male
is more expansive
and demands other and varied contacts.
(Pound
, –)
Females are monogamously homosocial (and unquestionably hetero-
sexual) here; males are promiscuously polysexual and polysocial. Pound
seems to have been negotiating to go “beyond” the two inadequate
genders (even one inadequate species) in these remarks. Despite this
advantage, the letter goes on to express, archly, a good deal of male vul-
nerability. But for Moore, “the female is a chaos” would certainly stick
in the craw. Aside from the universalizing insult, Moore was prone to
dislike gender polarities, and hoped to avoid argument based on banal
binaries. Moore’s early reviews for The Dial, all of which postdate this
letter from Pound, evince admiration for the erasure of gender binar-
ies, mentioning in
, for instance, “Giotto’s superiority to interest in
masculinity or femininity per se; the inadvertent muscularity and angelic
grace of his male
figures – the faces of his madonnas and female saints,
like the faces of stalwart boys” (Moore
, ). Clearly stereotypes of
masculine and feminine were coming under her increasing scrutiny,
and she was trying to build a gender-blurring tertium quid between the
polarities of masculine and feminine and their problems for poetic rep-
resentation. Given the dates of all this work – Loy’s poems on romance
in
–, Pound’s linkage of the two women in as arid, emotion-
less, and fascinating purveyors of logopoeia, his gender-thumping letter
of
, “Mauberley” (published ), and then Moore’s work in the
s – one is left with the possibility that Moore’s poems of the s,
which do constitute a thematic cluster involving the critique of
romance, are a response to being linked with Loy in the Pound review,
and to being on the receiving end of such Poundian statements as “the
female is chaos.”
17
The works are also in dialogue with H.D. Marianne
Moore’s poems from the
s make a direct critique of such romantic
lyrical conventions as beauty, the love plot, and carpe diem motifs.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
The poem “Roses Only,” uncollected except in Moore’s Observations
(
), is a frontal consideration of a flower widely associated with
beauty, the feminine, love, and carpe diem injunctions. The rose is
addressed directly in the poem, which begins “You do not seem to realise
that beauty is a liability rather than / an asset . . .,” and ends as if in syl-
logistic proof, “your thorns are the best part of you” (Moore
, ).
Essentially, the poem argues that the rose’s intelligence exists (“you must
have brains”) and is an emanation of its beauty, yet that it is not its sexual
availability and beauty that distinguish it, but rather its resistance to the
tropes and the assumptions that would place it in the lyric tradition of
unsurpassed and peerless gorgeousness. That’s why “your thorns are the
best part of you” (ibid.). This approval of female resistance attacks carpe
diem motifs. Carpe diem poems typically see thorns as the problem to
overcome: the female’s sexual prickliness and virginity are genially
reproached. Or, as in the Williams, female beauty is projected through
an elegiac lens – the leaf is already fallen. Conventional carpe diem
poems separate the rose from her thorns; Moore’s “Roses Only” reunites
them. And of course the carpe diem poem readies the “virgin” for sexual
initiation in the guise of memorializing her beauties, while Moore
remarks in a countermove that “it is better to be forgotten than to be
remembered too violently,” plucked by a “predatory hand” (Moore
, ). Moore’s educational advice tries to resocialize the rose, to turn
it away from such haunting background lyrics as “Tell them, dear, that
if eyes were made for seeing, / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being”
and “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. . . .”
18
For as we know, a rose is often sent as a message to decode within a
seduction framework, an image for female beauty at its peak of perfec-
tion, and a displaced object of sexual desire. In one of the poems from
Spring and All (
), Williams tries to negotiate both the desire and its cri-
tique in a poem which begins “the rose is obsolete,” but ends by
finding
that if it is reimagined as somewhat technological (made of steel or
copper, exploratory), and capable of “penetrat[ing] spaces,” it can claim
for itself more than just passivity. He makes it a dual sexed image
(Williams
, –). A similar recuperation of a rose occurs in his
poem written to Pound in
. In “La Flor,” Williams rejects the “inge-
nious tapestries” and “soft perfection” of other poets in favor of Pound’s
work (Williams
, ). He describes Pound “himself surpassing
flowers” in relation to other writers: “and certainly his verse is crimson
when they speak of the rose.” Praising Pound’s writing as the very
essence of crimsonness makes a tribute to his
flowering that brings the
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
rose over into a complex of maleness and masculine abilities, rejecting
“softness” and quaintness as the property of lesser poets.
So too H.D., in “Sea Rose” (the
first poem in her first book, )
recasts the convention of roses in poetry by positing another rose, neither
lush nor “precious.” This rose is not an iconic object of erotic veneration;
instead it is resistant, hardened, harshly treated, but free. “Rose, harsh
rose, / marred and with stint of petals . . .” challenges the conventional
flower: “Can the spice-rose / drip such acrid fragrance / hardened in a
leaf ?” (H.D.
, ).
19
H.D., however, produces a poem with a perfec-
tion of melli
fluous lyrical markers, including a succinct sound, interior
rhymes, assonance, and consonance. In her “Roses Only,” Moore makes
diction choices highly resistant to the poetical beauties which are linked
to female beauties. Indeed, she seems to delight in anti-melli
fluousness in
“Roses Only,” using unpoetic, awkward, and turgid turns of line break
and hyphen: “But rose, if you are brilliant, it / is not because your petals
are the without-which-nothing of pre-eminence. You would, minus
thorns, / look like a what-is-this, a mere // peculiarity” (Moore
, ).
H.D.
fights the foundational gender cluster with a critique of feminized
imagery of beauty in her
flower poems. Moore fights the foundational
gender cluster by a further anti-poetic resistance to beauty in poetic
texture and theme.
In her short poem “Radical” (Others
; Observations , not col-
lected further), Moore also proposes a symbolic vegetable – no
flower,
and certainly no rose, a compound subjectivity of the enounced that
o
ffers a third way between polarized binaries of gender. This figure has
much in common with the independent New Woman heroine, and may,
indeed, be equally as “radical.” From this carrot-haired poet comes a
poem which memorializes strong-minded, independent growth in the
figure – of a carrot. “Tapering / to a point, conserving everything, / this
carrot is predestined to be thick” (Moore
, ). The carrot is a
keeper; it compresses impressions, and while it may seem “thick” in the
slang sense (slow-witted), it is enlarged with its concentric growth. The
carrot has a politically radical heritage of singular power:
With ambition, im-
agination, outgrowth,
nutriment,
with everything crammed belligerent-
ly inside itself, its
fibres breed mon-
opoly –
a tail-like, wedge-shaped engine with the
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
secret of expansion, fused with intensive heat to
color of the set-
ting sun and
sti
ff.
(Moore
, )
The poem, like many of her others, is written according to Moore’s syl-
labics, the only sustained practice in English of this prosody. By creating
syllabic stanzas, Moore conformed to the demands of poetic tradition
for
fictiveness and unnaturalized language, while relocating her writing
outside the long traditions of metrical prosodies that make up the bulk
of anglophone poetries.
20
The odd hyphenated words of “Radical” that
dramatically mark the line segment are created by syllable count; the
half-words thereby isolated can be semantically suggestive for a social
philology. “Mon- / opoly” can be understood not only by its connota-
tive meaning of exclusive possession or control, its denotative meanings
within economics of sole commercial rights, but also its segmental
meaning. This meaning may be translated as my (“mon”) manifoldness,
for while “poly” comes from “selling” in the Greek word monopolion,
when that word is split, the term “poly”
floats free, to suggest the prefix
which means more than one, many, or much. As presented in the poem,
the carrot is claiming my many-ness as its radical (root, extreme) title.
These readings of segmented phonemes within a social philology
suggest Lecercle’s concept of the “remainder.”
In the lines just before these, Moore describes the carrot triumphing
over the givens of “circumstance”:
The world is
but a circumstance, a mis-
erable corn-patch for its feet.
Again, syllabic counting and segmentivity combine to o
ffer words
behind the word, a double semantics. “Mis-” a pre
fix indicating error,
failure, lack buries “miss” in it, for a comment on the limitations of the
female gender that can be overcome, that are “[a]rable” or cultivatable.
This links to an allusion later to “slavery [being] easy and freedom hard”
(Moore
, ).
By the end of the poem, the carrot has o
ffered a strong message to its
farmer: “that which it is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.”
The carrot is an “engine” – it is something that works, and whose work
cannot be stopped. It is also “belligerent” in its own defense. Its message
is pure growth and pure momentum, and the images propose access to
powers through the fusion of two genders into a self (“im” as “I’m) both
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
assimilative and expansive, both pregnant and potent. “Impossible” pro-
duces an encrypted “I’m possible” by analogy with im-/agination earlier
in the poem. This claim might be the history of the female freelance of
modernity. This carrot of independence and activity is the site of a New
Woman subject position in Moore; it is a position that transcends the
limits of “Woman.” The emphases on singularity and work as com-
pacted power are Moore’s solutions to the problems in poetry’s tradi-
tional positioning of women. She invents, here and elsewhere, in place
of conventional female or male subjectivities, a more encompassing
position, a tertium quid – intellectual freelance as a bold carrot – rather
feminist in implication, synthesizing and sublating both genders. In
“Radical,” the male imagery of erectile sti
ffness and the female imagery
of engorgement and expansion combine in a pregnant poem of potency
unsheathed.
21
Moore’s confrontative poetic texture raised the hackles of Harriet
Monroe, who, in the same way that Pound queried Loy, takes Moore to
task on the subject of resisting beauty in poetry. Monroe diagnosed
Moore “in terror of her Pegasus; she knows of what sentimental excesses
that unruly steed is capable, and so her ironic mind harnesses down his
wings and her iron hand holds a sti
ff rein” (Monroe : ). This dis-
ciplinary harshness of the woman poet “
flouts the muse” (ibid.). Monroe
is disturbed that this struggle of a woman writer with the challenges of
the foundational cluster and the place of the feminine yields only
“prose” and sometimes “the hard reluctant beauty of a grotesque” (
).
It is clear that Monroe saw, and resented, the high level of Moore’s resis-
tance in diction to the charge of sentimentality and the role of poetess.
Monroe championed an eclectic vision of American modernism, a place
in the poetic mansion for Teasdale, Wylie, and Millay, and policed
Moore for her (tacit) denunciation of, and contempt for the poetess.
Indeed, this question of what to do with the “poetess” had implica-
tions for Moore’s and H.D.’s readings of each other, causing both to
slant certain evidence interestingly. They are brilliant misreaders of each
others’ work. In a
review, H.D. asserted that Moore wants beauty,
“frail” but “hard,” and is
fighting the same battle as H.D. “against
squalor and commercialism” with her “curiously wrought patterns,
these quaint turns of thought and concealed, half-playful ironies” (H.D.
, –). The term “quaint” is surely an escapee from the pretty
poetry world by which H.D. is, sometimes, tempted. For, though H.D.
did not see it, “squalor and commercialism” are thoroughly viable
sources for Moore in
: “all the physical features of // ac-/cident –
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
lack / of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns / and /hatchet strokes.”
(Moore
, ). In the poem () she stood first in her Complete Poems
she announces “it is a privilege to see so / much confusion.” The line
break is pointed; it is about her vision (Moore [
] , ). We might
wonder whether in these early works, beauty was important to Moore at
all; certainly the works I’ve cited twist theme, moral, and diction away
from conventions of beauty. Poetry is dogged, pert and alert: “‘a right
good / salvo of barks,’ a few strong wrinkles puckering the / skin
between the ears, are all we ask” (Moore
, ).
Moore’s review of H.D. in
does not avoid her “instinctive ritual
of beauty” but retracks it from softness and availability to hardness: “an
aesthetic consciousness which values simultaneously, ivory and the chis-
eled ivory of speech.” (Moore
, ). Aesthetic distance is a version
of gender resistance. Moore is trying hard to make H.D. into a writer
allied with logopoeia: with a “wiry diction,” “the clean violence of
truth,” and “the
firmness of the intelligence” (, ). In a striking last
paragraph, she suggests that the book in which H.D.’s masque-poem
“Hymen” appears (a work lush with beauty, a lavish depiction of a mar-
riage ritual, complete with bridal-torches, and “honey seeking lips” and
“honey-thighs”) gives evidence of a “martial, an apparently masculine
tone” (H.D.
, ; Moore , , ). As applied to “Hymen”
itself, this comment would seem like wishful thinking, so misconstruing
as to be revelatory. In fact, Moore is exploring the harsher lyrics in that
book, rather than the honeyed marriage ritual. But by avoiding that title
poem, she mutes her di
fference from H.D.
The terms Moore proposes show what is on her mind – a way of
breaking and remixing some of the conventions around Woman and the
feminine. “Women are regarded as belonging necessarily to either of two
classes – that of the intellectual freelance or that of the eternally sleep-
ing beauty, e
ffortless yet effective in the indestructible limestone keep of
domesticity” (Moore
, ). This fairy-tale image is one that Moore
will repeatedly reject; the New Woman subject position of independence
and analytic acumen is, instead, invoked. In H.D., Moore says admir-
ingly, one
finds even a third possibility: “the intellectual, social woman,
non-public and ‘feminine.’” This synthesis takes the best from both sides.
“Feminine,” isolated in quotation marks, may mean a non-passive yet
non-aggressive interest in beauty as an aesthetic. H.D., in Moore’s view,
combines the best of New Woman and old. As well, she resists stereotypes
of masculine and feminine: having an “absence of subterfuge, cowar-
dice, and the ambition to dominate by brute force” (ibid.). These two
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
reviews are certainly self-portraits or self-projections of H.D. by H.D. and
Moore by Moore. Both reviews show how much gender, mingled with the
demands of the lyric, was on their minds; both reviews show that each
was concerned to establish some attitude to part of the foundational
cluster (beauty–the feminine–sexuality) in the lyric.
22
Moore’s “New York” (
) continues the resistance to the founda-
tional cluster of the lyric.
It is a far cry from the “queen full of jewels”
and the beau with the mu
ff,
from the gilt coach shaped like a perfume bottle,
to the conjunction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny,
and the scholastic philosophy of the wilderness
(Moore
, )
As in many of her poems, when faced with something like the Cinderella
romance with its peculiar feminine and masculine, Moore proposes a
third place for herself to stand, not inside the gender binaries of fairy-
tale romance but inside “the savage’s romance” of collage, heteroglossic
diction, and tumbled together objects, variety, and accretion (ibid.). She
takes the word “romance” (with its implications of idealized love) and
reassigns the word wholly to adventure and mystery (the other de
finition
of the word romance).
23
It is a move in keeping with the feminist origins
of logopoeia.
“Novices,”
first published in , is a rather funny and cutting poem
about young men who write working entirely from the foundational
materials of romance: “in the sense in which Will Honeycomb was jilted
by a duchess, / the little assumptions of the scared ego confusing the
issue . . .” (Moore
, ). Will Honeycomb, a character in The Spectator
“who looks upon Love as his particular Province,” is a foppish commen-
tator on the many foibles of the fair sex (Addison and Steele
,
–). He is “jilted” by Lady Betty Single only by virtue of never
having asked her hand, contenting himself with public inquiries about
her fortune. Moore satirizes the erstwhile satirist, associating these
modern pretenders both with unmodern attitudes toward women and
with impotence.
24
This is a poem skeptical of the posings of the “good
and alive young men,” who think that “their suavity surmounts the surf
– ” (Moore
, ). They cannot confront the majestic challenges of
real sources – the ocean and the language of the Bible, both of which
Moore describes happily as a “chaos” or an “abyss” of con
flictual angles
and energies, whose vibrant forces have the last words (ibid.). Claiming
boredom (something which only exempli
fies their jejune qualities for
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
Moore), the young men cannot cope with satire as a genre or the antique
as a source. Far from real potency, they turn to romance materials and
“write the sort of thing that would in their judgment interest a lady; /
curious to know if we do not adore each letter of the alphabet that goes
to make a word of it – / according to the Act of Congress, the sworn
statement of the treasurer and all the rest of it – ” (
) The terms “lady”
and “adore” are satiric markers of the poets’ inadequacies; punning Acts
of Congress and treasurers are comments upon marriage’s sexuality,
politics, and economy at once. Out
flanking and outpacing the young
poetasters, Moore makes a place for herself in the scene of writing, not
courtship. The romance plot gets skewered, along with its adjunct –
stereotypical polarized genders:
stupid man; men are strong and no one pays any attention:
stupid woman; women have charm, and how annoying they can be.
(Moore
, )
A central statement of her poetics is mixed up with a critique of normal
gender narratives. It is tempting to see this double dose of stupidity as
Moore’s answer to Pound’s attack on the genders. Moore equalizes the
genders while rejecting both; Pound had made their
flaws unequal,
di
fferent (stupid male, chaotic female). For Moore, romance in poetry is
banal, ungenerative. It is, to return to Loy’s terms, “Eros obsolete.”
Loy and Moore produced a distinctive intellectual, analytic writing
fueled by their articulate suspicion of foundational assumptions of
gender in poetic texts and traditions. Moore interpreted H.D.’s work as
embarked on the same project; she was partly right. This move and its
fallout did not go unremarked by one of the central players in mod-
ernism’s production and consumption. Pound’s task was ambivalent. He
sometimes cushioned poetry from that feminist critique with its blows to
the gender norms of poetry, in order to make poetry safe for beauty,
treatment of the feminine, and normal pleasures once again. He also
appreciated, up to a point, the work Loy and Moore were doing, so long
as it did not displace his. He thus alternated between the phallocratic
and the “pal-ocratic.” More generally, it is clear that attitudes to the
foundational assumptions of gender in poetic texts were challenged in a
variety of ways by the subject positions of New Woman and Transitional
Man, o
ffering differential possibilities that were worked through by both
male and female poets coming to a poetic vocation in the years around
.
“Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern
representations and politics
The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge — is the
sexual embrace.
Mina Loy, “Feminist Manifesto” (
)
No human act is natural in an unmediated way, and even the most appar-
ently basic and primal, sexual acts, have been constructed of political and
ideological meanings. From New Woman and other investigative perspec-
tives, autonomous female desire, the nature and importance of orgasm,
possible dangers and pleasures in sexuality were probed from before the
very beginning of modernism.
1
For depictions of heterosexual intercourse
and sexual desire in modern poetry, Mina Loy’s “Songs to Joannes” has
both intellectual and historical primacy. It is the work of a certain New
Woman subjectivity – “the modern, investigatory, subtly alive, de
fiantly
free woman” (Gregory
, ).
2
Loy’s satiric, ironic, wickedly learned,
and passionate voice goes far to destabilize lyric assumptions about the
romance plot, female silence, and objecti
fication. The first four sections
were published in Others in
, and their pretty explicit allusions to lust,
to “Pig Cupid . . . rooting” with its crypt word rutting, to scrotum and tes-
ticles (the male “skin-sac”), and to “abortions” startled and scandalized
many readers. Loy sees sexuality as a complex of events and meanings, as
a site of struggle between genders and among various historically situated
desires. Other works besides Loy’s – works by Stein, Lawrence, and Pound
– draw on the discourses of New Woman/free love and narrate acts of
sexual intercourse and even orgasm. Because these representations focus
intensely on sexual activity, we can read sexual intercourse as a site
wherein various agents and cultural processes are exposed: rede
finitions
of morality, questions about the independence of women, the loss of
verbal taboo, the exploration of female sexuality, agency, and, sometimes,
maternity, issues concerning pleasure and danger, and the rejection of any
part of feminism that hinged on female passionlessness. Some depictions
of male sexuality are also treated here. In this, Dora Marsden’s theoriz-
ing also played a role, as she “explicitly connected sexual emancipation,
evolutionary progress, and libertarian politics” with “anarcho-feminist”
bravura (Clarke
, ).
Mina Loy’s “Songs to Joannes” contains a unique representation of
sexual intercourse, and many also imaginatively graphic descriptions of
speci
fically sexual apparatuses. Of thirty-four sections, fourteen (com-
prising about forty percent of the poem) are arguably centered on di
ffer-
ent occasions of/acts of sexual intercourse, or may be said prominently
to mention sex. And this representation is drastically aconventional, a
challenge to prudes, and, more interestingly, to the hegemonic romance
narratives of the lyric genre, but equally well a challenge to modernist
libertarian thinking. Loy’s poem is
filled with sex-radical evocations of
pleasures both sexual and intellectual, and the equal meeting of the part-
ners on a sexual terrain.
As Michel Foucault remarks: “It is no longer a question simply of
saying what was done – the sexual act – and how it was done; but of
reconstructing, in and around the act, the thoughts that recapitulated it,
the obsessions that accompanied it, the images, desires, modulations,
and quality of the pleasure that animated it” (Foucault
, ). Some
of this is possible in readings of poetry based on social philology, espe-
cially the understanding of con
flictual thoughts in what Empson calls
“compacted doctrine” – those images that condense contradiction and
historical debate (Empson
, ). Loy’s “Songs to Joannes” will be
read here to exemplify how poetic texture represents social debate, “how,
in the very detail of composition, a certain social structure, a certain
history, discloses itself ” (Williams
, ).
“Songs to Joannes” opens with a frequently cited section, in which
“Pig Cupid” presides over the writing and instigates the erotic and its cri-
tique.
Spawn of Fantasies
Silting the appraisable
Pig Cupid
his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
“Once upon a time” . . .
(Loy
, )
“Pig” makes a greedy, lurid, id-
filled muse, rooting “erotic garbage”
rather than shooting arrows, a drastically anti-conventional
figure with
neither the whimsy of echt Cupids nor the androgyny and elegance of
Eros. Pig Cupid, however, condenses intercourse and its product as the
“Spawn of Fantasies,” both the ovum from which fantasy arises and the
o
ffspring of reproductive encounters. He is as well a phallic or lusty dis-
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
turber of the peace, sticking his snout into “erotic garbage” – those nice
fairy-tale narratives of “‘Once upon a time.’” Pig is, in short, a symbolic
fusion of male–female–child, an image of Loy’s erotic-satyric holy
family annealing her maternalist hopes and her erotic desires with a
strong dollop of critique.
From the beginning of the poem, Loy creates an excessive, exagger-
ated attention to the one act hidden in the carpe diem convention of
lyric tradition, although its constant point. She makes a new kind of
gender narrative, validated by historical struggles around sexuality,
sexual expression, and female desire. By excess in a female voice, she
swamps the convention’s dependency on a certain delicacy, feminine
resistance, or reluctance. She overrides the poetic convention of
romance both by a sense of aggression where she represents herself con-
tinuously as a sexual woman, and by a sense of judgment, where she rep-
resents her skeptical, damaging analysis of what can happen after the
“achievement” of bliss or completion promised in the convention of
romance. A short list, well-depicted in the poem, includes impotence,
unsatis
fied desires, awkward, ill-paced consummations, betrayals of
trust, “ephemeral conjunction[s],” jealousy, the apparently “superhu-
man” man reseen as a “weak eddy,” “Little lusts and lucidities / and
prayerful lies” (
, , ). In short, Mina Loy produced a work whose
depiction of sexuality is a provocation to conventional codes of the lyric
and to female place.
3
As Janet Lyon states, “Loy pro
ffered the experien-
tial female body as a laboratory of creativity” – including orgasmic,
artistic, and maternal (Lyon
, ).
In a little noted observation, Dorothy Richardson – that doughty (but
also sometimes doughy) critic and writer of
fiction – remarks how close
is the interest of most novels to the “frothy excitement” of sexuality, and
how the plot of the novel, its pace, tempo, shape involve arousal and
climax, secrets and disclosures. She postulated, proposed, and proselyt-
ized an alternative narrative model from
on: an erasure of any ele-
ments of story based on “the sex motif as hitherto seen and depicted by
men,” attention to a multi-pointed narrative middle (quite comparable
to Stein), critique of telos, sequence, causality, and, along with these, of
gender polarization and gender asymmetry (Richardson
, ;
Gregory
, ). Richardson associated narrative-as-expected with
gender-as-mandated (DuPlessis
, –). Richardson’s vehemence
about the ideological link between narrative and sexual conventions
indicates how intensely these questions were under debate in early mod-
ernist work, in which the construction of a new womanhood, sometimes
a new manhood, and new attitudes to sexuality seemed plausible and
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
productive. The invention of the serial poem in early modernism (pos-
sibly by Loy) helps to rupture insistent narrative telos by telling a set of
intersecting or mutually suggestive narratives, having a variegated sub-
jectivity or point of view engaged on a multi-vectored intellec-
tual–ethical–political–spiritual quest through a ruptured social terrain,
making thematically and narratively suggestive vignettes without artic-
ulating a speci
fic or clear plot, mixing lyric modes with evaluative and
narrative statement (not to speak of mixing memory and desire). These
are familiar in such works as Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” (
),
Eliot’s The Waste Land (
), both of which seriously engage with the
depiction of sexual acts and sexual desire. To show by implication, to
narrate “lyrically,” honoring gap and fragment, to make poetry by an
imagist condensation of the novel – these modern tasks were pioneered
in Loy’s “Songs to Joannes.”
“Songs to Joannes” is a mediation with narrative hints; since it does
“make a progression of realizations,” sequence (if not story) is vital to it
(Kouidis
, , citing Loy). Loy traces the course of a love affair. She
narrates her sexual desire, her active, somewhat shamed pursuit of an
apparently
flagging partner, the complex of satisfactions and dissatisfac-
tions centering on a split between sexual urges and suspicious analyses,
an apparent break from her lover about which she is both cynical and
wounded, and
finally she offers a passionate consideration of sexuality
and reproduction. The early part of the poem shows the “Loy”
figure
enthralled and pursuing her lover, traveling to him, even stalking him
through city streets at night, at once exhilarated by her passion and
debased by it. In one of these sections, the female
figure is a marionette
of passion who “knows the Wire-Puller intimately” (Loy
, ). If (as
Nancy Cott summarizes) free-love advocates “assumed that free women
could meet men as equals on the terrain of sexual desire just as on the
terrain of political representation or professional expertise,” they found
instead sexual exploitation, inequality, thralldom, and the ambiguities of
serial monogamy leading to jealousy (Cott
, ).
“Songs to Joannes” (
–) with its companion piece, “Feminist
Manifesto” (
), a heady work written just before the poem, together
negotiate the con
flicts between sexual pleasure and sexual/emotional
danger.
4
These terms characterize two di
fferent feminist discourses
about sexuality: sex-radical and social-purity ideologies, both of which
emerged, though in di
fferent generations, as New Woman discourses.
“In de
fiance of superstition I assert that there is nothing impure in sex –
except in the mental attitude to it.” Loy’s forthright critique of female
consciousness – not to speak of her forthright willingness to discuss sex
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
(sexuality, gender, but, especially, sexual intercourse are all mingled in
the term) – articulate one New Woman position (Loy
, ). In her
“Feminist Manifesto” Loy is insubordinate, sexually blunt, eager to tran-
scend and eradicate (by the power of individual agency and will) any
prior world history of female servility – what Dora Marsden would call
Bondwoman in opposition to the modern Freewoman behavior, and
what earlier feminists Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner
called parasitism and prostitution – meaning the private ownership of
women in marriage as a form of sex work.
5
Indeed, Marsden argued
that female purity and passionlessness was compelled by men, retro
moralism, and the marriage market. Modern women are waking to
“sex-love” and the visionary experiences to which it gives rise (Clarke
, ).
And yet Loy
fiercely rejects the program of much contemporary fem-
inism. In Loy’s view, “the feminist movement as at present instituted is /
Inadequate
” because it depends on social reforms calling for “equal-
ity,” among them, female su
ffrage, equal education, and professional
opportunity (Loy
, ; font and line break in Loy). “Cease to place
your con
fidence in economic legislation, vice-crusades & uniform edu-
cation,” she enjoins in a rhetoric of high-manifesto (ibid.). This liberal
feminist agenda is an inadequate sop when nothing short of “
Absolute
Demolition
” will change the sex-gender system (ibid.). The issue is
not collective reform of institutions, but individual reform of conscious-
ness, which impacts upon the behaviors within and attitudes to sexual-
ity. Incidentally, this is a feminism that wants to change women, not one
that claims to change men, and it is not a feminism of complementarity
but, at least verbally, of a take-no-prisoners claim of female agency.
“Leave o
ff looking to men to find out what you are not. Seek within your-
selves to
find out what you are” ().
To facilitate this discovery, to solve the woman question, including
issues of freedom, chaperonage, the overvaluing of virginity, marital
choicelessness, and sexual manipulation, Loy proposed the annihilation
of “the principal instrument of [female] subjugation” (
–). That is:
the hymen. Whether to mock, to provoke, or to outrage, Loy suggested
“the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female
population at puberty –” (
). This preemptive strike on the hymen
prevented virginity from being a bargaining chip in the exchange of
maidenly “virtue” for marriage and home. This little chip, imbedded in
the female body, also prevented the free exploration of (penetrative) sex-
uality.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
This liberatory feminism is in dialogue both with general ideology
and with a speci
fic kind of Victorian and modern reforming feminism
called the Social Purity movement that combined claims for the moral
superiority of women with a denial of active female sexuality. Both sex
radicals and Social-Purity reformers called themselves feminists, and
each tendency might have di
fferent reasons for support of issues affect-
ing women, like campaigns for contraception (Lyon
, –). As
Dubois and Gordon summarize, feminists have acted within two con-
flicting traditions about sex, one committed to analyzing its dangers, its
victimizing potential – frequent pregnancy, venereal disease, exploita-
tion. Those who interpreted sexuality as danger sought protection by
enforcing sexual controls over men that women (in the double standard)
had already internalized, by insisting on chivalric honor in men and con-
sensual sex, and by campaigning against vice (prostitution), this last often
a campaign for the “containment of female sexuality within heterosex-
ual marriage” no matter how oppressive (Dubois and Gordon
, ).
The other set of feminists, the sex-radicals, committed to pleasure and
encouraged female autonomy and sexual expression, but did not see, or
thought they had transcended, power relations, and the “male construc-
tion of the sexual experience available to most women” (
). Many radical
ideas were suggested by both groups. For example, Dora Marsden
argued that when “womanly women abandon the ‘privileges’ which
enable them to make a corner in a commodity [virginity and free sexu-
ality] the demand for which they sedulously stimulate, [then] the pirate
brigs [prostitutes; sex workers] which ply on the outskirts of the trade
will become purposeless” (
a: ). QED.
Social Purity was hegemonic in the su
ffrage movement (between
–), but not unchallenged. Libertarians and utopian socialists, as
well as feminist sex radicals rejected the “purity” argument; these
would
find chosen sexual unions (free love) a moral and ethical kind of
sexual behavior, and would urge the end of sexual repression. Most
dramatic was the claim that women had rights to and capacities for
(hetero)sexual pleasure, that women’s sexual drive was equal to men’s,
that there was no physiological basis for the double standard.
6
In con-
trast to these sex radical claims, Social-Purity feminists made urgent
allegories of gender division in sexual matters: men were lustful,
women were spiritual; men needed their sexual (and the synonyms
were bestial, animal) instincts curbed by women as asexual guardians
of an evolutionary superiority, glossed as a minimal need for the
“sexual embrace” (Mort
, ).
7
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
In his poems in Lustra, Pound held a number of positions on sexual-
ity, but one of them was a moving defense of those attempting to exit
from sexual repressions of all sorts, especially those who needed sexual
expression to become whole or renewed. That is, he was a kind of sex
radical, and his title puns on that position, arguing that lust is pure and
puri
ficatory, and that orgasm is liberatory for whomever might say (as
does Eliot’s woman in “A Game of Chess”) “my nerves are bad tonight.”
Pound sends his poems as missionaries to both genders: “Go, my songs,
to the lonely and the unsatis
fied, / Go also to the nerve-wracked, go to
the enslaved-by-convention, / Bear to them my contempt for their
oppressors” (Pound
, ). An ideological strike for free sexuality and
ful
fillment. Among these, women and wives are singled out: “Go to the
bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis, / Go to the women in suburbs.
/ Go to the hideously wedded . . . / Go to the bought wife, / Go to the
woman entailed” (ibid.). This last word suggests woman as property,
woman unable to inherit property, woman bestowed as possession, and
a person carved upon or sculpted into a shape imposed upon her. In
Pound’s list, and in the richness of “entailed,” the “Parasitism and
Prostitution” argument about marriage
finds some resonance. In the
double position as subjectivity of the enounced and the enunciation,
Pound invites his songs to help others by this de
fiance, taking on the
modern task of chivalric rescue of women and adolescents from “mort-
main” – their ownership by the family (
). In this, Pound’s views are
consonant with the sex-radical arguments of feminism.
However, men faced with a di
fferent feminism, with the Social-Purity
position that threatened the female vote would be used to curb male lust,
might well be found protesting, a
ffirming sexuality, turning upon women
the weapons of resistance and satire. Doggerel circulating on the fringes
of high art poetry among strongly bonded men evinced jocular discom-
fort that did not distinguish the two feminisms, attacking both sex radi-
calism (female agency that did not need chivalric rescue) and social
purity (female passionlessness). In the mid-
s Pound finally felt that
with all this feminist politics and gender theorizing about sex, simple
“fucking” (as an act of non-ideological nature, so to speak, or at least of
male assertion) had been left out of the equation. He was prepared to
stick up for it, with a
quatrain in his “Amurikan” cracker-barrel
vein: “Oh the Henglish wuz so stoopid / They’d fergotten how to fook
/ Till Mrs Doktor Mary Stoops / Com to skow them wid her book”
(Pound
, ).
8
The “Henglish” seem to be orthographically hen-
pecked; the doctor in question, Marie Stopes, “stoops” to conquer with
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
her Married Love: a New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Di
fficulties (), an
exhortation to attend to the tidal periodicities of female desire in order
to have an e
ffective sexual love and achieve orgasms whose lack, in
Stopes’ view, led to neurosis in modern women (
, , ). Such a theory
made the female body a third player in the sex life of men and women,
something to be consulted and respected: or, in Pound’s irreverent
summary of
: “O Jhon [sic] do mind the moment / When her
oviduct is full . . .” (Pound
, ; see also version in Pound , ).
But sex talk, Pound avers, seemed to theorize the self-evident, to give
advice where none was needed. “Alas, eheu, one question that sorely
vexes / The serious social folk is ‘just what sex is.’ / Though it will, of
course, pass o
ff with social science / In which their mentors place such
wide reliance” (Pound
, ). While sex will not pass away, this
satiric farrago (
/) certainly seems to resist the policing of, chan-
neling of, or even analysis of sexuality by social reformers. Also in the
doggerel line, Eliot is inventive, although his comic poems are even more
about race than about the New Woman, as much about homosexuality
as heterosexuality, and as much scatological as sexual. In ditties on King
Bolo, Columbo, Isabella, and the Big Black Kween, Eliot makes several
aggressive remarks on sexuality, inventing a topos and topography in
which all assertions are verbally possible, with a bounce upon “Words
Ending in -Uck, -Unt and -Ugger,” as Lewis remarked to Pound (before
July
, Pound , ; see Eliot , , –).
These doggerel works in circulation (and the posturing rhetorics of
some letters exchanged among male modernists) are important as iden-
tifying an underside, the intense ambivalence expressed by young male
modernists to female agency – whether sexual or artistic, and to joining
the artistic “big wigs,” the kind of ambivalence through which the male
and female members of a notable artistic family are denominated
“
[sic] and Shitwell” in a letter that in fact offers up some
of the doggerel poems as an antic and spit-in-the-eye reading sugges-
tion (Eliot
, , to Pound, Oct. ). This jealousy and sense of
poetic rivalry makes problematic such a thesis as Gilbert and Gubar’s
that male modernists invented avant garde strategies and disjunctive
poetics (Peter Quartermain’s phrase) to di
fferentiate themselves from
the broad stream of (often prose) realism dominated by female masters
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the variety of modern rhet-
orics and functions cannot so easily be divided into experimental versus
realist nor male versus female (Gilbert and Gubar
, ). Indeed,
the notion of formally radical writing as a “men’s club” e
ffectively
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
marginalizes Moore, Stein, Loy, H.D., Sitwell, Woolf, Barnes and
numerous others (
).
The fallout from debates about female sexuality is expressed in a bitter
poem by Alfred Kreymborg called “Icicles,” in which women manipu-
late men in the manner of a puppeteer, and men su
ffer phallic depreda-
tions: “Other men have been known to tighten into buds, only to loosen
to spreading lotuses. / To assume the outer corrugations, only to wilt to
the inner sweetness, of pineapples. / To twist into cactus shapes, only to
flower toward purple mist” (Kreymborg , ). The striking meta-
morphic androgyny of phallus to
flower is, nonetheless, deeply resented,
since “Milady” holds total power over these changes. The poem ends
fiercely with a bravura moment of misogyny and projection: “Milady is
indigenous to every soil and climate, every star and planet. / In enlight-
ened America, a fetich more prevalent than God the Almighty. / In
darkest Africa, they club her to death” (
). The ironic shifting between
who is really primitive and who enlightened harnesses the narratives of
race fantasy and gender privilege to take revenge on women who have,
in the modern American world, somehow gotten too much sexual
power, but who, Kreymborg fantasizes, are dealt with pertinently in the
“primitive” world. In a backlash to feminist analysis and to the debates
among feminists, men claimed that they were in danger from female sex-
uality (against sex-radical feminists) and, as well, from the attempt to
curb male sexuality (against Social-Purity feminists). Loy would certainly
have agreed on the latter point: “The man who lives a life in which his
activities conform to a social code which is a protectorate of the femi-
nine element ———— is no longer masculine” (Loy
, ).
Loy’s feminism of individual agency and will considers women as a
group, and does, if quirkily, use the term “feminist,” a term itself con-
tested in the Marsden circle in which several of the male poets also par-
ticipated (Pound and Aldington, for example). Dora Marsden was highly
resistant to any consideration of Woman-as-type, by which she meant
both stereotypes of women and any analysis considering woman in the
mass – that is, analyses by gender. She announces that: “‘Woman,’ spelt
with a capital, Woman-as-type, had no existence; that it is an empty
concept and should be banished from language” (Marsden
a, ).
Marsden also insisted that “‘Feminism’ was the natural reply to
‘Hominism’” proposing, in
, that both were inadequate and unnec-
essary, because a higher and more speci
fic individualist urge had now
replaced these political positions – ”[women] can be as ‘free’ now as they
have the power to be” (Marsden
b, ).
9
This was a powerful, if
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
rather premature, sentiment, a pre-War optimism of the will, that clearly
exhibits the productive tension between individual creative person and
the social category of putative allegiance as seen in the “New Woman”
milieu (See Clarke
, –, –, ; DuPlessis , –).
Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” is situated within a sex-radical discourse.
Loy calls, in the manifesto, for free love brought about by “intelligent
curiosity and courage” in acknowledging sexual desire, in critique of
“the impurity of sex,” in renunciation of the status of parasite (marriage
as a “trade”), and in principled, vociferous resistance to old-fashioned
marriage, called, disparagingly, “comfortable protection” (Loy
,
–). Another transformative proposal, an extension of her own life-
choices, was “the right to maternity” for all women, married or not,
although as can be pointed out, this had a eugenicist torque (and in her
life led to certain amazing childcare issues) (DuPlessis
; Lyon ,
). In her forms of marriage resistance and resistance to legitima-
tion/legitimacy, Loy absolutely holds to sex-radical positions: that high-
minded revulsion against marriage as women’s trade that one sees in
Cicely Hamilton, the curiosity about free love in Florence Farr, or the
criticism of the Pankhurst (Social-Purity) position that one sees in Dora
Marsden.
And yet, when the manifesto declares “Woman must destroy in herself
the desire to be loved,” it continues in a pensive un
finished sentence
“The feeling that it is a personal insult when a man transfers his atten-
tions from her to another woman” (Loy
, ). It is this fragmentary
half-thought that “Songs to Joannes” takes up. Along with “the desire to
be loved,” the manifesto claims this insulted feeling must be extirpated
too. In the manifesto, Loy shows de
fiant desentimentalism, as if feelings
associated with the ideology of femininity were downright toxic, part of
the “rubbish heap of tradition” (
). Thus she argues “honour, grief,
sentimentality, pride, & consequently jealousy must be detached from
[sex]” (
). As in most manifestos, there is a ferocious prevalence of
“must,” a theatrical assertion of will, New consciousness, and declama-
tory overstatement. Yet her absolute rejection of prior female strategies
and her repeated tropes of destruction protest too much; feminine con-
sciousness is a specter haunting “Songs to Joannes.”
The narratives of thralldom and recovery, obsession, rupture, and
painful isolation visible in “Songs to Joannes” do conform to certain
stories of the dangers of sexuality emerging from Social-Purity femi-
nism, from sentimentalist visions, and from the topological femininity of
the abandoned woman.
10
“The desire to be loved” (one of the aspects of
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
female servility) and the capture of the woman “in the weak eddy / of
your [the man’s] drivelling humanity” is confessed repeatedly in the
early part of the poem and even seems to recur at the end (
). This goes
far to argue that the old feminine consciousness with its concepts such
as “love,” accompanied by “honour, grief, sentimentality, pride, & con-
sequently jealousy” spoils the brave new world of liberated heterosexu-
ality (
). The poem stands in a contradictory relation to the manifesto,
considering emotions the manifesto resists.
When this poem is scrutinized by a social philology, one sees that Loy
condenses these passionate contemporaneous debates about sexuality in
her word choice and diction. Take the word “bed-ridden”: “We might
have coupled / In the bed-ridden monopoly of the moment” (
). Ellen
Trimberger’s studies of sex radicals con
firm the realities of jealousy and
pain in the open heterosexual relationships of contemporaneous free
love advocates (Trimberger
and ). The temporary monogamy
of a potential sexual conjunction, and the possible excitements of riding
the bed (meaning copulate) are quali
fied with a word that suggests a sick-
ness. Or worse: that sexuality is itself dangerous, with the word “hag-
ridden” hovering in the background, for ridden can mean controlled or
dominated, even harassed and pursued. Pleasure and danger condense
in this word (cf. Quartermain
, ).
The poet enters into her consideration of the “wild oats
sown in
mucous-membrane” with the clear admonition “These
are suspect
places” (Loy
, ). “Sowing wild oats” comes from a proverbial
expression; “mucous-membrane” is a medical term. The mixture of dic-
tions in this logopoeic style has one of its origins, as I have argued in
chapter two, in the feminist critique of a foundational cluster of materi-
als about romance in poems. The main character assumes various pos-
tures for this investigation, among them a “wise virgin” pose, holding an
investigatory lantern aloft so it will not be blown out by “the bellows /
Of experience.” For this lantern show (like a slide show, the sections of
the poem o
ffer individual moments of a quasi-narrative montage), the
poet takes her own cool, analytic “eye” as the source of light, but that
analytic “lantern” is involved with in
flammatory orgasmic imagery: “An
eye in a Bengal light / Eternity in a skyrocket” (ibid.).
11
Negotiating sexual and analytic passions, the poem often presents
impacted and intellectualized languages of wit graphically describing
sexual moments and apparatuses. The gaze of power (narrator’s eye as
illuminating lens) rests on the man. And even – in the very
first view we
have of him – on his genitalia: “The skin-sack / In which a wanton
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
duality / Packed / All the completion of my infructuous impulses /
Something the shape of a man.” (ibid.). Loy yearns for the completions
locked inside his testicles: the sperm to make her fruitful. As a “complete
woman,” she wants motherhood and mistresshood both (
). So this
“wanton duality” is not simply an abstract portrait of his genitalia, but
of her double impulse toward licentious, rebellious sex and desires for
male fertilization. Maternalist thinking meets free love; Loy proposes –
quite overriding conventional thought on these subjects – that there is
no con
flict between them (Weeks , –).
Other sections are more comic, apparently unafraid of the game of
sexual intercourse. Charming and alarming is this haiku, allusively com-
plete in just three lines.
Shuttle-cock and battle-door
A little pink-love
And feathers are strewn[.]
(Loy
, )
The shuttle-cock of badminton bears irresistible double overtones, and
the battledore, a
flat wooden paddle (and the old word for badminton
itself), is provocatively re-spelled “battle-door,” to suggest the site of pen-
etration. This
first line emphasizes the physical difference between the
sexes, yet the sport that can be made of these di
fferences. “Pink-love”
smacks of a fond eros of knowing possession, rather than unconsum-
mated yearning. The “feathers” signal a comic devastation of the
“birdie” or cock, a triumph perhaps of the woman, or perhaps mutual
release in plucking. Sex becomes a game, a sport, a cartoon.
“Voices break on the con
fines of passion / Desire Suspicion
00
Man
Woman / Solve in the humid carnage.” (
). This little list of
nouns can be read two con
flicting ways. First, the lines suggest that both
man and woman have desire and suspicion (suspicion of their relation-
ship, and of each other; suspicion as well about what sexuality means).
This equal intersubjectivity attempts to depict a non-hierarchical
arrangement of the sexes. They are equal on the terrain of the sexual
embrace, for they have the same border – or perhaps the same impris-
onment (“con
fines” are both). Therefore, all barriers are “solved” in that
embrace, where “solved” may mean dissolved, disappearing, or
explained, emerging as a correct answer to questions about modern sex-
uality. Sexual intercourse, that “humid carnage,” will override the
gender division based on the mutual hatred of “parasite” and male host,
as the epigram to this chapter from Loy’s manifesto also suggests: in
“Feminist Manifesto,” the genders can now become equal in orgasm,
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
but when women become feminists à la Loy, presumably the enmity
between men and women will no longer prevail.
However, the same lines can also be interpreted as following sexual
purity binaries, creating two matched sets in ratio: “desire” goes with
“man” and “suspicion” with “woman.” Loy’s syntactic presentation via
this indeterminate metonymy calls forth both latent narratives of
male–female relations; thus, in a reading undertaken by social philology
sentence structure evokes these positional debates within feminism. As
Nancy Cott observes, “the endorsement of heterosexual passion and
pleasure was a double-edged sword for Feminists in the
s” because
for feminists “heterosexual liberation for women intended to subvert
gender hierarchy rather than to con
firm it” (). The evidence of a
debate between subversion of hierarchy and con
firmation of it, between
female desire and female suspicion occurs in the language of this
passage.
With “laughing honey // And spermatozoa / At the core of Nothing
/ In the milk of the Moon,” and continuing for six sections (
‒), Loy
composes precisely on or alluding to (hetero)sexual intercourse with a
striking frankness of diction, and in a great variety of registers, includ-
ing terror, danger, pleasure, resistance, lust, controlling wit (Loy
–). These are not, it appears from their tonal differences, narratives
of one erotic encounter, but rather six separate, distinct, and precisely
noted representations of activities and attitudes that go with sex, each
section ending in a representation of orgasm. Loy pays special attention
to the similarities between the partners at the moment of pleasure when
(according to Loy) male–female distinctions dissolve, yet a moment
whose social and psychological contexts draw upon the dangers of that
di
fference: “seismic orgasm” (). For instance, the obliteration of
gender distinctions seems especially keen in “humid carnage // Flesh
from
flesh / Draws the inseparable delight / Kissing at gasps to catch
it,” “welded together” and “knocking sparks o
ff each other” (–).
“Welded” puns on the more familiar phrase “wedded together” with an
industrial allusion, involving sparks.
However Loy’s most distinctive phrases – “humid carnage” and
“seismic orgasm” – combine words indicating pleasure with words of
danger. “Carnage” reaches etymologically for “
flesh” and connotively
for “carnal,” with a historical pun, “dying,” but denotively for war-dead
and “mass slaughter.” In “seismic,” also, pleasure and danger contend;
the technical term for earthquake with its etymology of “shake” is far
fiercer than the sentimental notion that “the earth moved.” So in Loy’s
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
diction the sex-radical direction (pleasure and a
ffirmation of female
agency) meets the danger of free love – being discarded, being used,
having a consciousness still “welded” to ideas of marriage and monog-
amy.
The next main portion of the poem (sections
‒) narrates the
apparent aftermath of a sexual relationship, with the tentative steps
toward recovery, and backslidings into misery, pleasure in isolated iden-
tity, bitterness about betrayal. The “severing” might be of man from
woman, with the “heinous acerbity / Of your street-corner smile” (
,
). But it might be self-induced, a bitter self-imposed punishment of
exile from him when her emotions (pride, jealousy, sentimentality, etc.)
could not be detached from her sexual experience, and she violated the
terms of her own brave “Feminist Manifesto.” A summary set of lines
thereupon moves away from the sensuous alba of romance tradition,
and divides into two categories those who wake up post coitus. The
section names “some of us” still “melted” “Into abysmal pigeon-holes /
Passion has bored / In warmth”; this produces an unsavory combina-
tion of the swindled female “pigeons,” their wretched domestic com-
partments, and the duplicitous word “bored,” summarizing both ennui
and sexual penetration (
). These are distinguished from “Some few of
us” who “Grow to the level of cool plains / Cutting our foot-hold / With
steel eyes” (ibid.). An analytic elite has waked up in another sense and
will be able to scrutinize the situation of love and sex, examining Nature
with intellectual dispassion, not sensual passion, misplaced morality, or
curdling personal sentiments of loss. “The cerebral forager”
first takes
herself as a one-woman petri dish for the cultivation of sexuality, and
then becomes a scientist scrutinizing the growths (
). The sex-radical
woman may su
ffer the conventional story of passion and loss, thralldom
and grief, but she will rewrite that narrative by rebounding to analyze it.
Nature is thereupon called “that irate pornographist.”
12
“Irate”
means angry, excited, incensed; “pornographist” makes of Nature itself
an angry or emotional producer of texts depicting sexual intercourse.
Given Loy’s poem, this would put her in precise alliance with Nature;
she too is an angry writer depicting sexual intercourse who has certainly
“shed . . . petty pruderies” (
). Yet in what senses does she side with
nature? Loy
first argues, with Naturalist panache, that Nature is a pre-
senter of materials for our sexual arousal, and we are just those human
materials upon which Nature has to act for its designs. Since we are
simply containers for natural forces, our individual scruples, our speci
fic
feelings, certain kinds of resistance are counterproductive, causing only
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
su
ffering to the small speck, with its “souvenir ethics” somehow stand-
ing up in the face of these forces. Nature “knows us” with” “blind eyes”
– implacable, amoral (
and ). Women and men are, in a kind of
Hardyesque fatedness – controlled like cosmic puppets by the force and
overwhelming character of “nature” – sexual drives.
These “naturalist” feelings about sexuality (that the hard-won individ-
ualism of the New Woman stands in the way of and is swept away by
cosmic natural drives) seem to be at issue when Loy bitterly calls for a
new breed of “sons and daughters” who might have “some way of
braying brassily / For caressive calling” and be “seduce[d]” “To the one
/ As simple satisfaction / For the other” (
, ).
Let them clash together
From their incognitoes
In seismic orgasm
For far further
Di
fferentiation
13
Rather than watch
Own-self distortion
Wince in the alien ego
(Loy
, )
The sexual life of these active and “caressive” paragons will be simple,
compared to her “own-self distortion.” They will have evolved to be
more in accord with Nature than she, more like human animals
(“braying”) without twinges of bourgeois individualism.
As she represents sexual intercourse, the loss of individual gender
binaries was an advantage and a pleasure, the place where disparate
gender interests merge. But there is danger: a lust for orgasm necessar-
ily overrides a sense of ego or boundaries. So the “Nirvana” is ter-
rible/terrifying and terri
fic/exhilarating, as they “tumble together /
Depersonalized / Identical / Into the terri
fic Nirvana / Me you – you –
me” (
). These metaphors of chaos or annihilation in sexual bliss show
the dangerous loss of identity, perhaps reversion to a “femininity” of dis-
solution and passivity, de
fined by stereotypical gender ideas which Loy
has staked herself upon resisting, perhaps the loss of hard-won female
agency and human personhood, a “depersonalized” erosion. The pleas-
ures and dangers of merging boundaries are in unresolvable circulation
in the poem.
In the end “seismic orgasm” has yet another function. It is necessary
to the utopian building of a new female gender identity – one in which
“mistress and mother” are not distinct (
). For Loy, autonomous
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
sexuality and her “freewoman” brand of autonomous feminism still
involved a deeply felt claim to maternity.
14
The argument toward the
end of the poem (“Evolution fall foul of / Sexual equality / Prettily
miscalculate / Similitude”) strongly suggests that “sexual equality” and
species meliorism are at odds (
). When one factors in Loy’s rejection
of a feminism of equal rights and equal access, the phrase suggests that
mainstream feminism is going to fall foul of natural forces, but that her
eugenic feminism, proudly set forth in the “Feminist Manifesto,” will
not. To build better species, the sexes should remain, in certain of their
aspects, strongly di
fferentiated – (intelligent) womanly superwomen
meeting (intelligent) manly supermen; this is emphatically not the non-
maternal androgyne
floating around in some sex-radical discourses
(Smith-Rosenberg
, ). And yet, at the same time, the linking of
sexual activity with reproduction was a potentially conservative posi-
tion, when the whole history of modern struggles for the acceptance of
sexual practices (whether contraception, abortion, homosexual expres-
sion, or masturbation) had been to valorize non-reproductive sex, what
Richard Brown wittily dubs “copulation without population” (Brown
, ).
So there are two intertwined narratives at the end of the poem. One
is the analysis of the amorous failure of these highly developed intellec-
tuals whose precepts and experiences don’t match.
The prig of passion—– —– —– —–
To your professorial paucity
Proto-plasm was raving mad
Evolving us —– —– —–
(Loy
, )
They are ill suited to continue the race. One would not want to produce
“foetal bu
ffoons” in whom the bad patterns of the generative parents get
mimicked or copied in utero. The superior candidates for “vital creation”
should produce racially superior children and should “participate con-
sciously in the evolutionary process” (
; Weeks , ). But the part-
ners in this poem are characterized as too far from the origins of life –
he by “paucity” (smallness, dearth) – a kind of
finicky withdrawal, and
she as a “prig of passion.” But since she is assuredly no prude (“prig”),
one looks to other meanings. She could be arrogant or smug, a plausible
reading of the ways the poem tests and tempers her self-assured
“Feminist Manifesto.” Or, interestingly, a reading of “prig” in British
slang, a pickpocket, petty thief, or pilferer. She was trying to pilfer a little
passion, and more, but his “paucity” prevents her.
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
Because the second narrative that structures the end, is – to summar-
ize baldly – her rage and grief that she does not have his child, that she
did not get pregnant, or that pregnancy was not allowed to happen,
barred from happening by contraceptive practices, or even, perhaps, by
abortion.
15
This a
ffair did not lead to “vital creation” – that is, to a child
(Loy
, ). As she says: “The procreative truth of Me / Petered out
/ in pestilent / Tear drops / Little lusts and lucidities / and prayerful
lies” (
). There is angry mourning for the washing away of their sperm
and cyprine
16
mixture, a “plastic” substance that was not allowed to
become anything:
The hands of races
Drop o
ff from
Immodi
fiable plastic
The contents
Of our ephemeral conjunction
In aloofness from Much
Flowed to approachment of —– —– —– —–
There was a man and a woman
In the way. . . .
(Loy
, )
The next section with its white towel, and images of blank whiteness,
characterizes his abilities at erasure. “I am burnt quite white / In the
climacteric / Withdrawal of your sun” (ibid.). Not only about thralldom,
although plausibly about her wounding by the loss of his illuminating
central presence, this section seems speci
fically about “withdrawal” – a
pun on an uncertain tactic of birth control, combining the shadow word
“climax” inside “climacteric,” or “critical change of life.”
Loy parses the resistances of the “man and [the] woman / In the way”
of
successful conception. Their relationship has only led to
“Inconceivable concept” – a bad idea, and a non-conceptus (
). The
“cruci
fixion” section (one of the final ones) seems to criticize her self,
assured as a “busybody / Longing to interfere so / With the intimacies
/ Of your insolent isolation.” Like much Loy, these lines are sedimented
with meaning. Not just a criticism of him for narcissism or uncaringness
(those familiar tropes of the end of romance) or for a sel
fish unwilling-
ness to become a father, or for the aborting of “an illegal ego’s /
Eclosion,” this is speci
fically her “crucifixion” as the bearer of a new and
controversial idea (she is the “Caryatid
of an idea”): that all women
should freely bear the children of their lovers, and that superior women
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
will bear superior children in a eugenic sense (
). The messianic claims
of the New Woman to redeem the world should not go unremarked.
The
final sense of loss is not between the lovers, only or exclusively, but
between the speaker and the missing child. Thus aspects of her urgency
and grief in the turn to reproductive sexuality at the end could be seen
as radically conservative.
In the “Feminist Manifesto,” Loy also produced a eugenicist codicil to
her Superwoman maternalist hopes: “Every woman of superior intelli-
gence should realize her race-responsibility, in producing children in
adequate proportion to the un
fit or degenerate members of her sex –”
(
). It is especially amusing to construe ordinary, run-of-the-mill, con-
formist women as “degenerate”; those who considered themselves
among the elite certainly would have – given these ideas – a good deal
of pregnancy and childrearing in their futures. This is also a claim that
superior women like herself, through rede
fined sexuality and maternity,
will lead the race to a “social regeneration.” As she had said, in lines I
only half-glossed earlier, “Where two or three are welded together /
They shall become god” (
). This is not only about the new fusions in
orgasm, but about a new holy family – man, woman, and fetus/baby –
or perhaps just the dyadic woman and baby as a next evolutionary step.
Perhaps the future paragons of “caressive calling” – more modern sex
radicals than she – might be able to have sex without thinking that their
combined discharges and ejaculations are “human insu
fficiencies /
Begging dorsal vertebrae” (
). But Loy mourns angrily for the lack of
or loss of a child from sex, rejoining, for radical, evolutionist and eugenic
reasons, sexual intercourse and reproduction. While this could be the
most traditional justi
fication for the sexual embrace, her justification is
to claim the radical identity of sexual mother.
Seismic orgasms also became ideological entrants into the British
debates over su
ffrage – the extension of the franchise to all women and
some men, and they also played a role in discussions of male homosex-
uality. The impact of transgressive masculinities and militant feminisms
on the development of male subjectivity in modernism, can be seen,
through Ezra Pound, as strategies of “surviving the Ibsen revolt” and
“the Edward Carpenter tone.” Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”
(
) is a poem that also significantly makes its proposals about gender,
sexuality, and male subjectivity as central to cultural diagnosis. The
poem criticizes the past generation, careerist uses of both poetry and the
poetic career, and tries to reposition art, aestheticism, “all things save
beauty alone” recuperating these from the negative and hostile aspects
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
of the
s’ sensibility by a passionate appeal to poetic potency via female
figures. The poem thus criticizes gender transgressiveness and female
militancy in order to claim primacy for a new male subjectivity that is
the real possessor of art – and of the seismic orgasm and its deployment.
First the poem separates sexual ambiguity from aestheticism, so that
a
s’ position on the importance of art can be affirmed along with a
modernist critique of e
ffeminacy. Sexual ambiguity and inability are sit-
uated in the character Mauberley. Pound controls and manages homo-
sexual suggestions by packing them all into the
figure of an impotent,
passive, yearning, sexually ba
ffled (though apparently heterosexual)
character. Thus Pound can speak from a reassembled aesthetic view-
point precisely because the sexual problematics have been siphoned o
ff.
This modernist aestheticism is more noble than the varieties of cultural
compromise and sell-out satirized in the poem. The poem argues that
the “memory of the
s,” Plarr, the “prose stylist” and so on deserve cul-
tural credibility and honor. Pound assumes their mantle while warding
o
ff s’ sexual ambiguity in favor of a renewed effulgence of phallicism
asserted in the de Gourmont translation that is the manifesto-like com-
panion of this poem.
17
As Pound had remarked to Margaret Anderson
in
: “I am fed up on the Edward Carpenter tone. Hueffer wipes
Weiniger [sic, for Weininger] o
ff the earth. De Gourmont has written
‘Physique de l’Amour’ and ‘Chevaux de Diomedes’” (
, ).
The most notable aspect of Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age (
;
) is the chapter on “The intermediate sex,” a positive introduction
to homosexualities as one aspect of the contemporary con
fluence of
genders.
18
Carpenter argues that numbers of masculine women and
feminine men had increased. By seeing these ambiguous
figures as a
useful middle ground between binary genders, Carpenter di
ffers might-
ily from such later interpreters of sexuality as Lawrence and Pound.
Pound’s “Edward Carpenter tone” took in the (misogynist and anti-
Semitic) work of Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (
; trans. ).
Weininger’s argument begins that all human beings were in a fundamen-
tally bisexual condition, and that homosexuality was a lively and preva-
lent possibility; this promising theoretical proposition took an odd turn
when Weininger argued that from this plastic intermediary material an
ideal, absolute type of pure Man or Woman must be constructed, pre-
cisely to avoid the saturating possibility of homoeroticism prevalent in
all human interactions (Bristow
, –).
Carpenter di
ffered; he did not deny the value of the spectrum of sex-
ualities between Man and Woman, proposing that
figures of gender
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
con
fluence represented a positive, even evolutionary trend for the
human race. Striking here is Carpenter’s sense of a continuum of
gender traits and sexual object-choice, in which homosexuals/lesbians,
bisexuals, and heterosexual people with a diverse range of behaviors
all take their valued place in society. Indeed, Carpenter defends his
yearning “Uranians” of both genders as representing a possible higher
evolutionary stage of persons – as “dreamers and enthusiasts” (here he
is speaking of men) and “representatives of the higher mental and
artistic element” (
, ; ). He also praises the possible “new sex”
of women who have an “ardent social enthusiasm” but no particular
adaptation for child-bearing – following a progressive interpretation of
politicized women o
ffering “social service, indispensable for the main-
tenance of the common life” (
).
In this – the
finding of artistic energy and work for social good among
the intermediate sex and evolving members of a new sex – Carpenter’s
argument is parallel to Freud’s on homosexuals a generation later in
.
19
He also praises homosexuals for their bridge function as inter-
preters between genders – addressing both “sides,” so to speak. In con-
trast Pound resisted Carpenter’s substitution of feminine men and true
homosexuals in the same functional place that Pound reserved for artists:
as “the antennae of the race.”
Further, attitudes in Carpenter toward heterosexual men are not
always
flattering. The “Edward Carpenter tone” regarded male hetero-
sexual passion with a tinge of sex-purity fastidiousness (Carpenter
,
). Heterosexual men are seen as blunted in sensibility, especially “at the
whole spectacle of woman’s degradation” (sexual bondage, selling
herself into marriage, “serf-like” service, constant unrelieved childbear-
ing) that they regard “with stupid and open-mouthed indi
fference” (;
). This is consistent with Carpenter’s sentimentalized claims that
women were ahead of men on the evolutionary scale: they had, as a
group, a tenderer sense of love; they had more subtle ways of dealing
with the sexual issues with which they were faced. Indeed, in Carpenter’s
view, human evolution (Darwinian-mandated progress) will continue
only when women return to their former position as animators of
“sexual selection” by choosing those men with whom to mate (see
Carpenter
, ; ). This denial of male sexual leadership and
powers might well have rankled Pound; implicitly and explicitly men like
him are cast en masse as oppressors and as inadequate to lead human
evolution. With his rejection of “the Edward Carpenter tone,” it
appeared that Pound was consolidating, in his translation of de
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
Gourmont, for instance, an increasingly intolerant heterosexuality
(
, ).
Pound was also acutely aware of the militancy of women. In April
, he declared to Olivia Shakespear: “I write with no confidence that
the Griselda type has survived the Ibsen revolt and the last election”
(
[April ], –).
20
Pound casts his personal request for a little
secretarial and research help onto a large, cultural–political stage, and
makes it a question of ultimate female types (helpful and patient) with a
medievalizing cast (the “Griselda type”). As a date, the year
marked
one notable turning point in su
ffragist patience, and the intersection of
this fact with Pound’s evocation of “patient Griselda” shows di
fferent
appropriations of the Middle Ages. The sight of pro-su
ffrage women
marching, like female knights in neo-medieval mode or by professions in
proto-industrial guilds o
ffered a very different use of the past than
Pound’s pre-Raphaelite stil novisti decor and helpmeet Griseldas
(Tickner
, passim, with illustrations).
Pound’s poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” features several succinct
formulations, read via a social philology, of his interests in “surviving the
Ibsen revolt” and rejecting the “Edward Carpenter tone.” The nature
and uses of seismic orgasm are at issue. The poem’s second section con-
cerns “the modern stage” and contrasts Greek drama and its beauties
and truths with the “mendacities” and “accelerated grimace” of popular
drama. While the attack is pointed, it is also general. Yet it does appear
that the “sex problem plays” of Ibsen, Shaw, and many others (with a
whole category for su
ffrage drama) are unfortunately preferred in the
modern period to poetic drama (the stylized monologues of Noh, or
Yeats mythological closet dramas, for instance), whose “obscure reveries
/ Of the inward gaze” (Pound
, ) are on the defensive.
The Christ/Dionysus binary in Pound’s third section proposes a
world historical shift between a culture of plenitude and one of depri-
vation.
Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations;
Caliban casts out Ariel.
(Pound
, )
“Phallic and ambrosial” links male potency and pleasure in manhood
with the nectar of the gods. “Macerations” points to a culture of depri-
vation marked by fasting and emaciation, but also sexual abstinence.
The context links sexual pleasure and food.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
The macerations (fasting) of the Christian world view with its subli-
mated or asexual stance had been recently reactivated in the macera-
tions (fasting, or hunger strikes) of the imprisoned su
ffrage women.
Some critics hinted that these fasts were sublimations of the women’s
sexual problems, not at all a political protest, but a symptom of lack of
orgasm. These problems would be solved by sex, and by the male
phallus. Such claims were made by Sir Almroth Wright in a notorious
letter of
to the Times, answered by May Sinclair in a feminist
pamphlet (also
). Sir Almroth Wright (M.D.) traced the militancy of
the su
ffrage campaign to the “reverberations of her physiological emer-
gencies,” a hysteria experienced by “sexually embittered” surplus
women.
21
Sinclair’s response, published by the Women Writers’ Su
ffrage
League (one of many professional guild-like groups) is a scathing attack
on Wright’s anatomy of four types of su
ffrage women, all finally redu-
cible to “frustrated natural instincts” – that is, lack of sex-leading-to-
babies. The implication of Pound’s lines in “Mauberley” is to register
some palpable agreement with Almroth Wright, insofar as these macer-
ations are linked to a degraded world in which women have lost touch
with the pleasures and plenitudes of the “phallic and ambrosial.”
The tawdry and commodi
fied, or anorectic and frustrated women,
and the men now cheapened by democracy are thus all mixed up in the
extension of the franchise.
We have the press for wafer;
Franchise for circumcision.
(Pound
, )
The extension of the franchise to (more) men had been much debated,
since the reform bills also changed the property quali
fications for male
su
ffrage and lowered their age to vote; by Acts of and , a
slender majority of British men had achieved the right to vote. The esti-
mate is that in
, percent of men were enfranchised irrespective of
education, “
fitness,” wealth, or social class (Tickner , –). However,
as is clear, universal manhood su
ffrage had not yet been achieved. In
, one of the blockages of the Conciliation Bill had been the attack
from Lloyd George and young Winston Churchill claiming the bill was
not “su
fficiently democratic,” because it did not extend the male fran-
chise (Strachey
, ). In , another bill to extend the male fran-
chise (the Reform Bill) was proposed with woman su
ffrage explicitly
excluded (
). A great parliamentary move, adding women, was
debated in
with renewed hope, given the carefully worked-out addi-
tion of woman-su
ffrage amendments; however, the Reform Bill went
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
crash by a massive blunder – ”either a stupid mistake or an elaborate
wickedness. And in either case the women were equally defrauded of
their opportunity” (
).
Pound’s poem gathers up some of these historical events, arguing that
even the extension of franchise to more men is an error, since it
increases the chance of having “a knave or an eunuch / To rule over us”
(Pound
, ). The word “eunuch” is, of course, a renewed allusion
to male potency, or its lack. Thus castration links up with circumcision
as probably the richest condensed allusion about franchise.
22
To have
“press for wafer; / Franchise for circumcision” joins the democratic cit-
izenship of the vote to marks of two distinctive religious traditions.
“Press” – the compressed pieties of journalism, but also loosely the
“press” of democracy with all those bodies to be accounted for – is said
to substitute for the wafer of the Christian mass, considered the symbol
of Jesus’ redemptive sacri
fice. “Circumcision” – the distinguishing
marker for (male) Jews of their entrance into a historically active
Covenant with God – is contrasted to the right to vote. So far this is a
brisk chiasmus deploring contemporary social degradation by weighing
it against the spiritual symbols of the past. Secular versus sacred is
Pound’s modernist binary.
However, to call “franchise” a contemporary and degraded version of
“circumcision” is to attach it verbally to a cluster of attitudes about
penile matters growing in importance to Pound. “Circumcision” was
widely viewed, not tolerantly as a harmless aspect of the Hebrew
Covenant, but in revulsion, as a kind of castrating mutilation that, when-
ever practiced, gave rise to feminized men. Thus male Jews were widely
considered as non-men, feminine, and despisable, the very opposite of
the male subjectivity that Pound increasingly championed (Casillio
, –). The word “circumcision” evokes the threatening (because
enfeebling) presence of womanly men in relation to stigmatized Jews;
the word “franchise” may similarly evoke the threatening manly women
of anti-su
ffrage stereotype. The clarity and elegance of Pound’s phrase,
indeed, its very chiastic de
finitiveness, is supported by the binary archi-
tectonics of gender, sexual, and ethnic stereotypes.
In his “Postscript to The Natural Philosophy of Love by Rémy de
Gourmont” (dated
), Pound offers a loose, expansive, and specula-
tive set of meditations about gender and creativity. De Gourmont was
an essayist with a particular interest in “sexual ethnography” (
, ).
The Natural Philosophy of Love contains a long discussion of sexual dimor-
phism (the existence in humans and animals of the absolute polarity of
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
the sexes), celebrated as natural, a discussion with a clear political
agenda of preserving the gender binary. It would be folly if the genders
try to equalize, since “masculine work diminishes [the female’s] feminin-
ity, while feminine work feminizes the males” (de Gourmont
, ).
De Gourmont makes explicit the genial, “natural” anti-feminism of his
position at several points: “The duty of woman is to keep and to accen-
tuate her aesthetic and her psychologic dimorphisms” (ibid.). He dispar-
ages any feminist claim to equality, and dismisses “free-woman in
free-love” as “even more chimerical than all the chimaera which have at
least their analogy in the diversity of animal habits” (
).
De Gourmont holds that virtually any “moderate feminist” program
is “unnatural,” that is, unsanctioned by any of the manifold diversity of
nature whose habits he has happily collected and described, for the book
is a vast compendium of the organs and copulations of a great variety
of creatures, from monkeys to sparrows, from spiders to oysters (
).
Only “feminism in excess” occurs in nature – by which de Gourmont
means the absolute physiological dominance of females and the appro-
priation of inseminatory functions to female creatures. As for the human
social program of “equality of the sexes,” in de Gourmont’s view, the
“standpoint of natural logic” makes this an irrelevant and untenable,
because an unnatural claim (
–).
Pound’s essay on de Gourmont builds on the fascination with the
“natural” to compose a work that obsessively returns to sperm in male
orgasm, and the evolutionary potential in nature from male potency.
The essay comes from a sex-radical position that the sexual body is a
source of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development for both
genders. In many ways, the essay retools nineteenth-century theories of
spermatic discharge within an economy of rich retention, leading to
images and fantasy and art, and in certain cases the discharge of “a
surplus at high-pressure,” indicating genius (Pound
, ). The male
force is vital and life giving, “spermatophore in the nautilus” – a striking
image of a complicated – and poetic – mollusk which signals power, like
a semaphore; the suggestive crossing the etymologies of sign (sema) and
seed (sperm/semen) brings things back to a productive root: “an
extruded mass or capsule of spermatozoa in certain invertebrates and
primitive vertebrates.” A Whitmanic “new up-jut” is central to male
identity as a creative power (
). Note the appropriation of Whitman
back from the “Edward Carpenter tone”; a homosexual Whitman was,
of course, central to Carpenter. In this self-portrait, Pound accepts the
responsibility, the nobility and fountainous purpose of his phallus, which
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
is a venturesome form-creator, and he
finds the “integration of the male
in the male organ” a gratifying aspect of his identity (ibid.). Many other
men, he opines, are like insect drones, unmanned by business,
finance,
capitalism; the male artist di
ffers because of the quality of orgasm, and
thereby leads.
As for the female – Pound states at least three times that he “is not
writing an anti-feminist tract” or participating in a “journalistic sex-
squabble” by these speculations, that only on the surface claim “dispro-
portionate privilege for the spermatozoide” (
, ). Despite this
intricate, quite well-informed disclaimer, his place for females separates
an elite few from the many. He suggests that females may experience an
“ovular bath” from the force of their sexuality; but while a few of them
“bene
fit by an alluvial clarifying, ten dozen appear to be swamped”
(
). Generally, his speculations on females are Aristotelian: the pres-
ence of “the sperm, the form-creator” o
ffers “the substance which
compels the ovule to evolve in a given pattern” (
). Not only that, but
male
fluid, “a spermatic sea of sufficient energy” might yet help evolve
a new faculty of the brain (both will and telepathy are suggested).
Seminal
fluid and the brain are coextensive. This provides a masculinist
answer to Carpenter’s discussion of transgressive genders and evolution
and Loy’s evolutionary hopes for Superwoman maternalism; heterosex-
ual phallic manhood or spermhood is, for Pound, the force that will gen-
erate or compel the evolution of our species.
The seminal
fluids of male seismic orgasm have a heroic charge. In
this expansively speculative context and as an aside, Pound thereupon
makes a very provocative, and now much-cited, remark of “‘phallic aes-
thetics’” (Tickner
, citing W. Lewis , , ). He explains that
“man [is] really the phallus or spermatozoide charging, head-on, the
female chaos,” precisely the way he has felt “driving any new idea into
the great passive vulva of London.” This phrase, of a bracing vulgarity
and a
ffront, suggests Sir Almroth Wright’s analysis of what suffrage sup-
porters really need (Pound
, ).
23
London is coded as a big neuro-
tic female which hardly knows how much “she” wants the aggressively
restorative act of sexual intercourse performed upon her, and cannot
properly respond. The “rejuvenating power of sexual energy” in both
men and women is one of Pound’s psycho-social prescriptions, but
spermhood claims leadership (Bush, in Scott
, ).
24
Yet this rich narrative of form-giving tumescence is not so much sex-
ually lively as politically marginal. The real politics of the moment
involved su
ffrage struggles and war. Pound participated in neither.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
However, he constructed his own versions of both for the rest of his
career, consolidating masculinist gender pride and re
fighting the war.
The sex war is expressed by Pound’s growing distaste for any entity ideo-
logically coded by him as that (apparently) passive, (apparently) mushy
female genital: “female chaos,” Swinburne, Amy-gism, swamps, Jews
(Casillio
, –). He will then serve, for the rest of his life, in his
own self-declared political war,
fighting the “real” but concealed First
World War: a recurrent attack on the bankers, the obstructors, the
usurers, the feminized men, the controlling ideologues, of whom “Jews”
swiftly became the metonym and symptom. Pound develops this anti-
Semitism somewhat abruptly after the invective and barrage of the Hell
Cantos (
–), works that condemn all these forces – warmongers,
journalists, politicians, big money. Yet these cantos do not almost amaz-
ingly – as Robert Casillio has pointed out – mention Jews. His anti-
Semitism, certainly consistent with contemporaneous political and
social analysis from many thinkers and purveyors of thought, may also
be considered an extension of the consolidation of modernist masculin-
ity, a Priapic manhood facing a female militancy disinterested in his reju-
venating o
ffers – the “Ibsen revolt” – and facing down a claim – the
“Edward Carpenter tone” – that transgressive, e
ffeminate maleness was
evolutionary and creative.
Besides Loy’s and Pound’s, there is another modern sexual story from
one other sex-radical author narrating sex, love, and the politics of inter-
course.
25
D. H. Lawrence is also keen to describe orgasm, keen for the
transformation of women and men, and polemical in his frankness. As we
have seen, in ways recommended by Richardson (though for another
genre), Loy refuses the formal linkage of sexual climaxes and narrative cli-
maxes. In contrast, D. H. Lawrence manifests, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(
), a formal tendency to link narrative climax and sexual climax and
a political tendency toward renewed heterosexuality to regulate feminism.
Sexual scenes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover punctuate the book, making each
orgasm a station of a sexual via sacra and a political a
ffirmation not only
of heterosexuality but judging and distinguishing kinds of female orgasm.
Sexuality is also a force programmatically set against super
ficial liberal
meliorisms and moralities: education, regimentation, intellection, and
abstraction. Lovemaking (in The Rainbow) is a dark and “subtle” exercise,
in which an insinuating, “stealthy,” “relentless” and “fecund” male
figure,
by penetration, “shatters” certain resistances in a female
figure, inducing
her to leave o
ff light, and go into the dark: “The lighted vessel vibrated,
and broke in her soul, the light fell, struggled, and went dark. She was all
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
dark, will-less, having only the receptive will” (Lawrence [
] , ,
). The willessness of Lawrence’s heroines may be construed as a
response to various political assumptions and spiritual claims of female
agency: it is in dialogue with feminisms.
26
It is uncanny that Loy’s trope of
lighting an orgasmic yet investigatory lamp is the obverse of this blackout:
she creates female will, power, aggression, and judgment.
Lawrence produces, during the apotheosis of the phallus in Lady
Chatterley’s Lover (in its halo of light) a remarkable attempt at a New Man,
because, despite the understandable enthusiasm for male potency, the
New Man also absorbs much of the language of the feminine and mai-
denly, in the terms which serve to describe a penis (“bud-like reticence”;
“tender”; “frail”; “pure”; “lovely”; “delicate”; “soft”; “sensitive”; “inno-
cent”). Indeed the clitoral aspects of female sexuality (“bud-like”; “sen-
sitive”) seem thereby to be transposed to the male body (Lawrence
,
, ). The phallus is thus a (bi-gendered) personage with a lordly,
demanding aspect and a frail, tender, feminine character.
27
Lawrence is aware of, eloquent and polemical about, clitoral sexual-
ity. Mellors’ un
flattering description of the orgasms of his first wife
Bertha shows a fervor against the active/clitoral in woman that is deeply
informative (
–). Such phallic women are willful, depraved,
addicted to their sensation, and in the pièce de résistance – are really
“Lesbian.” Indeed, nearly all women are lesbian, if not by their clitoral
“beak,” by their New Woman hyperconscious cleverness, and Mellors
confesses he would like to kill them all (Lawrence
, –; cf.
–). This fervor could be contrasted to the careful language about
non-vaginal sex, for an act of heterosexual anal intercourse, “the end of
shame,” is the occluded climax of the sexual via sacra. Lawrence’s curi-
osity and tolerance extend only to varieties of phallic sexuality (
–).
The clitoris is exorcised (cf. Spivak
, ).
Lawrence powerfully o
ffers a non-feminist but sexual subject position
for women. He tempts women who might have been burned by free-love
serial a
ffairs with a concentration upon purity and monogamy in
Mellors’ character at the end of the novel. A revolution in male sexual-
ity will bind a new ordering of human relations that will stand against
feminist and working-class revolutions – so Lawrence responds, by his
narrative proposals, to the considerable contemporary changes in
gender and class relations. The work is a continuation of the conduct
book tradition in which novels educate women.
In this novel by Lawrence, scenes of intercourse are indeed climac-
tic: that is, they are proposed as narrative peaks. Narrative climax and
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
orgasmic climax coincide. In contrast, Loy’s contemporaneous repre-
sentations of intercourse in her serial poem occur in a loosely structured
poetic plot of connection, loss, and analytic reprise. These representa-
tions are not climactic, but various, acting to in
fluence, and influenced
by, the mixture of suspicion and desire, the playing out of equations for
possibilities, which is constitutive of the sexuality depicted. Because
narrative climax may not exist, and certainly does not coincide with
sexual climax, Loy’s mode is antiseptic, less readable (indeed – less
read). Because these acts provide no “crisis” in a narrative sense, they
seem rather a series of repeated behaviors, conceptualized and recon-
ceptualized, thought and rethought.
In the Loy poem, there is no “typical” or “valorized” statement about
sexual intercourse. The images she does use do not concern phallic
power, but, as we have seen, involve a variety of attempts to
figure
orgasm itself (“inseparable delight”) in which male and female are not
especially di
fferentiated. Loy does not depict a sexual–political peda-
gogy in which male leads female to some realization. Loy’s representa-
tions of sexual intercourse are less narrated, less sequentially
filled in
with a moment to moment, or play-by-play set of (“molten”) metaphors
than Lawrence’s. They tend to be a fragmented narration of thought,
options, or temporary, situational positions: a summary report, as if rep-
resentation were precisely at issue, and there were some equation to
“solve.” Representation, not conversion, is precisely at issue. Perhaps it
is the syntactic fragmentation or obscurity of the poem, but in Loy sex-
uality seems more a problem (i.e. in math or logic); in the Lawrence
novel, it has the status of solution or political proof. Her representations
are determinedly secular; allusions to sex are made with the same pas-
sionate dispassion as any other topic of the poem. There is no special,
magical diction for sex, in contrast to the diction of spiritual and politi-
cal renewal in Lawrence.
Lawrence’s sense that sexuality and sexual intercourse involve a
Bildung – and the woman still needs to learn more – occurs as well in his
poem “Manifesto” (from the
collection Look! We Have Come Through!)
(Lawrence
, –). This is a Whitmanic work in eight considera-
tions, speaking with great frankness about the hunger for sexuality, the
ful
fillment of sexual peace in orgasm (“actual fulfilment, / here in the
flesh”), and the understanding of pure female otherness (). Lawrence
wants the female partner to have a speci
fic realization about
female/male di
fference from the sex act: “She touches me as if I were
herself, her own. / She has not realised yet, that fearful thing, that I am
“Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics
the other, / she thinks we are all of one piece. / It is painfully untrue”
(
). From the perspective of social philology, the comma-splice sen-
tence in a texture of end-stopped lines, shows, inside the detail of punc-
tuation, female misapprehension of her unity with a man. While this
comment is unlikely to be an actual “answer” to Loy, it argues precisely
against Loy’s point, and against a sex-radical point about orgasm: that
in sexual intercourse men and women were “all of one piece” – more
similar than di
fferent. Lawrence argues for a sexuality “not in mixing,
merging, not in similarity” but in touching “my secret, darkest sources”
knowing “she has no part in it, no part whatever, / it is the terrible other.”
Another comma splice, counterintuitively, shows the ennobling split of
male in isolation from female. The aim is to be “unutterably distin-
guished, and in unutterable conjunction” (
); punctuation plays its
role to achieve this end. “Manifesto” is not so much about New Women
as about Newer Men: “After that, there will only remain that all men
detach themselves and become unique” (ibid.). Certainly in these repre-
sentations sex has a didactic quality; there is something to learn from it,
some road to travel in gender improvement and respect for male special-
ness.
Finally, in his famous novel, as Stephen Heath has argued, Lawrence
con
firms certain longstanding gender conventions, although acting
within a libertarian sexual ideology about sexual intercourse: how the
powerful magic wand of a penetrating penis (wherever it goes) trans-
forms the female psyche.
28
Orgasm is a reconversion experience to
polarized gender binaries away from modern womanhood and its ter-
rible, aggressive “beak.” In his poem, Lawrence feels that intercourse is
the path, but that “merging” is a tax on the solemnity of male isolation
and quest. Loy claims, unevenly, that orgasm is the only site in which oth-
erwise socially active gender binaries are rendered inoperable, where
men and women lose their suspicion and become just grasping
flesh:
“The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge – is the sexual
embrace” (Loy
, ). It may simply be that Loy and Lawrence
di
ffered on the location and consistency of gender binarist thinking, but
it is interesting nonetheless that Loy exempts sexual intercourse from
gender polarization. This makes sexual intercourse a radical space for
newly con
figured persons and for the new entitlements of modernism,
not “men” or “women” of the old type. In any event, unlike Lawrence
and Pound, Loy hardly proposes either heterosexuality or orgasm as
means to convert women from feminism.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
“
HOO
,
HOO
,
HOO
”: some episodes in the construction of
modern male whiteness
, kill the Arabs.
, kill the white men,
, , .
Vachel Lindsay,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.
Wallace Stevens,
Hoo ha ha
Hoo ha ha
T. S. Eliot,
–
This chapter undertakes an analysis of “Hoo”: a phonemic bit appar-
ently decorative, unpurposeful, and wayward, resounding in poems of
Vachel Lindsay, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot. Despite looking like a
meaningless sound or inarticulate syllable, the phoneme presents a cor-
nucopia of racialized materials in order to create a powerful position for
[male] whiteness; it makes a vibrant, aggressive sound of threat and
promise that thrills and jolts its users.
1
This reading of a poetic phoneme
by social philology proceeds “by fully semanticizing / the so-called non-
semantic features of language” (Bernstein
, ).
2
An alternative and
important reading of “hoo” in Eliot only, one that helped incite this
chapter, occurs in Michael North’s work. He takes the syllable as an indi-
cator of nullity, a “purely phatic sound” “associated with cultures
outside of Europe” that Eliot uses to indicate that “language has become
null” as Sweeney crosses the line, confessing the savagery of murder
(North
, –; , , ). In contrast, but helped considerably
by North’s focus, I see the sound as having content and intertextualities.
Brie
fly to sketch some of its effects, “hoo” draws on black agency and
autonomy, which, because mysterious, inexplicable, and frightening to
Euro-American writers, is therefore paradoxically a
ffirmed and denied
in the syllable “hoo.” The syllable also a
ffirms white “rights” in black
materials.
Whiteness, or blanchitude, as Sylvia Wynter named it in a path-
breaking essay, “had been nothing else than the constituted
of
culture in relation to which all other cultures had been made subservi-
ent.” Her polemical introduction to the concept challenges “the fact that
whiteness is taken as a given, rather than as a striking phenomenon calling
for extensive research” (Wynter
, ). The concept has subse-
quently emerged as central to understanding United States writing; here
I draw on Toni Morrison’s term “Africanist” – ideological constructions
of “Africa.”
3
Poets using the term “hoo” in the decade or so after
are respond-
ing to the enormous provocation of “The Congo.” Vachel Lindsay, now
considered an anomalous backwater of U.S. poetry, had once enlivened
it, fusing melodramas of American popular oratory with poetic perfor-
mance. Lindsay
figures talismanically and heroically in Harriet
Monroe’s A Poet’s Life as the proof of an autonomous, burgeoning
American modernism. T. S. Eliot, though more familiar, needs to be
further contextualized within racialized, gender-laden, popular, and
American discourses.
4
In particular, the curiously evasive “Sweeney
Agonistes” must be replaced in Eliot’s oeuvre not only as a work of tran-
sition (to Christianity, to plays) or of personal crisis (an oblique yet
fierce
commentary on his
first marriage), but also as work seriously and logi-
cally related to The Waste Land – and “The Congo.” A similar contextu-
alization of Wallace Stevens is in order.
5
Both the “midwestern” vatic, evangelical modernism of Vachel
Lindsay and the “international” ironic, confrontational modernism of
T. S. Eliot use a signi
ficant drumbeat (“” in Lindsay) joined to the
word “hoo,” to signal that Africa as a trope is being engaged and that
both whiteness and blackness are in play. The African trope aggregates
the diverse elements of a whole continent into one unhistorical mass and
then absorbs African-Americans into that bolus of materials. “
”
and “hoo” mark a passage from modern real time and morality to non-
historical temporality and amorality, signaling, in Johannes Fabian’s
terms, a “denial of coevalness” and of ethics to Africa, a denial that
propels and con
firms Euro-Americans’ status both as effective historical
agents and as arbiters of values (Fabian
, , , ). “, kill the
white men” is an especially galvanic line, ventriloquized as black state-
ment by a white person. The evocation of tom-toms (used as a trope for
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
frenzy without form or meaning) is also a way to erase the musical com-
plexity, learned traditions, and aesthetic innovation of African artistic
and social practices in order to suggest an unmotivated loss of control
and a malicious, insinuating seduction into unreason.
6
Evoking “primitive” substrata apparently beneath history and
reason, Lindsay’s “The Congo,” Eliot’s “Sweeney Agonistes,” and
Stevens’ “Bantams in Pine Woods” were written at the historical epi-
center of a crisis in the development of modern whiteness – between
(the founding of the NAACP) and (The Wall Street crash) or
(the Scottsboro trial), with one falling before, and two after the Red
Summer of
, a time of murderous post-War anti-black riots in
many cities. The works are performances that allude directly to min-
strelsy (white performances in blackface); both Eliot and Lindsay use
drums to emphasize a primitivist order of things, and both evoke
voudou and cannibalism. In Stevens’ poem the allusion to drumming
occurs neither in the diction and imagery (as in the Lindsay) nor in the
stage directions (as in the Eliot), but in the parodically excessive metri-
cal stresses that compel a percussive reading. These racialized materials
are fraught with complex identi
fications, fascinations, and anxieties that
amount to a cycle of warding o
ff, haunting, appropriation and incorpo-
ration, devouring, and a volatile
final term, varying among attempted
exorcism, transcendence, or confrontation. This racial vortex extends
Eric Lott’s
findings to the modern poetry of Euro-American writers.
“Whiteness” is not a clean construct holding an impure Other at bay
but a desire to distance and confront its own creolized or miscegenated
markers.
Now hoo is not a real word, but an allusion to, or a resistant version of
the words hoodoo/voodoo [voudou]: “Hoodoo, or Voodoo, as pronounced
by the whites,” writes Zora Neale Hurston, showing their link ([
]
, ). So too does Louis Zukofsky’s line in pop-music style from
“Poem beginning ‘The’” (
): “For it’s the hoo-doos, the somethin’ voo-
doos” (
, ). The word hoodoo was first recorded in the s; its use
had declined by the
s, replaced by voudou, a word first recorded in the
s and still current (Major ).
7
Hoodoo is related to practices of
voudou, perhaps a synonym for voudou itself – charms, spells, conjure,
curses, and rites which hold a magical power, especially the power to
change behavior – to hex and undermine, to get back what you think
belongs to you. In the muted rage and desire for the redress of wrongs
through voudou there is potential political as well as spiritual meaning.
Given these meanings, hoo is a scare word when used by a white person, a
“
HOO
,
HOO
,
HOO
”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
word alluding to African-American and Afro-Caribbean ritual practices
that have undertones of witchcraft, sorcery, and power. To say “hoo” in
the sardonic mocking tones of Lindsay, Stevens and Eliot holds blacks in
the posture of bogeys, wards o
ff the political or spiritual logic of hoodoo,
and practices white conjure against any sense of social guilt about white
ability to control or threaten blacks. The image of power from the
amalgam of African/Africanist/African-American practices was so com-
pelling that, as Pound enthusiastically, opportunistically insists (
),
modern [white] artists are “the heirs of the witch-doctor and the voodoo”
(cited by North
, ; Pound , ).
8
The function of a hoodoo as almost powerless power, the bottled rage
of narrow agency is visible in a didactic poetic monologue called
“Bottled” (c.
). Here Helene Johnson describes a black street musi-
cian dressed exactly as if he were an end man in a minstrel show (Honey
, ). The [black] speaker in the enounced is a kind of urban skeptic
and nay-sayer.
I saw a darky dressed to kill
In yellow gloves and swallowtail coat.
And swirling a cane. And everyone
Was laughing at him. Me too,
(
)
until s/he sees the man begin to dance on the street. The speaker is torn
between morti
fication and wonder at the expressiveness and flair despite
the dancer’s ridiculous garb, the traditional “Zip Coon” or urban dandy
costume of the minstrel show. The dancer was “digni
fied and proud,” an
artist in fact. In light dialectal diction, the speaker then observes
The crowd kept yellin’ but he didn’t hear,
Just kept on dancin’ and twirlin’ that cane
And yellin’ out loud every once in a while.
I know the crowd thought he was coo-coo.
(
)
In one sustained passage, the speaker imagines the dancer performing
in the jungle, without the “trick clothes” of the minstrel tradition. He is
beautiful – “black, naked and gleaming.” He would carry a spear “Like
the bayonets we had ‘over there,’ / And the end of it would be dipped
in some kind of / Hoo-doo poison” (
). This is a discursively layered
observation. It is
first an African-American vision of Africa as a specially
free and enhancing site, in which all the stereotyped jungle tropes of joke
and derision are counterturned to black pride. This is a form of black
standpoint ethnography, and may be set against the ethnographic
visions of both Lindsay and Eliot.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
Part of the power of this
figure links pre-industrial weaponry with
World War I weaponry. “Over There,” the George M. Cohan song,
was a patriotic anthem for U.S. troops entering that war, with its all-
purpose solution to European problems: “The Yanks are coming.” Pre-
enslavement African power and autonomy (spears) join with an allusive
reminder of the contested service of black troops in the recent war
(bayonets), brought together under the rubric of secret threat – the
point of the spears (but by extension the bayonets) “dipped in some
kind of / Hoo-doo poison” as revenge.
World War I was a time of rising power and consciousness for black
Americans: they served under unconscionable segregated conditions;
they helped to win a victory for “democracy” abroad, and yet were sub-
jected to racial terrorism at home. The sickening ironies of this situation
were lucidly, bitterly, and repeatedly noted. Sterling Brown’s poem “Sam
Smiley,” as just one example, ends in the lynching of the black veteran.
The Red Summer of
, just post-War, was a ferocious unleashing of
racial terror on blacks,
filled with beatings, murders, mass riots includ-
ing arson, and brutality of all kinds. Claude McKay’s great sonnet “If
We Must Die” was composed in
as a statement of sublime militancy
in response. The sense of black rage is clear; one may postulate that
certain post-
ideologies of whiteness functioned as a strategy of con-
tainment, discrediting, or ignoring this political and moral betrayal.
In Helene Johnson’s poem, the moment of rage is spoken through the
hoodoo allusion. The power, pride, artistry, veiled threat – and compro-
mise – of Helene Johnson’s dancing man is read, for a social philology,
in the syntactic instability of the word “trick” and possibly the word
“shine.” The man is like a bottle of sand taken from the Sahara; he, like
the sand, is packaged for the consumption of others. They “Bottled him,
/ Trick shoes, trick coat, trick cane, trick everything.” The repeated word
in the enunciation begins to function with various meanings, including
fraudulent, mischievous, mannered, magical, adorned, weak/defective,
trained to do little performative acts. The question who tricks whom is
thus raised deep inside the enunciation. In the enounced, the
figure is
tricked by the powerful “they”: African power has been compromised
and made pitiable by being bottled as minstrelsy inside American
culture, made into a denatured souvenir. In the enunciation, the
figure
“tricks” main culture and is tricked by it in a ceaselessly unstable reading
of the adjective. The word, in its fourth incarnation, turns adjective into
imperative verb: “trick everything.” Beyond the tricked-out
figure being
tricked yet being trickster, the poem also uses racialized language, like
“
HOO
,
HOO
,
HOO
”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
“darky.” The last line, “Gee, that poor shine!” is bemused and awkward,
filled with pity for his loss of agency.
9
In that incarnation, within the
enounced, it is a disparaging word, and it also has a dictionary meaning
(in the plural “shines”) – foolish pranks or tricks. But it also has a straight,
central meaning of radiance or distinction that can occur as a comment
within the enunciation, as if “shine” were a verb and the phrase were
subjunctive.
Johnson has described a black person doing blackface minstrelsy. The
main practice – widespread in American society – involved whites in
blackface minstrelsy: troupes in all the major cities, traveling shows,
amateur performances, and
finally the absorption of practices of min-
strelsy into performance materials and styles in vaudeville, early cinema,
and musical comedy in the early twentieth century.
10
Minstrelsy was a
central cultural form in the construction of whiteness and the uses of
blackness; indeed Lindsay’s “The Congo: a Study of the Negro Race”
(
) is arguably a one-man minstrel show. The poem is an overdeter-
mined work showing the formation of whiteness.
During his career, Vachel Lindsay wrote a number of performance
poems to be read “in your own variety of negro dialect.” It is clear from
heart-felt statements throughout his career that Lindsay wanted “love
and good-will and witty conversation” between the races, that he
believed strongly in and argued openly for the extirpation of race prej-
udice, and that he even thought his “negro” poems would help” (Lindsay
, ). “The Congo” was first performed publicly on February ,
, the anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday, in Springfield, Illinois; it was
read at a private gathering in March sponsored by Poetry in the presence
of W. B. Yeats.
11
The U.S. invasion (
) and occupation (until ) of
Haiti added to the excitement of Lindsay’s early audiences and their
interest in the poem, in which whiteness is a
ffirmed as bringing order,
rule, and correct government to sinister black chaos, evil, and “hoodoo.”
Lindsay claimed that the poem tries to synthesize “vaudeville form
back towards the old Greek precedent of the half-chanted lyric” (
,
) and also spoke of it as “a rag-time epic” (Monroe , ). This
marked desire to fuse ancient poetic culture with more recent Euro- and
African-American performance materials is part of Lindsay’s yearning
to do something helpful to extirpate racial prejudice (in the aftermath of
the Spring
field anti-black riots in ), a yearning which is totally
swamped by the poem’s raucous, sinister primitivisms. These occur
under the rubric (in the subtitle) of a “study of the Negro race,” which
harnesses a social scienti
fic word to the poem’s observations, as if they
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
were authorized by, and part of, academic studies in an ethnographic
mode. A free white gaze upon blacks is part of the power of whiteness.
From the
first, this poem was taken, by certain readers, as an indication
of the failure of white liberalism; it is a bombastic response to the history
of white misrule over blacks in the
first half of the twentieth century.
Confronting the
, or , racist riots and lynchings, Lindsay
changes the subject to “Africa” and its alleged traits.
12
“The Congo” is a six page poem in three sections (Lindsay
,
–). In “Their Basic Savagery,” the “Fat black bucks” are like the
“Negroes [who] seemed eight feet high” whom Lindsay had seen in the
saloons he visited on behalf of the Women’s Christian Temperance
Association, men who left him with “a jungle impression” (
, ). The
prurient desire to appropriate and devour such a source of potency is a
rich motivator for “whiteness.” Lindsay’s black drinkers inspire in his
observer an atemporal Africanist “vision” of the Congo River “
-
, /
,” with attendant “cannibals” and “sorcerers.” The poem
contains a hint of just revenge for the Belgian atrocities in the Congo,
but essentially it creates the fear of demonic, unmotivated cannibal-
ism.
13
Terror of blacks seems to be a central element in this construction
of whiteness, terror combined with a brave fascination at seeing the
“truth” of Africa displayed, even if it threatens to eat one alive. Or, as
Lindsay explained: “‘Congo, Congo, Congo, Congo, Congo, Congo,’ I
said to myself. The word began to haunt. It echoed with the war drums
and cannibal yells of Africa” (
).
The address from the “witch-doctors” is directed past the other char-
acters inside the poem to the reader or listener. “
, , ” is the
sound that at once warns and threatens. “Be careful what you do, / Or
. . . / Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you” (Lindsay
, ). Mumbo-
Jumbo is a spooky god of demonic power and reach. Lindsay is calling
upon the meaning “an object or fetish believed to have supernatural
power,” but his use also evokes other senses of the word – “gibberish,”
“nonsense,” or “confused and meaningless activity, unintelligible incan-
tation.”
14
Lindsay fantasizes a free-
floating black menace in the first section, and
a free-
floating black pleasure in the second. Called “Their Irrepressible
High Spirits,” the second section pastiches “juba” (West African group
dance), “cakewalk” (black dance performances for racially mixed audi-
ences), minstrel (white blackface lampoons performed mainly for
whites), ragtime or jazz (“the well-known tunes of the parrot band,” for
“
HOO
,
HOO
,
HOO
”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
jazz is often visualized during this period, by Euro-Americans, as behav-
iors of raucous animals), and popular music – a song of racial self-
mockery written by the African-American vaudeville star Bert Williams
(Cooley
, ). The revelry is set in an exotic never-never land like a
movie set, but given the poem’s tripartite construction and the political
allegory (of hell–earth–heaven) loosely underlying it, the second section
becomes worldly purgatory of garish sumptuousness and pro
fligacy.
Lindsay was an enthusiastic consumer of African-American forms and
persons in theater. “Then there was a song ‘My Zulu Babe,’ where [Bert]
Williams as the buck and [George] Walker as the lady used to appear in
black tights and brief ostrich-feathered skirts and go prancing in and out
of the stage jungle in a mock wooing. They magically conveyed the
voodoo power of Africa. The whole white audience turned into jungle
savages and yelled with a sort of gorilla delight” (Lindsay
, ). The
construction of whiteness involves a positioning of blacks as the perpet-
ually carnivalesque, authorizers of white libido – from “woo” to
“voodoo” – under whose auspices whites could experience the Africanist
pleasures of being “savages” and “gorillas.” It was important to the
making of whiteness that license be incited by, and blamable on, African
materials.
15
As Gail Bederman has proposed, white “manhood” power accrued in
monopolizing both the discourse of “manly and civilized” and of “mas-
culine and savage” (
, ). In her pointed exposition of the symbolic
stakes in the Jack Johnson–Jim Je
ffries boxing match in , during
which the African-American boxer trounced the white man, and in her
discussion of the racist arrangements of the World’s Columbian
Exposition (
), that excluded “Colored Americans” while exhibiting
“the Negro as a repulsive savage” in the Dahomey village (
, citing a
pamphlet written by Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells ), she opens a
nuanced discussion of the formation of white manhood in the early
period of modernism. White manhood depended on the assertion of
racial dominance of whites over blacks by appropriation of the ima-
gined potency of the so-called “primitive” to enhance the potency of the
white and civilized. This is very like what Lindsay is o
ffering both in the
above description of “voodoo power,” in his performance of this poem,
and in his comments on musicals featuring blacks: “American men
[playing] at being masculine barbarians themselves, savoring the visual
pleasures of semiclad exotic dancers while simultaneously and inconsis-
tently relishing their sense of superior, civilized, white manliness” (
).
Into this scene of revelry, the “sinister” witch-doctors interject their
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
threat. But here, the lines about “Mumbo-Jumbo” are not apparently
directed to the audience but to the black “scalawags prancing there.”
They are warned against their own attractive playfulness. The multiple
allusions to African-American performance in this section suggest that
the witch-doctors are acting for Lindsay in proposing the containment
and control of African-American popular culture at the same time that
Lindsay is both mimicking it in the poem and appropriating it in his
exaggerated Africanist performance style (Gubar
, ). He wants
black mannerisms and voices for himself and also wants Mumbo-Jumbo
to punish their real cultural owners. As Eric Lott argues, this “theft,”
absorption, or borrowing of African-American materials caused in
whites great cultural anxiety that intermingled with their envious desire
(Lott
, ).
In the
final section of “The Congo,” Lindsay proposes “The Hope of
their Religion”: to extirpate this menacing and joyous–erotic black
culture and society with Christianity:
And they all repented, a thousand strong
From their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong
And slammed with their hymn books till they shook the room
With “glory, glory, glory”
And “Boom, boom,
.”
(Lindsay
, )
The work overtly proposes the clearing of the jungle and the cleansing
of African “temples” through the e
fforts of “pioneer angels,” who
preside over the triumph of a blue–silver, sunny whiteness that brings
“light” to Africa. The trope of African inferiority, depicting a whole con-
tinent and its diasporic peoples as indolent, sinful, lascivious, and
retarded without the aid and help of imperial intervention is evident in
the words “stupor” and “wrong,” yet the exciting but inappropriate use
of religious books as percussion instruments (“
”) makes the wrong
persist even as it is apparently ended (Mudimbe
, ). To argue that
Christian imperialism jump starts a perpetually stalled African evolution
is consistent with colonialist assumptions throughout this period.
Interpreting Africa as the lowest stage of human, political, and spiritual
development feeds the neo-Darwinian nativist hauteur of American
whiteness (Michaels
, –). One might also view this fierce dispar-
aging of Africa as a collective ideology still attempting to justify the prac-
tices of slavery.
The trans
figuration of the African landscape into a “Congo paradise”
through Christian imperialism is shadowed by the same menacing,
“
HOO
,
HOO
,
HOO
”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
vibrant “Congo tune” that repeats throughout the poem (Lindsay
,
, ). Whispering vultures continue the hoodoo refrain at the very
end, despite the poetic polemic which twice insists “Mumbo-Jumbo is
dead in the jungle, / Never again will he hoo-doo you.” The repetition
of this formula presents not the death of “Mumbo-Jumbo” but his per-
sistence.
Despite Lindsay’s protestations, this atavistic structure is related to the
arguments of racist “science” and polemic in such contemporaneous
work as R. W. Shufeldt’s America’s Greatest Problem: the Negro (
). The
terms Negro, savagery and cannibalism are essentially interchangeable in
this work, and the words displace sexual desire and guilt engendered by
fantasies of devouring made possible by the political realities of enslave-
ment and imperialism (Shufeldt
, ). Shufeldt moves into a hyster-
ical polemic against miscegenation as racial pollution, by asking “are we
now to take up into our blood a race of human
flesh-eaters, who would
consume human
flesh again with relish were they returned to the
country from whence they came?” (
). This atavistic argument
emerges only slightly mellowed in Lindsay’s con
figuration of the ideol-
ogy of whiteness.
However much Lindsay insisted that “the third section of the Congo
is certainly as hopeful as any human being dare to be in regard to any
race,” the poem reads di
fferently (Lindsay , , Nov. , ).
Through its repetitious chant and its hyper-melodramatic scare lines, the
poem subverts its stated argument and “intellectual” claim. The argu-
ment says “Africa” will be trans
figured and civilized with messianic
imperialism. But the rhythm says that the menace and lurking evil of
“Africa” can never be extirpated. Blacks embody the primitive forces of
sexuality and violence; these forces are uneradicable, essentialized, in the
black body: “A Negro at the North Pole is Congo to the marrow of his
bones, and believe me more luxurious than Assurbanipal and more fun
than a goat” (Lindsay
, ; October , ). A social philology
shows how the mystery phoneme, exaggerated rhythms, and repetitious
rhetorics of this poetry have been harnessed to uphold the ideological
formation “white manhood.”
According to Lindsay, “the refrain stands for the ill fate and sinister
power of Africa from the beginning” (
; February , , soon after
its
first performance). The popular appeal of the poem is based on its
judgmental participation in primitivist behavior that entertains whites
by arousing them with the rhythms to which they feel superior. Lindsay
argues that Africans and blacks are permanently and essentially the
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
hoodoo of the family of man, bringing the curse of primitive menace to
everything. In her review of Lindsay’s work (
), Marianne Moore
states that Lindsay’s intention, his claimed familiarity with black dialect,
and his general humanitarian urges “cannot absolve such Aryan dogge-
rel” (Moore
, ).
16
Though the poem is super
ficial, it anneals two competing ideas about
racial origins, ideas developed in the nineteenth century but still active
within the racial discourses of the early twentieth century. To think of
one overarching humanness, one root from which separate racial stems
branched o
ff – monogenesis – is to think of the potential (if far future)
unity of all humankind, in spite of contemporary racisms and reductive-
ness. Monogenesis deemphasizes di
fference in favor of one striving
human family. Lindsay claimed this was his opinion on racial matters.
Polygenesis conceives of the races as separate species, separately
evolved, with di
fferential abilities (Fredrickson , Chaps. –). To
speak of one race in its infancy and another as highly developed and to
suggest the condescending uplift of one race by another was to stand on
the seam between these positions: the social promise of monogenesis
(“we” are all one humanity) abutted by the immediate polemical satis-
factions of polygenesis (“they” are inferior to “us”). The self-congratu-
latory resolution inherent in this contradictory position (“we” help
“them”) helped construct whiteness. “The Congo” claims to think of us
all as one big human family, but its garish emphasis on extremes of
menace and joy, both “irresponsible” or under the sway of a capricious,
vengeful god, and its zoological fascination with the Other invoke a
shadowy sense of polygenesis, in which Africans are permanently di
ffer-
ent, tainted, and, of course, very powerful in their inferiority. Far from
being “hopeful” about those it claims to anatomize, “The Congo” goes
far toward marking and blighting the “Negro Race” as a whole.
Because Lindsay believed his poems could be socially e
ffective against
racial prejudice, he was stunned to
find that “My ‘Congo’ and ‘Booker
T. Washington Trilogy’ have both been denounced by the colored
people for reasons that I cannot fathom” (Lindsay
, –; Nov. ,
).
17
His correspondent, Joel Spingarn, one of the white founders of
the NAACP, a noted editor at Harcourt Brace, and a strong supporter of
black writers, tried to wise him up: “No colored man doubts your good
intentions, but many of them doubt your understanding of their hopes.
You look about you and see a black world full of a strange beauty di
ffer-
ent 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
“
HOO
,
HOO
,
HOO
”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
the resemblance” (Wintz
, ; Spingarn, , –).
18
Lindsay
must have his exotic, his primitive, his Other, based in di
fferent social his-
tories and cultural outcomes, polygenesis sweetened by self-delusion.
Spingarn speaks from a liberal monogenetic racial theory and from the
idealistic center of a progressive integrationist ethos that wants to see
“colored humanity” and “white humanity” as sharing in “a common
civilization in which all distinctions of race are blurred (or forgotten) by
common aspiration and common labors” (
, ).
In his numerous, even obsessive, discussions of what inspired “The
Congo,” the poet’s explanations exceed the poem and reveal a rich col-
lection of demonizing attitudes. He begins with the “Dahomey War-
Drums” and “Cannibal war dance” that he saw at the
Chicago
World Columbian Exposition, an exhibit analyzed by Gail Bederman
as presenting an architecturally sustained ideological split between “the
civilized grandeur of the manly White City contrasted with the rough
savagery of the Dahomey Village” (Lindsay
, – [Feb and
, ]; [April , ]; Bederman , ). The eclectic list of
Lindsay’s sources for “The Congo” run the gamut from romantic
racialism (Stephen Forster; “Stanley’s Darkest Africa”; his interpreta-
tion of “Joseph Conrad’s haunting African sketches full of fever and
voodoo and marsh”), to appreciation of monuments in the struggles
against slavery (the Emancipation Proclamation, Stowe’s novel), to the
work of black intellectuals (Du Bois), to politically masturbatory and
personally salacious evocations of cannibals, savage power, the jungle,
and the like (Lindsay
, –). It is a cornucopia of conflicting
Africanist materials. Despite certain noble sentiments, a crisis about
race was being solved by stigmatizing African-Americans as always
part animal, part jungle, part predator – a great black spot in the white
imagination onto which negative, guilt-ridden, exciting emotions could
be projected.
Lindsay includes among the incidents that provoked his poem “the
Burnings alive of negroes in the South” (
; April , ). In her anal-
ysis of lynching as a ritual of exorcism, Trudier Harris reports that
between
and , about , persons were lynched in the
United States, of whom
, were black (the vast majority were black
men) (Harris
, ). The Crisis kept a grim running report on these
crimes throughout this period; indeed, certain horrors were investi-
gated by the NAACP, for example, the Waco, Texas, public torture and
burning of a Negro in
, a report on which formed a special sup-
plement to the July
issue of The Crisis. Lindsay was deeply affected
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
by the Spring
field anti-Negro riots of , which ended in carnage
and destruction.
But in an elaboration of these remarks to Harriet Monroe on the
sources of “The Congo,” he glosses the e
ffects of the “ill fate and sinis-
ter power of Africa from the beginning” – the power of hoodoo, in his
terms. He continues: “I do not say so [in the poem] – but the Civil War
was a case of Mumbo Jumbo hoodooing America. Any lynching is a
yielding to the power of the Hoodoo. Any Burning alive, or hand-
cutting depredations by Leopold, is a case of Mumbo Jumbo Hoodooing
Civilization” (Lindsay
, ; Feb. , ). The negative and sinister
evil out of Africa infected or a
ffected (“hoodooed”) “Civilization.” This
formulation blames blacks for white violence directed against them.
White political terrorism occurs because white civilization has been
spooked and cursed by hoodoo. Indeed, the ritual repetitions of the
poem “The Congo” might be credited with proposing sub rosa the wish
for such an exorcism of “black savagery” and “Mumbo Jumbo.” Whites
are coterminus with “Civilization”; Euro-Americans’ falls from grace in
fratricidal con
flict and racial terrorism are due to their having black
African witchcraft exercised upon them. The poem is thus as much a
veiled justi
fication for lynching as a criticism of it.
“The Congo” was an in
fluential poem. Louis Untermeyer remem-
bers, “Perhaps the most memorable occasion [on a trip to England]
was when, prompted by one of my remarks about recent American
poetry, James Stephens declaimed most of ‘The Congo.’ Nothing like
it was ever heard in that setting: a drum-banging poem by an American
poet on a Negro theme chanted in an English restaurant by an Irish
mystic with an accumulating brogue” [and heard by a Jewish antholo-
gist] (Untermeyer
, –). Several responses to “The Congo”
can be identi
fied, whether direct and polemical, or allusive and
muted.
19
Sterling Brown’s response, “The New Congo” (
?), its
terse epigraph “with no apologies to Vachel Lindsay,” is a double
parody: of the writer of “The Congo” for his simplicity, and of racial
puppets and puppeteers for their deviousness – a pox on both houses
(Brown
, –). Brown appropriates the familiar rhythm of “The
Congo” for his disdainful portrait of inter- and intraracial manipula-
tions and bad faith. He insists on a series of insinuations and payo
ffs
that manage the African American masses via black “leaders” who are
controlled by, yet excellently manipulate, their white masters. Black
spokesmen address “big white boss paymasters” with veiled and deri-
sory threats:
“
HOO
,
HOO
,
HOO
”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
“Your Mumbo-Jumbo will get away from you.
Your Bimbo-Sambo will revolt from you.
Better let Uncle Tombo see it through,
A little long green at this time will do. . . .”
(Brown
, , end of poem, ellipsis in original)
In this cynical polemic, Brown attributes “mumbo-jumbo” (mysti
fica-
tion) to whites and to black mediators who play on the gullibilities of all.
He attributes massive bad faith to black leaders who deploy their two
stereotypes (Sambo/Uncle Tom) to control a needy proletariat and to
line their own pockets. The poem attempts to transpose Lindsay’s meta-
physical concepts of race into a class analysis. The di
fficulty of this move
and the enraged pallidness of Brown’s poem measure the degree to
which metaphysical ideologies of race return to haunt the arguments
against them.
But this is not the only emergence of Lindsay in Sterling Brown.
Several times in his critical prose, one line from Lindsay, interestingly mis-
quoted, does service as a synecdochic token of all of the insult and disre-
spect Brown identi
fied in “The Congo.” In Brown’s “Negro Character As
Seen by White Authors” (
) (Brown ) and in his “The New Negro
in Literature (
–)” () (ibid), the refrain of Lindsay’s “
, , ⁄
” is given as “Then I saw the Congo, cutting
through the black.” (
and ). Brown removes the melodrama of the
capital letters, the implied servility and slyness of “creeping,” and the key
word “jungle,” but he still emphasizes the hurtful atavism and primitivist
interpretation of Lindsay’s work by the misquotation, suggesting that the
African river cuts through the black collectivity and the black person to
reveal the instinctual passions uncurbed. It is the “cutting” quality of the
poem’s representation that Brown reveals in his slip.
Twice more does Brown turn to “The Congo” (
and ). In his
speech at Williams College of which he was an alumnus, he calls the
poem “that monstrosity,” indicates that he uses it pedagogically (reading
it to students and changing their admiration to skepticism), and
finally
reveals: “I tried to write a parody, with Severn cutting through the
Anglo-Saxon, but I couldn’t get a rhyme for ‘Anglo-Saxon’ except
‘claxon’ and ‘claxon’ is a bad horn. So I had to give it up” (
). The cri-
tique is patent in the signifying rhyme of the discarded poem, including
the encrypted Klux (in “claxon”) of the Klan. The socio-cultural trauma
of “The Congo” is manifest in Brown’s insistence, even sixty years later,
on the necessity to confront this work.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (
) may be
another response. The Congo, called by Lindsay the “Minstrel River,”
and astir with cannibals and witch-doctors, is reinterpreted as a pasto-
ral, nourishing, maternal setting in Hughes: “I built my hut near the
Congo and it lulled me to sleep.” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” was
composed in
on the train to Mexico when Hughes was still in his
teens (eighteen to be exact), and published a year later in Crisis. This
poem was written as an internal dialogue with his father whose “strange
dislike of his own people” ba
ffled and disturbed Hughes, and, of course,
implicated his son as object of that dislike (Hughes
, –;
Rampersad
, –). In this poem, Hughes joins affirmative black-
ness to a universal human quest, by putting into a global context the
racial stresses and demands of the United States.
The poem (as is well known) lists four key rivers, all “ancient as the
world” (Hughes
, ; dedicated in Weary Blues to W. E. B. Du Bois).
Three of the four
flow through regions of colored peoples; they are
“rivers in our past” – the word “our” is marked (Hughes
, ). The
fourth is a river still reverberating with the past hundred years of
American history; it is the river on which, Hughes says, Lincoln “had
seen slavery at its worst, and had decided within himself that it should
be removed from American life” (ibid.). With an “I” strongly indebted
to Whitman as mediated by Sandburg, and with a diction drawn from
spirituals, Hughes describes the Mississippi down which he was travel-
ing as he wrote the poem, as having a strong racialized meaning both by
its often brown appearance (“I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden
in the sunset”), by the possibility of a cross-race mixing or single-race
a
ffirmation of different colors (“muddy” turns more “golden” – a word
appearing in “The Congo” as well), and by its historical meaning under
slavery.
Thus Hughes’ journey doubles Lincoln’s, and the concern with
slavery, in the context of Hughes’ relationship with his father discloses a
crisis of autonomy on a personal level, and a political rejection of a black
man identifying with whites, for a white man (Lincoln) identifying with
blacks. In contrast to the voyeurist fantasies of “The Congo,” this poem
is a statement about vocation, an emancipation into blackness: “My soul
has grown deep like the rivers” (Hughes
, ).
20
Stevens and Eliot also saw Lindsay’s poem and his popularity as a cul-
tural problem – one to be solved by their own poetic careers. In Stevens’
“Bantams in Pine-Woods” (
), “hoo” is a jaunty challenge, and its use
shows the strong racialized meanings of the monosyllable. The speaker,
“
HOO
,
HOO
,
HOO
”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
an Appalachian bantam cock, says his aggressive “hoo” to “Chieftain
I
ffucan of Azcan in caftan / of tan” – an exotic cock, for the speaker
“fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos” (Stevens
, ). The poem, with
its impacted comedy of sound – “if you can,” indeed – says “hoo” back
to the
first strutting cock. Therefore the poet’s cock, or the cock as poet
defeats both tan cock and yet another metaphoric cock playing “black-
amoor to bear your blazing tail,” the servant of the “tan” opponent and
part of his glory. “Bantams in Pine-Woods” is an intricate sexual maze
of color through which white manhood threads its amused and pu
ff-
proud way.
Drawing on Frank Lentricchia, Helen Vendler suggests a possible
challenge of gender from the “bantam” poet of feminized lyric to a
“cock rooster” poet of masculinized epic (
, ). The regal lightness
of the verse and its phallic bounce should be clear, but this “funny phallic
subtext” manifests a swirling racialized carnival (Cook
, ). Stevens
wrote this poem in direct response to Vachel Lindsay, who is cast in the
role of “damned universal cock” and “ten-foot poet among inchlings!”
Stevens could easily have read “The Congo,” but I think he was espe-
cially inspired by the Lindsay performance in Hartford in early April
that he (apparently) attended.
21
Much about Stevens’ poem can be reinterpreted given this literary
historical conjuncture. Lindsay apparently acted out “The Congo” in a
minstrel blackface style (Cooley
, –; Ruggles , ). A
racialized critical reading would note that the colorful bantam o
ffers the
swaggering display of prowess one associates with “colored”
figures in
certain performances. The mock shock of “blackamoor to bear your
blazing tail” could then be read as a direct response to Lindsay’s repre-
sentation of blacks. A white poet, with no
first book, sits watching a
popular, much-touted white performance poet playing black. Stevens
(“an inchling bristles in these pines”) is faced with the exorbitant success
of Lindsay as an American poet of racialized import. This makes
“Bantams” a jealous response to a blackface situation in which Lindsay
garners the supplement of African-American culture for his poetic
career. In Stevens’ poem, the triumphant expostulation “Fat! Fat! Fat!
Fat!” and later “Fat! / Begone!” is a comic warding o
ff that absorbs the
heft, weight, and phallic sonority of the Lindsay poem, or of Lindsay
performing blacks. The word “Fat” is, of course, particularly indebted
to the “fat black bucks” at the beginning of Lindsay’s poem. Stevens
both a
ffirms and conjures away the black men and their performer,
Lindsay, thereby protecting his own rights in Africanist materials. To say
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
“hoo” back to the fat tan chief is to take for yourself the syllable of (his
representation of) “colored” power.
22
The poem is a counter conjure, an
“anti-Congo,” that nonetheless uses the tools of “The Congo,” in an
attempt to claim and ward o
ff that by which it is seduced.
The “hoo” of T. S. Eliot, another modernist making this Africanist
sound, comes at the notable climax of his un
finished chamber musical,
“Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama.” This
work was written in
–, immediately after The Waste Land, yet not
published until
(in The Criterion, under the jazzy title Wanna Go Home,
Baby?) nor performed until
(Gordon , and ). As The Waste
Land synthesized high and popular literary and poetic culture (but with
a tilt toward a high tradition), so this “Sweeney” fuses and compounds
performance traditions such as music hall and vaudeville/minstrel from
both sides of the Atlantic. The word “hoo” occurs in the rousing
final
chorus, which is very like Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Nightmare Song,”
a patter tune from Iolanthe: “You’ve had a cream of a nightmare dream
and you’ve got the hoo-ha’s coming to you. / Hoo hoo hoo” (Eliot
,
). The chorus continues:
And you wait for a knock and the turning of a lock
for you know the hangman’s waiting for you.
And perhaps you’re alive
And perhaps you’re dead
Hoo ha ha
Hoo ha ha
(Eliot
, )
Nine knocks follow and end the play.
Eliot desired that “light drum taps” accompany the entire perfor-
mance (Malamud
, ). At least in its rhythmic insistences and use
of the racialized expostulation “hoo,” the work draws on, alludes to, and
trumps Lindsay, a heretofore unsuspected spur to Eliot and someone
whose work, needless to say, he “was appalled by” (Eliot
, ,
Sept.
; vide Crawford , who also suggests a link). Eliot did
indeed read “The Congo” in Untermeyer’s
Modern American Poetry,
commenting that Lindsay’s verse had “no moral signi
ficance” (,
).
23
Given the enormous success of its discursive allusions, its gut-
grabbing booms, and its investment in the poet as social prophet of
whiteness, it is not surprising that Eliot considered “The Congo.” For
Lindsay’s work raised certain issues on which Eliot focused in the early
“
HOO
,
HOO
,
HOO
”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
s – ”rhythm,” “the primitive,” and the meaning of drama, issues he
encountered in his serious study of Francis Cornford’s Origins of Attic
Comedy, given his desire to use the
findings of anthropology to construct
contemporary drama (Crawford
, –).
24
Lindsay’s much-touted but callow achievement provoked Eliot to
“Sweeney Agonistes” as it provoked Stevens to “Bantams.” In “Sweeney
Agonistes,” the aggressive performance style, the veiled quotation of
precisely one African-American popular song, the portrait or threat of a
horror, the cannibal materials, the appearance of “religion” or
“mystery,” the vaudeville and minstrel sources, and the interest in
rhythm all resemble “The Congo.” The preternatural popularity of
Lindsay’s work, with its dynamic audience appeal suggests that there was
a serious cultural need for this kind of white ideology.
In Lindsay, the primitive is outside “whiteliness” and constitutes a per-
manent lurking menace to it (Frye
). In Eliot the primitive lives
within all of us and can be developed, as on a photographic plate, by
white artists in blackface.
25
However, in their positioning of blacks and
what blacks mean, Lindsay and Eliot are, in certain lights, not far apart.
It is the position of the murderer–cannibal – the question “(w)hoo” and
(w)here is the horror – that joins and splits these works. In both the allu-
sions to blackface are a way of saying what primitive murderous thing
lies inside the human (Eliot), or African (Lindsay) heart. We again see the
discursive burden of the Africanist tropes.
26
The anxious desire for and
resistance to black materials and sites is quite visible in Eliot’s interest in
universalizing; “Sweeney Agonistes” is the point of con
fluence of his
anthropological studies, his creolizing imagination, and his Africanist
prods from Lindsay’s poetry and minstrel forms.
Eliot proposed a new theatrical genre, neither realist in the manner of
Shaw and Ibsen nor high-toned and poetic in the manner of Yeats and
Maeterlink. This new genre would go to the roots of drama, cutting
beneath the di
fferentiation between tragedy and comedy. Eliot articu-
lated a heterogeneric melodrama: “For to those who have experienced
the full horror of life, tragedy is still inadequate . . . In the end horror and
laughter may be one – only when horror and laughter have become as
horrible and laughable as they can be” (Eliot
, ). Eliot’s evocation
of the vitality of popular genres and their allusive fusion has a hint of
anti-female/anti-feminist attitudes, as when he suggests that, by virtue of
a primary rhythm, “the juggling of Rastelli [ – an acrobat – is] more
cathartic than a performance of ‘A Doll’s House’” (Eliot
, ; vide
Eliot
, ). That is, a circus act is more dramatic, more satisfying
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
than this
flash-point New Woman drama. The remark is in equal
measure sardonic, mocking of middlebrow pretense, and disparaging of
the social complex around New Woman subject positions that the word
Ibsen summarized – free love, the “intellectual freelance,” su
ffrage
debates, and female disinvestments in the feminine (Moore
, ). In
any event, Eliot damns modern woman as deracinated and super
ficial,
cut o
ff from primal rhythms; the same argument would be made, in other
tones, by D. H. Lawrence.
The drama Eliot sought was based not in “poetry,” but in “entertain-
ment of a crude sort” (
, ). Music-hall comedy and vaudeville
were the valuable sources upon which this new drama could draw. After
, in The Dial and Criterion, Eliot began to limn the necessity for a cre-
olized drama that would satisfy “the craving for ritual” (
a, ). As
a fusion of genres – a revue noir – “Sweeney Agonistes” compounds melo-
drama, tabloid shock, working class sentimental poetry, true-crime con-
fession, bartender’s parable, religious ritual, and Gilbert and Sullivan
operetta as well as minstrel and vaudeville. Through this generic
amalgam, Eliot wanted to invent a popular drama that would challenge
and displace cinema, evoke primitive rhythms at a subliminal level, and
o
ffer to the middle classes a bizarre and grotesque mirror of their vacu-
ousness so they could move from super
ficial vulgarity to ritual awe and
anti-cathartic confrontation with “the horror.” A tall order.
27
In his
Norton lectures at Harvard (
–), Eliot proposed a version of the
poetic career based on the notion that the poet was “a popular enter-
tainer . . . having a part to play in society as worthy as that of the music-
hall comedian” (Eliot [
] , ). This sounds droll, but it was
quite serious.
In the years before composing “Sweeney Agonistes,” Eliot wrote
repeatedly about the music hall. A
essay on Marie Lloyd in Selected
Essays pays tribute to her ability to give “expression to the life” of a
working-class audience by subtle exactness of representation (Eliot
,
). Several other performers influence him with their “orgy of
parody” (
). Ethel Levey, for example, evinced “a fascinating inhuman
grotesquerie . . . Her art requires a setting which (in this country at least)
it has never had. It is not a comedy of mirth” (Eliot
, ). The
“bizarrerie” of these music-hall performers is “mature” and “cosmopol-
itan.” “But,” said Eliot, “the revue itself is still lacking”; that is, there is
no script adequate to the combined talents and intensities of these per-
formers. In these proleptic remarks Eliot foresees a grotesque tragicom-
edy in revue form – his new work.
28
“
HOO
,
HOO
,
HOO
”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
In “Sweeney Agonistes,” a bunch of bumptious male drunks pay a call
on two demi-mondaines. In the course of their banter, Sweeney both
flirts with Doris and tells her of a murder in which a man kills a woman
and hides the crime successfully (or appears to), but is nonetheless
filled
with an ambiguous combination of guilt, fear, and terror called the “hoo
ha’s.” The end of the play mockingly confronts the audience with the
laughable, horrible possibility that such crime lurks in every man’s heart.
The story could be Sweeney’s dream or fantasy, his provocative memory
of a news article, his confession of his own (or “a friend’s”) already com-
mitted crime, or a menacing narrative suggesting that Doris will be mur-
dered after the end of the play.
The work shows a gender narrative undermining female sexual
choices and agency; the Africanist/primitivist material occurs only in the
second part of the work. The
first half shows the women in lazy or slut-
tish control of their lives, manipulating one erstwhile lover, discussing
and inviting others. The second half overtly punishes their parasitism on
men, as they become the audience for and victim of Sweeney’s teasing.
“O Mr. Sweeney, please don’t talk . . . I don’t care for such conversation
/ A woman runs a terrible risk,” says Doris, as Sweeney begins his tale
of murder, with relish (Eliot
, –). Swarts and Snow are abso-
lutely fascinated, especially by the fact that the man is not (overtly)
caught and punished.
Sweeney is a simianized Irishman, the Irishman as a “white Negro” –
a well-established stereotype in both American and British popular
imagination and anthropology (Curtis
; Michie ; Pearce ).
So Sweeney comes with borrowed blackness and apish qualities to ask
his existential questions about crime and punishment. Sweeney’s narra-
tive hints at the horrors that can lie behind any normal life, for while
waiting for the female body to dissolve in lysol, his “friend” “took in the
milk and he paid the rent” (Eliot
, ). The lysol/milk combination
marks a
fluid exchange more than a little unsettling, especially in rela-
tion to the “cream of a nightmare dream” in the song that follows, san-
itizing sexual–maternal
fluids. But this allusion is not only sexual. It is
also an allegory of the delivery system of whiteness that arrives both
from everyday banality and from the unconscious. The arrival is mixed
up with “darkness” – it is never “pure.” The white milk must be taken in
to hide, with normal household activity, the evidence of a dark crime;
the cream–dream is a most excellent nightmare – crème de la crème of
the dark. The “Irishman” is really “Negro,” and he is also a white phi-
losopher of the dark primitive.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
Only the super
ficial (that is, the female) cannot credit this realization
of spiritual horror in impure or darkened whiteness; amid sexual disgust
and desire, Doris and Dusty stupidly ask, “Cheer him up?” of the mur-
derer because they do not see that being caught in death-in-life is, or so
everyone says, a fate worse than death.
29
Nor do the women chant “hoo
hoo hoo” with the male chorus at the end, but instead say only, in a
final
vain comment, “I know who” [will pay the rent]. Lyndall Gordon’s bio-
graphical interpretation connects this work to T. S. and Vivienne Eliot’s
severe marital crisis; the problem of women was much on Eliot’s mind,
as was his muted rage at the marriage. But Gordon also indicates that
the problematic of female power for Eliot precedes his marriage and
Vivienne’s impact on him (Gordon
, ). In his early works female
figures are very narrowly represented: quick-sprung traps, as in the
poem “Hysteria”; while the fantasy of female death occurs as early as
“Portrait of a Lady” (
) as one solution to the problem of male
engulfment.
The character Sweeney appears with Swarts and Snow to form a
circuit of Africanist materials in “Fragment of an Agon.” Eliot uses race
and gender as uni
fiers for the disparate classes (and intelligence levels) of
his (presumed) audience. In “Sweeney,” the gender narrative of mordant
misogyny, the racial–sexual narrative of cannibals (with a kind of swing-
ing ragtime self-parody), and the racialized primitivism of the “
” are put at the service of a cross-class address about guilt and horror
lurking under normalcy. Indeed, the highest moments of Western
culture – the Oresteia and St. John of the Cross (in epigraphs to the work)
have the same underlying structure as voudou and witch-doctors. The
apparent “heights” of white culture have the same primary structures as
the apparent “depths” of black culture. The relativist shock this may be
said to deliver is now shopworn, but it is a serious aspect of “Sweeney
Agonistes,” a buzzer held in the hand of a superior white trickster to jolt
and to mock illusions of white superiority.
The opening of “Fragment of an Agon” is a “cannibal” scene in
which Sweeney
flirts heavily with Doris.
:
To a ca
I’ll carry you o
ff
:
To a cannibal isle.
: You’ll be the cannibal!
: You’ll be the missionary!
(Eliot
, )
The amatory “coon song” in whiteface casts the woman as a “nice little,
white little missionary stew” and Sweeney, by implication, as a colored
“
HOO
,
HOO
,
HOO
”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
or black (Paci
fic Islander or African) play-cannibal, titillating and court-
ing a white woman. Marianne Moore notes this section of Eliot’s poem
in her review: “woman in the cannibal-pot or at hand to serve,” com-
menting slyly upon the gender issues (Moore
, ).
In a brisk summary of cannibal motifs as part of “the basic racial par-
anoia of many cultures,” Nigel Rigby catalogues the fascination with
cannibalism (
, ). These are reinforced by the evocation of the
Grand Guignol “Sweeney Todd” in the name of Eliot’s character. Now
there is far less cannibalism in the world than there are cannibal jokes
and allusions. The attribution of cannibalism to others is a claim of
moral superiority and a greater degree of civilization (Sanday
, ,
noting Arens). According to Peggy Sanday, fantasized incidents of can-
nibalism taking “the form of a belief in cannibal sorcerers or witches”
sends “messages having to do with the maintenance, regeneration, and,
in some cases, the foundation of the cultural order” (
, ). Our culture
has this belief, particularly linked with imperial claims, a belief melodra-
matic and lurid (as in Lindsay or in Edith Sitwell’s extraordinary long
poem “Gold Coast Customs” from
) or sardonic and playful (as in
Eliot or cartoon images).
The metropolitan images of tribesmen cooking the “white hunter” or
“the white missionary” suggest that the political/economic and spiri-
tual/ideological conquest of other societies is at issue; this joke about
ingestion is related to metropolitan feeding upon colonies. But if other
cultures are represented as “eating” us, we will help them (their men par-
ticularly) regenerate and become strong, a notion which violates our
sense of the correctness of Western political hegemony. Further, if
others (imaginarily) eat us, our substance will merge with theirs; we will
be forced to share our identities with them (Bergman
, , citing
Slotkin). These crosscultural guilts and fear of syncretism are submerged
in the cannibal materials.
30
Expressed here as the playful fantasy of male predator and female
prey, Eliot’s cannibal song is probably also a joke at the expense of the
sexually active, adult woman. A powerful childhood fantasy of ingesting
the mother and the fear of being eaten by her lies at the heart of some
cannibal fantasies. Even if the cannibal moment in Eliot appears small
and playful despite this analytic freight, it is repeated in the brooding
soliloquy of Sweeney, for the rotting woman (representing death as a
viscous liquid) is incorporated into the “friend’s” routine “life” until
various permutations of “death-in-life” are the result. The dissolving
woman watched by the murderer cannot be washed down the drain, for
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
her presence has in
filtrated the murderer’s consciousness. It is Eliot’s
illustration of Conrad’s premise in “Heart of Darkness”: that the West
has become the dark continent.
31
The second in
flection of race occurs immediately after the cannibal-
ism/South Seas scene. The stage directions read “Song by Wauchope
and Horsfall / Swarts as Tambo, Snow as Bones.” Tambo and Bones are
stock names from minstrel theater; Tambo was the parodically dandi
fied
urban Negro and Bones, the rustic. Further, Snow[ball] is one of the
possible names for the antic “Jim Crow”
figure of minstrel shows from
about
on (see also North , ). Swarts is a variant of the word
schwartz (black) and may well be a Yiddish allusion. Thus both their
“own” names (Snow and Swarts), and their ascribed names (Tambo and
Bones) associate these characters with minstrel and vaudeville
figures.
32
Yet this blackface allusion, with its “dialectical
flickering of racial insult
and racial envy,” is just one among the creolized complex of other theat-
rical genres alluded to here (Lott
, ). These characters sing lyrics in
an Irving Berlin/Noël Coward mode more appropriate to a musical revue
than a minstrel show: “Where the Gauguin maids / In the banyan shades
/ Wear palmleaf drapery” (Eliot
, ). The first song is followed by
a light, sentimental, but also parodic (barber-shop quartet?) ditty about
the simple joys of the island: “We won’t have to catch any trains / And we
won’t go home when it rains” (
). This song is sung by the other two men
(Klipstein and Krumpacker, more than vaguely Jewish names with a
vaudeville punch), with Swarts and Snow “as before,” serving as Tambo
and Bones. This minstrelsy could be read through Lott’s interpretation as
an awkward and grotesque attempt to credit a black cultural presence
while simultaneously mocking it. Michael North is more dismissive of the
“preemptive mimicry” of African-American materials that allowed
American whites to free themselves from European authority while
erasing and suppressing the “other race” at home (North
, , ). Yet
the overloaded amalgam of generic allusions drawing on a maximum of
theatrical traditions prevents reading minstrelsy as the central form and
keeps the work mobile – campy, knowing, stylized, sincere, and mocking –
di
fficult to fix or pin down. Eliot mingles Aristophanes, music hall, min-
strel shows, revues, blackface, and vaudeville theater. His work is a cross-
over, a creolization of sources which notably include African-American
ones. As The Waste Land is a class creolization, so “Sweeney Agonistes” is
a racial creolization: creolizing creates cultural power.
Indeed, the
first song these endmen sing, which includes the lines
“Under the bamboo tree / Two live as one / One live as two,” is a direct
“
HOO
,
HOO
,
HOO
”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
citation of work by the African-American song writing team of Bob
Cole, Rosamond Johnson, and his brother, the writer and activist James
Weldon Johnson. Cole and the Johnson brothers wrote this particular
song about “a maid of royal blood though dusky shade” wooed by a
“Zulu from Matabooloo.” It was
first sung by [white] Marie Cahill in
Sally in our Alley,
; it became a hit, and sold over , copies in
sheet music (Woll
, –). (The next song the team wrote for her
was called “On the Congo.”) One recalls that another “Zulu” song and
parodic courtship counted among Lindsay’s numerous inspirations for
“The Congo.” Eliot apparently knew whose lines he remastered; North
has suggested that he heard the song in
during the St. Louis World’s
Fair (North
, ).
33
Eliot’s move parallels Lindsay’s use of an
African-American popular song by Bert Williams.
34
His appropriation has a number of possible motives. Respectful
acknowledgement is one; blind theft might be another, the complex of
desire and imitation and racial crossings, notably proposed by Eric Lott,
and moved into the twentieth century by Susan Gubar. The desire for
[white] men to act like savages in order to “remasculinize” themselves if
they were
flagging has been traced by Gail Bederman as an ideological
formation (
, , ). The desire to recapitulate primitive traits, to
a
ffirm and solidify claims to manliness and “white civilization” would be
a very adequate explanation of the e
ffect Eliot wanted to achieve – remas-
culinizing uplift through appropriation of primitive force. One might
further propose that Eliot (temporarily) wanted to be, or to mimic and
ventriloquize one of those black or Jewish vaudeville song writers because
of the popularity of their materials. For a time these sounds contributed
to his repertoire as a poet, but it gave him only an unstable and debatable
advantage, both before and after this work, given his extended entertain-
ing (at least
–, possibly through ) of anti-Semitic explanations
for cultural decline. As we will have occasion to see again, “the ideas and
practices comprising any discourse will be multiple, inconsistent, and
contradictory” (Bederman
, ). Eliot can illustrate: he was in conflict
about whether playing barbarian or depicting the energetic, but wrong-
headed was inoculation against their virus, or was itself a symptom of
their disease. He spends the twenties deciding that borrowing that sexual-
social parvenu energy with its creolizing diction and amorality came with
too high a price. Eliot’s cultural analysis therefore stabilized and solidi
fied
into conservative and pietistic claims for one established religion.
In this work, Eliot is experimenting with a moment of confrontation
that deploys Africanist materials both as the horror and to frame the
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
horror – a use both racist and sympathetic. The end of this work scares
the [white] audience with an ominous “
.” This scare word
alludes to blacks and to a primitive character who is a proto-black
person; the word is sung in a style designed to allude to blackface min-
strelsy. Citing African-American song writers (Cole and Johnson),
deploying white Africanist representations (minstrelsy, the cannibal
trope), and using metonymic equivalences for blacks (Sweeney), Eliot has
resourcefully bricolaged a packet of racialized materials to jolt, amuse,
and sober up a white audience. He is, at bottom, scaring whites with
“blacks,” with their own dark impulses, cross-coded as African, and with
all that “Africa” implies, all succinctly evoked in the phoneme “Hoo.”
This Africanist aspect is not fundamentally di
fferent from Lindsay’s, but
Eliot as a cultural creole puts more discourses into play and creates a
shimmer of irony about the meaning and location of the primitive.
Where is the horror? ask both poets. Both evoke the authority of
Joseph Conrad for their answer. The horror is in Africa, says Lindsay,
just as Conrad said it was; this is a warding o
ff, haunted titillation making
whiteness the control of this dark thing. Lindsay’s melodrama depends
on a strong racial binary. The horror is in us, says Eliot; we are Africa,
just as Conrad said; this is an incorporative, haunted confrontation
making whiteness an ambiguous social position
filled with powerless
superiority because
flooded with the energies and demands of the dark
instinctual. Eliot’s melodrama mingles the racial positions of black and
white, producing multiple ironies. These may seem to be di
fferent opin-
ions. Yet in both writers, Africa is left as horror, the immobilized site of
pejorative meanings for these Euro-American modernists, made so by
their construction of whiteness as a political and cultural position.
Layers of white conjure, of primitivist discourses, and of contradictions
on racial matters all constitutive of whiteness as a position have been
revealed by this social philology of “Hoo”: racial superiority versus
equality; identi
fication with and warding off of blacks; desire for and fear
of pleasure; noble sentiments and stigmatizing attitudes; white rights in
black materials and white guilt for appropriation; denial and covert
acknowledgment of black agency; the desire to extirpate racial preju-
dice, and to revel in its cultural connotations and the social power it
o
ffers whites. Social philology as a reading strategy has demonstrated
how, with “hoo,” cultural narratives and ideological debates with large
implications are articulated in the oddest and most intimate bits of
poetic language.
“
HOO
,
HOO
,
HOO
”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black
and white poets
Use dusky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.
Wallace Stevens (
)
Caroling Dusk
Countee Cullen (
)
In the teens and twenties of the twentieth century, New Negroes and
some politically sympathetic Euro-Americans struggled to counter the
staggering oppressions of blacks in the post-Reconstruction United
States – “economic disinheritance,” rigid educational and professional
limits, murderous terrorism, imposition of segregation, and the compro-
mise of African-American citizenship (C. Johnson
, ). Tales of
Darkest America, Fenton Johnson’s blistering prose title from
, puns
precisely on the site of the uncivilized and primitive, given the ethical
and political scandals resisting racial equality. African-Americans
claimed cultural authority in the Negro Renaissance. The New Black
subjectivity was a culmination of cultural and political struggles of
respect for blackness, desire for social striving and a
ffirmation, self-
determination, debates about the uses to which African-American “folk-
stu
ff” (Sterling Brown’s term) could be put, and self-conscious focus on
the decolonization of a serf population interior to the United States by
an emergent educated elite (Brown
, ).
1
Work by African-American poets had a mix of cultural and political
tasks. For example, allusions to the strains of decolonization and the
question of the “maturity” of a people occur in Langston Hughes’ often-
anthologized poem “I, Too, Sing America” (
) whose simple diction
and declarations seem super
ficially to concede the childishness of the
“darker brother” even as the poem remarks how this brother grows
strong (Hughes
, ). The meal at the same dining table proposes
that intimacies of equal companions – black and white – will happen
“tomorrow.” The family metaphor is, however, pointed and not entirely
a metaphor but a reality of genealogies. Seen via a social philology, there
are several fraught words. The
first word is “Besides” (in the last lines
“Besides / They’ll see how beautiful I am / And be ashamed – // I, too,
am America”), a word that, meaning furthermore or in addition, also
encodes the side-by-side companionship that is still denied. A second
word is the oddly isolated one word line “Then”; so isolated, it evokes
the question of time in the past (what happened “then” to split this
family?), the time in the future (the teleological assurance that this will
change), and the then of consequence (raising issues of militancy):
“Nobody’ll dare / Say to me, ‘Eat in the kitchen,’ / Then.” Finally, the
poem plays with what might be called the phoneme of assertion (am), a
phoneme in “I am,” in the words “am America” that claim full citizen-
ship, and in the semantic meaning of triumphing by strong persistence,
a fact registered in the word “ashamed,” applied to white attitudes. The
“am” of assertion here changes to the “aim” (as pronounced inside
“ashamed”) of black modernity: equality of access and possibility.
At this time, too, some black and white writers wanted to “darken
[their] speech” – to represent African-American artistic creativity, black
cultural agency and black voices.
2
Yet even when the same terms (like
“dusk” or “primitive” or “brother,” or a far worse but not uncommon
word) are deployed or implied, the poetic arrangement of “social eval-
uations” di
ffer strikingly both between the two racial communities, and
sometimes within each racial community (Bakhtin/Medvedev
,
). A social philology shows that, in the details of language, cross-
purposes, contradictions, and secret narratives emerge that complicate
the announced investment of both black and white writers in “dark-
ened” speech and other verbal and ideological signs of engagement with
New Black subjectivity. Extending Lecercle, this chapter shows how
“ideological remainders” are expressed in speci
fic verbal artifice.
In another pronominal allusion to interior decolonization, the title
“To Usward” (of a poem by Gwendolyn Bennett,
) may first be said
to condense a hopeful moment: the work is spoken to us going forward –
“dedicated to all Negro Youth” and especially future artists, with the pun
on “upward” – the hoped for direction (Bennett
, ). Yet “Us” and
“ward” emerge in the visual text, with “ward” being a specially complex
word, containing both custody (ward of) and parrying (ward o
ff) as part
of the political crypt words alluding to the compromises in this rising of
people of color. Bennett’s poem comes out
firmly on the side of social
mission, supporting artists “Not self-contained with smug identity / But
conscious of the strength in entity” (Honey
, ). This question of
the individual in relation to the race was one of the main points of
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
debate among African-American artists. It intersected with the other key
debate: if one declared “strength in entity,” was one also committed to
support an aesthetic ideology of uplift as a key term of black modernity,
or was this a form of moral sentimentalism, compromising art? What
does it mean to “darken” one’s speech?
Du Bois declared that “Beauty in [the black writer’s] Art” was the
same as the “
fight for Life and Liberty” the community was undertak-
ing (Du Bois
, ). Given unequal political power in the U.S.,
Countee Cullen, too, was sure that a black person should not reveal the
down side of black life to those whom he viewed as prying guests in his
particular house. Thus he proposed an aesthetic of uplift: “Put forward
your best foot” (Cullen
, ). Cullen claimed political realism in this
position, a warning addressed exactly, though not exclusively, to Hughes:
“American life is so constituted, the wealth of power is so unequally dis-
tributed, that whether they relish the situation or not, Negroes should be
concerned with making good impressions” (ibid.).
3
Hughes di
ffered loud
and long; an aesthetic realist with a broader de
finition of poetry as a
genre, he drew his inspiration from the “low-down, jazzy, cabaret-ish,
sensational, and utterly uncouth,” and remained unapologetic (Hughes,
, ). At the same time, the “New Black” subject place incorpo-
rated individualist critique of and resistance to any sense of a race con-
sciousness held in common, especially in Countee Cullen, who said
repeatedly that he wanted simply to be a poet, not a black poet, mainly
because he wanted to be judged by a universal, not a special, or patron-
izing, or stereotyping standard.
Yet there was a double bind – that the “universal” was, in its current
Euro-American incarnation, precisely a stereotyping ideology. In
Opportunity of April
, the journal listed the very negative associations
with black, the very positive ones with white as a color, and cited some
poems to editorialize that “the advent of Negroes to the
field of letters
promises the most salutary results in breaking up some of these long, and
hoary associations” (Cullen
, ). The word hoary, meaning both
old and white, was a nice touch, along with the crypt word “whore” for
the stereotypes. While the New Black writers urgently desired to control
these issues and to change ideologies surrounding their race by chang-
ing representation, their community did not,
finally, hold enough cultu-
ral power fully to alter representations of blacks, nor to qualify the
triumphalist representation of them as creative daimons by whites.
What then was the New Black subject position in poetry? The desire
for black racial authority is central, whether that means the freedom to
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
explore speci
fically black, or general culture, or the resistance to
oversimpli
fication of any of these sites.
4
As it was an attempt to examine
poetic and cultural authority via racial analysis, it is not one
fixed posi-
tion, but a debate. There was a debate between universalism and partic-
ularism, including responses to special pleading for the warmth, beauty,
rhythm, and speci
fic culture of African-Americans. There was a debate
between duty or political realism (the need for ennobling depictions of
blacks) and pleasure or aesthetic realism (the need for wide-ranging, pro-
vocative depictions of blacks). The New Black could claim that there is
no “Negro verse” (only black poets, diverse in mode), or, in contradis-
tinction, could claim that “black” is a powerful and self-conscious space
of emergent group identity articulated in poetry.
The debate that can be reconstructed between Countee Cullen and
Langston Hughes – framed by the unstable dialectic of double-
consciousness announced by Du Bois, “to be Negro, to be American” –
summarizes the shifts between individual expression and group identity
on the issue what it might mean to darken one’s speech as a New Black
modernist working with issues of African-American modernity. Both
Cullen and Hughes stated an intransigent resistance to interventions in
their aesthetic choices. In Hughes’ ringing words: “We younger Negro
artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned
selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If
they are not, it doesn’t matter . . . If colored people are pleased we are
glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either” (Hughes
a, ; also in Mitchell ). This is close to a declaration of a third
space – ”Negro artist” – beholden to neither race for approval.
Cullen reviewed Hughes’
first book, making a clear distinction
between “that select and austere circle of high literary expression which
we call poetry” with its “truly beautiful poems” and Hughes’ “jazz
poems,” viewed as “interlopers.” Though the review is short, this point
is repeated over and over, with its controlling de
finition of “we” and of
“poetry.” While Cullen recognizes the importance of The Weary Blues, his
categorical rejection of Hughes’ vernacular and notational work (“it
ought never to have been done”) draws a line between the “racial artist”
and “artists pure and simple” that both reveals Cullen’s position, and his
limits (Cullen,
, –). Hughes’ realist representations of dialect,
the settings in speakeasies, the modernist tactics of collage intercutting
multiple conversations at these unpoetic sites made Cullen incredulous
that this had been presented as poetry. On the high road, Cullen cau-
tions Hughes from falling into “the gaping pit that lies before all Negro
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
writers, in the con
fines of which they become racial artists instead of
artists pure and simple” (
). The casual, the allusions to sexual licen-
tiousness and working-class pleasures articulated in the very form and
diction of Hughes’ work – so o
ffhand and apparently improvisatory –
should have been taboo. Cullen derides Hughes’ good sense as an artist
and as a black person in the endemically judgmental racial situation that
was U.S. society.
Hughes responded a few months later with a discussion of the posi-
tion ascribed to Cullen (“I want to be a poet – not a Negro poet”) which
charges: “meaning behind that, ‘I would like to be white” (Hughes
a, ).
5
In this manifesto–essay from
, Hughes links race and
class issues, blaming the tight rein of black middle-class values and
modes, assimilating “white manners, morals, and Puritan standards”
which make certain blacks (the unnamed Cullen, the unnamed painter
Henry Ossawa Tanner) guard against their folk culture (jazz, spirituals,
blues) and their racial artists (Bessie Smith, Paul Robeson, Jean Toomer,
Aaron Douglas) in the hopes of always appearing noble and butter-side
up. In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hughes upholds a
position about di
fference and diversity, in opposition to “American stan-
dardization” (the white main culture), and therefore he attacks Cullen
for identifying with those class and structural norms. Cullen is quite
aware that “race traitor” is the phrase Hughes here implies but never
uses, for one of his answers, the poem “To Certain Critics,” sets forth
the words traitor, treason, and betray in the
first three lines (Cullen , ).
For Hughes, “Negro” is a powerful and self-conscious cultural space
of socially emergent group identity, a space that has been opened
between “white” and “colored” – the latter term representing for
Hughes the passivity and apparent a
ffectlessness of a person yearning to
stay out of racial trouble. For Cullen “Negro” is solely a term of descrip-
tion of individuals: there are individual black poets with a variety of
styles and strategies, but no “Negro verse,” no necessary thematics or
stance. Indeed, when Cullen alludes to Hughes’ position that race can
and should be marked in literature, he uses the metaphor of illness: race
consciousness is just a “new literary ailment” and dialect poems – absent
from his anthology Caroling Dusk – are an arti
ficiality (Cullen , xi,
xiv).
When he discusses melanin, it is just that: “this pigmentary anomaly”
– something accidental, not constitutive (xiii). This debate between iden-
ti
fication with a group identity or affirmation of an individual identity
has analogues to the groups of political feminists when confronted with
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
the individualist (“egoist”) feminist ethos of a Marsden or a Loy with
their sometimes quirky polemics against women. Cullen did not want
people thinking about race in his poetry, but about its poetic quality and
his ability to join the great tradition of Anglo-American verse on his own
terms, with no prejudice working for or against him.
6
But this does not
mean that he wanted his work to be treated as if it were not socially artic-
ulate. Rather, he discouraged forms of condescension and demeaning
double standards, for his aesthetic depended on a concept of poetry in
English as one (universal) tradition, not marked by racial di
fference or
particularist diction.
7
Hence Cullen’s “To Certain Critics” overtly insists that neither pain,
passion, nor trouble is located exclusively in one race, and thus poetry
should not be addressed solely to that group.
8
His religious and pastoral
metaphor (of shepherd–poet and sheep, both su
ffering people and con-
soled readers) is, however,
filled with an ideological remainder. He denies
that any shepherd would care for only the “darker lamb,” rather than
for all lambs, yet the denial contains the recognition, encrypted in the
diction, of the special hurt status su
ffered by his race, alluding, in “darker
lamb” to the proverbial outcast black sheep. And yet another of his con-
densed words, the Scots word for tribe or group, “clan,” faces in two
directions. The clan is other African-American writers explicitly barred
from controlling his sense of audience, meaning, diction, or poetic voca-
tion. Cullen will always reject particulars in favor of universals (
, ).
But while the statement speaks on the surface of a clannish group of
blacks, the shadow of Klan is unavoidable, and this crypt word makes a
counter accusation to a more dreaded threat to black autonomy than
fellow African-American poets.
As for the question of cultural di
fference, Cullen would only be inter-
ested in showing how black (like white) poets di
ffer markedly among
themselves. “A survey of the work of Negro poets will show that the indi-
vidual diversifying ego transcends the synthesizing hue” (Cullen
,
xii). Indeed, Cullen looked to the day when race as a category would be
obsolete. Yet he alluded to racial color – progressively darkening – in all
his titles for books of poetry from
–: Color, Copper Sun (with its pun),
The Ballad of the Brown Girl, Caroling Dusk, The Black Christ. For Cullen, it
is clear, being a Negro artist is a contradictory task with “innumerable
rami
fications” (Cullen , ). Thus Cullen’s poems of poetic author-
ity propose marked, and contradictory, black–white materials with
strong bearing on de
fining his subjectivity and poetic practice. In certain
poems using race as metaphor, Cullen makes conglomerates of social
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
identity that struggle against any one de
fining racial mark for Poet, but
fuse the races in a Poetic Identity. In other works, he is more dour and
resistant to white friendship and its cultural signi
ficance.
“Tableau” (
, ) is a three quatrain poem about a bond of a
golden white youth and a dark black youth, metaphorically day and
night, and as deeply linked together. Their homoerotic, cross-racial love
and/or friendship crosscuts many social assumptions and
fixed groups.
9
As the second quatrain tells us, both the spying and gossiping black and
white detractors are scandalized at their concord. Answering the charge
of an unnatural relationship, the poem works on stable natural meta-
phors in conventional phrases; lightning/thunder and day/night as
tropes for their bond have the e
ffect of justifying the relationship, for
these natural twains are well known, unquestionably paired, and linguis-
tically unremarkable.
The poem, a rich and determined statement, o
ffers a political alle-
gory, a spiritual allegory, a sexual and poetic allegory. The cross-race love
(or friendship) evokes their critical violation of socially mandated paths
and the actual subcultural spaces of cross-race, same-sex sexual meeting
coded as marginal (as it may evoke a higher spiritual way, with the word
“cross”). Their Christological concord allows them to pass unscathed
through a quagmire of angry looks. The evocation of the word for racial
passing suggests the formation of a conglomerate racial identity (a new
space for passing) fusing and merging the two races as one, in one sexual
body. Indeed, even the title, meaning a striking scene with picturesque
people, contains a deep metonym for “tablet” and (with the lightning
and thunder of the end) suggests a new law, or a scene of judgment. The
homoerotic content is used powerfully to establish racial equipoise in a
new post-racialized space, a conglomerate interior title to poetic author-
ity for the speaker of the enunciation.
The attempt to universalize poetic vocation beyond racial marking, in
a poem similar to Cullen’s but earlier, is seen in a psalm-like Whitmanic
work by Alfred Kreymborg that is addressed to Fenton Johnson. Here
“red” is a sign of their mutually held vocations and their politically
radical ideas – “songs and singers are red” (Kreymborg
, ).
“There are veins in my body, Fenton Johnson – / veins that sway and
dance because of blood that is red; / There are veins in your body,
Fenton Johnson – / veins that sway and dance because of blood that is
red”: rhetorical parallelism represents absolute, but utopian, equality
(Kreymborg
, ). When the poets walk “arm in arm down State
Street,” the “easily horri
fied” will cry “look at the white man chumming
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
with the black man!” (
), but the poets will reply “‘We are red,’” their
basic humanity and social ethos marked by this politicized and natural
color (
). The word “State” is not understated, either, as a claim within
nation and estate.
Cullen wanted to operate in this even-handed way in a universe that
was (and is) absolutely not color-blind.
10
He wanted to be neither com-
pelled nor impelled by what others thought was appropriate to his race,
but rather self-motivated to “do, write, create, what we will,” a claim of
poetic authority – darkening his speech in his way – by transcending
social markers or by studying them, but always on his own terms (Cullen
, ). Therefore such a finding as “Tableau” does not cover all
cases. Another poem of poetic authority whose
findings are quite oppo-
site is the sardonic four-quatrain “Uncle Jim” (Cullen
, ). This
figure of folk wisdom has some gnomic words to say about whiteness.
The poem begins with Uncle Jim’s gnarly stupidity, pointing tautologi-
cally to the fact that whites are white. A series of de
finitions can be sub-
stituted – counterrevolutionary? blank? decent? (usage – ironic), but
finally the message boils down to – they are totally different from you by
virtue of their color. They live and act in a di
fferent world. The young
man in the enounced tries to reject this, with a
flippant non sequitur,
describing Uncle Jim as being intensely bitter and trying to discount the
wisdom o
ffered. Yet the second two stanzas reconsider the question.
Cullen describes a soul-mate, a friend (race unspeci
fied, but as such
probably the unmarked race – white). The friend is given a kind of high
romantic Keatsean/Dickinsonian a
ffect: he is so empathetic, and iden-
ti
fies so closely with the speaker that he experiences the speaker’s joy and
sorrow with intensity. Their relationship seems an exemplary spiritual
communion. Yet there is something a little inordinate about the inten-
sities of identi
fication, something parasitic or hysterical in such
empathy.
11
Thus the
final stanza argues that, even as the subjectivity of
the enounced lies next to his companion “face-in-the-grass,” feeling the
pleasures of their bond, he thinks not of their high romantic and
Keatsean communion, but “muses” on Uncle Jim and his suspicion of
whites.
The two men, soul-mate and speaker, are depicted in a deeply inti-
mate posture. Yet read in a social philology “face-in-the-grass” is shad-
owed in the enunciation by the crypt phrase snake in the grass. A careful
association bolstered by this “phantom locative” evokes a betrayal in the
enunciation that is at
first denied in the enounced (Stewart , ).
The speaker’s allegiance to the sublime of art and sexuality as the height
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
of British poetic tradition, to the high poetic language evoking depths
and heights of sadness and ecstasy had seemed compromised by the
uncle and his message of racial suspicion. But the speaker identi
fies
more than he wants to acknowledge with Uncle Jim, for “muse” not only
means think or ponder, but also suggests the realm of muse
figures. The
intimate eroticized companionship of two men, [white] and black,
thought to lead to the high emotions and investments of poetry, thought,
therefore, to function as muse, is destabilized by another muse, the muse
of racialized thinking, of barriers between white and black.
Both of these poems arguably present a homoerotic encounter with a
white man as involving a claim for black cultural authority, but the two
poems come to opposing conclusions about that white muse
figure. Yet
at the same time “blackness” brought with it so many uncontrollable res-
onances that it is no wonder Cullen attempted in part to change the
terms of the debate entirely, in his exchange with Hughes, to “good
poetry” versus “not poetry.” Thus for Cullen to “darken one’s speech”
was neither easy, nor natural, nor assumed. That very suspicion was part
of New Black entitlement, as this subject position can be reconstructed
from its own interior debates. Wallace Stevens seems to have “darkened
his speech” with more ease and pleasure. Stevens writes a poetry peopled
with blacks and Africanist materials who and which symbolize access to
creative power; he does so in a way that does not credit black modernity
nor those lacerating intellectual and emotional debates about blackness
in modernism that have here been exempli
fied in the work of Cullen and
Hughes.
When “dusk” carols for Countee Cullen (
) in the title of his
famous anthology, the word indicates the professional presence of a gen-
eration of African-American poets quite various in their rhetorics,
similar only in their color. They are singing joyously, or caroling, dusk, a
word implying twilight, shadow, and even gloom; set together, the two
words make an oxymoron balancing glee and despair. Dusk is a quintes-
sentially poetic time, liminal, pensive, and romantic: this suggests
Cullen’s deep conviction that black poets’ styles, like all poets’ styles,
should honor the traditional. Stevens also used dusk to evoke the
romance of poetic access to a tempting dark
figure. While these poets
are parallel in their claims for racialized “dusk,” they di
ffer precisely in
their relation to New Black entitlement and in the crossracial encoun-
ters proposed.
Caroling Dusk is ambiguous: are the poets singing about dusk, are they
in the dusk (obscured, in the shade, overshadowed by main culture), or
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
are they themselves a thing, a singing dark? The title, read by a social
philology, is a political allegory condensing the history of slavery and
emancipation, thing and person. This allegory also occurs in Cullen’s
sonnet “Yet Do I Marvel” analyzing the black poet as “curious thing”
(
, ). This work, filled with cunning verbal contradictions, concerns
the almost paralytic encounter between blackness and universalized
poetic vision.
The sestet is based on a
fierce, restrained blasphemy. It would be vain
even to ask God, goes Cullen’s argument, why evil, cruelty, torture, and
frustration have meaning. It is simply that He is so “awful” that He
cannot quibble over such small questions. The repetition of the word
“awful” moves from awe-inspiring to horrible, from terri
fic to terrifying.
Indeed, the echo of Blake’s “Songs of Experience” casts God Himself
as the man-eating Tyger. The speaker plots a carefully worded resis-
tance, seeming to enhance God, and to blame the small-minded person
for doubting the possibility of satisfactory explanations.
The apogee of God’s uncanny ability to put dreadful pressure and
frustration in the universe is to create black poets. The apparently simple
phrase “curious thing” read via a social philology shows ideological
contradictions. First, it means an oddity; here the speaker comments sus-
piciously upon God and his motives. The distance created by the com-
mentary elaborates the promissory note of the sonnet’s opening phrase
doubting God’s bene
ficence, wherein that very doubt, through denial, is
furthered. Second, the speaker wonders that God has made such a
novelty, something so rare, odd, or intricate. This praises both the nobil-
ity of God and [black] humankind. Finally, the poet, being black, is both
the curiosity (thing) and the curious questioner (person). To have been
both thing and person is precisely the heritage of African-Americans.
This opposition is then elaborated by the confrontative rhyme of “thing”
and “sing.” “Sing!” is held out tantalizingly at the very end of the poem
as goal and imperative, compounding the strength of black poetic
authority by seeing it as an almost impossible test of authorship author-
ized by God himself. In the word “bid,” God is both commanding and
gambling – raising the stakes for black poets only. The word also has a
tinge from the semantic surround “auction,” a sotto voce encrypting of
enslavement. The poem illustrates, in poised contradiction, the di
fficulty,
and the actuality, of African-American poetry.
Wallace Stevens’ address to an ungenerous, ungendered (but
“puerile”)
figure is fascinated by “dusk”: “Be the voice of night and
Florida in my ear. / Use dusky words and dusky images. / Darken your
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
speech” (
, ). This is an imperative plea to a muse in charge of a
fecund darkness to become darker still; these yearnings are sexualized,
and take place in a special topographic site for Stevens, the South. Yet
the poem also argues that the poem’s speaker already “spoke for you per-
fectly in my thoughts, / Conceiving words” (ibid.). Hence the dusky
words of the puerile
figure are not even necessary. Already inside the
thoughts of the speaker, dusky words are generative and “conceived” –
in body and idea. This ideological contradiction around black speech –
evoked and necessary, but absent – will persist.
This always–already status of “dusky words and dusky images” resists
(though it does not totally ignore) New Black materials, for those claims
would complicate his possession of “black” space. Conversely, Cullen’s
“dusk” depends upon the New Black position, however much he resisted
and debated the politicization of the poetic act and the deuniversaliza-
tion of the role of poet. The ideological drama of di
ffering investments
in parallel materials is a
finding of “historical semiotics” (Arac ,
).
Most white work with the “dusky” – the creative powers of Africanist
figures – occurs in and as rich fantasy, not in relationships with black
writers nor in particular acknowledgment of their cultural dilemmas
around black creativity and poetic agency; it is a form of “American
Africanism” in Toni Morrison’s terms (
, ). Wallace Stevens did not
comment upon actual black writers, but the various uses to which he
could put a black creative
figure entranced him in work from on.
12
The precise gap between his loss of any historical
figures and his imag-
inative possession of blackness is symptomatic of his turn from New
Negro to Old. Stevens mined rich veins of stereotype and mythoi pro-
ducing resonant, if primitivist, depictions of blackness that fused sexu-
ality and artistic creativity. As early as
, in a letter to his future wife,
Stevens plays out his fantasy of being Sambo in a little vaudeville/min-
strel vignette of lady and servant
filled with flirtatious and scandalous
possibilities of sexual desire (Stevens
, ; Dec. , ).
13
Sambo is
a black bu
ffoon from American folklore – merry, ingratiating, endearing,
loveable, harmless in his grinning and dancing, o
ffering a comic cornu-
copia of bounty without aggression (Boskin
, –). Sambo makes
a clownish appearance at the climax of “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,”
part of the pointillist colors and joking subtext, while the main text of a
cosmic re
flective encounter between sea and sky “rolled as one” creates
a triumphant transcendence via the poetic acts of “trumping,” “conju-
ration,” and “trans
figuring,” after the clearing away of “motley”
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
(Stevens
, ; ) .
14
Sambo states sexual desire, using race to
sweeten, while titillating, that desire (Boskin
, ).
However, before Stevens settles into generally warm-hearted depic-
tions of black male
figures, another more startling representation occurs.
In his prize-winning poetic chamber drama “Three Travelers Watch a
Sunrise” (
), Stevens’ turn from the force of a contemporary moment
in race relations is condensed and telling. In this play are three Chinese
(in European garb to begin with), two (lower case) “negroes,” and a white
female character with a given name (Stevens
, –, ). The
Chinese, philosopher–kings at the top of a racial hierarchy, speak a man-
nered, oblique poetry and investigate the relationship between imagina-
tion and reality. They and Anna speak and sing.
The two black characters only serve; they are completely silent or ges-
tural.
15
This is so striking and so suspicious that the poet himself com-
ments upon it in a contemporaneous letter to Harriet Monroe: “You will
note that the negroes now have no speeches. I cannot well make them
both servants. The negro who appears
first has been searching for the
[dead] man” (Stevens
, ; May , ). Despite his qualms,
Stevens has done exactly as he says he won’t: neither black character
speaks. Some racial anxiety about African-American agency and auton-
omous presence, some inability to reckon with what such characters
might be imagined to say vetoed Stevens’ announced goals. A
flicker
acknowledging New Black subjectivity comes in the letter but is ignored
in the play. The contradiction between his intention and practice
bespeaks a certain kind of [white] problematic: knowing as political or
social fact the active presence of blacks in the world, but producing a cul-
tural artifact that depicts blacks in silent service.
16
Aside from walking back and forth on stage, aside from moving props
for the Chinese, one African-American character enters the dark stage,
while “the limb of a tree creaks.” He
finds a hanged man: “Discerning a
dark object among the branches, he shrinks back . . .” (Stevens
, , all
italics). The black characters are, thereafter, silent. The Chinese, seated
with their backs to the “dark object, hanging to the limb of the tree” will
eventually discover it, but the discovery does not deal with the socio-
political allusion inhering in this image, which remains unresolved,
casting a free-
floating shadow across the play (). The anxiety and
terror of lynching seem to be encoded in this body, physically visible on
the stage yet emotionally and politically hidden as a concern of the
play.
17
The apparatus, including the tree, is quite similar to materials in
many African-American poems, such as a three-line epigram/epitaph
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
among Countee Cullen’s “Colors” in Copper Sun (
, ); the color is
“(Black)” and proposes a lynching as a spectacle and torture at once –
with the tortured man forced into a Calvary that has no redemptive
outlet but that grim one-word allusion to Christian narrative.
This is a “contrapuntal” reading, to evoke Edward Said’s method in
Culture and Imperialism, that expands attention to socio-political allusions
within works, by projecting, even in despite of the formal balance and
structure of any art work, an analysis of the historical events to which
they tangentially allude (Said
). For lynching was endemic during
those very years. These were public spectacles con
firming, by murder,
white “civilized manliness” (Bederman
, ). And the struggle
against lynching, commencing in the
s, is part of the political
outrage and social resistance that contributes to New Black subjectivity.
It is uncanny to have lynching present visually, but ignored narratively:
a contradiction in Stevens’ presentation of the actual terms under which
“darkened speech” occurred.
By a detour through the love plot, this apparent allusion to a lynching
turns out to be untrue; as Huck Finn might have said, the hanged man
was only Italian and a suicide.
18
Hegemonic art has never had any trouble
dealing with unrequited romance, love plots, suicide, and personal grief.
But the love plot is a cover story for a shocking political reality, and the
play’s philosophical speculations about imagination and reality web
further indeterminacies around that shock. Therefore one cannot help
but allegorize the allegory and see this play as an attempt to mute the
inassimilable, scandalous fact of contemporaneous white political terror-
ism by constructing an elaborate aesthetic machinery for its avoidance.
In the twenties, just before and just after the publication of the
first
edition of Harmonium in
, and parallel to the emergence of a modern
African-American literature, Wallace Stevens created his own Negro
Renaissance – a pretend world peopled by colored
figures enacting
muse-like dramas. But this “Renaissance” was not urban, northern,
urbane, and analytic, nor was it realist in its use of folk sources, rural or
urban. That is, it was not the Harlem Renaissance of the New Black sub-
jectivity, but a pastoral idealization of African-American life in the
South (and in the Caribbean) before black modernity, a depiction from
which the speaker gets speci
fic benefits in poetic authority.
To begin with, Stevens created a tropical arena for his imagination, in
which traveling “to Yucatan, Havana next, / And then to Carolina”
(
, ; “Comedian / Letter C,” ) offers images of peaceful (ibid.
), desirous (“O Florida, Venereal Soil,” ; Stevens , ) and
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
aggressive sensuality (“Floral Decorations for Bananas,”
; Stevens
, ). The fable of the tropics in Stevens is that the general fecun-
dity, exotic
flora, and female or androgynous visitants are a spur to a
magical kind of creativity. Mexico, Cuba, Florida, the American South,
and the Gulf of Mexico are a space in which one may be possessed
because one (in an imperialist sense) possesses it.
19
Within Stevens’
general tropical topos, the American South and its black inhabitants are
in a special category of address, occurring in twenty or more poems or
sections of long poems in Stevens’ early career –
– (with the
largest cluster from
–).
20
Stevens is exhilarated at his invention of
black
figures whose imagined activities open the terrain of poetry for
him; these “dusky words” were sensual, creative, fertile, potent. Thus
black
figures are muses, through whom and because of whom poetic
authority accrues. They have all the problematic of muses as well – they
are vibrant, but silent; unsophisticated, yet unconsciously creative; desir-
able, but appropriated; givers, not owners.
Stevens’ “The Silver Plough-Boy” (
) is a poem of inspirational
blackness that, like the play, contains muted political counterpoints
(Stevens
, ). By wearing a stolen sheet, a black youth (a “boy”) has
turned silver.
21
While silver, he is a lyric, creative, metamorphic sprite.
But even before the transforming sheet, this “black
figure . . . in a black
field” had already been dancing. The silvery sheet only enhances the
prior creativity of the black
figure, making him more fecund, The
moment of silvery whiteness turns labor (ploughing) into a dance. The
pronoun “it” rather than “he” is attached to this plough “boy” through-
out the poem. He may be gender neutral in a negative sense, his male-
ness voided. Or positively, once taken to represent art or imagination,
the impish
figure can transcend gender as well as negotiate the race-
based transformation from slavery to silvery.
This artless poem opens with a racialized situation – a dark
figure,
stealing something. The poem makes this
figure wear the sheet of the
Klan nightriders – a suggestion absolutely not in tune with the tone of
epiphanic sweetness of the poem and yet, given its date, an irrepressible
“contrapuntal” reading. Indeed, as in his play, Stevens envelops and
di
ffuses intransigent political facts, softening the racial allusions (lynched
figure in the play, nightriders in this poem), turning certain political trag-
edies policing African-American life into blurry mythoi outside of time
or space. Modernist depictions here refuse black modernity.
“Hymn From a Watermelon Pavilion” (
) speaks directly to “You
dweller in the dark cabin, / To whom the watermelon is always purple”
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
(Stevens
, ). The watermelon and cabin together say African-
American living in a glorious perpetual “now” of grati
fication. He pos-
sesses a “best cock” with red feathers, a green “feme” (wife), and a
cackling blackbird (adding up to the colors of Garveyite militancy), that
make the “dweller” “Rise, since rising will not waken.” He is in a potent
sexual dream (
–). This appreciative remark is part of a colonizing
and stereotyping move, arguing that the rural black
figure has no need
of an interior life or an imagination, given that his phallic reality and
sexual bliss are richer than the [white] speaker’s dream. The argument
that black
figures have “plenty,” especially a full sensual life, is very diffi-
cult to displace as it ascribes to blacks a bliss that seems at
first glance
like a bene
fit. However, such an ideological claim strips the figure so
invested of any other emotion or human situation – thought, grief,
cunning, anger, narcissism, loss.
Both Sterling Brown – in “Negro Characters by White Authors”
(
) – and Alain Locke – in “The Negro in Art” () – analyzed the
obdurate persistence of stereotyped depictions of blacks in modernism.
Brown argues that, even in the late
s, a range of high-, middle- and
lowbrow work – in Agrarian writers, contemporary poets, and prize-
winning O. Henry Award stories – showed ante-bellum grotesqueries
passing for realist depictions. To a sophisticated version of this “cotton-
patch and cabin-quarters formula” Stevens has generally acceded in his
poems (Locke
, ). In Locke’s view, the South won the Civil War
culturally speaking, since so-called “modern” depictions still glori
fied
slavery, o
ffered justifications for it, and shed fake tears over incompetent
freemen. White uses of black
figures may not have been entitled “New”
from the perspective of modernity, but these modern Euro-American
representations had a good deal of cultural entitlement.
Stevens identi
fies with the joyous creativity of his rural black subjects
in the enounced and, in a next step, proceeds to ventriloquize black folk
poems (though not their dialect) in a context – Harmonium – in which the
sounds of many ethnic and gendered American subjectivities are being
voiced – from the Oklahoma jolt of Josie, the “old song” of soldiers, to a
Poesque “Vincentine,” to the German “Mutter” and her “Liebchen,” to
Hispanic “revolutionists” and the quasi-Asian obliqueness of “Thirteen
Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” In each of these works, there is an aural
appropriation/creation of a mimic subjectivity alluding to a particular
social and ethnic space; Stevens creates a new nation. Harmonium seems
to be a work of pluralized citizenship, in which the subjectivity of enun-
ciation has the power, will, and desire to incorporate, or voice, a multi-
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
plicity of social songs. The work’s witty title states “harmony” – these ele-
ments pleasingly, sympathetically, uncon
flictually combined. There is an
imperial imagination in Stevens emphatically predicted by the poem
“Architecture” – claiming that “only the lusty and the plenteous” are
capacious enough to assimilate all the discursive styles, rhetorical modes,
and social voices that make U.S. poetic authority – and also, perhaps, to
neutralize or sweeten politics (Stevens
, ).
Certain poems of Stevens go further in instructing blacks even as the
[white] speaker participates with them and appropriates their sound,
creating a magpie black–white subjectivity. In “Ploughing on Sunday”
(
), the speaker has become the joyous, effervescent “plough-boy”; his
lyric of poetic power is irrepressible. In the work, he demands to be cele-
brated for his access to pleasure and force as one rural worker to another:
Remus, blow your horn!
I’m ploughing on Sunday,
Ploughing North America.
Blow your horn!
(Stevens
, )
The “Remus” instructed to celebrate the Bunyanesque elan of the
plough-boy has virtually no connotation but black. The wise, wily “Uncle
Remus” of [white writer] Joel Chandler Harris is a paternal
figure with
whom the speaker of the enounced identi
fies. By claiming rural citizen-
ship and addressing himself to a black compatriot, the speaker makes
raced and working class a
ffirmation bold proofs of poetic power.
In “The Jack-Rabbit” (before
) and “Some Friends from
Pascagoula” (
), Stevens proposes making poems, as a black folk poet,
and/or instructing the making of black folk poetry as a [white] éminence
gris. The two positions have in common an attempt to imitate the sound
of a black “maker,” in a “racechanges” manner, as both Michael North
and Susan Gubar have generally proposed (North
; Gubar ,
passim), but these are rural, not New Black subjectivities. “The Jack-
Rabbit” contains the intensities of an Uncle Remus beast fable.
The black man said,
“Look out, O caroller,
The entrails of the buzzard
Are rattling.”
(Stevens
, )
This is a unique instance of the imagined speech of a black character;
in most comparable moments, Stevens instructs these inspiring charac-
ters how to speak, and in sympathetic imperatives asks for more of their
speech, but does not cite them. In “Some Friends from Pascagoula,” the
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
speaker is listening to a folk singer or a folk fabulist whom he is also
instructing:
Tell me more of the eagle, Cotton,
And you, black Sly,
Tell me how he descended
Out of the morning sky.
.............................................
Here was a sovereign sight,
Fit for a kinky clan.
(ibid.,
–)
Although the desire to take this material for his own may be appropria-
tion, pure and simple, these poems also bespeak a desire, however
awkward, to know the talents of American blackness.
Stevens’ personal “Negro Renaissance” mainly celebrates the rural
pastoral. No New Black engagements occur. Indeed, as soon as there is
any urban hint, or often when black female
figures are at issue, the
poems jump to a crude, jocular defensiveness against even a hint of black
modernity. “The Virgin Carrying a Lantern” (
) expresses this
female American Africanist presence with a nasty, voyeuristic, precision
(Stevens
, ). It is a comic poem wherein the word “negress” is part
of the punch line, the butt of a joke. The “negress,” in her lower-case
form, is like Eliot’s predatory “Big Black Kween” in the King Bolo and
Columbo poems (Eliot
, ). A fair, pious [white] “beauty,”
perhaps one of the wise virgins of the Bible is set by Stevens against a
black
figure who becomes sexually excited.
The pity that her [the virgin’s] pious egress
Should
fill the vigil of a negress
With heat so strong!
(Stevens
, )
The manipulative, comic rhyme in the enunciation is the centerpiece of
the poem, creating it as a jeu d’esprit archly laughing o
ff, while expressing
white erotic anxiety about the promiscuous potential of female and
black sexuality. Polysexuality, lesbianism, fetishism intermingle in this
visualization of cross-race, same-gender sexual desire.
“Contents of a Cab” mocks a
figure whose pretensions to refinement
and elegance are dismantled by the poem.
Victoria Clementina, negress,
Took seven white dogs
To ride in a cab.
(
) (Stevens , –)
The group of dogs (or men) indicate excessive and uncontrollable sex-
uality, as in the decadent depictions of women and dogs suggestively
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
presented by Bram Dijkstra (
, –). The poem is a luxurious
imagination of a sexual black woman so tempting as to be frightening,
whose sexuality – whether of the urban setting she enters with the pre-
tence (as the poet sees it) of elegance, or of the imagined jungle where
her “savage blooms” have full play – is barely contained by the poem.
Joan Richardson reads the poem as a work about the role of the imag-
ination for Stevens: “here was a metaphoric illustration of the kind of
completion indulging poetry allowed” – sexual completion in fantasy
and displaced of acts and desires deeply sinful and forbidden, the fuel
of his poetry, in general, being desire (Richardson
, ). This is
clearly so, but the social and cultural contexts pointed to – urban migra-
tion and urbane blacks, changing sexual attitudes, the fantasy sexual
status of black women, the twenty-
five anti-black race riots of ,
which is the poem’s date – need not drop out or be allegorized away
from speci
fic social meaning. Stevens depicts a black female one step
from savage sexuality, once the veneer of civilization is stripped from
her loins. Primitivist ideology is a way of answering New Black social
possibilities.
Thus for Stevens, the buoyant and generous black muse
figures are
generally male; the threatening and dangerous black
figures are females.
However, both
figures fulfill what Toni Morrison sees as the cultural
duties of the Africanist persona for Euro-American writers (
, –).
Part of the entitlement of white subjectivity is to be able to shape black
subjects in the enounced as fantasy ful
fillments, to inhabit them, to voice
for them. Stevens’ glancing, and resisted, allusions to issues for black
modernity (lynching, nightriders), do not destabilize his rural, tropical
golden-age paradigm of primitivism and potency through which his
speech is correspondingly “darkened.”
Indeed, a number of Euro-American modernists found their art was
inspired and provoked by Africanist “duskiness.” Their ways of seeking
that duskiness and its advantages seem quite lurid at times. When D.
H. Lawrence asks, “Can you, after dark, become a darkie?” he links a
libidinal time to an attitude assumed to be more
fleshly. To “run up
against the standing
flesh of you / with a shock, as against the black-
ness of a negro . . .” links
flesh, the unconscious, and complex feelings
of white desire and need whose token or symbol are so conveniently
unspeci
fied, unindividualized black people (Lawrence , ).
Blacks have often been used by whites as an image of the unconscious
of whites – fecund, productive, creative, but, as it were, in a colonial
relation, the raw material of blackness fueling poetic production in the
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
factory of whiteness. The conglomerate of attitudes in Euro-American
Africanism shows wild, volatile, one might say “primitive” changes of
white attitudes from wonder to disgust, envy to malice, fear to desire,
tempted rejection to vulnerable and manipulative identi
fication. The
discussions of entitlement and theoretical analyses made in black mod-
ernity are generally unknown to Euro-American poets. In contrast,
“dusky words and dusky images” already exist; they can be a
ffirmed in
powerful spurts of projection, invoking discourses, stereotypes and
propositions of race, based on understandings of “Africa” as an idea,
“the primitive,” racial essence, and other fraught topoi.
22
The investments both white and black cultural communities made in
the notion of “the primitive” (as the technical opposite of modernity)
help construct black subjectivity for both white and black writers in mod-
ernism. To discuss this necessitates a turn to ideas about Africa. The de
Zayas monograph African Negro Art: its In
fluence on Modern Art () offers
symptomatic materials. Although the essay announces that the discus-
sion of this in
fluence will be central, actually the proposition in the sub-
title is treated in only one paragraph at the end of forty pages. The rest
is a bolus of scienti
fic racism. Brain studies disparaging and final, the
notion of superior and inferior races, the “fact” that Africans are like
children, the sense that one has captured the
first evolution of the
human race in Africans are propositions outlined with absolutely no res-
ervations. “An ethnological group can exist to-day whose brain is in a
very primitive state and which, therefore, produce a very primitive art”
(de Zayas
, ). The brains of Africans “can be considered as being
in the
first state of the evolution of the brain of man” ().
This lively sketch of a racist baseline (blacks are human, but not as
“evolved” as whites) demands we ask why any modern Euro-American
artist would desire to be in
fluenced by African art. De Zayas then
remarks that African abstraction brings us closer to “our” feelings. This
is consistent with the view of blacks as a kind of case study: “human
nature obscured by so little veneer” (Peterkin, Crisis, Sept.
, ).
The more evolved naturalistic representations of Western art o
ffer only
“the reality of the outer world.” The price of white superiority and evo-
lutionary perfection is a modern loss of an inner world for which the
“very primitive state” o
ffers solace and replacement – again the cultural
“duties” of the Africanist materials are patent. “The abstract represen-
tation of modern art is unquestionably the o
ffspring of the Negro Art,
which has made us conscious of a subjective state, obliterated by objec-
tive education” (de Zayas
, ). Whites have been denatured; blacks
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
will restore them. Whites are too objective, too intellectual; an infusion
of subjective mindlessness from blacks, graciously accepted despite
white superiority – these are the strained explanations for the in
fluence
of African art on European modernism.
Gertrude Stein did, of course, know African art, and her propositions
about it were in many ways the negative – but not the negation – of de
Zayas’ argument. Indeed, Stein expends serious e
ffort to explain away
both African sculpture in itself, and its impact on Picasso. In her essay
“Picasso” (
), Stein says was “the negro period” in his art, but
she sees him essentially as having a Spanish vision. She comments,
damningly, that “African art [was] like the other in
fluences which at one
time or another diverted Picasso from the way of painting which was
his” (Stein
, , ). Not only a diversion, but an unworthy one, for
“the african is not primitive, he has a very ancient but a very narrow
culture and there it remains” (Stein
, ). Thus African art is caught
in cultural stasis and immobility, as the universalizing singular insists; this
parallels de Zayas’ conviction that “there is no evolution in Negro art”
(
, ).
23
By arguing that such work was not primitive, she sidesteps a
very controversial word and concept, but in a scandalous manner, insist-
ing that the traditions of African art were in fact created by Arabs: and
that, while it was civilized, African art was also quite limited, arrested in
development.
24
This perverse point is a version of the nervy and nervous
disparaging of African descended people in which Stein engaged: as she
said in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “negroes were not su
ffering
from persecution they were su
ffering from nothingness” (Stein ,
). A. L. Nielsen has foregrounded this remark as a key expression of
a central Euro-American attitude, a kind of existential and ontological
erasure of black reality (
, –).
Primitivism is a contradictory set of
findings and attitudes, an
“ensemble of tropes” (in Marianna Torgovnick’s words) that form a
complex of evocations from the unexamined perspective of an Us about
a Them that is childlike and violent, mysterious, dark, irrational, lower,
docile, and yet resistant, taboo in their lust and yet natural in sexual
matters (Torgovnick
, ). Nathan Huggins shows this fusion in his
critical discussion the white vision of Harlem as primitive, romantic, and
vitalist – a cure for white modernity. Harlem o
ffered “a means of soft
rebellion for those who rejected the Babbittry and sterility of their lives,”
a rebellion conveniently involving only “a taxi trip to the exotic”
(Huggins
, , ). Primitivist yearnings, no matter how naive,
o
ffered inchoate critique of modernity. This anti-modernization thesis
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
is central to the argument of the art historian Gill Perry. The “positive
discrimination in favour of so-called ‘primitive’ subjects and techniques”
visible in the visual arts in the early twentieth century, made a serious cri-
tique of modernity (Harrison et al.
, ). Perry discusses the ways in
which “primitive” has at one and the same time been used “positively
and pejoratively” in European discourses (
–). Pejorative primitivist
thinking found repugnant that which positive views sought out. These
attitudes were not necessarily separated in texts, arguments, oeuvres.
The confused impact of de Zayas, for instance, is the result of forty
pages of pejorative primitivist thinking meeting a paragraph of positive
primitivist notions.
Tumbled together are negative notions of societies barbaric, uncivil-
ized, without “cultural ‘progress,’” notions visible in Stein. These join
positive vitalist ideas of primitive primalness, goodness, closeness to the
wellsprings of life. We see this in Stevens’ view of black males; yet his
view of black females is closer to pejorative primitivism. In discussing the
uses of the primitive, it is important to remember that many of its terms
are idealizing, and sometimes admiring (though never really respectful),
at the same time that the terms are disparaging and dismissive. If so-
called primitives are, for one example, “libidinous” or “sexually free,”
the valence of these terms can extend from prurient voyeurism into
admiration, through jealousy, to disgust.
Primitivism always negotiates political and historical gain for its white
users, for as a discourse, primitivism denies history, real time, and matur-
ity to its native denizens, erasing the existence of tribal peoples as func-
tioning adults and as serious artists, operating in historical and
situational circumstances, in favor of infantalizing visions which pre-
serve for Western civilization a role as capstone (Price
, –). One
begins to see primitivist nostalgia as expressing an unspoken guilt for
imperialist claims to the land, the livelihood, and even the life of a
variety of othered peoples. Modernist primitivism is both symptom and
putative cure for the wounds of imperialism and related versions of
appropriated labor and land, such as the American slave and sharecrop-
per systems.
In some modern works, positive primitivist tropes provide a simply
irresistible mythology about Others. For whatever distressed Euro-
American culture, blacks of all kinds and of any kind (whether these
were Africans, African-Americans, persons, sculptures, rural sharecrop-
pers, urban jazz musicians, etc.) seemed to have the cure. This interested
encomium for (apparently) simple peoples, peasants, closeness to the
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
land or to nature, a folk sweetness or special wisdom, could pass into
fear-laden pejorative tropes of tribal mystery, preternatural strength or
perception, the thicker, resistant nature represented by “the jungle,”
unusual sexual prowess, lurking rites and so on. Believers in primitivist
thinking will resist the notion that any civilization, tribal or urban, is a
complex webbing of forces with historical, intellectual, and social spec-
i
ficities, that – in Jerome Rothenberg’s dialectical aphorism – “Primitive
means complex” in the same way that modern means complex (
,
). Indeed, in that sense, there are no primitives at all. The whole
concept is an (albeit seductive) fake.
Insofar as American blacks were largely (before the Great Migration)
a kind of rural ser
flike peasantry, and because Southern white ideologi-
cal e
fforts had been expended in a late nineteenth century campaign of
romanticization of the position of African-Americans in the slave
economy, rural African-Americans were susceptible to primitivist
mythologizing depictions. However, urban and middle class blacks – the
New Black – endured this projection also, which thus reveals itself as an
ideological free agent quasi-independent of socioeconomic realities.
This projection is visible in a sour review from
of Van Vechten’s
Nigger Heaven, Walter White’s Flight (and works by Dos Passos and
Hemingway), in which D. H. Lawrence protests Van Vechten’s impor-
tant resistance to primitivizing his middle-class hero and heroine (a resis-
tance that notoriously does not extend to the other black characters in
the book). Lawrence is annoyed at this failure, for he deeply desires the
illusion he also sardonically criticizes, a striking ideological contradic-
tion. “Reading negro books [White’s], or books about negroes written
from the negro standpoint [Van Vechten’s], it is absolutely impossible to
discover that the nigger [sic] is any blacker inside than we are . . . It is
rather disappointing. One likes to cherish illusions about the race soul,
the eternal negroid soul, black and glistening and touched with awful-
ness and mystery” (Lawrence
, ). His posturing irony about this
need still demands the smoke and mirrors of “awfulness and mystery.”
For white writers, primitivist thinking was a way to undercut New Black
modernity.
Hardly a small question to begin with, discussions must account for
African-American writers who also face Africa and the primitive as a dis-
cursive cluster; for them as for the Euro-Americans, the primitive is a
topos of romanticized yearning. But the topos di
ffers considerably given
the racial position of its user. The notion of being wrested from an Eden,
the idea of being part of a place where brown and black skin is natural,
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
unmarked, undespised, and where the bearer will not have to beat on
the “leaden door” of racism (to cite Georgia Douglas Johnson) gives rise
to a number of poems using primitive tropes (Hughes and Bontemps
, ). Langston Hughes’ “Dream Variation” () – “To fling my
arms wide / In some place of the sun, / To whirl and to dance / Till the
white day is done” – is a yearning for the place where to be black and
expressive and joyous is comfortable (Hughes and Bontemps,
, ).
Sometimes the trope of Africa asserts a reality behind a (primitivizing)
mythos to contest Africa’s appropriation while appreciating its impact:
“I know now” says Hughes (
) that “In Africa” “tom-toms . . . do beat
/ In village squares under the mango trees” (Hughes and Bontemps
, ). The poem mentions a series of foreign places (Paris, Antwerp,
Venice – and Africa) which Hughes, with his justi
fiable “from Missouri”
attitude has seen with his own eyes and can attest to. It is also plausible
that the depictions of Africa in African-American work were early
explorations in the pan-Africanist mode, given early anti-imperialist
conferences (from about
on) spearheaded by Du Bois and analyzed
by Locke.
Helene Johnson’s “Magalu” and Cullen’s “Heritage” put the poet-
speakers into Africa, to resist or criticize the denatured qualities of Euro-
American Christianity. Helene Johnson asks the African “Would you sell
the colors of your sunset and the fragrance / Of your
flowers, and the
passionate wonder of your forest / For a creed that will not let you
dance?” (Hughes and Bontemps
, ). Cullen’s poem offers a rich
argument about the compelling contradictory emotions that the vision-
ary fantasy of Africa sets o
ff in him. He tries to resist these emotions, and
the striking gods of polytheistic religion, in favor of Christianity. But
with austere Marvellian resonance – in the urbane couplets of Marvell’s
Horatian ode, the speaker claims to hear drums booming even when he
stops his own ears against the tempting throbbing. He desires that his
God be black, he feels an urgent dance rhythm, and, in the
fierce last
lines whose tri-syllable couplet rhyme is a measure of the control which
the poem has elaborated, he admits such temptation from the drum-
ming, that his head and heart have not “realized” that he is, and needs
to remain, “civilized.” Primitivist tropes within New Black modernity
seem to be a way of showing such self-divisions. Yet Cullen also claims
not to be interested in “nebulous atavistic yearnings toward an African
inheritance” (
, xi). One might venture that he does not want the
Africa topos to be either controlled by or provoked by the expectations
of others. In many poems by African-Americans, “primitive” means a
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
kind of inner freedom, self-expression untempered by white scrutiny
and white judgment, or a
flare of freedom and beauty drawing deep on
a racial past, and bypassing racial prejudice and pain. The eleven poems
in the
final section of Hughes’ first book The Weary Blues (), poems
under the rubric “Our Land,” turn and return to the repressive coldness
of the white world that “tortures” a variety of black people; the several
“primitive tom-toms” are a straining reminder of black authenticity and
autonomy.
In some of these poems Africa is the body of blackness, and the black
body is inscribed essentially with Africa. “Those mountains should be
ours” says Arna Bontemps of the African landscape, in “Golgotha is a
Mountain” (
), but the work also speaks of the crucifixion of the
African peoples, and the breaking of the black body; hence the poem is
both an a
ffirmation (hoping for the repossession of one’s body and one’s
original land) and an elegy of total loss, for a burial after the breaking
(Bontemps
, ). This is seen in the social philology of the phrase
“moulded glory,” said of the treasure inside the African mountains, for
“moulded” means pressured, shaped, and formed, but it also means
crumbled, disintegrated, and decaying – “One day I will crumble,” says
the speaker, of both death and a giving way under unmanageable pres-
sure.
However, for many African-American poets, “primitive” often means
an semi-ideal place where whites cannot touch or bother one, where one
can resist white culture, or declare an anti-imperialist stance. For many
Euro-American poets, on the other hand, “primitive” seems to mean a
site in which one can capture and grasp the deepest spirit of blacks. The
divergences and di
fferences in interests in the discussions of the primi-
tive between being untouched/autonomous, and being touched/appro-
priated are striking. For African-Americans, primitivism makes a
pre-imperialist/pre-enslavement a
ffirmation of power; for Euro-
Americans primitivism proposes a cure for (or vacation from) the pain
of, or even recognition of, their political and economic masteries. In one
case, poets a
ffirm an actually compromised power; in another, poets
deny an actually patent power. The investments in
figures and topoi of
black creativity di
ffer markedly in the two ethnic communities. This
“primitive” material is, to say the least, a site of discursive con
flict and
questions of ownership between American (and interested British)
writers of di
fferent races, despite the similarities of the images they use.
Civilization is a social and spiritual burden (and the jungle is a free
space) because “civilization” has placed exorbitant, unforgiving demands
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
upon African-Americans; it is a trope for enslavement, serf status, or
extractive claims. Fenton Johnson explains the interest of “resting” in
these terms: “I am tired of work; I am tired of building up somebody
else’s civilization” (Hughes and Bontemps
, ). Insofar as hard
drinking, hard dancing, and hard gambling can make up for the pain of
growing up to “
find that you are colored,” as Johnson says, such activ-
ities may appear full of “primitive” license, but may have other causes
than the essentialized libido so frequently touted for its explanatory
value. Other New World African descendents also have written poems
that signify on the question just who exactly is primitive. Claude
McKay’s sonnet “America” limns as a jungle predator the vigorous new
country (to which he immigrated from Jamaica): “Although she feeds me
bread of bitterness, / And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, /
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess / I love this cultured hell that
tests my youth!” (Hughes and Bontemps ed.
, ). Langston Hughes
accepts the animal analogy but in a critical way in “Lament for Dark
Peoples”; the term “circus” emphasizes the constructedness of the
animal trope.
Now they’ve caged me
In the circus of civilization.
Now I herd with the many –
Caged in the circus of civilization.
(Hughes
, )
Lillian Byrnes has a poem from
in which she attempts, pushing
against an intractable cliché, to invent “the ‘Great Blond Beast,’ ” a rapa-
cious “Nordic” man, a move performed to counter, or match the “black
beast” of America’s lurid racial melodrama (Honey
, ). “Nordic”
was the word used recurrently in this period for Anglo-Germanic white
superiority in the pseudo-scienti
fic contexts of racial classification. In his
poem “Dust,” Waring Cuney o
ffers “Ozimandias”-like reflections about
“the skill / With which you [“proud ones” / whites] play this game –
Civilization”: pointedly, “The Coliseum tells a story / The Woolworth
Building may repeat” (
) – that is the decline and fall of imperial
ruling powers (Cullen
, ). The critique by African-American
writers of the notions, and location, of the “civilized” is one response to
the plethora of “primitivisms” in Euro-American work. In the “civiliza-
tion” trope, African-American writers try to criticize and reconsider the
locus of the “primitive” against dominant discourse. Gail Bederman has
argued that the hegemonic “discourse of civilization” was, at root, a
white-supremicist, male-supremicist set of ideas (Bederman
, ).
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
The material about the primitive parallels the di
fferent investments in
dusky words in general: while African-American writers struggle for cul-
tural authority and for the right to comment on their situation, for the
freedom to make racially marked works or not, for the leverage to work
out the terms of a relationship with culture, tradition, language, a white
writer such as Stevens has an already carved-out place for blacks that
enhances his cultural authority. Both white and black writers claim
poetic authority by the possession and use of black-in
flected materials,
but they do so di
fferently.
The restraint of the word “dusky” or “darken” has its correspondent
in another much-used, much less delicate racial epithet. The most
visible racial moment in Stevens is probably the title of his
–
poem, “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery.” Very few critics have
commented directly on the word choice in the title; Helen Vendler is
one exception; Mark Scroggins is another. “This is Stevens’
flagrant
borrowed simile for a chain of poems.” (Vendler
, ; also see
Scroggins
, –). “Flagrant” registers the shock of a word that
carries a full burden of at least careless, at most racist attitudes; “bor-
rowed” is semi-exculpatory – the mot is cited. “The title,” Stevens notes,
“refers to the litter that one usually
finds in a nigger cemetery and is a
phrase used by Judge Powell last winter in Key West” (Stevens
,
; Dec., , ).
25
However, this word choice is not a unique
instance in Stevens (nor in other white writers); Stevens chose to use it
several times, in several poems (see Nielsen
, , for other
instances). Here is an incantatory place: “Solange, the magnolia to
whom I spoke / A nigger tree and with a nigger name. . . .” whose fra-
grance is “Almost a nigger fragment” (Stevens
, ; poem from
). Such a word so obdurately repeated clearly had a tempting, even
desirable, aspect for the poet. It seems to mark that deep merge of
erotic and aesthetic yearning that we have already established in
Stevens’ poems. It is clear that white writers of the early modern era
had a kind of birthright eclecticism, born of white privilege, about
their synonyms for African-Americans, with a vague pretense of not
fully crediting the special force of this focal word (or crediting it only
sometimes). And the word takes its revenge, for it pretty much over-
powers Stevens’ poem.
26
As we have already seen from a reading of Cullen’s “Incident” (in
chapter one), in African-American poetry from the early modern era,
the word “nigger” is not, in the main, casual; its positioning and focus
di
ffer markedly from those uses made by white poets. In a notable poem
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
by Frank Horne, “Nigger: a Chant for Children,” the poet pursues the
pursued child with an ironic primer. As the child is taunted by the ugly
cry, Horne counterposes
five noble, mainly black, heroes who had been
called “Nigger . . . nigger . . . nigger” – Hannibal, Othello, Crispus
Attucks, Toussaint and – Jesus (Johnson
, –). The “Jesus”
material is part of a rich African-American tradition of employing the
Calvary motif for torture and martyrdom, so that blacks become hon-
orary Christ
figures, and Jesus, normatively the property of white
mythology, becomes an honorary black by virtue of his su
ffering.
Horne’s poem, with its calculated repetition of the term “nigger” (three
times in every stanza, four or
five times in the framing stanzas, once in
the title, twenty-
five times in all), is an implacable mixture of consoling
and bitter, a vaccine employing the ugly virus of this word to control –
and expose – its e
ffects.
27
Stevens may have felt this word choice was unremarkable, just one
word in his wide-ranging vocabulary, one frequent enough in [white]
usage, and anyway part of the vibrant diction and
flexible heteroglossia
which makes his poetry, in general, so appealing. However, no matter
when you track it, the word also carries a depth charge of derogation,
insult, and o
ffense. The OED gives an American usage from that
makes that connotation clear: “when I say ‘colored’ I mean one thing
respectfully; and when I say ‘niggerish’ I mean another, disgustedly.”
Clarence Major’s Jive to Juba: a Dictionary of Afro-American Slang o
ffers
social wisdom lucidly about di
fferentials in use based on different social
locations: “when used by a white person addressing a black person,
usually it is o
ffensive and disparaging – and has been so since the end of
the Civil War; used by black people among themselves, it is a racial term
with undertones of warmth and good will – re
flecting, aside from the
irony, a tragicomic sensibility that is aware, on some level, of black
history” (Major
, ).
28
This is a word which certainly marshalls visceral e
ffects and psycho-
social resonances; it is a bolus of hotwires. Reporting on Hemingway,
Toni Morrison observes that “[the term ‘nigger’] occupies a territory
between man and animal and thus withholds speci
ficity even while
marking it” (
, ). It is clear that most blacks have had one view of
this word choice; in this early modernist period, many whites had
another.
29
Di
fferent investments all over again. Euro-Americans offer a
squeamish, bad-faith mixture of “just a word, no special resonance,”
while they banked on its special resonance of white superiority and con-
tempt. For example, it is a word Pound used about African-American
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
poet–critic William Braithwaite, a genteel Boston anthologist and man
of letters, who reviewed Pound unfavorably and stood for a kind of
poetry with which he had absolutely no patience (Pound
, ; see
also “coon,”
, ). In short, the offensive word in Stevens’ poem was
a commonplace for many white writers.
The use of the word “nigger” could be seen in relation to the appro-
priation of black-based images; one must demean the owner to take
the beloved product. I am echoing Eric Lott’s terms love and theft, in
his in
fluential work on the functions of minstrelsy in nineteenth-
century United States culture. There are, in these poems, “contradic-
tory racial impulses” at work, the “dialectical
flickering of racial insult
and racial envy, moments of domination and moments of liberation”
which, together, Lott identi
fies as “a peculiarly American structure of
feeling” (
, , ). The desire for what blackness meant (love in
Lott’s terms) and the guilt over the mistreatment of blacks on a politi-
cal and economic level led to a muted Euro-American anxiety and
guilt.
Stevens’ poem “Like Decorations . . .” (as it is often safely dubbed in
the criticism) has been taken as an “olio” – a Caribbean-African stew; a
hodge-podge medley; a vaudeville entertainment between the acts of a
minstrel (or burlesque) show. It also might be a generic transposition
from the decorated graves with their spiritual power and warding to the
genre of the poem – each section a little grave, perhaps. The poem is a
set of epigrams on a variety of cultural materials – eclectic, but not
African-American (except for the overarching allusion in the title).
However, because of that allusion, one could argue (rather painfully)
that Stevens saw himself as analogous to a black folk artist; he too is
making decorations in the aforementioned cemetery out of attractive
debris and whatever comes to hand (a “man on the dump” modernism).
Of course, Stevens is not (for reasons of both race and class) easily
masked as a black folk artist; nothing seems further from the plausible.
Yet he wants again and again to try. He puts himself into a black space,
appropriates a black formal, generic, and spiritual idea, and uses a term
for the process within the discourse of both races. Conversely, the poem
may be addressed over the heads of blacks to the Southern judge who
o
ffered him the title – a kind of old [white] boys’ jocularity. But further,
given the fact that this is not a particularly compelling work, and that it
may have been made up of fragments that could not, for whatever
reason, be developed into richer poems, Stevens may have chosen the
title word as a term for a lot of throwaway materials that could, with
“Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets
such a title, be uni
fied as lesser, yet witty, work and be excusable as such.
What Stevens’ title also assumes is that [white] readers would continue
to read the o
ffensive word as jaunty and amusing; this assumption is
perhaps what all readers have to be able, now, to confront, for its stark
revelations about di
fferent investments in racialized discourses from two
social communities with di
fferent power.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
If the anti-Semite charges that the Semitic spirit mongrelizes his
national culture, the Modern Pharisee complains that the mongrel-
ization is quite mutual . . . In fact, Jews being a minority people,
they are more mongrelized than mongrelizing.
Joel Blau, Atlantic Monthly,
1
In
, two years after Russian terrorists assassinated Czar Alexander
II, compelling (in the scapegoating and pogrom aftermath) a mass
migration of Russian and Polish Jews to the U.S. and England, Emma
Lazarus composed “The New Colossus.” This sonnet, now inscribed at
the base of the Statue of Liberty, contrasts old world and new, the
“brazen” Apollo at the harbor at Rhodes and the statue called “Mother
of Exiles” (
).
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
(Lazarus
, )
Lazarus took hold of many pseudo-scienti
fic descriptors of the immi-
grants of the late nineteenth century: Jews, Slavs, Italians, Irish, in such
flash-point words as “teeming,” suggesting overwhelming fertility, and
the enormous euphony of “wretched refuse,” connoting disease,
filth,
and garbage. The word “masses,” perhaps evoking the political radical-
ism that could plot and undermine, was neutralized by the vulnerability
of “huddled.” Lazarus, an upper class, assimilated Jew, worked to
contain the damage of these much-invoked negative words by the Great
Mother
figure, and her poem proposed that a patrician renewal of gen-
erosity would assist those “yearning to breathe free.”
2
Her own social
attitudes toward the new Jewish arrivals with their unassimilated
Orthodox oddness were less sanguine, and yet the subject of the
enounced (the Statue herself) seems to coincide with the subject of the
enunciation (Lazarus herself) in ways that ennoble the author
(Lindemann
, ). On the same topic – Diaspora and immigration,
the British poet Richard Aldington produced a set of parodic, ignoble
sonnets. One features an allegorical female rather di
fferent from the
“Mother of Exiles.”
Behold Columbia in her cosmic robes –
Illimitable Eros weds Osiris now –
Dagos and niggers, Polacks, Dutchmen, Jews.
(
, )
Here the United States becomes a sacred prostitute of the Hellenistic
decadence (a triple amalgam of Isis, Eros, Columbia), promiscuously
accepting “races” in rank catalogue. While all of the new immigrants
were caught up in this net of pseudo-scienti
fic politicized fantasy, Jews
are my topic here, along with the emergence of these discursive nodules,
the arrangement of “social evaluations” in poetry (Bakhtin/Medvedev
, ). This chapter is situated just before the “melting pot” meta-
phor became hegemonic; the metaphor and social evaluation on which
I shall focus is its alternative: “mongrel.”
About a million “premodern and preindustrial” Jews immigrated
from the Russian Empire (including Poland) between
and ,
with an upsurge in immigration after the anti-Semitic laws in Russia of
, after – (with new Russian pogroms), and after the rev-
olutionary attempt was broken. Then after the Russian Revolution
(
–), there were other surges (Dawidowicz , ). About
percent of this million went to the United States and
percent to
Britain. In general, the presence of Jews a
ffected discourses of the
modern, for there is a convergence, as Norman Finkelstein notes,
between the Jewish crisis of modernity – “Enlightenment,” assimilation,
secularization, the nature of tradition plausible in diasporic commu-
nities, including intermarriage with non-Jews – and modernity’s crisis
with Jews – civil rights and “emancipation,” scapegoating, anti-
Semitism.
3
Further, the
figure of the Jew as a cultural formation in mod-
ernity is one part of a “contrapuntal ensemble,” in Edward Said’s terms,
structured and maintained in relation both to Christian hegemony and
to nativist proto-fascism (Said
, ).
Henry James had evinced a fascinated distaste in
, walking
through the Lower East Side, anatomizing the “Hebrew conquest of
New York” (
), and crossing paths, according to Louis Zukofsky’s
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
provocative self-mythology, with himself as a baby (James
, ;
Zukofsky
, ). James runs through a catalogue of envious disgust
at the vitality, teeming populations, alien qualities, and sheer material-
ity of Jewish immigrant bodies (James
, –). Indeed many saw
the new Jewish immigrants as “our Yiddish conquerors” and “our
Asiatic invaders,” predicting a society “plagued” (a word condensing
discourses – both bothered and diseased) as a result of this “alien immi-
gration” (Holmes
, , ). As the diction choices show, the political
question of conquest and the medical/physical question of bodily
plague were especially keen; these two issues fuse in mainstream fears
of fertility and “teeming” on the one hand, and “race suicide” via mon-
grelization on the other.
4
The charges against the Jews were similar in
both the U.S. and England: an infestation of the social body and an
infesting particular body were featured in the attacks. These prejudices
enjoyed mobility; one negative stereotype seemed to evoke the other,
even, as Bryan Cheyette argues, when “semitic discourses” featured
contradictory claims about “the Jew,” as both modern and medieval,
both socialist and capitalist (
).
5
In a political category, Jewish particularism and separateness led to
the charge of being “a nation within a nation” with “divided loyalties,”
a group whose national allegiance could be questioned (Holmes
,
and
). Then there were other political fears – the claim that Jews had
“secret revolutionary societies” (
); in any event, they often became
symbols of “foreign radicalism” (Higham
, ). There were fears
that Jews could come to dominate society as it was; indeed, that they
already did. There were fears that Jews controlled the press and
finance,
fears that they had an international and transnational
financial network
that threatened national policy decisions (keywords here are cosmopoli-
tan, subterranean, and materialist) (Holmes
, , ; Lindemann
, ). In , in an economic slump and time of “political disillu-
sion,” Henry Ford began in
fluentially to champion the idea that “Jewish
money-kings” ran the world (
, ). Indeed, there were charges that
Jews had both induced the U.S. to enter the First World War, and then
had prolonged that war for the gain of Jews as a group (
). After the
First World War, the Bolshevik revolution, and a few short-lived left
coups in European states, the specter of left and socialist victories were
a red
flag, so to speak, to isolationist and conservative strands of
American politics. In the United States a strong nativist and
“Americanization” movement responded to the fear that “America,
Americans and Americanism are being crowded out of America” (
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
letter, in Higham
, ). A series of interlocking events – the Palmer-
inspired deportation of “subversives” (left-wing immigrants), the resur-
gence of the anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan, and
the renewal of immigration from Russia (in the wake of its civil war in
–), all propelled the climax of a xenophobic reaction that had
been underway throughout the period from
s (Dawidowicz ,
–).
The body of the imagined Jew, its ability to stain and taint those who
came in contact with it, combined with the medical ills of the poor,
induced a germ theory of immigrants as bacilli, a “
filthy, ricketty jetsam
of humanity” (Holmes
, ; from Roger Sherard – a British journal-
ist who investigated immigration to America). The immigrants were
taxed by one
fierce British commentator (Joseph Banister) with being
“semitic sewage” – odor, oiliness, “Asiatic” looks, and germ-carrying all
added up to danger from a Jew’s touch (Holmes
, ). The epi-
demics of cholera and typhus in New York City added to these fears, and
encouraged metaphors of pestilence being applied to immigrants
(Markel
, , ). There were anxieties about sexuality and hegemony
aroused by teeming and fertility, “a Jewry that had burst all bounds”
(James
, ). Yet those kinds of analyses or presentations of ruling
ideas were often couched in representations
filled with checkered admi-
ration for the Jews’ energy and verve, social and reproductive.
Finally, a racial purity argument emerges (paralleling eugenic ideas),
a concern with “race degeneration or race suicide” proposed in both
England and the States by a number of in
fluential thinkers. If intermar-
riage continued, encouraged by immigration, Anglo-Americans and
older immigrants would be committing “race suicide” (Higham
,
–). The “race” to which worried “Americans” already belonged,
the “Nordics,” feared the mixing of good white stock with the Slavs,
Jews, and Southern Europeans would create “a hybrid race of people as
worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central
America and Southeastern Europe” (Kenneth Roberts [
], cited by
Higham
, ). The fears of mongrelizing the white race, polluting
it, stunting it, weakening its hegemony, destroying it were bolstered by
such screeds as Alfred Schultz’s
book Race or Mongrel. Schultz is suc-
cinct, presenting, before one leaves the title page, “a theory that the fall
of nations is due to intermarriage with alien stocks: a demonstration that
a nation’s strength is due to racial purity: a prophecy that America will
sink to early decay unless immigration is rigorously restricted” (
, title
page). A similarly apocalyptic work, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
Great Race (
), enjoyed great credibility in the early twenties, influenc-
ing both journalists and scholarly writers, and popularizing the idea that
the mixing of ethnic groups produced and promoted “mongrelization”
and degeneracy in the “race” that counted. A third in
fluential work,
Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy
(
), comments that “the Nordic native American has been crowded
out with amazing rapidity by these swarming, proli
fic aliens . . .” (,
).
6
In
the National Origins Act restricted immigration to the
United States.
The issue of “racial mixing” or mongrelization even had some inter-
esting modulations in certain Jewish and philo-Semitic hands.
Enlightenment Jews themselves debated traditionally forbidden inter-
marriage with non-Jews and their loss of particularism. Indeed Maurice
Fishberg’s
nonpartisan ethnographic study of the Jews, focusing on
the processes of assimilation and the debunking of stereotypes, still con-
tains a sudden warning against Jewish “race suicide” that echoes, with
its own traditional Jewish particularism, “Nordic” thinking (Fishberg
, vii). Those Jews who were pro-intermarriage had to acknowledge
the “mongrel” charge; those who were against intermarriage could
find
themselves praised by nativist thinkers for their own “purity.” In a grand
but suspect philo-Semitic gesture in his general fulmination against
mixings and mongrelizings, Alfred Schultz o
ffers backhanded praise to
the Jews for not intermarrying, and thus not mongrelizing their “race”:
“Promiscuous crossing reduced Greece, Egypt, the Hindoos, the
Romans. Racial purity is the secret of the success of the Jews” (
, ).
Some Jews agreed: assimilation meant the loss of particularism, of “dis-
tinctiveness, separation, noble aloofness,” even the loss of the “Jewish
soul” (Blau
, and ). Thus there could be a confluence among
nativist thinkers and Jews supporting traditional exclusiveness. But even
so, most nativist discourse saw the Jews as destructive. Henry Pratt
Fairchild suggested (
) that Jews, no matter how distinctive and high-
minded, are simply a
ffiliated with the new (non-Nordic) immigration,
raising the problem of “race mixing” (of Northern Europeans – the
stable American stock – with Southern/Eastern Europeans), which
leads to the creation of the mongrel (
, ). Fairchild’s work is a
defense of the restrictions of the
immigration bill with its national-
origin clause.
Fairchild defends the
bill by attacking a galvanic, influential
counterweight to the mongrelization metaphor. In The Melting-Pot (
),
a play by Israel Zangwill, it is proclaimed: “America is God’s Crucible,
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-
forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis
Island, here you stand in your
fifty groups, with your fifty languages and
histories and your
fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long
like that, brothers, for these are the
fires of God you’ve come to – these
are the
fires of God” (, ). The utopian, universalizing metaphor
that God Himself will melt down all traditional political and social
antagonisms in the Crucible of America is repeated at the peroration of
the play. In The Melting-Pot Mistake, his polemical monograph, Fairchild
grouses that “The
figure [of the melting-pot] was a clever one – pictu-
resque, expressive, familiar, just the sort of thing to catch the popular
fancy.” Not incidentally, each of those
five adjectives is coded “Jewish.”
But he goes on to call the concept of assimilation “a fallacy” because it
violates racial and national “group unity” (Fairchild
, , , , ).
To cite a Jew against Israel Zangwill and his New Jew “mistake” of the
melting-pot, Fairchild selects the anti-assimilationist essay (
) of Joel
Blau, who sees assimilation as destructive of “distinctiveness” and par-
ticularism. Speci
fically the “Jewish soul” is put in danger. “This oriental
soul [is what] the Modern Pharisee [the anti-assimilationist, spiritually
inspired, but modern Jew] claims as his birthright, not to be traded away
for the contents of any pot – even though it be the Melting-Pot” (Blau
, ). The evocation of materialist Sadducees in the word “traded” is
also cutting. New Jews should, in his view, avoid giving up their birth-
right, as Esau did, for a mess of melting-pot pottage. It is mongreliza-
tion in another guise: Zangwill’s productive–creative metaphor of
“crucible” devolves to a culinary–familial trick – the Jacob–Esau inci-
dent of patriarchal blessing on the wrong Jew, evoking the muted
sexual/breeding metaphor in “mongrel.” This essay shows that the enti-
tlement of the “new” in New Jew was under debate in much the same
ways we have seen in the other groups this book has discussed.
Among Jews themselves, there were many social
fissures and conflicts:
between the established community of mainly German Jews and these
new immigrants, among the very Orthodox, or the very secular among
the immigrants and the nascent Reform Judaism of the already estab-
lished American Jews, between the di
fferent social classes in which Jews
were present. What ideology informed the position “New Jew”: was it
Zionism (
saw the first Zionist conference)? Was it adhesion to the
Pittsburgh platform (
) with its theology of reform – the tempering
of Chosen People claims, for example? Was it a resurgence of neo-
Orthodoxy based on the practices of the pre-Emancipation immigrants
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
from Eastern Europe? Was it secular Yiddishkeit? And was assimilation
a gain or a loss? (Joseph Blau
, passim). The socio-cultural struggles
within the Jewish community comprised Jewish modernity in the same
way that debates about African-Americans and the representation of
blacks were, in sum, the New Black.
Yet, as Tamar Garb shows, contemporaneous racial pseudo-science
argued that although Judaism could be set aside by conversion or by
enlightenment/emancipation and its secularizing trends, “Jewishness”
was
figured as an essence, and pathologized in a variety of ways (Garb
in Nochlin and Garb
, ). For Jews, the struggle for civil rights, the
advantages and costs of assimilation, the loss of particularism, secular-
ist thinking – issues all emerging from post-enlightenment, modernizing
Judaism (Haskalah) – could still be quali
fied by the evocation of this
essence. Hence writers of Jewish background often had to investigate the
social and personal meaning of their formation as Jews as part of their
entitlement as writers. For both Jews and non-Jews, the imaginary Jew
(as Linda Nochlin calls this
figure, although, like all stereotypes, it wasn’t
totally imaginary) played a rich ideological bogey-role and helped
provoke and solidify the articulation of a Christianized high modernism.
This chapter examines, via a social philology, several writers who felt
entitled to semiticized materials. Diagnosing and curing “the Jew,”
traveling to exile and back with “the Jew,” identifying with and against
the assimilated Jew, expressing ambivalence to and fascination with “the
Jew,” defending and attacking “the Jew” are all ideological activities that
contribute to a signi
ficant discursive site – semiticized discourse – in
some of the poetry of the teens and twenties (Identi
ficatory quotation
marks, Cheyette
). Materials constructing the New Jew – especially
assimilation and secularization, ethnic character, mixing and purity all
consolidated in the mongrel trope – emerge forcefully in poetry. Work of
Loy and Zukofsky, modernizing, assimilated Jews, will illustrate aspects
of a “Jewish crisis of modernity,” while Eliot, Moore and Pound will
serve as examples of modernity’s crisis with Jews (Finkelstein
, ).
7
Eliot used Jews and mongrels in linked poems from Poems
:
“Gerontion,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” and “Burbank with
Baedeker: Bleistein with Cigar.” Indeed, his analysis – that the barbar-
ians were at the gates, the vermin were boring from within, the patriciate
was displaced – was indebted to The Education of Henry Adams (originally
published in
, but republished in and reviewed by Eliot).
Adams’ perspective is consistent with Eliot’s quatrain poems: that the
Jew had so fully destabilized American culture that “our lot” (patrician
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
New England or elite culture) was now minoritized. The Education begins
with the trope of the shadow Jew, the double of the hero. Little Henry
Adams understands that American history is seemingly the property of
his own family (with its two Adams presidents); continuing to make that
history seemed to be his own destiny. Adams remarks he was scarcely less
branded if he had been “born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the
Temple, and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest,
under the name of Israel Cohen” (
, ). The bizarre metaphor, the
“circumcision of Adams,” evokes in one economic gesture both his sense
of being a chosen person, elected to the patriciate, and his sense of dis-
placement – even impotence – by the in
flux of a rival Chosen People.
This vision of circumcision with its subtext of unmanning, feminization,
and impotence is used to full advantage in Adams’ self-analysis of his
lacks.
This trope of the Jew reemerges when Adams considers the post Civil
War period. “[Adams] had become an estray; a
flotsam or jetsam of
wreckage; a belated reveler, or a scholar gipsy like Matthew Arnold’s.
His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow, –
not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird
Yiddish to the o
fficers of the customs, – but had a keener instinct, an
intenser energy, and a freer hand than he, – American of Americans,
with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an
education that had cost a civil war” (Adams
, ).
8
The whole
passage is a locus classicus of repulsion and attraction toward Jews: as
escapees from a wreckage, as parts of that wreckage, as “reeking” and
“snarling” with its animal connotations. The word “weird” applied to
the immigrants’ language, the word “furtive” applied to their a
ffect show
Adams’ unmixed repulsion, quali
fied by a small, grudging, jealous admi-
ration for their projected keenness and energy.
9
Issues about mongrel-
ization could be especially marked in language. In Henry Adams’
typology of national loss, “snarling” and “reeking” do not just color his
argument; they produce it. The direction of the overstatement is clear:
the foreign-born can easily overrun “o
fficers of the customs”; those who
are supposed to stop or to police them cannot. Thus American custom
and customary culture is under alteration. “Nordic” and Anglo-Saxon
American hegemony has been circumscribed by the circumcised.
This argument was given credibility by Eliot’s poetic creation of
figures who embody “our” culture (the Burbank figure in the one poem,
the man punningly described as “the host” in the other). These have
been turned from possessors to the disinherited, just as the un
fit (Irish,
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
Negro, Jew and New Jew, New Women) had become possessors. The end
of Anglo-American Christian culture is stingingly proposed in Eliot’s
works; with two related causes: mongrelization and a Hebrew invasion.
10
An evocation of these materials – and more – is o
ffered by Eliot in his
poetry in the
s. Eliot professed and validated anti-Semitic represen-
tations, exhibiting a wavering graph of hostility, high in these poems,
lower in The Waste Land and “Sweeney Agonistes,” high again in After
Strange Gods. He also seems to have made a distinction between his use of
the “mongrel” topos and his use of the “Jew.” When the Jew is part of a
heteroglossic mongrel scene, Eliot maintains an interior debate through
the mid-twenties on possible cultural gains and losses from the vibrant,
if suspect, powers of this
figure; he decides by the thirties that mongrels,
too, must be rejected. But always, when Jews stand alone, without other
mongrels, they are reviled.
Many professional critics, reading Eliot’s poems through the years,
have acknowledged speci
fic anti-Semitic remarks in specific lines, but
had seen the materials as local, not constitutive. Some readers have
claimed that if anti-Semitic prejudice did get expressed, it was given up,
in the main, when Eliot turned to a formal Episcopal confession. This
claim is belied by After Strange Gods (
); indeed this odi et amo relation
settles into a chronic anti-Semitism by the time of the conversion, but in
the essays sparring within Christianity in the
s, Eliot’s animus is
redirected against varieties of Protestantism that are not Anglican and
against any forces preventing Anglicanism from ful
filling its universalis-
tic claims. Indeed, his argument might be paraphrased as a resistance to
the “mongrelization” of Anglicanism with other forms of Christianity.
Christopher Ricks deplores Eliot’s anti-Semitism, yet his essential atti-
tude is an ironized, hurt tolerance. As an unconscious moralist, but a
moralist still, the Eliot constructed by Ricks makes you think about your
own collusions with prejudice (Ricks
). In the past few years several
critics have set forth elaborate and rich culturalist readings that address
the social discourses upon which Eliot drew in his semiticized represen-
tations. In his
reassessment, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary
Form, Anthony Julius has put to rest most of the exculpatory readings,
with a sustained and passionate analysis tracking the deep textures, dis-
courses, and uses of anti-Semitic material in Eliot, whose tactics he char-
acterizes with dour irony as “virtuosity” – taking stale conventions and
anti-Semitic clichés and reanimating them into art (Julius
, ).
11
Bryan Cheyette explores Eliot’s discourses among an array of “construc-
tions of the Jews” in England during the Victorian and early modern
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
period (Cheyette
). And Maud Ellmann reviews the history of the
anti-Semitic charge, contextualizing Eliot’s thought, thus honoring its
ambivalences, and showing bibliographic evidence for Eliot’s textual
revisions (Ellmann
). My contribution in the mode of social philol-
ogy will be to elaborate how Eliot manoeuvers the timbres and strata of
cultural material through poetic form and then to unbraid “the Jew” and
the related
figure of mongrel, black, and Irish.
“Gerontion,” a meditative poem spoken by an old man in a “decayed
house,” a “rented house” opens Poems
with an announcement of a
cultural incubus. “And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner, /
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp.” The word spawned – with its
reference to the slimy eggs of
fish or aquatic animals – is thoroughly dis-
paraging. The also notable small “j” on Jew was an orthographic habit
that Eliot gave up only much later.
12
“Squats” makes an insult with its
animal and excremental precision, because “merds,” a nearby word,
and other (so to speak) wretched refuse are very much at issue. In a par-
allel way, Pound repeatedly associated Jews with excrement; in a resent-
ful comment from
about [“Yakobb”] Epstein to John Quinn
(himself no stranger to anti-Semitisms), Pound excoriates his painting as
a “merditious, excrementitious, Matisse and shitsmearish portrait” –
aside from “shit,” the obvious added word, the word “smear” is notably
resonant, meaning to stain by sticky, greasy, or dirty substance, and also
to defeat, to destroy (a reputation) (Pound
, ).
“Sweeney Among the Nightingales” and “Burbank with Baedeker:
Bleistein with Cigar” followed in Poems
; they were seen by Eliot as
works “intensely serious,” and “among the best I have ever done” (Eliot
, ; Feb. , ). “Sweeney” and “Burbank /Bleistein” are part
of the human menagerie of humors creatures whose traits and interac-
tions Eliot was parodying in early poems that parallel Sinclair Lewis in
his
Babbitt: satiric social anatomy (Sigg : –; cf. Eliot ,
). These poems offer a thorough-going analysis of the intertwined
decay of Europe and the U.S., as a visitor from the States, “Burbank with
Baedeker”
finds a set of rootless Jews, one nominally British, and one
nominally American, have preceded him to Italy. In Italy, the plain
Jamesean tourist Burbank, has fallen into the sexual and/or cultural
clutches of a Venetian and venereal “Princess,” voluptuous and wol
fish
Volupine. The poem makes sounds which will resemble the sexual scene
on the river in The Waste Land – “Her shuttered barge / Burned on the
water all the day.” Sexual license of women, impotence of men, and
failing historical hegemony are linked. Indeed, the regulation of women
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
and gender to achieve male potency and social health is a point that has
been repeated numerous times in many modernist texts.
The poem had begun with a pastiched epigraph whose exaggerated,
feminized, “gay” language contrasts with the stolid quatrains of the
poem. A homosexual turn of language (campy pastiche),
filled with an
exciting and mysterious heteroglossia, seems to o
ffer, but to bracket
another position besides that of the onlooker Burbank from which this
material could be judged – the position of gossipy, scandal-monger. This
position, it appears, does not lead to cultural critique, but to a renewed
complicity. Eliot, in contrast, proposed the poems critically. Logopoeia –
a rhetoric of heteroglossia, ironic swings, combined social levels and reg-
isters, esoteric diction – is used by Eliot in these quatrain poems to signal
a critical rupture of poetic practice from debased romanticisms and
from sexualities considered debased. Logopoeia can function in his work
as an attack on, or a call to order for, the e
ffete and the feminine.
13
The
poems’ very quatrains had an ideological cast for Eliot and Pound, who
had at this era made a formal compact for this form as against “general
floppiness,” the softening of vers libre, the tepid sweetness of Amy
Lowell’s poetry combined with her appropriative cultural ambitions
(Pound
, ). That narrative of hard and soft has been lucidly and
e
ffectively gendered by Cassandra Laity; these poems, thus, not only told
truth, they were, in an agreed-upon fashion, “masculine” in prosody
(Laity
, –).
“Burbank/Bleistein” shows a signi
ficant nexus of semiticized ref-
erences and discourses, set forth in the deep texture of the poetry, and
available through the reading strategy of social philology.
14
The par-
alyzed observer, Burbank, is contrasted with another tourist,
Bleistein.
But this or such was Bleistein’s way:
A saggy bending of the knees
And elbows, with the palms turned out,
Chicago Semite Viennese.
A lusterless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles,
The Jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs. The boatman smiles,
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
Princess Volupine extends
A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand
To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights,
She entertains Sir Ferdinand
Klein.
15
(Eliot
, –)
The female predator – and possibly prostitute – Volupine is located
between two Jews – an American new immigrant (“Chicago Semite
Viennese” ) so low in the evolutionary scale that he mimics “protozoic
slime,” and a European, “Sir Ferdinand Klein,” a Rothchild
figure.
16
Why would Eliot depict two Jews? For one, this literalizes the sense of
being overrun, the displacement of Burbank sexually, economically, and
culturally. It summarizes the bicultural problem – Jews immigrating
both to England and to the United States. The two Jews in turn relate
to the longstanding distinction between rich and poor Jews, between
(loosely) Sephardim and Ashkenazim, or between two generations of
immigrants. The attack on two classes also corresponds to a meretricious
question (debated in Britain) during the multi-decade debate over Jewish
immigration asking whether the lower-class Jew, with his diseases and
cheap pestiness, or the upper-class Jew with his cosmopolitan
financial
manipulations was a worse menace (Loewenstein
, ). In this poem,
Eliot echoes this debate, ending with a condemnation of both Jews.
Bleistein does not possess anything in a directly sexual way (though his
-ay rhymes take over Volupine’s), but his posture, protrusions, and slime
de
file an elegant depiction of Venice by his very gaze. Bleistein cum
“slime” is the classic stereotyped “sheeney,” economically and sexually
parasitic. The stereotype of the lecherous Jew was in play (Lindemann
, ). For slime, swampiness, fungus, and other things that are
somehow overfertile and verminous at once are all a
ffiliated, in many
representations, with the Jew. Robert Casillo has traced this set of images
in his study of Ezra Pound, for whom the Jew became,
finally, an “ulti-
mate contamination” (Casillio
, ).
17
In a chapter about the
regressive sexuality of slime/swamp, Casillo eloquently develops the
ways slime indicates sexual promiscuity, borderlessness, and the rejection
of “patriarchal restriction and authority” (
).
18
Given such images of
Jewish bodies as impurity, one can appreciate such banal propaganda
poetry as James Oppenheim’s
“Hebrews” with its image of lyric
flesh as clean water: “I come of a mighty race . . . mighty race! mighty
race! – my
flesh, my flesh / Is a cup of song, / Is a well in Asia”
(Oppenheim
, , ellipsis in original).
19
Oppenheim attempts to
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
reposition the word “swarms” to apply to Christians: “I am of the ter-
rible people, I am of the strange Hebrews . . . / Amongst the swarms
fixed like the rooted stars, my folk is a streaming Comet” (). The poem
closes with a Christological metaphor, claiming that Jews are, as a group,
cruci
fied by Christians. “And our twenty centuries in Europe have the
shape of a Cross / On which we have hung in disaster and glory.” (ibid.).
Eliot’s Chicago Jew, taxed with both evolutionary (protozoic) lowness
and apeishness, is also, as slime, a
figural representation of the (tainted)
spermatic discharge of a marked or circumcised penis.
20
His prop, the
cigar, is a smoke that has had its tip cut o
ff. Despite Burbank’s attempts
at sexual–cultural possession and assertion, he has been preempted.
Venice/Volupine have already been whored, and by Jews. Her immoral-
ity and decline and Burbank’s belatedness in visiting her seem peculiarly
intertwined. Sexual contact with Volupine opens Burbank to a taint, a
disease, an infection both sexually and culturally destructive.
For if Burbank has been unmanned by indulging in sensual bliss, he
has also been frightened by fears of infection. The poem seems to be a
late re
flection of a discourse surrounding syphilis, which was a social and
medical issue in the
s (Showalter , ).
21
In European litera-
tures, syphilis had di
fferent discursive elements. Eliot’s poem reflects
two: fear of the foreign prostitute as carrier of the disease and “scape-
goat for male sexual anxieties”: in Eliot’s poem the prostitute is displaced
upwards to a diseased princess. And the second was the metaphor of the
Jew as carrier. As Jay Geller tracks this, “historical, structural, and rep-
resentational connections are drawn between Jews and syphilis, usually
through the mediation of representations of the prostitute . . .; in the
early twentieth century syphilis became indelibly associated with Jews”
(Geller
; cited from typescript , ).
The threat involved an animalistic Jew able to taint whole populations
– a polluter of a well of purity that Oppenheim’s pallidly pure lyric tries
to answer. Sexual o
ffenses and offensiveness were central to early twen-
tieth-century conceptions of Jewishness, in part through the evocation
of Orientalist stereotypes. Princess Volupine is herself fundamentally
diseased. The rare word phthisic literally means tubercular; her disease is
consumption in several
figurative as well as literal ways. She consumes
things (which explains her alliance with Jews and bankers), and she con-
sumes men. And in her diseased state, she is also a displaced version of
the damaging trope of the blood-poisoning and syphilis (like tuberculo-
sis, a progressive, wasting disease), widely represented as related to Jews
and to their primary ineradicable taint. Having fallen into Volupine’s
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
clutches, Burbank will in consequence have been tainted by all her
former consorts. Since they are Jews, they are carriers of infection. Thus
Burbank is deeply threatened: he will be Jewi
fied, diseased, unmanned;
like Agamemnon in the related “Sweeney” poem, he is given a mortal
blow in the most intimate place. Syphilis, or sexual (consuming) disease
is part of Eliot’s analysis that cultural and historical decay enters through
the lower body, the lower orders or classes, and lower people (here, Jews).
In the veiled associations that a social philology can disengage, the tran-
segmental drift into crypt words – sick–phthisic–syphilitic – are cultural
work done by rhetorical, aural, and connotative suggestions, veiled
traces and tacit allusions deep in the poetic texture that o
ffer Eliot’s
socio-cultural interpretation through his poetic practices.
The Venetian lion itself has been
fleeced, and be-fleaed (verminized)
by association with Jews. And “The smoky candle end of time //
Declines.” The corresponding pun on Klein, who is one de-kleining con-
jugation of the verb “to jew,” is made textually; his smallness parallels
the unmanned waxy candle burning down. The association of decline
with a Jew is also made by situating the internal rhyme words “Declines”
and “Klein” in unusual and unusually eloquent prosodic positions. The
words both occur at the very end of a sentence, yet each is doubly
enjambed over a line break and at the very beginning of a new quatrain.
These are the only two words to be so treated in all of Eliot’s contempo-
raneous quatrain poems: by this tactic, decline and the Jew are prosod-
ically fused in the fundamental poetic texture. This reading of prosody
in a social philology corresponds to the endemic analysis that linked
decline to Jewish presence.
To Sir Klein, this (be)knighted person, is attached the word piles. Now
piles means the posts driven into a marshy (slimy) part of a river or sup-
ports for a dock, and it suggests a sinister waterfront scene compounded
of vermin and commerce. Indeed, Ezra Pound used this term, in a par-
allel sense, in his complaint (
–) in Patria Mia that the United States
is being taken over: only Henry James, in Pound’s view, had “the uprights
. . . the piles that are driven deep, and through the . . .
floating bog of
our national confusion” (Pound
, ). The scene is the same as in
Eliot’s poem: there is a mushy, inchoate arena whose swampy suction
makes clarity almost impossible; the artist with a masculine and analytic
strength drives the piles down into this swamp. But piles magnetizes an
array of other interesting de
finitions, from spike, dart, shaft; to a heap
of things; to a heap of money; to a minting (money-making) apparatus;
to a downy hairy wool, itself a pubic trope (recalling, in Woolf ’s The Years,
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
the epiphany around the hair of the Jew in the bath). Finally, in the
plural, one understands piles, a disease of the lower rectum, or hemor-
rhoids. Money and lower-body materials are hereby allied. The fascinat-
ing and disgusting Jewish body, activated by the deep connotations of a
word, o
ffers figures through which Eliot made a statement about the
slimy, verminous control by Jews of “the lot” – everything. This is again
familiar material in anti-Semitic discourse.
Beyond the sexual materials, Jews bore a heavy discursive burden:
they were seen as criminal, swindlers, crass, aggressive, dishonest, para-
sitic. In the poem, both the Shylock allusion to the Rialto and the hemi-
stich “Money in furs” stand for this; Eliot draws upon the sexual/somatic
and the economic topoi surrounding Jews. (One might hear an
encrypted, mocking “monkey in furs.”) The Jews’ economic deceit and
their tribalism coupled with their inexplicable (animal or intuitive)
energy, led to the endlessly deployed working postulate of their transna-
tional economic conspiracy. For instance, read via a social philology, the
list in apposition around Bleistein (“Chicago Semite Viennese”) uses the
lack of commas to blur the words listed, thus representing the stereo-
typed rootlessness and shifting allegiances of the Jew. The lack of gram-
matical consistency (two proper nouns and one adjective, but one city
and two cultures) also makes the line, like the character, hard to pin
down, yet crossing semantically on the word “Semite.”
Eliot’s Jew “underneath the lot” is also a double political statement.
The Jew is the lowest of the low, scurrying around in that low space with
rodents, beneath contempt. Yet “underneath the lot” intimates the most
controlling, basic and primary, a prime mover. This belief that Jews were
a secret power behind events was a recurrent ideological fantasy
(Lindemann
, ). “Underneath the lot” had a particular sugges-
tiveness in
and just before. For it was in that year that The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion – a notable forgery – achieved English translation and
wide circulation. This set of materials, variously translated into the
European languages between
and through the s suggest that
there is a secret Jewish government with a well-articulated plan to
achieve world domination, taking over Gentile states by fomenting polit-
ical unrest, subverting morality, and inciting to class warfare.
22
Norman
Cohn points out that “In Britain there had been talk of a Jewish world-
conspiracy for a couple of years before the Protocols appeared [trans-
lated in
]”; it was fueled by a very literate and presumably informed
response to the Bolshevik revolution (Cohn
, ). Thus it is more
than plausible, as J. A. Morris argues, that the impact of this conspiracy
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
theory on Eliot is registered in the poems he wrote in
and .
Indeed, the Protocols were known in America by
(Higham ,
). Henry Ford began a campaign in May against Jews, publish-
ing the Protocols in The Dearborn Independent, and circulating the propa-
ganda through Ford dealerships. Although he was compelled to retract
and apologize in
, Ford had propelled a major anti-Semitic cam-
paign (Dawidowicz
, –).
This survey of cultural discourses and their textual emergence in the
“detail of composition” reveals that Eliot’s poem condenses longstand-
ing and chronic stereotypes of Jews with a recent triggered activation of
the materials in the post-World War I period (Williams
, ). It was
Eliot’s “seriousness” to o
ffer – in metaphor, unpunctuated metonymy,
prosodic choices, deep connotations, and line break – a condensed social
debate drawing on discourses about Jews, prevalent in the United States
in Eliot’s youth in every site from dime novels for boys to sociological
analysis and scholarship, and present in the England of his chosen resi-
dence. He may, indeed, have been drawing upon two distinct discourses
– from the period of his youth, in which anti-Jewish sentiment is
expressed as a wariness of and disgust with teeming hordes of immi-
grants, and from the inter-war period: a revulsion against the European
other, the scapegoat for the economic disorder of that period, and the
focus of political anxiety about failing hegemony and social change.
But these “Semites” do not stand alone in Eliot; they work within and
near another
figure: amalgamating Black, Irish, and the lower classes.
This is a mongrelized
figure whose depiction is the climax of Poems .
There are links between the Sweeney and Bleistein poems, between
mongrel and Jew. Deep topographic associations are activated, given the
kinetic stance of the two characters. In the one poem, “Ape-neck
Sweeney spreads his knees / Letting his arms hang down to laugh” (
).
There is a matching posture in “Burbank with Baedeker: Bleistein with
Cigar”: Bleistein’s “saggy bending of the knees / And elbows” (
). The
posture evoking, as we shall see, the apeish Irish and the minstrel, can
relate this character to the “krumm” or crooked and bent posture, a
stereotype of the Jew. There is yet another link. Looking up “sheeney”
in the OED gives, of course, Jew, apparently from a pronunciation of a
Slavic word for Jew. The Hebrew letter shin
ù appears on the windows
of kosher butchers, and may be a source. When one looks up “sweeney,”
one gets a primary meaning “atrophy of the shoulder muscles of the
horse” and the
figurative “stiffness of pride and self-conceit” – thus asso-
ciating this name with the “sti
ff-necked people,” a characterization of
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
the ancient Israelites (by Yahweh and by Moses) in Exodus
: , : ,
and elsewhere. Through these deep denotations, the name “Sweeney”
can drift across to sheeney. These chains are also fused through gender
fears – whether erect or “krumm,” this sexualized lout triumphs over
women.
Like Sweeney and his crew in “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” in
“Burbank/Bleistein,” “Jew” is proposed as the antonym of real culture
(classical, sacred, invested with magni
ficence), by virtue of beast-like,
cosmopolitan, and rootless qualities.
23
Eliot’s erasure of long traditions
of Jewish learning as culture is notable. So Bleistein may suggest the
fullest development of Sweeney, in a continuum of urban horrors. Or
the Bleistein
figure may embody far worse cultural suggestions of decay
and destabilization. The materials are mobile, somewhat unstable. T. S.
Eliot can be tempted by and even admire elements of Sweeney, the
mongrel
figure, but he draws the line at Bleistein and Klein, the New
Jews.
Beyond the “sheeney” association, Sweeney is an Irish name, and the
character magnetizes an Irish stereotype. In both England and America,
in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Irish had moved, in
popular consideration, from depictions that made them into simple
peasants, and feckless, sometimes witty drunks, to apes. In “historical
physiognomy,” they were depicted visually as simianized
figures with flat
nose, long projecting lip, sloping forehead, and forward jutting jaw, vis-
ually coded as inferior. These codes were loosely based on a spectrum
depicting species evolution. So as “species” went, the Irish were subhu-
man, “white chimpanzees” (Curtis
, ). This mid-Victorian stereo-
type of the savage or simian Irishman, “the gorilla metaphor[,] cropped
up often after the outbreak of rebellion in
, followed by the Anglo-
Irish guerrilla war of
–.” In this, Sweeney seems like a post-
rebellion emergence of longstanding cultural materials involving threats
to British hegemony.
But ape-necked, spotted or freckled, and therefore perhaps “Irish” as
Sweeney is, he is also spotted or polluted, animal-like: “The zebra stripes
along his jaw / Swelling to maculate gira
ffe” (Eliot , ). With his
apeish posture – or is it a strained vision of a vaudeville singer, a
Charleston dancer, a minstrel? – and with the geographical origin of
these animals in mind, it seems equally likely to see him as “African.”
Sweeney may then allude to the “African” and “African-American” pres-
ence in early modernism, ambivalently viewed: the Harlem Renaissance
in America; the use of African art as an inspiration for cubism and artis-
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
tic innovation, jazz clubs, and the sensual license that any new popular
music encodes. That a link between Irish and black obtained in Eliot’s
mind is visible in textual waverings in “Ballade pour la grosse Lulu” from
July
, an unfinished comic work. “The Outlook gives an interview /
An interview from Booker T. / Entitled ‘Up from Possum Stew!’ / Or
‘How I set the nigger free!’” (Eliot
, ). The work parodies other
public
figures, too, all swept away in Lulu’s invitation to come to “the
Whore House Ball.” The poem originally had, in the place of Booker T.
Washington, Edward Bok, editor of The Ladies Home Journal, and in the
place of the comments about Washington, the lines “Called
kinds of
Irish Stew / And ‘How to
fill a Christmas Sock.’” Eliot’s parody of cul-
tural enterprise can substitute “Irish” for “Possum” stew, and unify
women’s magazine banality, Irishness and blacks. These are metonymi-
cally linked by him in one saucy farrago. There are many reasons for con-
sidering Eliot a writer who wanted at once to be and to resist such a
figure
as Sweeney; his own “Possum” nickname is a reminder of his tempted
revulsion, his struggle with the conglomerate title to writing provided in
these outrageous vital
figures. Their entitlement induces his fascination
and his despair.
Thus in some ways, for some purposes, in some lights, Sweeney is the
Black and Irish Bleistein; Bleistein is the Jewish Sweeney. This suggestive
convergence of despisable/sometimes a little attractive groups – Irish
and black and even Jewish – in the
figure of Sweeney, I take to be a very
signi
ficant moment, both ideologically for Eliot, and critically for us. By
the use of these discursive evocations, Eliot builds a shimmering under-
text inside his poem, constructing an interplay of veiled and tacit social
suggestions which also have a way of being self-denying – the
figure is
not “really” Irish, not “really” African, and barely Jewish; being a little
of both and all, and yet neither or none of one particular type. Eliot has
created a poetic mongrel (“mélange adultère de tout”), activating, and
activated by the discourse of the mongrel in contemporary thought
(Eliot
, ).
The question what discourses are encoded in “Sweeney Among the
Nightingales” demands a plural answer. Sweeney is a white “Negro,”
and a “maculate” (stained/blackened) white, o
ffering some intertwining
of two commonplace simian stereotypes for the primitive louts that are
somehow, barbarously, at – or inside – the gates. His sexual triumph (like
that of “Sweeney Erect”) is apparent, and is posed in the most degrad-
ing terms: sex is coterminous with a low drunkenness, prostitution, and
strange positions.
24
The social triumph may be in destabilizing imperial
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
claims (the Irish Sweeney), in displacing Eurocentric culture (the
Christian Church and Agamemnon
figure displaced by Black Sweeney),
or in displacing an enervated patriciate with animalistic, crude, and
cruel sexual acts. Thus Sweeney is a multi-ethnic
figure with sexual/
social implications. He is a
figure who encodes attitudes toward threat-
ening politically active races, classes, and groups who are (in terms the
poem proposes) beneath Culture in one sense while exhibiting a lurid,
complete, and tempting culture of pleasure, avariciousness, and sadism.
Eliot’s mongrelized
figure is invested with allusive mixes of lower classes
and aggressive ethnicities.
25
It is also clear that the “Sweeney”
figure
embodies Eliot’s terri
fic and mobile ressentiment – and admiring jeal-
ousy. The mongrel is admired and deplored; it destroys and revitalizes.
It is sexually potent and culturally active. It has entitlement; it is entitled
new.
This personage is surrounded by a set of low life: sexualized female
characters, whorish and slattern (nightingale is, after all, slang for pros-
titute). A woman falls o
ff Sweeney’s lap, into a revealing tarty pose.
Another, “Rachel née Rabinovich,” is spotlighted as greedy and aggres-
sive; her “murderous paws” – exaggerated in their object, a bunch of
grapes – continue the animal motif and the sense of threat. New
Woman/Jew woman/lewd woman are peculiarly intertwined. As else-
where in Eliot, insurgent females, rank sexuality, and the cunningly ani-
malistic are fused.
The “silent vertebrate in brown” – an onlooker – is attracted and yet
withdraws; his back and forth movement forms the center of the poem:
tempted by the two whorish women, yet declining the “gambit,” exiting,
yet found “leaning in” at the window as “Branches of wistaria /
Circumscribe a golden grin.” He seems to be deciding whether to be an
animal, or to be a distanced, but implicated voyeur. This character is a
peculiar fusion: of “brown” man (with the “grin” of stereotyped repre-
sentations of blacks) and of a Jew (“heavy eyes”). The “golden grin” may
suggest the golden-toothed (another stereotype of the Jew), as Anthony
Julius suggests (
, ); the nearby word “circumscribe” can emphati-
cally produce an encrypted “circumcise.” This
figure is, like Sweeney
himself, another of the mongrels (poetically depicted fusions of two
social groups) who inhabit this poem. But I also take this tempted, with-
drawing, negotiating character to be an encoded self-portrait. Eliot pro-
duces some self-image of himself as a potential mongrel too – a minstrel,
if not in blackface (as his characters were to be in “Sweeney Agonistes”)
at least in a brown suit, a sexually tempted witness of this drama. At this
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
point, the analysis echoes the
findings of Bryan Cheyette: that many of
the British writers he discusses (bridging Victorian to modern times) for
their constructions of “the Jew” had a secret identi
fication with the Jew,
as well as a fear of being Judaicized. In Eliot’s case, he desires the enti-
tlement these New
figures claim, and he wants to claim the passions and
energies of their presence for his work in poetry and culture.
This zoo is apparently, by its very obliviousness, dishonoring trium-
phant moments of high culture: the Convent of the Sacred Heart,
Agamemnon’s sexualized, vulnerable death, the traditional heroic and
martyred. “Dishonoured” is the word that Eliot proposes at the end of
the poem for the fate of the European tradition, as the “nightingales”
(literal and
figurative, actual birds and slutty women) emit excrementory
“liquid siftings” on the murdered body of a Greek hero, back from the
war – here a sense of betrayal of the male martyrs of World War I
enters.
26
Eliot used a Protestant hymn stanza and a logopoeic diction of intel-
lectual superiority and playful sourness to suggest that society is now in
the hands of
figures greedy, murderous, and female; vacuous, diseased,
and subhuman; phallic, simian, and triumphant: the Sweeney–sheeney,
the Irish ape, the maculate African, the grasping Rachel, the Hebrew
slime – all these representations bound and connected to each other. In
the matching poem, the erosion of a “pure” America or a “pure”
Europe by Jews and other mongrel peoples had radically displaced
Burbank. Burbank is wandering, expatriated, disenfranchised; he has
become nomad, or no man. He is virtually a shadow Jew, parallel to that
figure haunting Henry Adams (or Ezra Pound).
In his early work, Eliot was trying to
find and to negotiate a line
between poetry of ideas (which he rejected) and poetry of ideology
(which he embraced): overt espousal versus subtle deployment (Eliot,
, –). Eliot’s cultural work involved the sub rosa threading of
ideologically charged materials and chronic socio-cultural stereotypes
into the poetic texture (by allusion, metonymy, prosodic placement, deep
denotation, transegmental aural drift, and other tactics), tactics that can
be read by a social philology. He could reject “ideas” in poetry, since he
absorbed social issues into his poetry inside the poetic texture itself. The
fusing of racialized, ethnic/nationalistic, and Semitic tropes in one
figure
(Sweeney–Bleistein) or in an unstable compound – mongrel and Semite
as better and worse – made an ideological conglomerate which could
only with di
fficulty be taxed with the imposition of one capital letter Idea,
such as “The Jew.” Indeed, for many years such interpretations seemed
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
like all too interested overreadings, vulnerable to the charge of culture-
less oversimpli
fication or failed aesthetic sense. Hence the visibility of
Eliot’s anti-Semitism was mysti
fied and intermittent in commentary for
almost seventy years, although contemporary culturalist criticism now
does not neglect this matter. A social philology shows how these unstable
ideas are visible in “the detail of composition” wherein “a certain social
structure, a certain history discloses itself ” (Williams
, ).
The Waste Land is a poem making a spiritual quest through the debris
of contemporary urban civilization which seems to make no accusation
against one speci
fic group for the dissolutions visible – there are certainly
no accusations of the strength and animus of the “Burbank/Bleistein”
poem, although the same kinds of characters move through the site. In
The Waste Land, female power, sexual longing and frustration, abortion
and female control of fertility are clear targets, but by cutting out a par-
ticularly swell passage (on Fresca), Eliot/Pound also somewhat represses
the thought that blames the New Woman and her literary–cultural pre-
tensions for some of the ills of society. Now that the manuscript is avail-
able, the reference is both there and not there; a critic can foreground it,
or not. In the published poem, the Sweeney
figure is quite reduced, with
one line or two. His ilk is much more present in the original beginning,
a scene of pub-crawling with character-types which later emerge in
“Sweeney Agonistes.” Some responsibility for the pervasive atmosphere
of despair and loss falls on the
figure of the irresponsible lower middle
class – the dim clerks and their debased, rapacious sexual encounters
with turned-o
ff “nymphs.” All in all, The Waste Land, like “Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley” makes sexuality much more of a cause and symptom of cul-
tural decay than ethnicity. Women are deregulated, hysteria is rampant,
the grail legend bespeaks a wound to generation and phallic potency.
So too the Jew in the published The Waste Land occurs intermittently,
and is not named as such, yet the
figuration is present. But the Jewish
danger is spoken in a muted fashion: in the notes, in German in a
passage from Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos, as if a code that some might be able
to read – a conspiratorial use of poetic texture (Eliot
, ). These are
the “hooded hordes” who are coming across from Eastern Europe – an
image that condenses the fear of Bolshevik Revolution and the “Asiatic”
(arguably Jewish) overspill into the white domain that were the subject
of Lothrop Stoddard’s recent fulminations (
). These hordes emphati-
cally suggest the Jew, and the unleashing of unregulated populations,
including a suggestively “demotic” list of cities without commas, as in
“Chicago Semite Viennese” – “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
London” – but Jews as such (by name) are not adduced as a mainspring
of this social and historical moment of potential chaos, as they are in the
“Burbank/Bleistein” poem, written at about the same time (
, ). Jews
are present and absent. However, this sense of being overrun is a strong
motive for the work: the shards constructed (“shored”) are a jerry-built
wall propping up “my ruins” against further incursions (
). One could
see The Waste Land, therefore, as a poem whose shardlike texture walls
out the alien, degenerate face of “Asiatic invaders” of whom the shard-
like texture is also an interior symptom.
The Waste Land proposes (as is well known) a conservative analysis of
cultural decline in an exciting heteroglossic form and texture, thus o
ffer-
ing a synoptic struggle with analysis and symptom poised in scintillating
interplay. The stakes are very high: The Waste Land stages a struggle for
the sign between the mongrel and the pure. Soon after, in “Sweeney
Agonistes” Eliot tries to recuperate the energies of the mongrel for
popular theater. That work is, in certain ways, a second Waste Land.
There was to be no other. The mongrel was a source of danger that over-
whelmed the pleasures of using it. Eliot identi
fied with the forces of pas-
sionate primitives that he associated with the Jew and the immigrant
mongrel. He needed to capture that force and sever it from its apparent
owners. So he grasped the mongrel as intimating a better culture with
more positive ends when the primitive was properly channeled and
focused, and he rejected the Jew.
From
through , Eliot underwent a period of increasing
Christianization, in which more and more of his social, ethical, and cul-
tural analysis solidi
fied into one “complex”; indeed, in he would
argue with a mournful rage that we lack something that primitive soci-
eties have: “the operation of a social–religious–artistic complex” (Eliot
, ). It is clear that he is directing his efforts and best energy to
a
ffirming such an anti-secular complex for modernism and modernity.
At
first, post-conversion, Eliot said “What I want is a literature which
should be unconsciously, rather than deliberately and de
fiantly,
Christian” (
[“Religion and Literature” ], ). But just a few
years later (
), he shifted from unconscious to conscious Christianity,
as the threats of fascist Germany on one side and mass (“mob”) democ-
racy and liberalism on the other became equated in his analysis. It is
clear that his e
fforts as a Christian apologist were increasingly devoted
to articulating and inspiring adhesion to a renewed “complex” under the
aegis of Anglicanism, rejecting the plausibility of any other of the world
religions, liberalism, free-thinking secularisms, paganism, not to speak of
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
the mob mind of any stripe, and fascism – though not rejecting patri-
cian authority over others. In his arguments, the superiority of a “con-
scious” (and non-dissident – non-mongrelized) Christianity and its
humbly powerful “clerisy” is assumed; other religions and their poten-
tial for ethics are given no discussion when the “Kingdom of Christ” is
assumed (Eliot
, ). His argument seems intra-Christian, for a
certain amount of tight-lipped hostility is expressed about the range of
non-Anglican Protestants; indeed, his call “to a
ffirm the Universal
Church on earth” is directed at them (
–; ).
In this phase of Eliot’s polemical arguments for a Christian culture,
the hostility to both Jews and immigrants (as related mongrels) is more
muted, but persistent, as one can see in After Strange Gods: a Primer of
Modern Heresy. The book was never republished after its initial appear-
ance in
, and yet as Anthony Julius documents thoroughly, the sen-
timents it contains were never repudiated (Eliot
, ).
27
These
lectures, delivered to a Southern audience in
, let us know that
Eliot’s patience is running out with a world “trying the experiment of
attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality” (Eliot
[“Thoughts after Lambeth,”
], ). Here Eliot is concerned about
immigration (for the “in
flux of foreign populations” is destabilizing),
and he congratulates the South as being “farther away from New York
. . . less industrialised and less invaded by foreign races” (
, , ).
Homogeneous populations and “blood kinship” are, he argues, crucial
for e
ffective tradition, which he construes as far overriding modernist
writing and its super
ficial originality (). His overt attack on “free-
thinking Jews” matches a covert attack on blacks; both may “adulterate”
the desired cultural and ideological homogeneity (
, ). He recom-
mends resistance to “excessive tolerance” because of the social damage
from such liberal benevolence; heterodoxy is a form of mongrelization
that needs to be nulli
fied ().
The Jew was forcefully put into question during this period by a
number of debates both speci
fic to religious culture and by ideas about
“race” and national character. Jews, new and old, Enlightenment and
“Orientalized,” are discursive
figures on whom many writers comment,
and through whom writers made and modi
fied their subject positions.
In some writers, one can easily see politics of conspiracy and ressenti-
ment building ominously throughout the
s – Pound is, of course,
among these. But when Jews were in debate by modernists in the early
s, anti-Semitism was not the only plausible position. Marianne
Moore seems to have been consciously responding to the foregrounding
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
of stereotype by poetic and popular discourse in two of her poems from
the
s, one subsequently uncollected. Both try pointedly to avoid
“racial” prejudice and socioeconomic stereotype. The index to
Observations – a rare touch for a book of poetry – adduces, from these two
works, the following information (with page numbers): “Jew, brilliant,
;
not greedy,
” (Moore , ). There are also positive and powerful
statements about Hebrew (Biblical) poetry, an important source for
Moore.
“To A Strategist” (a one-word note identi
fies this character with
Disraeli) obliquely concerns canards of anti-Semitism; it shows,
however, how di
fficult it is to manage them (Moore , ). For the
poem half-participates in the prejudice it also deplores, which may
explain its absence from collections after Observations (
).
You brilliant Jew,
You bright particular chameleon, you
Regild a shabby fence.
(Moore
, )
Confronting the charge that Jews were changeable, specialists in mimicry,
altering their opinions strategically, trying at all costs to
fit in, Moore does
not deny the generalization, but she revalues it as the triumphs of a polit-
ical strategist. The “gold”-seeking stereotype has been split and revalued
into “brilliant”/“bright” and “regild” – adding luster to something in
decline, rather than causing that decline. A second stanza says that “they”
“begrudge you prominence / And call you cold!” Although “they under-
stood / your stripes and particolored mind,” they were resistant to the
chameleon. “Stripes and particolored” presents, in a condensed way, a
depiction of the little lizard, a Biblical allusion to tactician Joseph’s many-
colored coat, and puns pointing to the strategist’s “winning stripes” and
service for a political party. But the root image of the chameleon becomes
problematic as the poem goes on. “But when has prejudice been glad to
hold / A lizard in its hand – // A subtle thing?” Although the intent of
the poem is to speak against prejudice, the reptilian image can be read as
patronizing even in the context of Moore’s many lovingly detailed poems
about small animals, and even despite her clear identi
fication with their
elegance and allegorical message. She closes by saying “Sound sense is
contraband,” which I take to mean that constructing a position against
anti-Semitism has to be smuggled into people’s consciousness, it so cuts
against the grain – “contra band,” a word punning on those Jewish
stripes. So Moore’s stripes (indeed, the very lines of her poem) and the
chameleon’s stripes are compared.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
The other poem, “The Labors of Hercules,” retained in her Complete
Poems, is explicit to the point of a credo; indeed, its ringing last words are
taken from a minister’s sermon (Moore
, ). She appropriates to
herself the labors of Hercules, the serious and hard tasks of persuasion
it takes to extirpate prejudice. One remembers the labors of Hercules
best for the cleaning of the Augean Stables of mounds of animal excre-
ment. Hence this is Moore’s critical use of the “merds” metaphor
worked by Eliot and Pound, for it makes anti-Semitic prejudice into what
must be cleaned up. The ultimate labor is
to convince snake-charming controversialists
that it is one thing to change one’s mind,
another to eradicate it – that one keeps on knowing
“that the negro is not brutal
that the Jew is not greedy,
that the Oriental is not immoral,
that the German is not a Hun.”
(Moore
, )
28
The sentiments against anti-Semitism and other prejudice, closing the
poem, might well be responding indirectly to Eliot’s work in Poems
.
It is certainly a forthright poem in the light of its context: the lynchings
that were endemic, the
race riots in the United States, the Henry
Ford anti-Semitic campaign going on as Moore wrote, and the aftermath
of the First World War during which “the Hun” was stigmatized.
Indeed, the “snake-charming” alludes to a hypnotized irrationality; for
Moore, those believing in these stereotypes have “eradicated” their intel-
ligence.
Mina Loy’s contribution to this debate was to valorize the mongrel, to
claim that subject place as fruitful and creative. Loy’s aesthetic sites, the
places in which interesting art could be made, mingle garbage, cast-o
ffs,
flotsam, and the beautiful, sleek, and fashionable – a mongrelized aes-
thetic. This mongrelized vision is the modern for Loy. Her
satiric
play The Pamperers (quite indebted to cinema, with its fade outs and scan-
nings of “tag ends of overheard conversation”) concerns the discovery
of a “genius” in the form of a bum “picking up cigar ends” (Loy
,
, ). (“Picasso,” it is noted suggestively, “uses all sorts of odds and
ends” [
].) This “houseless loony” – a nomad figure, vaguely semiti-
cized, with “fanatical eyes, set in the lewdest eyelids” (
) – is transported
to an aristocratic, pretentious salon headed by the seductive Lady Diana,
who
finds that the Loony is a genius, worth cleaning up (as is done with
another down and out genius in Loy’s Insel) and packaging.
29
The Loony
has a few moments of suggestive lucidity before he is colonized by the
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
rich and pretentious. In these moments, he has a slightly Christological
and Hebrew air, as those eyes and eyelids suggest, but as some of his
diction also proposes. “You know not what you ask,” he says to Diana’s
proposition of visionary and erotic partnership. “I am the apostle of
Fraternity,” he responds, yet he implies that she would be out of place in
the mud, which he describes graphically, genially rejecting the life of the
rich “among the geometric static of your bric-à-brac” (Loy
, ). But
as quickly, in this stylized work, the Loony has a few cocktails, gets
cleaned up, and, creative impulse still relatively intact, progresses to a
second stage of show: as Diana o
ffers, “No use picking up cigar ends –
Here . . . are the whole cigars . . . (handing him the box . . . the genius
picks out a cigar entirely at his ease.)” (
). But for our purposes, the
hybridity of mud and upper crust creates a mongrelized moment which
is revealing of Loy, as the Loony recites a Loyesque poem, proposing,
from the “transcendental showers of ideofags,” to glean a few “ashy
iotas” (
). The butt-ends of cigars, the Prufrockian “butt-ends of our
days and ways” have been replayed with brio. Loy’s attitudes to debris
and to the hybrid emphasize their importance to the modern. It is the
same impulse to mix that led Loy late in her life to create collage and
sculptural assemblages of garbage and debris.
Loy’s longest poem, Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose:
–, is a sixty-
four page Bildungsroman or Kuenstlerroman treating the family back-
ground, the growth and development into consciousness and exile of the
female artist, Ova, with greatest attention to the de
fining moments in
her childhood (Loy
: –). This poem undertakes to present and
defend a mongrel aesthetic, even if the mixed elements – the paternal
and maternal heritages – are rife with betrayal, hypocrisy, and rejection.
The poem can be positioned as a response to T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitic
discourses of the early
s. But since he was, of course, not alone, the
poem can also go on record as a response to the amount of loose, general
anti-Semitism in the British world in the
s and earlier, occurring
everywhere from Wyndham Lewis to Virginia Woolf. Bryan Cheyette’s
study of selected (and not even extreme) authors argues that the
“Semitic racial representations” in Shaw, Wells, Belloc, Chesterton,
Joyce, and Eliot are not aberrations or embarrassing ga
ffes but central
to the construction of liberalism.
Ova’s father, Exodus, is Jewish, an immigrant to London from
Budapest; her mother, Alice-Ada, is an English Rose. The poem drama-
tizes issues of entering, as a Jew, into hegemonic Gentile and genteel
society: “Zion’s sons / with the subconscious / irritant of superiority”
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
(the “Chosen People” trope, reiterated in Exodus and Deuteronomy, as
in Deuteronomy
:–), and while “David’s daughter’s dowries” beckon,
he spends his evenings “circumcised circumspect,” until he “knows / no
longer father / or brother, or the God of the Jews” . . . but rather the
“romance of the rose” (Loy
, , , , –). The ten-page
section devoted to the exodus of Exodus with his “itinerant / Judaic
eyes” conveys a good deal of information about the tensions between
alienation and assimilation.
For reasons that are inexplicable, the prim, bloodless, tepid, and vir-
ginal English Rose succumbs to the fascinating Jewish male body
“loaded with Mosaic / passions that amass / like money” (
).
Albion
in female form
salutes the alien Exodus[.]
(Loy
, )
Rejecting the Jewish traditional arranged marriage through “intermedi-
aries” which involve courtship rituals designed to protect the virginity of
the woman, Exodus is intrigued by a woman having her virginity in her
own care. “Delightfully / on its own defensive!” puns charmingly on
defense/defensive (
). The analysis of her parents’ premarital flurries
(he gets one petal, but somehow the whole passion of the rose disap-
pears) shows that Loy was well aware of the dynamics between them,
but also fairly well informed about Jewish customs and stereotypes,
which she deploys with nuance and bite. Among other features of their
marital engagements, Alice-Ada and Exodus embody
the shocks of intimate impact
of the instinctive
murderer and pamperer
of Jesus [.]
(
)
so that their sexual bond represents the whole social history of Christian
anti-Semitism (murder of Jesus) and worshipful sentimentality sur-
rounding Him. These contradictory forces form the child Ova.
Ova is a “Mongrel Rose,” mixing Israel and Albion. She is “this com-
posite / Anglo-Israelite,” with a “mongrel heart,” and, the ambiguous
gift of a fairy godmother, a “Jewish brain” (
). The word “mongrel”
repeats aggressively in this work; given the bad press it has had in this
period, Loy’s use makes a bold statement of adhesion to a subject place
of hybridity. What is this “mongrel-girl” going to do? (
). Like the
Loony in Loy’s closet drama, she will “coerce the shy / Spirit of Beauty
/ from excrements and physic” (
). Her first artistic epiphany comes
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
when she hears the word “[d]iarrhea” and hears its color described as
“quite green,” an incident several critics have compared to Joyce’s por-
trait of Stephen Daedalus’ early childhood (
). The “iridescent hush”
is a mixture of the visual and the aural that characterized Loy’s work in
writing (ibid.). It seems appropriate as well to situate this muck as a cri-
tique of the representations of Jews that work through such tropes as
“merds”; “[d]iarrhea” may connect to Eliot’s
“Gerontion.” Dirt to
beauty, “moon-
flowers out of muck” is not an unusual aesthetic, but it
becomes more suggestive when linked to the derogatory terms in which
the Jewish body was cast, and to the forthright use of the word
“mongrel” in Loy’s title (Loy
, ). It is worth wondering, as well,
whether Marcel Duchamp’s provocative auteur, R. Mutt – another
mongrel – with his upsidedown urinal at the Armory Show, was not also
diddling these discourses about the purity and high-mindedness of art
while playing with lower-body allusions.
Loy’s poem is an essential document for a study of religious culture in
the literature of the modern period, because Loy depicts Ova negotiat-
ing a particular kind of relationship with her dual heritage. Jesus appears
as a
figure available to compensate for the angers and rejections visited
on her by her mother. Introduced to “gentle Jesus” by a “housemaid,”
Ova is grati
fied at his potential to absolve “every infantile / indiscre-
tion,” but ba
ffled at his general absence in the world; she thereby
engages in “Christian / introspection” (
, , ). She also walks
through the haunts of the Jewish “ragamu
ffins” of Kilburn who are
apparently doomed to hell for killing Jesus, in the simplistic doctrine of
Christianity. These children may be dressed in rags, but they eat mu
ffins
(Ova’s folk etymology), and therefore have what she desires (
). The
materialism and literalism of stereotypical Judaism is thereby manifest.
In a variety of incidents, the poem tracks a religious and cultural
debate out of the mixed marriage between two arrogant and rejecting
parents, each embodying a di
fferent religion, each rejecting the other,
and each tricking her and putting her in the wrong. The poem describes
certain “spots of time” around religious apprehension and ethical real-
izations of which the father’s trick gift of a farthing and claim of having
given her a sovereign is a masterful nexus. The subtracting move of
father/sovereign to father/farthing (not to speak of further lower-body
allusions) embodies Loy’s thematics of loss inside poetic language itself.
Ova is cheated by the sharp practices of her own Jewish father.
Ova begins to do a pained synthesis of these two unpromising relig-
ious traditions: “Jehovah – / exemplar par excellence / of megaloma-
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
nia –” and Christ with his feet “neat-/ly crossed / in anguish / and
wounded with red / varnish” (
). The synthesis proposes a new sub-
jectivity of exilic “wondering Jew
”
(
), a dynamic pun on wandering
Jew, for the “child of Exodus” follows him and many others of the
Diaspora, into a “heritage of emigration” (
). As well, “wondering”
suggests the speculative intelligence whose birth this poem chronicles.
The poem itself has two endings. One, the section called “Religious
Instruction,” traces a sense of con
flict between the ethical – and
Enlightenment Judaism – impulse to “commit” her consciousness “to
justice,” the secular form that certain strands of Jewish Messianism took
in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (
). This contrasts with
the sense of being tampered with and impeded by those parties nastily
and antiseptically called “her breeders” and “her procreators” (
).
This section seems to chronicle Ova’s
first foray into exodus, by a child’s
very compromised episode of running away from home. A command-
ment is delivered, a warning twisting and criticizing the Biblical injunc-
tion in Deuteronomy
:: “Thou shalt not live by dreams alone / but by
every discomfort / that proceedeth out of / legislation” (Loy
, ).
(“One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from
the mouth of the Lord.” This is repeated in the temptation scene in
Matthew
: and Luke :.) At that moment, both the Jewish and the
Christian strands of her makeup conspire to lay down unpalatable law.
The second ending is much less clear, but it is very important. Called
“The Social Status of Exodus,” it seems (and this is confusing) no longer
to concern Exodus the father, but to use a number of the materials asso-
ciated with the father (he is a Tailor, for example) to divulge a new path,
and a new hero, “another / greater than Jehovah” (Loy
, , ).
The section is a notable critique of religion’s religiosity (“Spiritual
drapers / Popes and fakirs and shakers”) (
). In it Loy proposes a mys-
terious concept – “dissubstantiation” – that “Theological tinkers / and
serious thinkers” have spent a good deal of time discussing (ibid.). The
“‘unprintable word’” that they contemplate is, probably, God (ibid.). He
is literally, by Hebrew custom and reverence, unnameable, and thus is
written as “G-d” in pious renditions of English. Further, God functions
metaphorically as an “unprintable word,” in the numerous curses (like
“God damn”) that utilize Him as a bit of vocabulary; hence “the
unprintable word” that Loy does not mention is in fact “impossible to
erase from a vocabulary” (ibid.). Loy’s condensed wit is
fierce; I think
that the suggestive phrase “this jew-jaw of general invective” clues us to
the unprintable Concept (ibid.).
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
The “dis” of dissubstantiation means reversal, negation, lack, removal,
rejection. The term substantiation means the veri
fication of, the proof of
the
firmness of material form. Of course Loy’s neologism calls up both
transubstantiation (the eucharist transformed into the true body and
blood of Christ), and consubstantiation (the materials of the eucharist
coexisting with the body and blood of Christ, but not changing into it).
These two alternative interpretations about the body of Christ had long
been the subject of theological debate even unto religious war among
Christians. Loy’s entrant “dissubstantiation” is a nonce word blithely
inserted into raging religious debates. Responding to Christian issues,
she makes an existential query from the childish insight noted earlier in
the poem – the absence of God, or Christ, whenever He is most needed.
Responding to Jewish tradition, “dissubstantiation” could be a wild pun
on the fundamental terms of post-Christian Jewishness (or Jewishness as
Christians, astonished, construct it), precisely not to believe in Christ as
the Messiah. This is dissubstantiation – the rejection of the bodily pres-
ence of God, incarnated in his son.
In any event, at the end of the poem a modern thinker about the
issues of God’s existence has arisen. This humanist proposes “the man-
made God” as an anthropological insight about human need (
). He
is described as a Jew because (like Exodus) he is a tailor, a cutter, who
makes new clothes for humankind. But he is as well someone from whom
gentle people turn away, and whom they ostracize (ibid.). “Gently born”
plays with Gentile, and genteel, and gentlefolk, of course, in a class and
religious amalgam violated by this tailor. Thus he is also like a Christ-
figure “who staked the plot / of manhood in his nobler form” (ibid.).
Who he is precisely is not identi
fied in the poem, but he is both a hero,
and a mongrel Jew–Christian.
30
Keith Tuma has made the important
suggestion that Loy is writing about Sigmund Freud, whom she met in
. If so, she is tracing his contributions, or the contributions of a crit-
ical humanist religious analysis, to the dilemmas of religious belief and
religious culture.
31
In this untrackable Jewish/Christian feminized and
prophetic
figure, Loy has constructed and approved of a mongrel sub-
jectivity o
ffering solutions to longstanding religious dilemmas. The
ending is vaguely Christological, but it is also vaguely Hebraicized: a
mongrel sensibility triumphs.
The claim that poetry itself would be reinvigorated by mongreliza-
tion, new vocabularies, the heteroglossias of immigration, and the pres-
sure of the city was a radical position. In a (ca. April
) essay called
“Modern poetry,” Mina Loy argues eagerly that the multicultural,
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
enriched American language of immigrants is the site of choice for “the
renaissance of poetry.” Modern poetry is a response to “the modern
world of varieties”; more speci
fically, modern poetry has received its
impetus from the U.S. (Loy
, ). Why? Loy proposes that modern
poetry arose in a double contact zone, between British and American
languages, and between new immigrants and older Americans. The neg-
ative counter to this position had already been articulated by Edmund
Wilson. His article “The Anarchists of Taste” in Vanity Fair (
)
describes the “sour befoulment” of Chicago and its class and status
limits in a criticism of Carl Sandburg’s poetry. Sandburg’s aesthetic skill
is inhibited by the city with its “blank buildings and slaughter-houses and
factories, of Claxon-blowing motor-cars and typewriters cracking like
machine-guns, taxicabs, jazz-bands, trick electric signs, enormous hotels
plastered heavily with garish magni
ficence . . .,” and so on (). Not only
is the physical environment degrading or overwrought, the “language
which he hears spoken is the harsh patois of the city”; hence, Sandburg
doesn’t stand a chance against French poets whose pastoral landscapes
and poetic language are singled out for Wilson’s admiration.
In contrast, mongrel language and the mongrel city are categorically
praised as vital generators in Loy’s essay on “Modern Poetry.”
Apparently written soon after her poem “Anglo-Mongrels,” Loy’s essay
argues that the reinvigoration of poetic language has occurred in the
United States precisely because of immigration. “It was inevitable that
the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America, where latterly
a thousand languages have been born, and each one . . . English
enriched and variegated with the grammatical structure and voice-
in
flection of many races . . .” (Loy , ).
Out of the welter of this unclassi
fiable speech, while professors of Harvard and
Oxford labored to preserve, “God’s English,” the muse of modern literature
arose, and her tongue had been loosened in the melting-pot. (Loy
, )
Poets incorporate these swinging tonalities by listening to, and partici-
pating in, the melting-pot of sound, a speedy, living, “composite lan-
guage.” The terms melting-pot and then composite/variegated, with its
mongrel overtones, signal the cultural power of immigrant idioms.
32
Loy’s examples leave no doubt that she is talking about the languages
and in
flections of the “baser avenues of Manhattan” (the Lower East
Side) where “every voice swings to the triple rhythm of its race, its citi-
zenship and its personality” – a nice Tainean touch (ibid.). Indeed, Loy
mentions explicitly the language of the “adolescent Slav who has spec-
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
ulated in a wholesale job-lot of mandarines and is trying to sell them in
a retail market on First Avenue” (ibid.). One can’t help but see an alle-
gorical encoding in the portrait of a “Slav” (Russian Jew speaking
Yiddish?) selling job-lot mandarins (oranges, of course, but also the intri-
cate, elite dialect of imperial control ) as a source for the new language
of American poetry. The “mongrel-girl” of “Anglo-Mongrels” has made
a mongrel aesthetic of language. The question of purity or puri
fication
of language as a modern marker is raised, of course, in both Eliot and
Pound. Although a variegated and heteroglossic diction is characteristic
of their poetry in the twenties, still both insist in their criticism on pur-
ifying the language of the tribe – and tribe is in the singular.
33
In this
debate over the language of modernity, Loy’s defense of the mongrel,
that unmistakable term for cultural contact, mixing, hybridity, and the
low fertilizing the high, is a signi
ficant, jaunty defense of the positive cul-
tural impact of immigration. Her theories of language are much closer
to Williams’ brash acknowledging that his American diction came “from
the mouths of Polish mothers” – whether imagined as Slavic or Jewish,
the mongrel cast is the same (Williams
, ).
Another participant in this debate over mongrelization and
Jewishness constructs his position with reference to Eliot and Henry
James. Louis Zukofsky is making a new modernism in a crucial spiritual
struggle – in which he is the marked winner – with/against the two gen-
erations of [Gentile] modernists just preceding his. When he wrote his
earlier poetry, Louis Zukofsky seems to be deep in an interior debate
between emancipated Judaism with its “elimination of provincial partic-
ulars” and a
ffirmation of particularist markers, particularly Yiddish, a
familiar, loved and despised tongue (Blau
, ). His modernization
as a New Jew accepting “Western aesthetic norms in literature as in daily
behavior” meant the rejection of the physical markers of male
Orthodox Jews in dress and hair style (Harshav
, ). Zukofsky,
with his Columbia education, had a stake in Enlightenment values –
learning, aestheticization, and self-realization, but he also began life as
a speaker of Yiddish (Harshav
, ; Quartermain , –). His
con
flictual ties to both aspects of Jewish culture (the modernist and the
particularist) are represented in his
first major poem, “Poem Beginning
‘The’” (
), a work that also addresses anti-Semitism, both external
and internalized.
Written (when the poet was twenty-two) with elegant headnotes and
numbered lines, the work was not only an allusion to The Waste Land, but,
as Zukofsky wrote to Pound in
, “a direct reply” to Eliot’s poem
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
(Pound
, ). The poem comments on Eliot in its very presentation.
In both The Waste Land and this poem, the materiality of the signi
fier is
o
ffered by means of the foreign languages and the general heteroglos-
sia; the fact that Zukofsky numbers his lines, as if his poem were already
anthologized, shows a further aggressiveness in the marking of the mate-
riality of the text and of the signi
fier. Both poems renounce transpa-
rency, renounce the puri
fication of diction. Where Eliot began with a
dedication and homage to Pound, Zukofsky, with an arrant literary frisk-
iness, is both more eclectic, democratic, and insistent on a master. He
dedicates his poem both to “Anyone and Anything I have unjusti
fiably
forgotten,” [that is, forgotten to mention in the poem] – and to Bach.
The list of sources is heavy on soon-to-be-known modernists, but also
on such popular forms as “Modern Advertising,” “Popular Non-Sacred
Song,” and “Broadway.” The poem also puts these glossing notes
first –
the end beforehand – in scandalous formal pun on Jewish “backward-
ness” (whether the non-acceptance of Jesus as messiah or the insistence
upon Moses seeing only the backside of God, Exodus
:) and on the
images of excrement and the lower body that bedevil Jews, as we have
seen.
“Poem beginning ‘The’” has
five movements, like a tone poem, a
Heldenleben. It is also a concertedly “oedipal” poem of mother-love
and mother-elegy. The
first movement surveys modernist literature
(“Mauberley”, Lawrence, Daedalus, Ulysses, Woolf, Eliot are just a few
of the allusions). One issue the poem addresses is how to be a Jewish
modernist when one at least half agrees “
Not by graven images for-
bidden to us” (Zukofsky
, ). The answer is to repeat and scrutinize
images “graven” by others. This is also a terri
fically confrontative slap
at, and repetition of the canard of unoriginality: “A book is something
which one Jew copies from the other,” an anti-Semitic statement that
shocked Heywood Broun and George Britt into their philo-Semitic essay
(Broun and Britt,
, ). The first movement concerns Zukofsky’s own
vows, as a belated modernist, to live like Spinoza, grinding “lenses” with
which to bring the work of others into focus. Within a few years, the
“lens” of objecti
fication and sincerity had crystalized in a seminal essay
by Zukofsky. That enabling document was itself very plausibly in
flu-
enced by the In Zikh (Introspectivist) manifesto of
signed by three
Yiddish-language United States poets, Jacob Glatshteyn, Aaron Leyeles,
and N. Minkov, a work itself in
fluenced by “the American Imagists” as
“a self-conscious trend of Modernist verse in Yiddish that was founded
in New York in
” (Harshav and Harshav , , ). Zukofsky
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
hybridized Anglo-American modernist puri
fications of the language
(Imagism) with Yiddish a
ffirmation of a certain strand of New Jew enti-
tlement.
The second movement of Zukofsky’s poem is a concerted address to
the circumcised penis which is on an outing with Zukofsky; nothing
could be more abrasive and confrontative. “Peter Out” and Zukofsky are
walking through the city (an enactment of the “Prufrock” situation by a
randy young Jew).
34
They discuss a variety of topics, some serious (Il
Duce), and some less – the shows or revues they will see. In the context
of semiticized discourses about circumcision to which this chapter has
alluded, this walk with Peter (who is called “polite” with his “light”) is
particularly mocking of the norms of gentility and civility. This section
contains nineteen lines of the Yiddish poet Yehoash, a lyric love poem
about the Bedouin, his camel, and his love.
35
That part of the move-
ment, considerably more poignant, is a mourning statement for the
suicide of his close friend, Ricky Chambers. Yehoash was, not inciden-
tally, the only Yiddish poet of an earlier generation who received the
accolade of the In Zikh group in their founding document as “not
merely a precursor but a fellow poet” (Harshav and Harshav
, ).
The brief third movement (“In Cat Minor”) is a tap-dance routine;
the vaudeville moment following from the invented titles of revues
ending the second movement (like “Tear the Codpiece O
ff, A Musical
Comedy”) (Zukofsky
, ). It recalls the flowering of musical
comedy in the
s and how among the most creative, debonair, and
prevalent composers and librettists were Jews – George and Ira
Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Jerome
Kern. These tonal slides and eclectic allusions are an aggressive
comment on Eliot’s master poem. One could describe “‘The’” as a poem
that will claim, in the semantic text (the enounced), a theme of assimi-
lation, but is, in the textual rhetorics (the enunciation), mongrelized in
the extreme by inexplicably startling tonal shifts (from coarse joke to
elegy, for example). So too The Waste Land is a work whose rhetorics are
mongrelized, while the overt meaning mourns the very forces that run
rampant in the rhetoric.
The fourth movement, “More ‘Renaissance,’” is a nasty parody of
university education (“Askforaclassic, Inc.”) addressed to a boring
“Engprof ” who well knows that one of his listeners is a “Jewish boy,” and
whose repeated “don’chewknow” is, by the repeated phoneme
(chew/Jew) an excluding drawing of an inner circle (Tomas
, ).
36
The debate during the early twenties about “numerus clausus,” or the
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
quota-based exclusion of Jewish students from major private univer-
sities, lies behind this passage.
37
Harvard’s attempt to limit the numbers
of Jews was especially dramatic. Columbia, from which Zukofsky
received his M.A. in
(with a thesis on Henry Adams), also invoked
“numerus clausus,” so that Jewish presence would not constitute an
“invasion” (Feingold
, –; citation ). There had been a spurt in
the number of Jewish students before; this quota system was a replica of
the restriction on immigration, experienced as a crack-down by
upwardly mobile second-generation Jews.
The tension of insider/outsider in this section and the self-mocking
use of “backseats” (of the classroom) and “weary bott’m” (of the
student) with their backside imagery, the evocation of the doubly unko-
sher “roast
flitches of red boar” (flitch is bacon) as the substance the pro-
fessor serves all contribute to Zukofsky’s self-lacerating parody. The slide
from boar to bore (the professor) to boor (the transitional Jew) can be
remarked; to evoke Cuddihy’s terms of the kulturkampf between modern-
izing Jews and their coarse ghetto relatives, the burden of learning “civil-
ity” (the genteel norms of a modern elite) falls on the partially
assimilated, but still obtrusive Jew (Cuddihy
, –). Indeed,
Zukofsky’s confrontative tone and pockets of vulgarity violate a norm of
a Jewish (male) intellectual tradition: “edelkayt, a term signifying both
nobility and delicacy” (Howe and Greenberg
, ). The speaker
shows that he is not a full member of either family by two dastardly puns:
“For the Pater that was Greece / The siesta that was Rome.” This is a
parody of Poe’s “Helen” and it re
figures the line of culture that Poe had
made without any Hebraic element. Zukofsky then sediments “Pater” or
aestheticism onto that story without Jews, but he also produces a family
narrative (pater/siesta or father/sister). One might also remember
“Peter” in Pater. The vulnerable mother/son combination of the next
sections is like a response.
The
fifth movement, “Autobiography” is addressed to his mother,
about her Russian childhood and girlhood intermingled with post-revo-
lutionary desires. This section also has a high proportion of Yiddish allu-
sions: from the poems of Yehoash, cited in translation, to folk songs (one
cited in Yiddish; “
Un in hoyze is kalt”). Zukofsky’s contribution is to
try to bring Yiddishkeit into play in the context of a poem absolutely sit-
uated in European culture, in the same ways that Eliot’s poem is. The
cultural claims of Yiddishkeit are forthright and serious as a literary and
popular language, presented as such by the poet. But in the eyes of some
detractors Yiddish is also a degraded lower-class marker. As mama-loshen
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
(maternal language), not the hieratic Hebrew of the Torah and
Scripture, it is a language around which much cultural ambivalance
gathers. It is as if Yiddish culture is at play within the enounced (the nar-
rated events within the poem), but has to be ironized within the enunci-
ation (whole speech event as American-language poem).
The section ends with several citations from Heine, including “
Keine Kadish wird man sagen” – presumably no Kaddish over the
“dead” – assimilated – Jew. Alternatively, the assimilated Jew, when
dead, will have no one to recite Kaddish for him. Is assimilation a kind
of death? As Tamar Garb summarizes, Jews participating in the “uni-
versalizing projects of modernity” – Haskalah – rejected ghettos, irra-
tionalisms about Chosenness, particularist taboos (such as kosher laws,
resistance to intermarriage, and dress codes), Yiddishkeit, and holidays
and celebrations of Judaism; they embraced civil rights for Jews under
the rubric of democratic access, secularist premises (Nochlin and Garb
, ). However, there was a great cost: this dream of equality and
fraternity was “premised on an eradication of di
fference that was by no
means reciprocal”; Jews were asked to give up their “cultural speci
ficity”
for a universal de
fined both by and as Christian hegemony (). This
sense of hegemony and entitlement is clearly visible in Eliot’s
Christianizing essays of the
s; Zukofsky attempts, in this poem, to
construct the entitlement of the New Jew. But that entitlement is split
between assimilation as erasure of particularity and the aggressive reten-
tion of any, even self-lacerating, markers of Jewishness.
With these stakes, Zukofsky cites the excoriations of Jeremiah to the
backsliding Israelites about leopards changing their spots – an early anti-
assimilationist screed, one might say. (Jeremiah
:).
Assimilation is not hard,
And once the Faith’s askew
I might as well look Shagetz just as much as Jew.
I’ll read their Donne as mine,
And leopard in their spots
I’ll do what says their Coleridge,
Twist red hot pokers into knots.
The villainy they teach me I will execute
And it shall go hard with them,
For I’ll better the instruction,
Having learned, so to speak, in their colleges.
The cost of Haskalah is visible in Zukofsky’s
fierce ambivalence to his
own tactic of assimilation. To announce his ambivalent mastery, and
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
masterful ambivalence to main culture, he cites Shylock’s speech from
The Merchant of Venice: “the villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it
shall go hard but I will better the instruction” (
, i). Zukofsky proposes,
for his assimilated subjectivity, a tactic of disdainful overcompensation –
bettering main culture at its own tasks. The allusion to Donne and the
metaphysicals, the allusion to Coleridge’s epigram on the metaphysical
poets are all involved with the authority of the criticism of Eliot, since
the interest in this anti-romantic poetic mode was the sign, at this point,
of an advanced poetic sensibility. Zukofsky’s “villainy” was to out-Herod
Herod in his cosmopolitan panache, that is, to perfect literary tradition
by taking it as his own – but with a di
fference, of mimicry, deformation.
This tactic of “bettering the instruction” recalls the theories of Irigaray
on female tactics of mimicry, and of Houston Baker on “deformation of
mastery” in African-American work (Irigaray
a, ; Baker , xvi).
This angry a
ffirmation of his power and cunning at assimilation to
mainstream, Christian (metaphysical) modernist literary culture is com-
bined with self-derision at himself as assimilated. When Zukofsky says
“I might as well look Shagetz just as much as Jew,” he speaks self-
mocking jibes. “Shagetz” [saygets] is Yiddish (of Hebrew origin, in this
case) for a clever, roguish, handsome, arrogant male non-Jew. The female
equivalent is a word much better known but equally a term of contempt
and temptation: “shiksa.”
38
In this line he articulates his rage at the
games of assimilation and at his own Enlightenment position (the
“Faith’s askew” – crooked, oblique, and disdained) which positions him
– compels him – to play such games. If this poem is a notable act of cul-
tural overcompensation in homage to modernism, it is also a poem of
angry contempt for modernism’s exclusions, which Zukofsky redoubles,
bettering the instruction. And to better the instruction is to retain the
mongrel and Jewish core as in
flecting and motivating modernism.
The
final section speaks, also to the mother, a guilty moment contain-
ing a translation of a Yiddish lullaby. There is also a confession of his
attraction to non-Jewish women, and a song to the Sun, or the sun/son.
This last intermingles Christological and Jewish allusions, and wraps the
whole intense oedipal package in a pro-Revolutionary hope. As Bob
Perelman points out, this answer to The Waste Land is optimistic at the end,
with a swelling Internationale
flavor (Perelman , ). But the
material right before, it should be said, is wracked with untranscended
guilt about Jewishness, assimilation, and sexuality. Steve Shoemaker sees
this poem as articulating “tensions and con
flicts in the ideology of mod-
ernism” precisely over the issue of “ethnic identity” and “the permissible
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
range of ‘di
fference,’” and offers the narrative that Zukofsky’s sense of
the Jewish tradition of exile “supplants” modernism’s more narrow and
self-congratulatory “self-exiled men” (
, , ).
The energy and verve, the racial crossovers and mixings, the nasty
bounce all appear in an infamous poem by Pound, published in
in
An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology, edited by Louis Zukofsky. Like Eliot in The Waste
Land, Pound uses the textures and rhetorics of mongrelization to reject
the ideology of the mix: the enunciation is
filled with appreciative verve,
and the enounced is garish and mocking. “Yiddisher Charleston Band”
is a dialect poem, blaspheming the sacred (Mary, Jesus, and other
Christian icons) by an association with Jews, blacks, promiscuous
females, and jazz. The poem is written in an orthographic strain of
Yiddish dialect laced with some blackface turns, and a lineation suppos-
edly showing the syncopated emphases of jazz. It fuses Africanist meta-
phors, semiticized tropes, parodies of religion, and gibes at New, that is
sexually liberated, Women. It is therefore the poem of choice on which
to end this book since we have dealt with all three forms of entitlements
– New Black, New Jew, New Woman – and have touched on the fourth
– Newer Man. The third stanza:
Red hot Mary of Magdala
Had nine jews an a Roman fellow
Nah she’z gotta chob much swellah
Mit der yiddisher Charleston Band.
mit der
Charleston
.
(Zukofsky
, )
One might call this Pound’s klezmer. The “sweller job” is an allusive dig
at Mary’s pregnancy, the swelling she had before her performance with
the band. Pound’s second stanza appropriates, from T. S. Eliot, part of
an exchange of lewdness, and probably anxiety, in the form of light verse
among Eliot, Aiken, and himself. “Ole king Bolo’s big black queen /
Whose bum was big as a soup tureen” has “lef ’ the congo” for an
appearance with said band – an escapee from the Congo-laden con-
structions of Vachel Lindsay, perhaps.
The work and its paratextual surround have a kind of manic
Poundean glee that points to a desire to appropriate the mongrel in
texture, while rejecting it in ideology.
39
The crossing between black and
Jew, and the “red hot” quality of the women of both “races” is marked,
creating a nasty jumble that appropriated mongrel energies while dis-
paraging the social groups in a bombastic fashion. For example, he wants
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
to take the sound and force of jazz establishing his rights as connoisseur
in a
field where his expertise is not patent. It may not be too strong to
say that the word “active” brings jazz itself under the Poundean rubric
(his Active Anthology was published in
), especially given his insistence
in November
, to Zukofsky, that this poem “ has to be sung”
when they were considering it for the Objectivists’ issue of Poetry, where
it did not appear. Pound claims this tarty little poem is active both as cul-
tural work that matters and as physical performance (Pound
, ).
40
A second paratext in the printed version is the note, presumably to
Zukofsky: “
.. I shan’t persecute you if you print the Yittisher without
the music” (Zukofsky
, ). Pound thereby shows he was well aware
of one of the aspects of anti-Semitism, but claims that the word “perse-
cute” could pass between himself and Zukofsky in a playful manner. A
few years later, the playful aspect is considerably diminished: “I spose Mr
Pelley will be annoyed wi
ff me fer askin if all bankers iz jooz? . . .
Seriously, yew hebes better wake up to econ. . . . If you don’t want to be
confused with yr / ancestral race and pogromd . . . it wd / be well to
modernize / cease the interuterine mode of life / come forth by day
etc.” (Pound
, –; May []).
What it meant and means to “modernize” was very much at issue.
Whose entitlement was modernism? What was the relationship between
the modernity of the liberal compact – equal access for a meritocracy,
and the modernisms, semantic, situational, and rhetorical of these
poets? How can New Woman, New Black and New Jew be analyzed as
part of modernism – as well as of modernity? This book has considered
some of these questions. Note here Pound’s ability to pick up and claim
he initiated what had already happened – Jews had long been engaged
in “modernizing”; they certainly had been “pogromd.” There is a
subject position, Pound insists, even beyond New, or Englightenment,
Jew; as with the issue of the Newer Man following upon New Woman,
this is a position that Pound de
fines. Jews, new and old, in his view, were
“intravaginal,” part of a feminized site, kept warm in the family, as he
was to argue in Canto
. Zukofsky struggles with his attraction to
Pound’s admiration and his serious
filial mimicry and his desire to argue
with Pound’s discreditable anti-Semitism.
Given that “Yiddisher Charleston Band” is pretty
flimsy doggerel,
although thoroughly memorable, it is worth addressing the weight that
Pound gave it as a kind of signature piece. Sixteen years and one war
later, Charles Olson reports that in
, as a privileged prisoner at St.
Elizabeths, Pound performed “Yiddisher Charleston Band” for one of
“Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts
the sta
ff psychiatrists. It was a song and “a dance which Pound does, with
gesture, movement, words” (Olson
, ). A real vaudeville routine,
showing, as with Eliot’s “Sweeney Agonistes,” that Pound identi
fied with
the verve of the groups he also berated and sometimes despised. He
wants that compound energy, the energy of mixing black, Jew, female,
sexuality, and anti-Christian blasphemy. He performs that mix, trying to
assimilate it and come out as superior to it all in one economic gesture.
Here we can also take this piece, confrontative in tone and untrans-
parent in texture, as a mini-gesammtwerk of all the entitlements we have
examined as active and vibrant in the period of early modernist poetry.
It is a signature piece because it sums up the ambiguities and passions
involved in the questions of entitlement to modernism, the relations
between modernism and social modernity, and, within modernism, the
construction of and confrontation with subjectivities entitled new. This
book has been committed to exploring, by the invention of a social phi-
lology, how ideas, discourses, and debates about New Woman, New
Black, and New Jew are exposed not only in poetry but as poetry, in any
poem’s most intimate details of texture.
Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry
Notes
:
Responding to Susan Stanford Friedman’s “new modernist studies” and to
such invitations as Jerome McGann’s “to redraw the map of modernism”
(Friedman
, in her rubric for a set of MLA panels; McGann , ).
Responding also to Marjorie Perlo
ff’s “Modernist studies” overview (in
Greenblatt and Gunn,
).
The conjunction of “news” has been the subject of an anthology by Adele
Heller and Lois Rudnick (
), focusing on , and of a paper by Carla
Kaplan, given at the Modern Language Association in December
,
reading the “New Negro” woman and the “New Woman” in their con
flicts
and intersections. The word “Negro” was used contemporaneously, as in
the anthology The New Negro, but unless I am citing from work published
when the term “Negro” was in use, I prefer to use Black or African-
American, as more respectful today.
The term formation, as Raymond Williams uses it, refers to subjectivity in
its own historical, ideological, and textual dialogue with social materials,
subjectivities formed by and forming social stances.
In another study of modern U.S. poets, Frank Lentricchia proposes a “phil-
osophic modernism” from a generation of Harvard professors (Santayana,
Royce, and William James), all
flourishing around , and having serious
e
ffects on Stevens, Frost, Eliot, and Pound, not to speak, as he doesn’t, on
Stein (Lentricchia
, –).
As Ray Strachey remarks about Britain: “There were still, in , a score
of
flagrant injustices and inequalities to be cleared away: there were
unequal divorce, unequal inheritance and nationality laws, unequal fran-
chise, unequal guardianship of children, unequal standards of morality,
unequal chances of employment, and unequal rates of pay” (
, ).
Ann Ardis () and Carolyn Burke ( a and b) have made the impor-
tant claim that the New Woman is an as yet under-studied component of
the formal and intellectual shifts of modernism; DeKoven (
) and Burke
(
) – have contributed notable studies of fiction and of poetry fore-
grounding this claim.
This formulation is, of course, deeply indebted to Julia Kristeva’s postulates
about the subject-in-process (Kristeva
, –).
The point about undoing exclusion has been made with vivacity by a
number of critics who initiated a feminist reading of modernist texts,
including a major recovery of materials by women. There are noteworthy
studies of (mainly Anglo-American) modernism and gender by Shari
Benstock (
, ), Svetlana Boym (), Carolyn Burke (a, b,
, , ), Marianne DeKoven (), Jonathan Dollimore (),
Rachel Blau DuPlessis (
, , ), Bridget Elliot and Jo-Ann Wallace
(
), Betsy Erkkila (), Rita Felski (), Susan Stanford Friedman
(
, , ), Christine Froula (, ), Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar (
, , ), Barbara Green (), Linda Kinnahan (),
Wayne Koestenbaum (
), Cassandra Laity (), Jane Marcus (,
, , ), Peter Middleton (), Jane Miller (), Susan Schweik
(
), Bonnie Kime Scott (, ), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (, ),
Elaine Showalter (
, ), Susan Rubin Suleiman (), and Trudi
Tate (
). Bonnie Kime Scott makes the ringing claim that “modernism
at mid-century was perhaps halfway to truth. It was unconsciously gendered
masculine” (Scott
, ). With due respect to her halves (male modern-
ism) and other halves (female modernism newly arrayed) to make a whole
truth, I want to resist the binary picture of male and female modernism,
however apparently irresistible at times. In a more useful metaphor, she sees
“a new scope for modernism” by writing the workings of race, class, gender,
and (I would add) religious culture into modernism (
, ).
My critical interests are congruent, then, with the general emphasis on
getting beyond an articulation of a segregated “female modernism,” anti-
segregating perspectives that have been articulated in Tate (
) and par-
ticularly in Friedman (
). I do not divide my consideration of texts into
male and female modernism; di
fference is a multiple vector, not a unitary
one. But I do not consider this a post-feminist position. As Myra Jehlen has
argued, because of the existence of feminist criticism, “gender has emerged
as a problem that is always implicit in any [literary] work” (Jehlen
, ).
Bornstein (), Bush (), Michael Davidson (), Drucker (),
Friedman (
), Froula (), Kappel (), McGann (, ),
Brenda Silver (
and ). Influenced by critics like Jerome McGann,
contemporary readers have become more alert to the speci
fic occasions for
a poetic text: have scrutinized paratextual material (dedications, epigraphs),
looked at the material text as an indicator of bonds to historical occasions,
and found revealing the identi
fication of the occasions for which poems
were made, instead of disdaining as “technical” any discussion of the phys-
ical and prosodic nature of the texts or their editorial constructions (as if
poems and their Norton Anthology surround are to be found under
cabbage leaves). To these “multifoliate” textual “performances,” Charles
Bernstein would add the aural performances, thus giving any poem a “fun-
damentally plural existence” (Bernstein
, ).
Notes to pages
‒
An exception is Cary Nelson’s study of populist and formally innovative
poetries (
). DeKoven () has a chapter on poetry, Clarke () on
Marsden treats the poetic milieu. Here should be noted those particularly
treating modern poetries – Baker (
), Friedman (), Kalaidjian (),
Laity (
), Monroe (), Perelman (), and Perloff (, , );
see also Altieri (
), Conte (), Damon (), Davidson (, ),
Golding (
), Kalaidjian (), Keller (, ), Lazer (), Mackey
(
), Nielsen (, ), Perelman (), Perloff (), Quartermain
(
), mainly on poetry after modernism.
Golding (), Hogue (), Kalaidjian (), Lyon (), Nelson ()
Nielsen (
), Marek (), Perelman (), Perloff (, ),
Quartermain (
), Rasula ().
Watten and Bernstein; also Silliman, Perelman, Davidson.
Kalaidjian’s statement indicates some of the intermingled issues at stake:
“Throughout the postwar decades, many critics followed [John Crowe]
Ransom in repressing verse writing’s social text – that is, not merely poetry’s
inscription of historical events, but equally important, its social transactions
with various interpretive communities, conglomerate and small press
markets, the academy, and other spheres of cultural production”
(Kalaidjian
, xii). In a later book, Kalaidjian points to the postwar con-
struction of a dissemination mechanism called “high modernism” that has
“largely silenced the century’s complex and contentious social context”; he
recti
fies this with a bravura “reading of the expanded cultural field of
American modernism” – social and aesthetic avant-gardes – by including
all kinds of texts – literary, polemical, diagnostic, visual (Kalaidjian
, ).
I am indebted to Lawrence Venuti for the understanding of what Lecercle
contributes to this study. In his studies of translation, Venuti extends this
consideration of the signi
fier to archeologies of tone, diction, archaism, col-
loquialism (Venuti
, –).
None of the most notable contemporary materialist critics ignores poetry,
but the bulk of their readings vastly prefer
fiction, narrative, and theorizing.
However, Gayatri Spivak has written on Wordsworth, Dante, Yeats, the
former in a symptomatic reading of the containment of politics and per-
sonal guilt by poetry as an institution, the latter two in a passionate essay
demanding a “genealogical investigation” of the
figures of females in cultu-
rally authoritative texts (Spivak
, ); in addition, she tersely refuses the
special status of poetry as transhistorical (
). Said offers remarks on Yeats
in his book on imperialism. Eagleton discussed The Waste Land in relation to
its ideological productiveness (Eagleton
). Despite these materialists’
restrained critical engagement with poetries, concepts such as Jameson’s
“the political unconscious” or Said’s “contrapuntal reading” as well as
Eagleton’s “slowing down the frames of . . . reading almost to a standstill so
as to catch the complex e
ffects [of poetry] as they happen” have much poten-
tial for interpreting poetry (Jameson
, Said , Eagleton , ).
Bernstein’s use of the term “artifice” here might be glossed by his definition
Notes to pages
‒
– very like Lecercle’s sense of the “remainder” – in “Arti
fice of Absorption”:
“‘Arti
fice’ is a measure of a poem’s / intractability to being read as the sum
of its / devices & subject matters.” (Bernstein
, ). Some other strong
readers of poetry are also moving in this direction. Maria Damon is trying
“to bring the estranged twins, cultural studies and poetry, into closer concert
. . .” (
) in a paper given at Rutgers University Conference: Poetry and
the Public Sphere (April
), itself a conference that began to articulate
elements of a cultural poetics. Kathleen Crown, one of the convenors of
that conference, has spoken about poetry in the public sphere (Crown
).
Adorno’s essay was first made available in a translation by Bruce Mayo in
Telos (
); in my text the page numbers from that translation will follow
the page numbers of the translation by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Adorno
) that I use.
As Watten indicates about the New Historicist readings: “the rise of this
school has not been kind to poetry” (Watten
, ); in the anthology
Aesthetics and Ideology (Levine
), the articles on poetry by Susan Wolfson
and William Keach suggest that critical tools do exist to o
ffer culturalist
readings of poetry.
Arac’s essay challenges the lines of inquiry in this anthology, essentially
claiming that it is still circumscribed by the ahistorical assumptions of New
Criticism.
Machin and Norris say the anthology was made “partly to refute the wide-
spread idea that post-structuralism is a species of ‘textualist’ mysti
fication
which ignores – indeed denies – any access through writing to a knowledge
of history or the world outside the text.” They speak of the ways that
poststructuralist theory has “problematized” such access (by its deep read-
ings of narrative tropes of history or rhetorics of politics) but not foreclosed
it (Machin and Norrris
, ).
Wolfson’s recent proposal for a renovated close reading of poetry differs
from my concern only in its motivation, and its
field of study. For me two of
the keenest provocations of such a materialist critical practice are the moti-
vation from the interests of social and ethnic groups (based in gender, race,
sexualities, and so on), and the motivation from politicized understandings
of the literary text from contemporary poet-critics mainly a
ffiliated with
language poetries. In contrast, for her critical origins, Wolfson o
ffers a bril-
liant history of literary formalisms, from Russian Formalism, to New
Criticism (with a surprisingly historicist undercarriage) and deManian
deconstructive formalism, all in their philosophic rami
fications.
I take first license for the almost obsolete word “philology” from Leo Spitzer
in a discussion of “the etymology of a particular word-family” leading to
“evidences of a change of historical climate” (Spitzer
, ). Stephen
Nichols has also recently called for a new philology, based within the
Viconian work of Erich Auerbach, for Mimesis showed “that language could
be the key to a sociology of textual study” to understand how a social group
conceptualizes itself (Nichols
, ).
Notes to pages
‒
I am aware that Medvedev/Bakhtin (whose virgule indicates that they may
be “one” author, though two people) meant something more general by the
term “poetics” – something like the theory of art practices in writing.
However, they propose that all genres are susceptible to such analysis, and
bringing poetry into this critical arena has special status in their essay.
The editorial(izing) gender “correction” of pronouns should never occur
without comment, as it is possible that such a corrected phraseology will not
be equally applicable to male and female poets. In this case, I think it is.
“The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of
selection into the axis of combination” (Jakobson
, ).
“Method of this [Arcades] project: literary montage. I need say nothing.
Only exhibit (zeigen). I won’t
filch anything of value or appropriate any
ingenious turns of phrase. Only the trivia, the trash – which I don’t want to
inventory, but simply allow it to come into its own in the only way possible:
by putting it to use” ([N
a,] Benjamin “Theory of Knowledge, Theory of
Progress.” in Smith
, ).
In terms of the poetics of the detail, Marianne DeKoven suggests a fruitful
analogy between the New Critical emphasis on the detail and the New
Historicist desire to read whole movements and eras allegorically in or out
of one document (DeKoven
, ).
I have in mind such warnings as Robert von Hallberg’s to Walter Benn
Michaels, “Literature and history: neat
fits,” protesting against the exclu-
sion of understanding of form as a way of presenting and representing
social ideas, and insisting that historical scholarship not sanitize contradic-
tory representations by poets (von Hallberg
, –).
It must be said that Adorno’s notion of the historical moment is construed
as the larger economic tendencies, as anticipations of social progress, and
the poem as “a philosophical sundial telling the time of history” (
/ ) – ideas that cannot produce specific readings of the bulk of
poetry. In addition, I am interested in diverse social determinants, not one.
Any romantic (or technical) aura around creators or around what we help
to construct as “masterpieces” can impede our understanding of discursive
mechanisms; this aura is what Easthope resists by insistence on author-func-
tion. At every turn, one must struggle critically against too complicit a view
of poetry as a special discourse made by special people, with heightened –
because super
fluous and/or spiritual – value.
Here one might allude to Nancy Miller’s penetrating feminist argument
against the denial of authorial agency (Miller
).
I need to invite the reader of this book to find published versions to consult
– perhaps the Gerald Early, ed., My Soul’s High Song (Cullen
) or anthol-
ogized reprintings of Cullen’s important poetry. I have chosen, reluctantly,
to discuss Cullen by paraphrase and miniscule fair use citations of individ-
ual words. “Incident” (Cullen
, ).
Cyrena Pondrom (Stein (b) dates the work –; Ulla Dydo (Stein
(
a) gives it as .
Notes to pages
‒
Ulla Dydo is clearly not of my opinion: “The word gay nowadays means
homosexual, but in
it did not” (Stein a, ). In contrast, Marjorie
Perlo
ff queries this limitation on reading the term “gay,” suggesting that
Stein was one of the
first to use the term in its now-current homosexual
denotation, a point I follow (Perlo
ff , , ). Richard Bridgman takes
this meaning as extremely plausible, noting that “‘Gay’ has long been slang
for homosexual” (Bridgman
, ).
Partridge dates gay/homosexual from ; the OED from ; Chapman’s
New Dictionary of American Slang from
s or earlier; Richard Spears dic-
tionary of Slang and Euphemism says that from the
s to the present gay
meant homosexual man, and then woman. See also Bruce Rodgers, The
Queens’ Vernacular: a Gay Lexicon. See also George Chauncy in Duberman,
Vicinus, and Chauncy (
).
One may reconstruct some of the resonance of the sex debates from pas-
sages in Winifred Holtby (a British book, published in
). What Holtby
means by “the
fight for an equal moral standard” (, ) is the possession
by the woman of her own body and pleasure; it involves control and spacing
of births, no double standard for male and female adultery, no rape nor
marital rape. These issues were not the work of, as Holtby says, “Puritan
cranks” but were vital for females to control their own destiny (
). The
result, in the next generation, was a sex-radical emphasis on equality and
pleasure that is visible in Stein. As a summary of these trends for the United
States, John Fout states” “by the years immediately preceding the outbreak
of World War I, Victorian assumptions about sexuality were largely a thing
of the past” (Fout and Tantillo
, ).
Thanks to Carolyn Sorisio of West Chester University for this point.
Lisa Ruddick’s brave and convincing interpretation of the tropes and
rhythms of anality in Stein should remind us that, if literary criticism is to
talk of “drives,” it cannot limit itself to oral and genital.
Lentricchia uses feminine as an ahistorical spot in a generally historicizing
position, although it is not quite an absolute. One might instead propose
that the feminine was and is something actively in contestation. In the years
in which Stevens assumed some feminine poses, his mode is consistent with
a genteel, pre-feminist fe/male – a “Bo-Pete” to Elsie Stevens’ “Bo-Peep,”
two pastoral
figures in a pre-modern play. In this feminized (or androgyn-
ized) subjectivity, Stevens often avoids any possible allusions to contempo-
raneous gender debates.
Although my ideas were invented independently, I have been influenced by
Shoptaw’s ever since I
first was introduced to the notions, in , at a con-
ference at Cornell University.
Given Samuel Hynes’ interpretation of this moment of British culture as
an interior war against modernism occurring alongside of World War I, one
may here see Pound trying to cast Britannia in a “Germanic” light, to insist
that the barbarism and degeneracy are the property of the rulers, not the
modernists. In Pound’s countermove, a female allegorical
figure is scape-
goated (Hynes
, et passim).
Notes to pages
‒
That poets are fascinated by the compacting of materials from multiple ter-
rains can be illustrated by a suggestion by Alfred Kreymborg with which
Williams agrees: that the title Al que quiere encodes Kreymborg’s name
(Williams
, ).
For instance, in her consideration of the Hosek and Parker anthology Lyric
Poetry: Beyond the New Criticism, Perlo
ff reserves an instructive impatience for
readings that claim to do new (theoretical) things, but can only read the most
traditional romantic lyric, can only make romantic assumptions about
poetic practices, can only attend to the canon of the same, neglecting vir-
tually all post-symbolist modern and contemporary poetries (Perlo
ff ).
The term “American” is not a synonym for United States, but it is still so
used in card catalogs and indices.
British writing sometimes claims T. S. Eliot, but not H.D., although they
lived in England for roughly comparable times, and in assumption of British
citizenship H.D. actually predates Eliot. H.D. was resident in England from
to , when she spent increasing time in Switzerland; she died in
. H.D. became a British citizen automatically in October when she
married Richard Aldington. T. S. Eliot was resident in England from
until his death in
; he became a British citizen in November ,
making o
fficial an allegiance he felt well before that.
“ ”:
Homans proposes an extended Irigarayan reading of specularity as it deval-
ues female bodies and sexuality, and also proposes that female poets, faced
with this culturally powerful material, were compelled to construct counter
tropes replacing the primacy of the visual with tactile imagery, and replac-
ing metaphor with metonymy. She also suggests that “the best way out of
the binding conventions of lyric romance [may be] through renouncing
lyric altogether,” a position to which I am poetically sympathetic (Homans
, ).
Employing Jameson’s term about the novel: political, because gender rela-
tions are relations of power, and unconscious in the sense than any cultural
myth is part of a deep ideological structure.
For evidence of the impact of these materials on some poets: H.D.’s sketch
ca.
“The Suffragette” shows her curiosity and sympathy (Friedman
, ). Moore participated in feminist campaigns for the vote (Molesworth
). Mina Loy epitomized the New Woman and symbolized the link of
new poetry and new women, free verse and free love (Burke
, ). See
The Gender of Modernism (Scott
) for more links between modernism and
feminism, either directly or in reaction, and Lyon (
), J. Miller (),
and Clarke (
) for historical and cultural studies of the changes provoked
by and around independent women in early modernism.
My studies of H.D. have emphasized her resistance to the role of “poetess”
(DuPlessis
and ). The eloquent work of Svetlana Boym on “The
Notes to pages
‒
Death of the Poetess” in identifying “the grotesque conglomeration of lack
and excess” and other cultural
flaws of cultural inferiority well illustrates the
apparatus “poetess” and its problematic (Boym
, ). There is debate
on this point, with Eileen Gregory suggesting that H.D. attempts to draw
the poetess as a
figure of power. Here too I agree with Friedman’s empha-
sis on this poem as a semi-biographical encoding of H.D.’s desire to escape
from “conventional femininity” (Friedman
, –).
By citing some of Mulvey’s findings, though not treating her analysis of
male anxiety about woman’s “lack” or castration as the unconsciousness of
patriarchy, I am signaling the importance of feminist
film theory to discus-
sions of the lyric.
“It seems quite natural to me that an artist should have just as much pleas-
ure in an arrangement of planes or in a pattern of
figures [abstraction], as
in painting portraits of
fine ladies [i.e. realist representation], or in portray-
ing the Mother of God as the symbolists bid us” (Pound [
] , ).
I am giving the poem in the version in Gaudier-Brzeska with a colon after
“crowd” and a comma after the word “petals,” not in the version in Personae
(
) with a semicolon after “crowd” and no comma after “petals.” A gender
reading of this poem is also given in Marianne DeKoven’s Rich and Strange
(
): the poem is the “compression and containment of an erotic
response” that needs the interplay between the crowd and the technology
of the Metro and the “wetness and blackness of the female.” DeKoven
reads the work as emblematic of the simultaneous enabling by the woman
and erasure of the necessary woman by “masculine ahistorical poetic
transcendence” (
, , ).
His “songs” are repeatedly addressed, saluted, and given “commissions” to
attack all sexual repressors and censors; in a
letter to his father, “Tony
[Anthony] Comstock” (of the notorious “Comstock Laws” against the cir-
culation of sexual materials, including birth control information) is put forth
(familiarly) as one of the “male prudes” whom Pound found derisory, as he
proposes to let loose this bunch of sexual imps to tweak the bourgeoisie
(Pound
, ).
Suzanne Churchill’s work on Others contains a parallel finding: “little mag-
azines became associated with radical feminists and e
ffeminate men”
(Churchill
, ). Alfred Kreymborg “struggled both to redeem poetry
as a masculine occupation and to occupy the space of poetry without being
emasculated,” and thus “established an alternative poetic space that tran-
scended gender lines and tried to construct “an ‘other’ kind of masculinity”
(
).
In , the “Woman’s Number” of Others (, , Sept. ), welcomed
women’s voices, with a hortatory self-consciousness (although the actual
issue is underwhelming). “At present most of what we know, or think we
know of women has been found out by men. We have yet to hear what
woman will tell of herself, and where can she tell more intimately, more
immediately, than in poetry?” remarks editor Helen Hoyt. “In other words,”
Notes to pages
‒
adds Alfred Kreymborg, “it is time woman played troubadour!” (Others
,
).
See the version of this chapter in the Keller and Miller anthology () for
a discussion of Pound’s March
review of Loy and Moore, essential
reading for an analysis of logopoeia and gender.
Logopoeia – named by Pound – then became a key critical term of his mod-
ernism, appearing, for instance, in “How to Read” (
) and in ABC of
Reading (
). It is one of three ways of creating meaning – by visual
imagery (phanopoeia), by sound (melopoeia), or in logopoeia, by “using the
word in some special relation to ‘usage,’” playing ironically with the con-
texts in which one expects it, in a phrase retooled from
, “‘the dance of
the intellect among words’” (Pound
, ; , ).
I can’t, unfortunately, pursue all of the Pound end of things here. However
(irreverently) it does seem as if Pound’s attitude to women writers, while
genuine in its interest, and supportive, if didactic, was also like that of
miners to their canaries; if the canary didn’t keel over, then the site was safe
to enter and to work. Pound used H.D. as the canary for imagism, and
Moore and Loy for heteroglossic logopoeia. Amy Lowell keeled over and
was discarded.
I have cited the complete poem (Loy , ). Conover dates it to after
; it was first published in The Dial in October . Marianne Moore
read it appreciatively, and mentions it (July
, ), in her letters (Moore
, ). Elisabeth Bronfen has devoted Over Her Dead Body to the aesthet-
ization of the dead female
figure, with subtle accounts of the psychological
persistence and cultural rootedness of the topos in which “the feminine
corpse is treated like an artwork, or the beautiful woman is killed to produce
an artwork” (Bronfen
, ).
It is possible that this poem was challenged by Marinetti’s remark, “We deny
our Symbolist masters, the last Moon-lovers” and produces a modern moon
to love. Cited in Bradbury and McFarlane, (
), .
“Infusoria” are a class of one celled protozoas which live on decaying
animal and vegetable matter. Loy uses precise, obscure terms from biology
to get at forces animating us as organisms.
Moore did know Loy’s work; in a review, she sees it as cubist and sculp-
tural: “a sliced and cylindrical . . . use of words” (Moore
, ).
Emerson’s “The Rhodora” and Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much
of Time.”
Loy has a satiric poem called “English Rose” that simultaneously attacks
British imperial claims and prim, feminine women, in the
Lunar
Baedecker. This poem was then extended to treat Jews and her family, becom-
ing one section of the sixty-
five page poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose”
(Loy [
], –).
Given that syllabics are more common in the French prosodic tradition, her
poems are foreign to her own tradition; hence her choice makes Moore be
her own standard. She takes away what you are used to as poetry (meter,
Notes to pages
‒
regular rhyme, conventional stanzas such as quatrains, regularity in line
lengths) but, instead of modernist free-verse prosodies, she gives back some-
thing almost the same: syllable count, slant, or irregularly recurring rhyme,
or rhyme mingled with non-rhyme; unique but exact stanza shapes based
on syllable count; intricately irregular lines. The very artful elegance of her
syllabic system is a form of that “disruptive excess” which, Irigaray posits
(
b, ), is the final answer to theories of female incapacity and lack.
Molesworth tracks how Moore was both a serious suffragist, and also had, at
times, the teasing subject position of a boy or uncle in intra-family nicknames
(Molesworth
, , ). He tends to see the latter as regressive; it could
also be viewed as interesting gender hybridity, and resistance to “Woman.”
I have relegated to the article (in Keller and Miller, eds. []), not this
chapter, an analysis of how, in “People’s Surroundings,” conventional
beauty (“roses outlined in pale black on an ivory ground – ”) is probingly
examined for its hidden cost and secret story (Moore
, ). Materials
critical of the notional cluster of the lyric that we have been tracking emerge
in this poem: gorgeous and exotic beauty, complaisant and (might one say)
ductile “lady,” herself “lost” in nature like a jewel, and the clear hint of
predatory sexuality.
Note also Moore’s blason “Those Various Scalpels,” another poem about
gender challenging a genre featuring “the gaze.” Just as Moore attacks the
carpe diem poem, she also alters the blason in this poem about Loy.
Nancy Shevlin of the University of Maryland directed me to Addison and
Steele; see especially The Spectator
, – and , .
“ ”: , -
A number of points made in the version of this chapter published in Mezei,
ed. (
) and Shreiber and Tuma () have had to be cut: among them
a full analysis of sexualities in Dracula, a discussion of the times Loy alludes
to Sappho’s fragments, and a discussion of Virginia Woolf ’s responses to
Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I have also excluded a discussion of
Stein’s “Lifting Belly.” I also want to note, explicitly, that this chapter focuses
mainly on heterosexual intercourse. “Songs to Joannes” can be found in Loy
(
).
In the wake of “Songs to Joannes,” and possibly influenced by its frankness,
both Pound and Eliot’s serial poems (
and ) incorporate questions
of sexuality. Eliot knew Others in which “Portrait of a Lady” had been pub-
lished in September
; his Letters show he was reading Others in and
(or ) (Eliot , , ). He wrote to Moore in praising her
poems there, which suggests that he could have followed the journal through
the appearance of Loy’s whole poem in
; he knew enough Loy to review
her in
. Eliot was working on materials which came into The Waste Land
as early as
, but a spur from Loy’s work is not out of the question.
Notes to pages
‒
The crucial and most useful works on Loy are Roger L. Conover’s introduc-
tions and editorial discussions in his two editions of the poems (Loy
and
), the study by Virginia Kouidis (), and Carolyn Burke’s strik-
ing biographical, contextual, and analytic studies on Loy (Burke
a,
, ) which have been capped by a critical biography Becoming Modern:
the Life of Mina Loy (Burke
). Burke discusses elements of “Songs to
Joannes” at several junctures in her published articles to date (e.g. Burke
a and ). Vital also is Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (Shreiber and Tuma,
eds.,
).
The manifesto is conjecturally dated , that is, virtually simultaneous with
the poem, and just preceding it; possibly its critical force then is transferred
to the poem “Love Songs,” for, although Conover notes Loy had written on
the typescript. “This is a rough draught beginning of an absolute resubstan-
tiation of the feminist question,” the manifesto is apparently not continued
in these terms (Loy
, – and ). A background to this feminist
manifesto is her
“Futurist Manifesto” cast in the generic “he.”
As did Loy. “As conditions are at present constituted – you have the choice
between
Parasitism
, &
Prostitution
, or
Negation
” (Loy
, ;
her emphasis).
A review in The New Freewoman stated there was no difference between men’s
and women’s “sex-feelings” (Loy
, in Loy ). See Clarke () for
finely elaborated discussions of the sex debates in Marsden’s journal.
For the analysis of the sexual debates, I am indebted to Mort (), Weeks
(
), Dubois and Gordon (), Cott (), and Trimberger ( and
). The phrase pleasure/danger is also indebted to Carole Vance. My
double use of British and American materials for British Loy occurs because
the poem “Songs to Joannes” was
first published in the United States and
made quite a splash in its avant garde circles. First partially published in
Others (July
), the whole poem was later issued as a chapbook: Others ,
(April
). Burke’s article – an important study of the link of free verse
and free love – traces the considerable impact of Loy on the Others group
and the New York avant garde, and the impact on Loy of Margaret Sanger’s
birth control activism (Burke
a).
“Skow” could be someone’s misprint for show or it could be the verb scow: a
nautical maneuver to trip an anchor on a foul bottom. Evidence of Pound
(
, ) suggests that “show” is correct.
This latter editorial announces the now much-discussed end of the “new
freewoman” title, so that the review would no longer emphasize female
speci
ficity but be for “individualists of both sexes.” The name change was
precipitated by a letter from such male contributors as Ezra Pound, Allen
Upward, and Richard Aldington. Given the putative date of Loy’s
Manifesto (November
), it is plausible that was written as a response to
Marsden’s withdrawal from the word “feminist.”
Lawrence Lipking traces the seduced/abandoned motif of the poetess, as
does Svetlana Boym (Lipking
; Boym ).
Notes to pages
‒
A Bengal light is a firework with a brilliant blue light sometimes used for sig-
naling. The combination of orgasmic connotations with images of scrutiny
and signage exempli
fies Loy’s work in this poem. Lyon quotes a passage
about a honeymoon in Loy’s unpublished prose: “The rocket of the senses
has been lit. The rocket sputters out in nervous irritation. No inward body-
star illuminates the bride in tremulous revelation” (Lyon
, , citing
from Yale University’s Beinecke Library). This passage con
firms Loy’s inter-
est in
fictional and poetic representations of the experiences of orgasm.
Section (Loy , ) reads in toto: “Shedding our petty pruderies /
From slit eyes // We sidle up / To Nature / —– —– —– that irate pornog-
raphist[.]”
I take this as the development of a new species within a genus, or the devel-
opment of specialized organs, a word used of embryos or fetuses.
“Every woman [i.e. no matter whether married or unmarried] has a right
to maternity”; indeed “Woman must become more responsible for the child
than man –.” The latter is either the most banal of her propositions, since
it recapitulates what is, or the most radical in proposing dyadic families and
sexual mothers (Loy
, ).
Shreiber (typescript) suggests that within this poem Loy narrates an abor-
tion.
I follow Susanne de Lotbinère-Harwood’s suggestion (made in translating
Nicole Brossard), that anglophones should use a modi
fied version of the
French word “cyprin” for a word apparently missing in English (Lotbinère-
Harwood
, –).
One sees the relationship especially in a paragraph from the “Postscript to
The Natural Philosophy of Love . . .” which is, in prose form, the explanation
and gloss for the section in “Mauberley” (
) that begins “‘Conservatrix of
Milésien’”: “Woman, the conservator, the inheritor of past gestures, clever,
practical, as Gourmont says, not inventive.” (Pound
, ; , ).
Positive because Carpenter rejects any of the well-known interpretations of
homosexuals and lesbians as morbid, diseased, degenerate, or sexual liber-
tines. Behind each of these rejected descriptors there were scads of medico-
legal arguments. Carpenter does not even accept the “trapped soul” theory
of Ulrichs (homosexuals as mental/emotional women trapped in male
bodies; lesbians the other way round), although he alludes to it agnostically
(
, –). See also Weeks (, ; and Dollimore ().
“Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality.”
Elaine Showalter cites an comment by Edith Lees, about the excite-
ment among women who attended the
first London production of The Doll’s
House: “We were restive and impetuous and almost savage in our arguments.
This was either the end of the world or the beginning of a new world for
women. What did it mean? Was there hope or despair in the banging of that
door? Was it life or death for women? Was it joy or sorrow for men? Was it
revelation or disaster?” (Showalter
, vii, citing an article that appeared
in
). Marianne Moore saw Ibsen’s The Doll’s House in and was quite
Notes to pages
‒
a
ffected by its stance for “individual liberty” and by its offering of “harrow-
ing experiences in their real setting” (Moore
, ).
In his comments on “Suffragettes,” Pound dismisses Wright, yet in this
context, six years and a war later, the sexual opinions have more of a
hearing.
In December , T. S. Eliot is reiterating this problem: “It is a common-
place that the increase of the electorate, in Britain, is the destruction of
Democracy; that with every vote added, the value of every vote diminishes”
(
, ). Here the expansion of franchise is, counterintuitively, the death
of democracy. In another post-su
ffrage analysis, in poems () by D. H.
Lawrence, the sexual and political energies of women are seen as the fault
of e
ffete, masturbatory, or semi-potent men: “Willy wet-legs”; in what may
be a slap at even the Marsden-style of female emancipation, any “ego-
bound women” are dismissed as overt or covert lesbians – the most damag-
ing sexual category Lawrence had (Lawrence
, –, also ). This
argument, ten to
fifteen years later than our center of gravity, proposes that
womanish men and manly women have caused general social decay.
It is a development, in a specific way, of the “struggle of driving the shaft of
intelligence into the dull mass of mankind” about which he spoke in
(Pound
, ). In seven years (pre-War to post-War and post-suffrage),
the gender narrative has become more speci
fic. Note the word “chaos”
coded female; this is a usage in Pound that Moore criticized repeatedly. His
remarks also bear an uncanny resemblance to some of Marinetti’s phallic
politics (Poggi
, ).
See this letter to John Quinn (March , ), expressing an anxiety and
pride in equal measure (Pound
, ). He is praising Wyndham Lewis for
his vitality. “Vortex. that is the right word, if I did
find it myself. Every kind
of geyser from jism bursting up white as ivory, to hate or a storm at sea.
Spermatozoon, enough to repopulate the island with active and vigorous
animals.” The Paige edition of the letters leaves o
ff before the “jism” refer-
ence (Pound
, ). Pound’s further remarks can also be found in Pound’s
Artists
, .
Although I do not cite them, my knowledge of Lawrence’s sex-radical
odyssey has been informed by Simpson (
) and Siegel ().
Clarke summarizes Lawrence’s phases: first “an early suffragist and feminist
liberalism” then, second, “heterosexual libertarianism and anarchistic indi-
vidualism” then, third, “a physiological mysticism, a strident masculinist
hierarchical separatism, and a desperate survivalism” (Clarke
, –).
This is related to an important scene of the female gaze at the very begin-
ning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which Connie sees Mellors half naked:
many of the adjectives are feminine descriptors; indeed, it is a new woman
blason and Mellors is approved for his pure, delicate, white beauty
(Lawrence
, ).
Stephen Heath has spoken about this dominant discursive convention of
lovemaking in twentieth century
fiction (he calls it “the sexual fix”), which
Notes to pages
‒
frames the penis–vagina connection, with its male–female binary, and
makes a large “primordial and cosmic investment in ‘sexuality’” as “culmi-
nations of a life and a novel”: “Writing love-making is again a problem of
complicity with and support for the sexual
fix, going over and over the stan-
dard pattern. Here if anywhere, one might think, di
fferences would be fun-
damental, a plurality of positions and inscriptions would be possible. Yet
here [he speaks in fact of a passage from Lady Chatterley’s Lover] precisely the
same is made and remade, the very fact of these scenes determined by the
myth and its repetition; with the di
fficulty of writing otherwise, outside that
repetition, immense” (Heath
, , , ).
“, , ”:
In Carl Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia” (), hoo is the sound of a steamboat,
but made in the racial context of an apostrophe to “jazzmen” (Sandburg,
CP
).
Similarly, in a study of the virtually phatic in the Dada sound poetry of
Hugo Ball, Raymond Williams remarks about “zimzim urallala zimzim
urallala zimzim zanzibar” that the appearance of this last word is a “remin-
der of how deeply constituted, socially, language always is, even when the
decision has been made to abandon its identi
fiable semantic freight”
(Williams
, ).
See Frye (, ), Nielsen (, ), Morrison (), bell hooks
(
), Sundquist (), Lott (), North (), and Mullen (), and
also related to the work of such social historians as David Roediger (
).
The article by Shelley Fisher Fishkin in Wonham o
ffers more complete bib-
liographic documentation (Wonham
). The feminist social philosopher
Marilyn Frye o
ffers a penetrating analysis of whiteness as a “political clas-
si
fication,” from which one can disaffiliate (Frye , ). She subse-
quently elaborates the concept of “whiteliness” or “being whitely,” which
she de
fines as a set of learned but deeply imbedded and rewarded behav-
iors and ideologies parallel to masculinity for males (Frye
: –). The
eclectic book by Susan Gubar shows that “racechanges” – appropriations,
racial cross-dressings, minstrelsy, in
fluence, impersonations, passings, and
counterpassings – occur through the whole of twentieth-century literature,
visual art,
film, and performance. Gubar offers a synoptic cultural history
of motifs, illustrating “the powerful attraction of black people and their
culture within the white imagination as well as the imaginative centrality of
the color line for African-American artists” (Gubar
, xviii).
This process has begun, with work by Eric Sigg, Robert Crawford, and
Michael North, as well as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Colleen Lamos,
and others. When Aiken remembers their Harvard years, he reveals their
urgent examination of the American culture, including African-American, in
which both felt called to act, and which they hoped to in
fluence, including
Notes to pages
‒
vaudeville, comic strips, dirty jokes, and slang, including the “latest slang
word for Negro, ‘dinge’ –,” a word revealing the intense curiosity of the white
gaze on blacks as formative in Eliot (Aiken
, ).
“Sweeney Agonistes,” however, has pride of place in Robert Crawford .
Nor is it invisible to Tony Pinkney in his
study of women in Eliot. It is
important evidence for Michael North (
) as well. For Stevens, Peter
Brazeau’s biographical anecdotes, Alan Filreis’s exhaustive contextual
studies, and Joan Richardson’s biography are of prime usefulness.
African-American writers also evoked tom-toms for a variety of purposes;
I do not consider that question here.
Cheryl Wall also points towards ways of distinguishing the words, based on
Albert Raboteau’s work in slave religions, arguing that voodou was an inte-
gral cult and religious system, but that it “disintegrated” in the U.S., and
became a “less cohesive system” but still one that evoked magic, herb
working, divination, and conjuring as “a whole area of folklore” (Wall
,
, citing Raboteau , –).
Observe also that if a person says only “hoo” as a way of alluding to
“hoodoo,” something odd occurs. “Hoo” in isolation, without its “doo,”
suggests that agency (doing), power, powers, and control are still at issue, but
have been obfuscated. The denial or occlusion of black agency is an
element of whiteness as an ideology.
In a later appearance of this poem, in a collection for children, the last word
has been altered from the demeaning slang term for black person, and the
line is given as “Gee, that poor guy!” (Bontemps
, ).
In Marianne Moore records “I read an amusing article in Boy’s Life at
the library last night on ‘Putting on a Minstrel Show’” (Moore
, ).
Boy’s Life is the o
fficial journal of the Boy Scouts.
In his speech, Yeats praised Lindsay’s “General William Booth” as having
“an earnest simplicity, a strange beauty.” Harriet Monroe records what then
happened. “And when the new poet [Lindsay] responded by reciting for the
first [actually the second] time ‘The Congo,’ then still in manuscript, the
‘strange beauty’ of the poem came to the audience with an accolade, as it
were, of authoritative praise. Only a few of us had ever heard Lindsay recite
his poems; the audience was quite carried away by his gusto, and if any dis-
senters from his method or manner were present they dared not express
their feelings. That night, which for the Irish poet was merely one of many
such occasions, was a triumph for the young poet of Illinois” (Monroe
,
; Yeats’ speech, as transcribed after the event, –).
Lindsay stated: “I have heard the race question argued to shreds every week
of my life from [boyhood] til now.” But compare: “We have so many
negroes [in Spring
field, Illinois] that we had race riots for a week in .”
I see here a basic structure of blame, which I will continue to identify in this
chapter (Lindsay
, ).
“Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song / And a thigh-bone beating
on a tin-pan gong” (Lindsay
, ). The allusion to Tin-Pan Alley is
Notes to pages
‒
placed in a cannibal context. Yet “tin-pan” marks the joint black–Jewish
origins of popular music and adds an urban ethnic note to Lindsay’s ram-
paging Africa, expressed by the blackface vaudeville acts of Jewish and
black performers (Rogin
, –).
For the Mandingo peoples on whose language this word depends, a mama-
gyo-mbo (or Mama Dyumbo) is a protective spirit who makes the troubled
ancestral spirits go away. With etymological irony, one might point out that
our usage, and the usage which Lindsay enshrines in his poem, is apparently
the opposite of the meaning the term has in the African context. Manbo or
mambo is also a term, in voudou rites, for the priestess (Murphy
,
passim).
In these comments, I am interpreting Lindsay’s use of Williams and Walker.
However, it has been argued that these black performers engineered a major
transition from minstrel stereotype to Broadway success with their “Back-
to-Africa musicals” written and staged by black performers from about
to
(Woll , –). Jessie Fauset eulogized Bert Williams, pointing
out that he studied pantomime, he practiced African-American dialect (he
himself was from the Bahamas), and that his stage persona was a carefully
studied and honed cultural fabrication, not a natural emanation.
Furthermore, the white world that demanded and consumed these despised
stereotypes of “coons, end-men, clap-trap” thereupon denigrated this artist,
whose rare dramatic talent was, because of race prejudice, allowed to
emerge only in such limited venues (Fauset
, ).
Indeed, Moore singles out Lindsay’s lines “laughed till their sides were sore /
At the baboon butler in the agate door” and “hats that were covered with
diamond dust” explicitly contrasting them with the succinctness of Bert
Williams’ lyrics which Lindsay is remastering: “Baboon butler at the door, /
Diamond carpet on the
floor.” Moore uses this to illustrate her proposition
that Lindsay, despite his claims, has no ear for real African-American rhetor-
ical nuance. Moore does not mention Bert Williams by name. Lindsay does;
in “A Poem on the Negro,” he cites the stanza which is his source (
, ).
The brief comments, probably written by Du Bois, and appearing in his
regular column “The Looking Glass,” state that Lindsay’s work and opin-
ions are “well meant” but sometimes involve “nonsense.” “Mr. Lindsay
knows little of the Negro, and that little is dangerous” ([Du Bois]
, ).
This exchange of letters was made public in The Crisis (See also Massa ,
–).
Ezra Pound made a response to Lindsay, but one in a variant key from the
ones discussed here. In a letter of November
, he comments about
“Lindsay’s manner”: “it really is tew bloomin easy.” He proceeds to parody
a few choice elements, proposing the term “hoo,” but shifting the racial
group. “Bone arrow, / bow of beaver wood, / my squaw is a corker / my
cork is a squa[w]ker, / minne-hoo-loo / Laughing water.” Even with
Longfellow lurking, this “hoo” is evidence that the parody is part of the
“Congo” complex around whiteness (Pound
, ).
Notes to pages
‒
Like Hughes’ Mississippi as intimating black presence and power, there are
Sherwood Anderson’s poetic novel Dark Laughter (
) and T. S. Eliot’s Four
Quartets (
): “the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken
coops, / The bitter apple and the bite in the apple” (Eliot
, ). The
joining of African-Americans with domesticated animals who are property
is reductive, combined with the eradicating lower-case “n.” The sullen,
implacable “sudden fury” that one might read as white understanding of
black resistance or black anger is all displaced to the Mississippi.
The sequence of events is as follows: in February , Stevens submitted
one poem to the Dial’s Gilbert Seldes, promising more. On May
, he sub-
mitted more, including “Bantams in Pine-Woods”; they were published in
July
. A month earlier, on April , Stevens wrote to Harriet Monroe that
Vachel Lindsay was to come to Hartford “next week with other early song-
sters. Autograph copies of his poems are to be sold in the lobby of the High
School. My word!” (Stevens
, ; sequence of events ibid., –).
The temporal and situational put-down in “early songsters” is clear in its
repositioning of Stevens’ belatedness as timeliness and its use of the femi-
nized “songsters.” An appearance by Lindsay could not have avoided “The
Congo” – his major performance piece. In suggestive literary historical
probing, A. Walton Litz notes the possibility that “Bantams” may be a “dis-
guised protest against Lindsay’s colorful bombast” (not explicitly stating
“The Congo”); he does not further link the work to issues of race (Litz
,
).
The allusions are to an invented racial–class amalgam: Azcan (Ashcan)/
Aztec/Aztlan (the American Southwest as Mexican)/Arab (the “caftan”).
But given the function of “Arab” for Williams (the end of Spring and All) and
Stein (Picasso), as a euphemistic way to avoid acknowledging blacks and their
cultural power, this poem’s “Arab” may be a knowing displacement of other
dark-skinned players, as it is plausibly a response to Lindsay’s white perfor-
mance of blackness.
The (second) edition would have been available to Eliot, with six works
by Lindsay totaling seventeen pages (counting Untermeyer’s introductory
remarks). “The Congo” was among these works – ”an infectious blend of
rhyme, ragtime, and religion” (Untermeyer
, ). The works by Eliot
that the anthology included were three short poems or excerpts (e.g. only
the cat passage from “Prufrock”). Two pages were devoted to him, count-
ing the introduction, in which Untermeyer commented upon Eliot’s
“mordant light verse” and “complex and disillusioned vers de société” (
).
In June , for example, Eliot was experimenting with a (Lindsayesque?)
performance style for The Waste Land. Virigina Woolf heard him read it thus:
“He sang it & chanted it, rhythmed it” (Woolf
, ).
In a review from , Eliot noted: “The artist, I believe, is more primitive, as
well as more civilized, than his contemporaries, his experience is deeper
than civilization, and he only uses the phenomena of civilization in express-
ing it. . . . In the work of Mr. [Wyndham] Lewis we recognize the thought
Notes to pages
‒
of the modern and the energy of the cave-man” (
, ). One sees a
program for the character Sweeney, and for Eliot here.
Though he drew mightily on an “Africanist” lexicon, Eliot resisted specific
focus on the “negro problem.” In one contemporaneous comment on this
(in “Review of Eugene O’Neill”) he saw race as a subgenre of a larger kind
of problem, “the universal problem of di
fferences which create a mixture
of admiration, love, and contempt, with the consequent tension” (
,
).
The interest in Conrad links this work to The Waste Land. Eliot was ambiv-
alent about naming Heart of Darkness as a source; “The horror. The horror”
is Conrad’s climactic phrase that would prove central to Eliot’s imagination.
In a letter to Pound about his editing of The Waste Land, Eliot asks: “Do you
mean not use Conrad quot. or simply not put Conrad’s name to it? It is
much the most appropriate I can
find, and somewhat elucidative” (Eliot
). A letter from March then retracts the Conrad quotation.
In the “London Letter,” in which he reviews Untermeyer’s anthology and
mentions Lindsay, Eliot reiterates the qualities of music hall, “precisely
those forms of art” in which “directness, frankness, and ferocious humour”
are in evidence. He implicitly compares music hall with the “commonplace
and conventionality” of both American and British poetries. He also men-
tions Ulysses; evidently Joyce, as well as Lindsay, was a goad. These produc-
tive associations show he wanted some new kind of work going well beyond
conventional poetry (
, ).
Most of Eliot’s critics seem to agree: “[The killer] is dead, more truly dead
than his victim, since he is damned for all eternity” (Gordon
, ).
Unless a Christian teleology of redemption is assumed as a commonplace
frame for literary critical interpretation, this seems a specious argument,
since it is the female character who is really, truly dead; the killer’s mythic
or metaphoric “death” is not depicted.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse discusses contemporary comic images of the canni-
bal (chefs and gourmands), as the “icon of the colonized savage and of a
paci
fied Africa”: that Africans are perpetual savages, and thus need
Europeans, and that Europeans have civilized them at least with chef ’s hats
and wire whisks, and yet the process is incomplete (for they are cooking the
colonisers) (Pieterse
, ).
Indeed, one of Sterling Brown’s poems explicitly answers the cannibal trope
as applied to blacks, by a “surreal” description of the dismemberment and
scattering of the body parts of a black man named for two African-
American notables (the
first man to fall in the American Revolution, and
the inventor of an industrial lubrication process, and source of the phrase
“the real McCoy.”) “Crispus Attucks McKoy” (Brown
, –). As he
su
ffers every racial degradation possible in the Boston setting of “cradle of
freedom,” he could “have committed murder, / Mayhem and cannibal-
ism,” a comment which is Brown’s “boo” to his readers. What the poem in
fact recounts is the opposite: the hero’s murder and dismemberment at the
Notes to pages
‒
hands of “Nordics and Alpines / Hebrews and Gentiles,” a murder trig-
gered by the hero’s response to the scream of “Kill the Nigger!” The real
black McKoy is cannibalized – that is, picked apart by a lynch mob.
In a minstrel show, both characters would play percussion (tambourine and
castanets), and both would be part of the medley of entertainment – songs,
solos, and comic dialogue which featured exchanges between an emcee and
these minstrel clowns – whites in blackface.
Michael North argues that Eliot “imprisons the song once again in a min-
strel tradition” (North
, ). In my contrary view the use acknowledges
the power of African-American popular culture in relation to other power-
ful theatrical traditions.
Marianne Moore’s review of “Sweeney Agonistes” shows she well knew the
source of the song, for she cites a version of lines that Eliot does not quote:
“where you love-a me, I love-a you, ‘One live as two,’ ‘Two live as three’ –
and there is no privacy under the bamboo tree” (Moore
, ).
Modifying “If you lak-a me lak I lak-a you and we-lak-a both the same”
(Woll
, ). Note the same pattern as in her review of Lindsay: she cites
African-American popular music back to the white men who incorporated
it in their poems, tracking their sources to demonstrate her critical prowess.
“ ”:
Charles Johnson’s summary, “The Negro Renaissance and Its Significance”
(
), ends with the universalist claim that the intense race consciousness
of this period did not bene
fit only “a special culture group” but contributed
to “the national society and world civilization” (Lewis
, ).
I will not trace specific uses of African-American dialect (or imagined ver-
sions of it) to create a “pattern of [modernist linguistic] rebellion through
racial ventriloquism,” already elegantly discussed by Michael North (North
, ).
The passage argues that the idea of portraying “things as they are, no
matter what the consequences, no matter who is hurt, is a blind bit of phi-
losophy. . . . To broadcast [all elements of Negro life] to the world will but
strengthen the bitterness of our enemies, and in some instances turn away
the interest of our friends. Every phase of Negro life should not be the white
man’s concern” (Cullen
: ).
Gwendolyn Bennett’s poem “Advice” discusses the situation of having work
controlled and guided by others – light or white. “You were a sophist, / Pale
and quite remote, / As you bade me / Write poems – / Brown poems / Of
dark words / And prehistoric rhythms . . . / Your pallor sti
fled my poesy”
(
) (Cullen , ).
Cullen is not named in the review, but the identification is clear, despite a
slightly masked picture of “the colored middle class” home which gener-
ates these sentiments. The actual occasion for the review was also a
Notes to pages
‒
Menckenesque article by African-American journalist and novelist George
Schuyler called “Negro Art Hokum” which the editor of The Nation had
sent to Hughes, then a student at Lincoln University, in the hopes that he
would respond. His important statement clearly fuses attention both to
Cullen’s review and to Schuyler’s propositions (Schuyler [
] and
Hughes [
a] in Mitchell, ed., ; Rampersad , –).
In Caroling Dusk (subtitled “an anthology of verse by Negro poets rather than
an anthology of Negro verse” xi), Cullen’s brief biography, written by
himself, makes the point forcefully: “He has said, perhaps with a reiteration
sickening to some of his friends, that he wishes any merit that may be in his
work to
flow from it solely as the expression of a poet – with no racial con-
sideration to bolster it up. He is still of the same thought” (Cullen
, ).
The impulse to idealize the Negro against which Cullen made his princi-
pled remarks can be seen in Floyd Dell’s
review of “Negro Poetry”: “It
may perhaps be said that a Negro poet would feel the same emotions about
a sunset or a woman, a butter
fly or a battle, that a white poet would. . . . I
think that is not true. I hope it is not true. I believe there is a Negro way of
seeing a sunset. And I believe it is a more splendid way. – There, I have given
myself away” (Dell,
, ).
Even more: the role of the aesthetic experience in transcending the trials of
discrimination and segregation and liberating the spirit is clear in his
column “The Dark Tower” for the April
issue of Opportunity, cited in
Cullen (
), –.
Readers are reminded to seek the full text of Cullen’s work discussed in this
chapter in Cullen’s books, in easily available anthologies, or in Gerald Early,
ed., My Soul’s High Song (Cullen
).
A number of Cullen’s poems were dedicated to men with whom Cullen had
a strong bond, and a number were his lovers, including Donald Du
ff, the
dedicatee here. (Reimonenq, passim) See also Walter Kalaidjian’s reading
of the illustrations in the book Color, proposing that “image and text” o
ffer
a “queer performative act whose utopian mix” of sexual and racial images
is confrontative (Kalaidjian
, ). Charles Cullen, the illustrator, was no
relation to the poet.
For example, whenever faced with some mannered, exaggerated praise of
Negro artistic achievement, his response was always to list important white
artists – ”Frost and Robinson and Millay; Anderson and Cather and
O’Neill” (Cullen
, ; essay from ). His column “The Dark
Tower” in Opportunity during
and was characterized by a rich com-
mentary on that precise point where black and white meet (and where
“white” does not mean “universal”). He has a strong interest in and toler-
ance for whites writing about blacks (Du Bose Heywood’s Porgy); he con-
versely encourages blacks to write about whites.
A gloss on such types might be found in Cullen’s critical essay “On
Miscegenation” (Crisis
, Nov. ; reprinted in Cullen : –). The
essay concerns Cullen’s reasoned and ironic resistance to a melodramatic
Notes to pages
‒
novel on black–white intermarriage by Claire Goll, and his further resis-
tance, in a meeting with her, to “the enormity of her enthusiasm [for] the
Negro” (Cullen
, ). Enormity, indeed; Cullen always chose his words
pointedly.
The Letters of Wallace Stevens make clear that cultural or political move-
ments like the post-Reconstruction crisis, New Negro, or the Harlem
Renaissance were not subjects for his comment although he did sometimes
comment upon the social and historical presence of real African-
Americans, as those departing for World War I. Ann Douglas does not
find
any evidence of Stevens’ participation in the crossracial cultures of New
York (Douglas
). In Stevens’ Letters, there are no references to such con-
temporaneous black writers and thinkers as Hughes, Cullen, Brown, James
Weldon (much less Fenton, Georgia Douglas, or Helene) Johnson, Du Bois,
or Washington. No black writers noted, in Richardson’s biography of
Stevens, until
. The one is a compromising allusion (in ) to
Gwendolyn Brooks calling her “a coon” (Richardson
, ).
Sambo was also one signature of choice for his letters to Elsie (Stevens ,
). Joan Richardson’s discussion of this material (, –) does not
analyze the racial (and class) narratives at work.
Crediting Joan Richardson’s interpretation of this poem as not only one of
the great French symbolist poems in English (i.e. poésie pure, without refer-
ent) but also as commemorating the conception of the Stevens’ only daugh-
ter (with an absolute referrent), the importance of the Sambo
figure as
joyous po(e)tency demands comment.
To be exact, once one whispers (words unwritten) to a Chinese person;
another time one “makes a sound to attract their attention.” At a third time,
a black character picks up a discarded instrument and strums. But no
worded voice is depicted (Stevens
, , , and ).
An account of a production in explains that the problem of the voice-
less blacks was solved by treating “these visible stagehands as mo, prop men
on the Chinese stage who dress in black to be ‘invisible’ but available.” This
ingenious solution, well in keeping with the work’s Orientalist mode, still
protects us from Stevens’ use of “Negroes” (Evans
, ).
In the letter to Monroe (May , , Stevens , ) Stevens says that
Monroe and the prize donor both resisted the actual stage presence of the
hanging body; but
finally, as Holly Stevens notes, “the hanging body
remained in the play as published” (Stevens
, ).
Of course, as Eric Sundquist remarks, the Italian as type figured in anti-
immigrationist thought as a kind of “colored” and degraded
figure; and in
a sensational case, in
, eleven Italians were lynched in New Orleans,
possibly for crossing the social line between whites and blacks (Sundquist
, –; Lindemann , ).
This by virtue of U.S. military incursions into Mexico and countries in the
Caribbean in the early part of this century. Stevens also traveled to Florida
on business from
on.
Notes to pages
‒
Joan Richardson, Stevens’ biographer, says that Stevens identifies as black.
She is working with the poems of the
s in which Stevens, she says, enters
“the black man’s skin” in a Whitmanesque inclusiveness, and from the sense
that blacks had advantages of anonymity and closeness to the natural world.
His racial prejudices (or, as she says, “ambivalences”) were due to “the
circles in which he moved” (Richardson
, ).
The poem says a “black figure”; the rural site of the poem and its consis-
tency with others of this type make me interpret this as a “black person,”
rather than the weaker “[white] person dark because he walks at night.”
This admiration can also turn into a topos of criticism – white writers criti-
cizing each other for too much primitivist identi
fication. When Eliot
addressed Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” in “Charleston, Hey! Hey!”
he disparaged it through jazz: “its rhythms have a peculiar hypnotic power . . .
it has a kinship with the saxophone. If this is of the future, then the future is,
as it very likely is, of the barbarians” (Eliot
, ). When Wallace Stevens
came to disparage T. S. Eliot (in a more allusive moment in “Comedian as the
Letter C”), he spoke of “a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky” – the pun
on Eliot’s
first name evoked the automatic primitive-Africa complex of ideas.
The question of culture and civilization is always set in play by Euro-
Americans treating African materials. In Vision and Design, Roger Fry
reprints his
review of a show of “negro sculpture.” After a stunning
introduction about cultural relativism, showing Graeco-Roman assump-
tions of superiority being “blown away,” and after appreciative formalist
praise of certain works, Fry recuperates superiority by the remark “it is
curious that a people who produced such great artists did not produce also
a culture in our sense of the word” (Fry
, ). The “negro” exhibits a
“want of a conscious critical sense and the intellectual powers of compari-
son and classi
fication.”
“After all one must never forget that African sculpture is not naive, not at all,
it is an art that is very very conventional, based upon tradition and its tra-
dition is a tradition derived from Arab culture. The Arabs created both civ-
ilisation and culture for the negroes and therefore African art which was
naive and exotic for Matisse was for Picasso, a Spaniard, a thing that was
natural, direct and civilised.” Presumably because of the Arab in
fluence in
Spain, that is. This leap over Africa by assigning its culture to Arab in
flu-
ences totally decivilizes that continent (Stein
, ).
Robert Farris Thompson discusses the folk decorations of graves in Flash of
the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. Peter Brazeau cites Judge
Powell: “[Stevens] was interested when I explained the custom of negroes
to decorate graves with broken pieces of glass, old pots, broken pieces of fur-
niture, dolls heads, and what not” (Brazeau
, –). Stevens
“ignored” the comment of I. L. Salomon who told him directly that “I
found the title o
ffensive” ().
See Charles Bernstein’s comment on the situation in his title: “Like
DeCLAraTionS in a HymIE CEMetArY” (Bernstein
, ). Hyman
Notes to pages
‒
Kaplan – actually “H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N” – a Yiddish-speaking,
font-happy new immigrant proud of acquiring English, created by Leo
Rosten – meets Longfellow meets Stevens meets L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.
For another famous use, see James Weldon Johnson’s “St. Peter Relates an
Incident of the Resurrection Day” (
), in Johnson (), , whose cli-
mactic lines concern the heroic unknown soldier revealed to some good old
boy war participants as “his towering form loomed big and bigger – / ‘Great
God Almighty! Look!’ they cried, ‘he is a nigger.’”
This division is borne out in an extended comment by Claude McKay in
his novel Home to Harlem (
); as this comment is assimilated, one must
remember that the fond, intra-racial use of the term “nigger” pervades this
novel. “Jake thought how strange it was to hear the Englishman say “darky”
without being o
ffended. Back home [in the U.S.] he would have been spoil-
ing for a
fight. There he would rather hear “nigger” than “darky,” for he
knew that when a Yankee said “nigger” he meant hatred for Negroes,
whereas when he said “darky” he meant friendly contempt. He preferred
white folks’ hatred to their friendly contempt. To feel their hatred made him
strong and aggressive, while their friendly contempt made him ridiculously
angry, even against his own will” (McKay
, ).
Carl Van Vechten’s title, Nigger Heaven, glossed within the novel (),
alludes to the seats high up in a theater, and is a social allegory of both exclu-
sion and overview. The title is also, however, lurid and sensationalist, given
the many scenes of high life, jazz abandon, sexual liaisons, and jealous rage
well beyond the staid main plot of striving, middle class African-Americans.
The overt claim (the word is a descriptor) is swamped by the covert force of
this word as prurient scandal. Indeed Van Vechten’s father (an aristocratic
integrationist) criticized the title in a (
) letter to his son (from the Van
Vechten papers at the New York Public Library) that I am quoting from
Chidi Ikonné. “Your ‘Nigger Heaven’ is a title I don’t like. I remember that
it was said of some Democratic candidate for the presidency, he couldn’t be
elected because he spelled negro with two g’s, and I have myself never
spoken of a colored man as a ‘nigger.’ If you are trying to help the race, as
I am assured you are, I think every word you write should be a respectful
one towards the black” (Ikonné
, ).
“ ”: -
Title citation with its important pun from Loy, “Anglo-Mongrels.” The epi-
graph, cited in part to show how “mongrel” was a vital, even obsessive con-
sideration, has further interest as coming from “The Modern Pharisee,” an
essay bucking historical trends and all of the poetry in this chapter by
exhorting the modern Jew to resist assimilation. It was published in
by
Rabbi Joel Blau (my grandfather). He continues, “We are grateful to the
anti-Semites for having called our attention to it; in guarding against mon-
grelization at the hand of Jews, they will help us preserve our own type”
Notes to pages
‒
(Blau,
, –). I have also had occasion to cite from the historical over-
views of Joseph L. Blau, my father.
John Higham tracks the story of Emma Lazarus, whose poem was not set
on the pedestal til
, twenty years after it was written, in the context of
the transformation of the meaning of the Statue by the immigrants. The
poem was not popularized until the mid-
s, as an ennobling ideology in
light of the ethnic hatreds fueling fascism (Higham
, –). Lazarus
(
–) was a wealthy, well-educated woman, quite assimilated, who
became consciously politicized after the pogroms in Russia in the
s.
For Jews, according to Norman Finkelstein, drawing on John Cuddihy,
assimilation – the question of becoming a New Jew – is “the Jewish crisis of
modernity” (Finkelstein
, ).
However, a somewhat earlier formation in the U.S. saw a congruence
between the self-made Jewish man and the self-made Yankee – crude, loud,
and pushy: certainly a double edged descriptor, though not one that fea-
tured disease but rather preternatural energy (Lindemann
, ).
In his preface to Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and
Madness, Sander L. Gilman remarks that “stereotypes can be (and regularly
have been) freely associated, even when their association demands a suspen-
sion of common sense” (Gilman
, ). Linda Nochlin is also eloquent
about the contradictory stereotypes: Jews are smart/incapable of genius;
sexually wanton/frigid/impotent; control all
finance/live in poverty; are
over-intellectual/are over-emotional, concluding that one cannot talk about
a “good image” or “bad image” but rather who has invented these materi-
als, when, and how they are used (Garb and Nochlin
).
M. Carey Thomas, patrician president of Bryn Mawr College, subscribed
to these sentiments. Echoing Grant, she argued in
that “we are jeop-
ardizing the intellectual heritage of the American people by this headlong
intermixture of races, . . . lowering the physical and mental inheritance of
a whole nation by intermixture of unprogressive millions of backward
peoples”; she was “pro-Nordic,” anti-Eastern and Southern Europeans,
including Czechs, Slavs, Italians, Jews, while Asian exclusion (the
Chinese Exclusion Act was extended in
) and the low status of African-
Americans were, for her, givens (Horowitz
, –; ). These ideas
were played out in the exclusionary admissions policies of the college she
headed.
As Peter Quartermain and I argued in our introduction to The Objectivist
Nexus (
), to understand cultural products, one must develop a critical lit-
eracy in Jewish material – Jewish history and Jewish practices – comparable
to the critical literacy in various Christianities necessary for the study of lit-
erature. That is, one must know a good deal about Christian rites, beliefs,
practices, and paradigms to read Donne, Milton, Herbert, Hopkins, Eliot,
Auden and others, from early English and American literatures through the
modern period. A comparable literacy needs to be insisted upon to under-
stand modernities whether or not they directly represent or construct Jewish
Notes to pages
‒
experience. This literacy might begin with such terms as Diaspora, exile
(galut), Jewish messianism, Hellenizing, Hebraism, Wandering Jew,
midrash, assimilation, secularization, quarrels with God, covenant, chosen-
ness, Yiddishkeit; it might continue by understanding such practices as
circumcision, kosher, the (non-hegemonic) Sabbath, and the institutions
and claims of anti-Semitism such as shtetl, plague, degeneracy, feminiza-
tion/castration, infection, conspiracy, pogrom.
When Adams wants to characterize late nineteenth-century greed and cap-
italist expansion, he says that in their worship of money they were worse o
ff
than the ancient Hebrews (Adams
, ).
“Weird” is a term that recurs for Yiddish. Alfred Kreymborg is uneasy about
the oddness of Yiddish, which he cites in a semi-appreciative, semi-hostile
rush in his urban poem “Chess Players.”
call him ‘potzer,’ ‘nebich,’ ‘kibitz’;
if that trio don’t confound him,
sneer him ‘goy’; the weird vernacular
has always this to addle Jews. . . .
(Kreymborg
, )
An earlier passage suggests that Kreymborg knows that “goy” is a term par-
ticularly appertaining to “Gentiles.” A Jew might well be “addled” to have
precisely the wrong term of opprobrium applied to him.
In there was a high degree of anti-Semitism in the British press; in
an anti-Semitic group called “Britons” was founded, “which suggests expul-
sion or extermination as solution to Jewish problem” (Loewenstein
, ).
In an earlier version of this chapter, I tracked my own reading strategies as
a daughter (indeed, literally so) of Enlightenment Judaism, and discussed
the repression of the question of anti-Semitism in Eliot, because of the crit-
ical strategies of New Criticism. The Eliot elements of this chapter were
first written for anthology appearance in People of the Book before the impor-
tant and revelatory book by Anthony Julius (
). My remarks were origi-
nally formulated independently of his, but now may be read as parallel and
interdependent
findings.
Eliot only began using capitals for this Jew in (Ricks , ). Casillio
makes an important remark about the non-capitalization of “jew” with ref-
erence to Pound; it is applicable to Eliot. The lower-case “jew” is a cutting
down to size, a castration motif, responding to the multiple threat to the
phallus that Jews embody (circumcision as castration; syphilis, immorality)
(Casillio
, ).
Behind this bracketed voice of the epigraph which I have identified as “gay”
may lie the culture of decadence, homosexuality, and the association of
poetry with e
ffeminacy; see Dellamora () and Laity ( and ).
Julius says of this poem “it rehearses some major themes of anti-Semitism”:
“the unity and wickedness of the Jewish people and the trans-historical
struggle between Jews and Gentiles” (Julius
, ). Among its “anti-
Semitic clichés” are a number that I had (independently) also detailed: the
Notes to pages
‒
man with cigar, the rats, the piles (Julius
, –), the blind or protru-
sive eye (
).
“Entertain” means to divert, to amuse (sexually or in society); to give parties;
also to continue with, maintain, support (thus politically, economically).
Note also that Jews traditionally enter the furniture, jewelry, shoe, retail-
tailoring and fur trades (Holmes
, ).
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno are not alone in remarking that
Jews serve as the scapegoat for capitalist relations: “The economic injustice
of the whole [owning] class is attributed to them” (Horkheimer and Adorno
, ).
Casillio notes Eliot’s anti-Semitism, but does not see it structuring his work
as it did Pound’s (Casillio
, ). Casillio’s reading of anti-Semitic mate-
rials in The Cantos and in Pound’s oeuvre as a whole also links castration,
disease, especially syphilis, prostitution, parasitism, the swamp, loss of
single, solid maleness, identi
fication with nomadic exiles. Many of these
motifs parallel the claims of this Eliot poem, as we shall see.
Casillio notes that the Hell Cantos of Ezra Pound, contemporaneous with
this work of Eliot, never refer to the Jews, although the image package is
thoroughly consistent with his later uses: “fragmentation, darkness, bogs,
swamps, impotence, monstrosity, falsi
fication, loss of origins, infection,
plague, castration, organic disease, vermin, prostitution,
filth, stench,
sadism, and violence” are all characteristic of the Hell that is post-War
England. This material is waiting to be galvanized by the centralizing con-
spiracy theory
figure of the Jew (Casillio , ).
The cultural presence of Jews is remarked on virulently by John Quinn in
a letter to Pound from
: “the damned Jew spewing-up of the
Untermeyers, the Oppenheims, the Waldo Franks, the H. L. Menckens, the
George Jean Nathans and the other parasites and pimps in poetry, literature
generally, painting, the theater . . .” (Pound
, ).
A Bleistein poem cut from The Waste Land manuscript also represents this
figure as diseased; the loss of this figure to the poem as completed may
signal a di
ffusion of the suggestions around cultural decay, no longer as
pointed to any one group.
T. S. Eliot’s father had a decided attitude toward syphilis; as it was God’s
punishment, he felt it should not be tampered with. A cure should not be
found (Showalter
, , cited from Lyndall Gordon).
The Protocols were serialized in The Morning Post in the summer of
(Morris
, ).
Anthony Julius speaks about this in several places. This point is also made
by J. A. Morris, who especially notes the comparisons of Jews to animals,
and their position in Eliot’s writing as “parasites, marauders, destroyers”
(Morris
, ). Morris characterizes Eliot’s opinions as consistent with
the depiction of Jews in proto-Fascist and Fascist discourse.
In yet another poem, the simian has achieved a Darwinian, and sexual
Notes to pages
‒
“ascent,” related to evolutionist discourses analyzed here in “Seismic
Orgasm.” Stephen H. Clark, “Testing the Razor: T. S. Eliot’s Poems
,”
contains a startling line by line analysis of “Sweeney Erect,” discussing “the
violently repudiatory sexuality prevalent in these texts” and the “virulence
of its misogyny . . . its capacity not only to shock and repel, but also to impli-
cate” (Clark
: –).
In “Sweeney Agonistes,” the Sweeney figure is one of the apparently
American businessmen, Babbitts all, who visit the British demi-mondaines;
they break into a minstrel show as “Tambo and Bones” and sing a primitiv-
izing song, as whites in blackface. Sweeney discusses a lurid urge to kill and
dismember women in a ritual manner, a primitivizing image which slides
over to cartoon African (see chapter
).
The taint is affiliated with images about blood; this trails or traces a slight
motif of sexual taint in a shimmering, hard-to-pin down fashion. It suggests
the blood taint of
syphilis which will be activated in the
“Bleistein/Burbank” poem and the blood libel of Jews.
Eliot’s sentiments on race, Jews, blacks, the urban, and culture were consis-
tent with the popular postures of pseudo-historical narratives about the
South in the post-Civil War period. “Yes, I confess it,” [says the hero of The
Leopard’s Spots: a Romance of the White Man’s Burden,
–, by Thomas
Dixon], “I am in a sense narrow and provincial. I love mine own people.
Their past is mine, their present mine, their future is a divine trust. I hate
the dish water of modern world-citizenship. A shallow cosmopolitanism is
the mask of death for the individual. It is the froth of civilization, as crime
is its dregs” (Dixon
, ). The white race, and the white man’s burden
and this argument reemerges in After Strange Gods, with the same slide
between racial and semiticized discourses.
This poem originally appeared in The Dial, . I have cited it from
Observations. The version is longer than the version in Complete Poems, and
despite the small “n” on “negro,” it is a more stirring statement. Since I am
concerned with the context of the
s, I have cited the version from that
era.
On those “Jewish eyes,” see Williams’ poem The Wanderer, with a woman
character with “lewd Jew’s eyes” (Williams
, ).
It may well be Exodus, her father, in a different permutation than we saw
him earlier, now as a free-thinking Humanist.
Tuma, in Sagetrieb; his argument is subtle, suggesting that this “figure for a
secularized Christianity or just simply . . . modernity – has remade human-
ity, but he also denies us, or at least that part of us which is spiritual, our
‘cruciform’ nature” (Tuma
, ). Tuma reads the center of the poem
as Ova’s spiritual epiphany a “saint’s prize / his indissoluble bliss” (Loy
, ). I read it as her construction of a mongrel subjectivity. Carolyn
Burke does not emphasize this poem in her biography, but does see it as
betokening “a transcendence of the hybrid,” a position with which I clearly
Notes to pages
‒
disagree (Burke
, ). Another brief reading is Friedman, who sees the
poem as a “(re)constitution of history” rede
fining the epic as a mixage of
public and private (Friedman
, ). Two important readings were pub-
lished in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet, one by Elisabeth Frost, arguing that “Loy
uses this apparently eugenical history to cast herself not just as an ethnic
mongrel but as a hybrid of male and female traits” (Shreiber and Tuma
, ). The other, by Marjorie Perloff, calls the poem “Loy’s most com-
pelling representation of her ‘mongrelization’ – the ‘crossbreeding’ of the
English and Hungarian-Jewish strains that produced, so [Loy] herself
seems to feel, a form of mental and emotional gridlock that could be over-
come, in life as in art, only by large doses of the transnational avant-gardism
of the interwar period” (Shreiber and Tuma
, ). This essay also
appears in Perlo
ff .
The poets Loy mentions are Pound, cummings, H.D., Moore, Lawrence
Vail, Bodenheim, and Williams. H.D. is marked as an exception to her
general thesis, more engaged with an “older culture.”
“No matter how Pound might try to purify, isolate, and sacralize his words
by using Chinese ideograms and foreign languages, by drawing pictures and
employing musical notation, by drastically truncating syntax, language itself
was, as a social medium, impure, rotten, Jewish (that is, social and histori-
cal)” (Perelman
, ).
In her “Songs to Joannes,” a poem attentive to the vagaries of sexuality, Loy
also puns on “petered out” (Loy
, ).
Harold Schimmel has outlined Zukofsky’s indebtedness to Yehoash (Samuel
Bloomgarden) in Terrell (
).
To recall: Jews were excluded from the professoriat, a prejudice slowly
changing during this period, but a barrier still very much in force. An
account of Jewish progress in the U.S. is painstakingly catalogued in Isaac
Max Rubinow, “The Jewish Question in New York City,” mentioning by
name all Jewish professors who have found posts in private universities.
In when Pound was thinking of returning to the U.S., he and Quinn
discussed his needs. He was “perfectly willing to professize in Columbia or
the College of the City of
.. (where the hebraic element wd. pardon my
lack of Xtn. faith)” (Pound
, ). This is notable for its mildness and
identi
fication of common cause with a Jewish professoriat.
My definitions and spellings come from Leo Rosten (). Slightly alterna-
tive de
finitions in Harshav and Harshav (). “Shegets”: “young Gentile
man (with overtones of uneducated, unmannered ru
ffians)” and “Shikse:
Gentile maiden (sometimes used with negative overtones or as a symbol of
sexual attraction)” (
). After my analysis was written I found a parallel
analysis (Scroggins
, –, ), which remarks that shagetz some-
times meant ru
ffian and Jew.
In “European Paideuma” of , Pound the moralist finds a problem of
evil in history often coterminous with “Semitism,” despite self-masking
claims about some of his best friends being Jews (Pound
). The wrath
Notes to pages
‒
about the Semitic is visibly intertwined with Pound’s mysticism; “European
Paideuma” argues that Hebraic monotheism “destroyed” the nonetheless
persistent fecundating nature religions of Mediterranean paganism.
Zukofsky also made a strategic separation of himself from some Jews, an
ability to criticize Jews in speci
fic and in general, a disgust with certain Jews,
but the function of his discourse of “the Jew” often di
ffered from Pound’s.
Notes to page
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Works cited
Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok
,
Adams, Henry
–, , ,
The Education of Henry Adams
–, n.
Addison, Joseph and Richard Steele
Adorno, Theodor
–, , n. , n. ,
n. , ; see also Horkheimer, Max
African-American
modernity
, , –
experience
, , ,
African art
–, , , n. , n.
Africanist representations xi,
, –, , ,
, –, , , , –, , ,
–, , , , , –, n.
, n. , n. , n.
agency
authorial
, , –, , , , n.
poetic vocation
, , , n.
social
, , , –; see also New Black,
New Jew, New Negro, New Woman,
Newer Man
Aiken, Conrad
, – n. ,
Aldington, Richard
, , n. , n. ,
Altieri, Charles
,
American language
–
American literature
as definitional term
–, n.
“creolized ‘Unitedstateness’ ”
anality
, , n.
Anderson, Sherwood
, n. , n. ,
androgyny
, , ,
anti-Semitism
, , , , , –,
–, , –, , , , ,
, n. , – n. , n ,
– n. ; see also Jews, stereotypes of
Arabs
, , n. , n.
Arac, Jonathan
, , , , ,
Ardis, Ann L.
, ,
Asian representations
, , n. ,
n.
Auerbach, Erich
n.
Bach, Johann Sebastian
Baker, Houston
, ,
Baker, Peter
,
Bakhtin, M. M., and P. N. Medvedev
–,
n. ,
“social evaluation”
, ,
Barthes, Roland
,
beauty, see poetry and gender
Bederman, Gail
, , , ,
Behling, Laura
,
Belsey, Catherine
Benjamin, Walter
, , n. ,
Benn Michaels, Walter, see Michaels, Walter
Benn
Bennett, Gwendolyn xiii,
–,
“Advice”
n.
Benstock, Shari
,
Benveniste, Emil
,
Bergman, David
Berlin, Irving
,
Bernstein, Charles
, , , –, –,
n. ,
BLAST
,
Blau, Joel
, , , –, n. ,
Blau, Joseph L.
–, , –, n. ,
Bodenheim, Maxwell
n.
Bontemps, Arna
, n. , ,
“Golgotha is a Mountain”
Bornstein, George
,
Boskin, Joseph
, ,
Boym, Svetlana
, –, n. , n.
,
Bradbury, Malcolm, and J. McFarlane
n.
,
Braithwaite, William
Brazeau, Peter
, n. ,
Bridgman, Richard
n. ,
Bristow, Joseph
,
Brodwin, Stanley, see Singh, Amritjit
Bronfen, Elisabeth
n. ,
Index
Brooks, Gwendolyn
n.
Broun, Heywood
,
Brown, Marshall
Brown, Richard
,
Brown, Sterling
, , , n. ,
“Crispus Attucks McKoy”
–, n.
“Negro Characters by White Authors”
“Sam Smiley”
“The New Congo”
–
Burke, Carolyn xi,
, , , n. , n.
, –, n. ,
Bush, Ronald
, ,
Bunyan, Paul
Byrnes, Lillian
“Nordic”
cannibalism
, , , , , , , n.
, –, n. ,
Carpenter, Edward
, –, , , n.
,
Casillio, Robert
, n. , n. ,
Chatman, Seymour
Chauncy, George
,
Cheyette, Bryan
, , , ,
Christianity
, , , n.
Calvary
, , ,
Christian culture
, , , , , ,
, –, , , –, n.
customary practices
, , n.
religious ideas
,
Churchill, Suzanne W.
n. ,
Churchill, Winston
civilized (racial ideology)
, –, n. ,
n. ,
Clark, Stephen H.
– n. ,
Clark, Suzanne
,
Clarke, Bruce
, , , , , , n. ,
n. , n. ,
class (social)
, , ,
Coghill, Neville
Cohen, Ralph xii,
Cohn, Norman R.
,
Cole, Bob
,
Coleridge, S. T.
Columbia University
, n.
Comstock, Anthony
n.
Conover, Roger L. xi,
n. ,
Conrad, Joseph
, , , , n.
Conte, Joseph
,
Cook, Eleanor
,
Cooley, John
,
Cooper, Helen
Cornford, Francis
Cott, Nancy
, n. ,
Crawford, Robert
, , ,
Crisis, The
, , , n. , n.
Criterion, The
,
criticism, literary, see specific practices: feminist
literary criticism, ethnic literary criticism,
cultural studies, materialist literary
criticism, New Criticism, New Historicist,
poststructuralism
Crown, Kathleen
,
crypt word
–; see also Abraham and Torok;
Shoptaw; and poetry as mode
Cuba
Cuddihy, John Murray
, n. ,
Cullen, Countee xiii,
, , , –,
n.
, n. , n. , n. , n.
,
debate with Hughes
–
as Negro poet
–, , , n. ,
n.
, n. , – n.
Caroling Dusk
, , –, n.
“Colors”
“Heritage”
“Incident”
–,
“To Certain Critics”
–
“Tableau”
“Uncle Jim”
–
“Yet Do I Marvel”
cultural poetics
–, n.
cultural studies
, , , (Kalaidjian on)
canon
contextualizing theories
–
ideologies of form
–,
material text
production
reception and dissemination
,
and poetry
; see also social philology
problem of textual specificity
–,
(Bernstein on)
cummings, e.e.
, , n. ,
Cuney, Waring
“Dust”
Curtis, L. Perry
, ,
Damon, Maria
, ,
Davidson, Cathy xii
Davidson, Michael
, ,,
Dawidowicz, Lucy
,, ,
decadence
,
De Gourmont, Rémy, see Gourmont, Rémy de
DeKoven, Marianne
, , , n. ,
n. ,
Dell, Floyd
n. ,
Dellamora, Richard
n. ,
derogatory words
“coon”
, , , n. , n.
Index
derogatory words (cont.)
“hebes”
“nigger”
, , , , –, ,
–, n. , n. , n. ,
n.
“sheeney”
–
De Zayas, M., see Zayas, M. de
Dial, The
, , n. , n.
DiBattista, Maria
diegesis, see poetry as discourse
Dijkstra, Bram
,
discrimination (racial)
, –
Dixon, Thomas
n. ,
Dobkowski, Michael N.
Dollimore, Jonathan
, n. ,
Donne, John
, –, n.
Doolittle, Hilda, see H.D.
Douglas, Ann
n. ,
Douglass, Frederick
Drucker, Johanna
,
Du Bois, W. E. B.
, , , , , n. ,
n. ,
Duberman, Martin
Dubois, Ellen, and Linda Gordon
, n. ,
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau
–, , , ,
n.
, n. , n. , –
Dydo, Ulla E.
n. , n.
Eagleton, Terry
, , ,
Early, Gerald
, n. ; see also Cullen,
Countee
Easthope, Antony
–, n. ,
effeminacy
, , , , n. , n. ,
n.
Egoist
Eliot, T.S. xiii,
, , , –, , ,
–, , , , , , , n.
, n. , –, n. , n. ,
n. , –,
Africanist representations
–, ,
n.
, n. , n.
After Strange Gods
, , n.
“Ballade pour la grosse Lulu”
“Burbank with Baedeker: Bleistein with
Cigar”
, , –, , –,
n.
, n. , n. , n. ,
n.
“Charleston, Hey! Hey!”
n.
Christianity, ideas on
, –
doggerel works
, ,
drama, ideas on
–, , n.
Four Quartets
n.
gender, ideas on
, –, , , ,
–, ,
“Gerontion”
, ,
“Hysteria”
Jews, ideas on
, , , , –,
, n. , n , n. , n.
“Portrait of a Lady”
, n.
“Sweeney Agonistes”
, , –, , ,
, n. , n.
“Sweeney Among the Nightingales”
,
, –
“Sweeney Erect”
, – n.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
,
n.
The Waste Land
, , , , , ,
–, –, , , n. , n.
, n. , n.
Elliott, Bridget, and Jo-Ann Wallace
,
Ellmann, Maud
,
Empson, William
, ,
Engle, Gary D.
enounced, see poetry as discourse
enunciation, see poetry as discourse
Erkkila, Betsy
,
ethnic literary criticism
, ,
Euro-American, attitudes
, , , –, ,
, , , –, , n. ,
n.
Evans, Robley
n. ,
Evans, Sara M.
,
evolution
, , , , n.
excremental images
, , –, , ,
–,
Fabian, Johannes
,
Fairchild, Henry Pratt
–,
Farr, Florence
,
fascism
, –, n. , n.
Fauset, Jessie
n. ,
Feingold, Henry
,
Felski, Rita
,
femininity, as ideology
, , ,
feminism
, ; see also gender, femininity
feminist literary criticism
, ,
gender binarism
, ,
gynesis
gynocriticism
feminist cultural studies
, (DuPlessis)
feminist reception
“locational feminism” (Friedman)
Filreis, Alan
Finkelstein, Norman
, n. ,
Fishberg, Maurice
,
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher xii, xiii,
,
Fitzsimmons, Linda, and Viv Gardner
,
Ford, Henry
, ,
Index
Foucault, Michel
foundational cluster
, ; see also poetry and
gender
Fout, John
n. ,
Frascina, Francis, see Harrison, Charles
Fredrickson, George M.
,
free love
, , ; see also New Woman,
sexuality, sex-radicalism
Freewoman (and New Freewoman)
Freud, Sigmund
–
Friedman, Susan Stanford xi,
, , , ,
, n. , n. ,
Frost, Elisabeth
–, n. ,
Frost, Robert
, n. ,
Froula, Christine
,
Fry, Roger
n. ,
Frye, Marilyn
n. ,
Garb, Tamar
, , ; see also Nochlin,
Linda
Gardner, Viv, see Fitzsimmons, Linda
Gates, Henry Louis
gay
–, ns. and , n. ; see also
heterosexuality, homosexuality
gaze, the
,
Geller, Jay
,
gender
, –, , ,
gender ambiguity, see intermediate sex
genre
George, Lloyd
Gershwin, George and Ira
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar
, –,
, ,
Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
,
Gilman, Sander L.
n. ,
Glatshteyn, Jacob
Golding, Alan
,
Gordon, Linda, see Dubois, Ellen
Gordon, Lyndall
, n. , n. ,
Gourmont, Rémy de
, –,
Grand, Sarah
Grant, Madison
–, n. ,
Granville-Barker, Harley
Green, Barbara
,
Greenberg, Eliezer, see Howe, Irving
Greenblatt, Stephen
, ,
Gregory, Alyse
,
Gregory, Eileen
n.
Gregory, Horace
,
Grossman, Allen
,
Gubar, Susan
, , , , ; see also
Gilbert, Sandra
Guillory, John
, ,
Gunn, Giles, see Greenblatt, Stephen
Hallberg, Robert von
n. ,
Hamilton, Cicely
,
Hammerstein, Oscar
Harlem Renaissance
Harris, Joel Chandler
Harris, Trudier
,
Harrison, Charles
Harshav, Barbara, see Harshav, Benjamin
Harshav, Benjamin
, , , n. ,
Harvard University
,
Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment)
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) xiii,
, , , , , ,
, , n. , n. ,
gender ideas
n.
“Hymen”
review of Moore
–
“Sea Rose”
,
“Sheltered Garden”
–
suffrage interest
n.
Heath, Stephen
, – n. ,
Heller, Adele
,
Henderson, Mae
heterosexuality
–, , , , –, –,
,
Heywood, Du Bose
n.
Higham, John
, , , , n.
Hill, Lynda xii
history, see struggles, social
Hogue, Cynthia
Holley, Margaret
Holmes, Colin
, , n. ,
Holtby, Winifred
n. ,
Homans, Margaret
n. ,
homosexuality
, , , , –, , ,
, , , n. , n. , n.
; see also lesbian, intermediate sex,
effeminacy, gay
homosociality
, , ,
Honey, Maureen
, ,
hoo-doo (also hoo)
–, chapter passim,
n.
; see also Lindsay “The Congo”
hooks, bell
,
Horkheimer, Max
Horne, Frank
,
“Nigger: a Chant for Children”
Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz
n. ,
Hosek, Chaviva, and Pat Parker
n. ,
Howe, Irving, and Eliezer Greenberg
,
Hueffer, F. M. [Ford Maddox Ford]
Huggins, Nathan Irvin
,
Hughes, Langston xiii,
, , , , n.
,
debate with Cullen
–, – n.
“Dream Variation”
Index
Hughes, Langston (cont.)
“I Thought It Was Tangiers I Wanted”
“I, Too, Sing America”
–
“Lament for Dark Peoples”
“Our Land”
“The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain”
, –, n.
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
Hulme, T. E.
,
Hurston, Zora Neale
, ,
Hynes, Samuel
n. ,
Ibsen, Henrik
, , –, n.
Ikonné, Chidi
n. ,
immigration
, –, , –
intermediate sex
, , (inversion), , ,
–,
Irigaray, Luce
, , n. ,
Irish (stereotype)
, , , , ,
Italians
, , , n. , n.
Jakobson, Roman
, , n.
James, Henry
–, , , ,
James, William,
Jameson, Fredric
, ,
“the political unconscious”
, , n.
Januzzi, Marissa xi
jazz
–, , –, n. , n.
Jehlen, Myra
,
Jews
social issues
, –, , –, ,
, n. , n.
stereotypes of
, , , , , , ,
–, –, , –, –, ,
, –, n. , n. , n. ,
n.
see also Judaism
Johnson, Charles S.
, , n.
Johnson, Fenton
, n. ,
“Tired”
Johnson, Georgia Douglas
, n. ,
“The Suppliant”
Johnson, Helene xiv,
n. ,
“Bottled”
–
“Magalu”
Johnson, James Weldon
, , –, n.
,
“St. Peter Relates an Incident of the
Resurrection Day”
n.
Jordan, Viola Baxter
Joyce, James
, , n.
Judaism
circumcision
, , , , n.
customary practices
, , , ,
–, n.
kosher (food taboos)
religious ideas
, , , , –,
n.
Julius, Anthony
, , n. , –,
n. ,
Kalaidjian, Walter
, n. ,
Kaplan, Amy
Kaplan, Carla
n. ,
Kaplan, Cora
Kappel, Andrew J.
,
Karp, Abraham J.
Katz, Jonathan Ned
,
Keach, William
Keats, John
Keenaghan, Eric
,
Keller, Lynn
,
and Cristanne Miller xii,
n. ,
Kent, Susan Kingsley
Kenton, Edna
,
Kern, Jerome
Kinnahan, Linda A.
,
Koestenbaum, Wayne
,
Kouidis, Virginia M.
, n. ,
Kramer, Victor A.
Kreymborg, Alfred
, , , n. , n.
,
“Chess Players”
n.
“Icicles”
poem to Fenton Johnson
–
Kristeva, Julia
, ,
Ku Klux Klan
, ,
Laity, Cassandra
, , , , n. ,
and Nancy K. Gish
Lamos, Colleen
language poetry
, n. , n. , –
n.
,
Lawrence, D. H.
, , , , n. ,
“After Dark”
“Ego-Bound Women”
n.
ideas on gender and sexuality – men
,
–
ideas on gender and sexuality – women
–, , n.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, n. , –,
n.
“Manifesto”
–
“Now It’s Happened”
n.
review of Nigger Heaven
The Rainbow
Lawrence, Karen
Lazarus, Emma
–, n. ,
Lazer, Hank
,
Index
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques
, ,
Lentricchia, Frank
, , ,
Lerer, Seth
lesbian
–, , , , n. , n.
Lessinger, Hanna, see Swerdlow Amy
Levine, George
, ,
Lewis, David Levering
n. ,
Lewis, Sinclair
Lewis, Wyndham
, , n. , n.
Lindemann, Albert S.
, , n. ,
n.
,
Lindsay, Vachel
, , , , , ,
“Booker T. Washington Trilogy”
“General William Booth”
n.
racial ideas of
–, n. ,
“The Congo”
, –, –, n. ,
– n. , n. , , n. ,
n.
, n.
Lipking, Lawrence
n. ,
Litz, A. Walton
n. ,
Locke, Alain
, ,
Loewenstein, Andrea Freud
, n. ,
logopoeia
, , , , , n.
as feminist critique
–
as anti-female
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
n. ,
– n.
Lotbinère-Harwood, Susanne
n. ,
Lott, Eric
, , , , , ,
Low, Barbara
Lowell, Amy
, , n. ,
Loy, Mina xii, xiv,
, , , , , , , ,
, , , n. , n. ,
“Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose”
–,
n.
, n. , n. , –, n.
eugenicist ideas
, –
“Feminist Manifesto”
, , , , ,
n.
, n.
“Futurist Manifesto”
n.
gender ideas, including feminism
, –,
, n.
Insel
“Lunar Baedeker”
“Modern poetry”
–, n.
mongrel, ideas on
–, –, –,
n.
motherhood, ideas of
, , –, n.
“Poe”
, n. ,
religious culture
–
sexuality, ideas of
–, , , –, ,
n. ,
“Songs to Joannes”
–, , –, , ,
n. , n.
The Pamperers
–
lynching
, –, –, , , –,
n. , n. , n.
anti-lynching campaigns
, ,
Lyon, Janet
, , , n. , n. ,
Macherey, Pierre
Machin, Richard, and Christopher Norris
,
n. ,
Mackey, Nathaniel
,
Major, Clarence
,
Malamud, Randy
,
maleness
effeminacy, critique of
, , (also, see
effeminacy)
ideologies of manhood
, , , , ,
–, , , , ,
masculinity
, , , , , n.
spermhood
–, n. ,
Man, Paul de
n. ,
“return to philology”
–
Man Ray
March, Richard
Marcus, Jane
, , ,
Marek, Jayne E.
Marinetti, Filippo
n. , n.
Markel, Howard
,
Marsden, Dora
, , , , –, , ,
n. ,
Massa, Ann
materialist literary criticism
, , , , n.
, n.
Matisse, Henri
, , n. ,
McFarlane, James, see Bradbury, Malcolm
McGann, Jerome
, , ,
McKay, Claude
“America”
Home to Harlem
n.
“If We Must Die”
Medvedev, P. N.
; see also Bakhtin, M. M.
melting pot
, –, ; see also Zangwill,
Israel
Mezei, Kathy xii,
n. ,
Michaels, Walter Benn
,
Michie, Elsie
,
Michie, Helena
Middlebrook, Diane Wood, and Marilyn
Yalom
Middleton, Peter
,
Millay, Edna St. Vincent
, , , , n.
Miller, Cristanne
; see also Keller, Lynn
Miller, Jane Eldridge
, n. ,
Miller, Nancy K.
, n. , ,
Milne, Drew, see Eagleton, Terry
minstrelsy
, , –, –, , n.
, n. , n. , n.
Index
Mitchell, Angelyn
n. ,
modernism
as field
, , , –, n.
Christianity and modernism
, –
“female modernism”
, ns. and
“gendering modernism”
, –, , n.
primitivism in modernism
–
race in modernism
–,
“sentimental modernism”
modernist studies
, ,
modernity
its modernizing projects
, –
gender issues
racial issues
, –, , –
semiticizing issues
, , –
“the modernization of sex”
Molesworth, Charles
n. , n. ,
mongrel
ideology of race
, –, –, , ,
, –, , , n.
mongrel as Jew
, , , , ,
–, n.
Monroe, Harriet
, , , , , n. ,
n. ,
Monroe, Jonathan
, ,
Moon, Michael xii
Moore, Marianne xii, xiv,
, , , , , ,
, n. , – n. , n. ,
–, n. , n. , n. ,
n.
, n. ,
gender ideas
, , –, , , n.
, n.
“My Apish Cousins” [“The Monkeys”]
“New York”
“Novices”
–
on race
“People’s Surroundings”
n.
“Picking and Choosing”
“Radical”
–
review of H.D.
–
“Roses Only”
–
semiticized representations
–
suffrage support
n.
“The Fish”
–
“The Labors of Hercules”
, n.
“The Steeple-Jack”
“Those Various Scalpels”
n.
“To a Strategist”
Morris, J. A.
–, n. , n. ,
Morrison, Toni
, , , , ,
Morrisson, Mark
Mort, Frank
, n. ,
Mudimbe, V. Y.
,
Mullen, Harryette
,
Mulvey, Laura
, n. ,
Murphy, Joseph M.
,
Nation and Atheneum
national literature, see American literature
National Origins Act
nativist thinking
,
Negro Renaissance
, , , n , n.
Nelson, Cary
,
New Criticism
, , , n. (Kalaidjian
on),
n. (Arac on), , n.
Newman, Robert
New Black
, , , , , , , –, ,
–, , , –, , n.
aesthetic issues
–
Africa as topos
–
civic equality
–, , , , n.
critique of racism
, , , , n.
cultural debates
, –, , ,
decolonization
struggle with terrorism
,
subjectivity
–, ,
use of the primitive
–
new entitlements
, , , , –, ,
–
New Freewoman
, , n. , n. ; see also
Freewoman
New Historicist
, n. (DeKoven on)
New Jew
, , , , , –, , , ,
–; see also Jew, Judaism
assimilation
, –, , , n. ,
n.
, –, n.
Enlightenment
, , , ,
diaspora
, , , –, n.
melting pot metaphor
–
mongrel metaphor
, –
particularist traditions
, –, , ,
secularization
, , ,
New Negro
, , ; see also New Black
New Woman
, , , , , , , , , ,
, , , –, n. , n.
androgyne
birth control
, , , n.
critique of the feminine
, ,
critique of “poesy”
divorce
higher education
,
ideas on marriage
,
independence
professional claims
, , ,
sexuality, sex-radicalism
, , , , , ,
, , , , , , n.
“Social Purity”
, , , ,
suffrage
, , –,
Index
Newer Man
, , , , , , n.
Nichols, Stephen
,
Nielsen, Aldon Lynn xi, xiii,
, , , ,
,
“nigger”, see derogatory words
Nochlin, Linda, and Tamar Garb
, n.
,
Nordic
, –, , n. , n. ,
Norris, Christopher, see Machin, Richard
Norris, Margot
,
North, Michael
, , , , , ,
n.
, n. ,
numerus clausus
–
O’Hara, Daniel xii
O’Neill, Eugene
n. , n.
Ouida
Olson, Charles
–,
Oppen, George
Oppenheim, James
–, n. ,
Opportunity
, n. , n.
orgasm, chapter three passim; see also sexuality
Orvell, Miles xii
Osborne, Peter
,
Others
, , , – n. , n. ,
Pankhursts
Parini, Jay
parisitism and prostitution, see New Woman,
ideas on marriage
Parker, Pat, see Hosek, Chaviva
Pearce, Richard
,
Pease, Donald E., see Kaplan, Amy
Perelman, Bob
, , n. ,
Perloff, Marjorie
, , , , , n. ,
n. , –, n. ,
Perry, Gil
; see also Harrison, Charles
Peterkin, Julia
,
Picasso, Pablo
, see also Stein, Picasso
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen
n. ,
philology
, n.
philology, social, see social philology
Pinkney, Tony
,
Plessy v. Ferguson (
)
Poe, Edgar Allen
,
poesy
, , see also poetry and gender
poetess, traits of
–, , –, n. ,
n.
poetic drama
, , , –
poetry and gender
, , , –
foundational cluster
–, , –,
–, ,
poetry and society
, , –, ,
see also social philology
poetry as discourse
author, loss of
, n.
condensation
, , , ,
diegesis
,
editorial constructions
n.
enounced
, , , , ,
enunciation
, , –, ,
genre
,
ideology
et passim
material text
n
performance
,
persona
pronouns
semantic meaning
subjectivity of the enounced
subjectivity of the enunciation
, ,
n.
poetry as mode; see also poetry as discourse
caesura
connotation
, , ,
crypt word
, , , –, , , , ,
, ,
denotation
–, , , , , ,
–, ,
detail of composition
, , , , , , ,
, n. , n.
diction
, ,
etymology
, , ,
imagery
,
line break and segmentivity
, , , , ,
, , , , , ,
metonomic or lateral associations
, , ,
phoneme
, , –, ,
prosody
pun
, , , , , ,
punctuation
, ,
rhyme
, , , ,
semantic image
, ,
sound
, , , ,
stanza
, , ,
syntax
, , , –
“the remainder”
, , , ; see also
Lecercle
“transegmental drift”
, , , ; see also
Stewart
visual text
, , ,
Poggi, Christine
n. ,
pogrom
, –,
Pollock, Griselda
,
Pondrom, Cyrena
n.
Porter, Cole
post-structuralism
, –, , n.
Pound, Ezra xiv,
, , , , , , , –,
, , , , , , , n. ,
n. , n. , n. , n. ,
n. , ; see also logopoeia
Index
anti-Semitism
, , , , –,
n.
, n. , n. , n. ,
– n.
Canto XIV
,
Canto XXXV
“Commission”
,
doggerel poetry
–
Gaudier-Brzeska
, n. , n.
gender ideas – womanhood
, –, ,
, ,
gender ideas – manhood
, , –, ,
, –
“Hell Cantos” (Cantos XIV and XV)
,
n.
“Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”
, –, ,
, –, –, ,
ideas on sexuality
–, –, ,
n.
, n.
“In a Station of the Metro”
–
Lustra
,
“Postscript to The Natural Philosophy of Love . . .”
–, n.
racial attitudes
–
“Salutation the Second”
“Tenzone”
“The Condolence”
“The Encounter”
“Yiddisher Charleston Band”
, –
Price, Sally
,
Prins, Yopie, and Maeera Shreiber
primitivism
, , , –, , , , ,
, , –, , n. , n. ,
n. , n.
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
–, n.
Quartermain, Peter
, , n. ,
Quartermain, Peter, and Rachel Blau
DuPlessis
Quinn John
, n. , n. ,
n.
Raboteau, Albert
,
race
, –, , –, –; see also
ethnicity, New Black, New Negro,
whiteness, Africanist representations
race suicide, see racial theories
racial theories
, , , , , , –;
see also Grant, Schultz, Stoddard
Rado, Lisa
Rampersad, Arnold xiii,
, n. ,
Rasula, Jed
,
Red Summer
, ; see also lynching
religious culture
; see also Jews, New Jews,
Christianity
Richardson, Dorothy
, ,
Richardson, Joan
, , n. , n. ,
n. ,
Ricks, Christopher
, n. ,
Rigsby, Nigel
,
Robins, Elizabeth
Robinson, Paul
,
Roby, Kinley E.
Rodgers, Bruce
,
Rogin, Michael
rose
, –
Rosten, Leo
–, n. , n. ,
Rothenberg, Jerome
,
Royce, Josiah
Rubin-Dorsky, Jeffrey xiii,
n.
Rubinow, Max
n.
Ruddnick, Lisa
n. ,
Rudnick, Lois, see Heller, Adele
Ruggles, Eleanor
Russian Revolution
–, ,
Said, Edward
, , ,
“contrapuntal reading”
, , n.
Sanday, Peggy Reeves
,
Sandburg, Carl
, , , ,
Sanders, Mark A.
Santayana, George
Scarry, Elaine
Schimmel, Harold
n. ,
Schreiner, Olive
,
Schultz, Alfred P.
, ,
Schuyler, George S.
n. ,
Schweik, Susan
,
Scott, Bonnie Kime
, n. ,
Scroggins, Mark
, n. ,
Scully, James
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky
, ,
segregation (racial)
semiticized representations, see Jews,
stereotypes of
serial poem
–
sex-radical
, , n. , n. ; see also
New Woman
sexuality
, , – esp. representations of
sexual intercourse,
, , n.
Shaw, George Bernard
, ,
sheeney, see derogatory words
Shiver, William S., see Singh, Amritjit
Shoemaker, Steve
Shoptaw, John
, n. ,
Showalter, Elaine
, , n. ,
Shreiber, Maeera
n. ,
and Yopie Prins
and Keith Tuma
n. , n. ,
Shufeldt, R. W.
,
Shylock (Merchant of Venice)
,
Index
Sieburth, Richard
Siegel, Carol
n. ,
Sigg, Eric
,
Silliman, Ron
Silver, Brenda
,
Simpson, Hilary
n. ,
Sinclair, May
,
Singh, Amritjit
Sitwell, Edith
, ,
slavery in U.S.
,
Slavs
, , , n.
Smith, Carol H.
Smith, Gary
,
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll
,
social philology
, –, , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , , , ,
, , , , , , , , ,
–, ,
“close reading”
(Shoptaw on), n.
(Wolfson on)
“historical semiotics”
,
“social formalism”
“social evaluation”
, , , ; see also
derogatory words
see also poetry as mode, for specific examples
Sorisio, Carolyn
Spectator, The
,
Spingarn, Joel E.
–,
Spitzer, Leo
n. ,
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty
, n. ,
Stein, Gertrude xiv,
, , , , , n.
,
“Composition as Explanation”
–, n.
“Lifting Belly”
, n. ,
“Miss Furr and Miss Skeene”
–
Picasso
, n. , n.
“Poetry and Grammar”
–
racial ideas
, n. ,
“Sacred Emily”
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Stevens, Wallace xiv,
, , –, , , ,
, , –, , n. , n. ,
n. , n. ,
“Architecture”
,
“Bantams in Pine Woods”
, , –, ,
n.
“Contents of a Cab”
–
“Floral Decorations for Bananas”
gender ideas in
, , –
Harmonium
, –
“Hymn From a Watermelon Pavilion”
–
“Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery”
–, n. , –, n. ,
“O Florida, Venereal Soil”
“Ploughing on Sunday”
racial materials in
, –, –,
–, , , –, n. , n.
, n. , n. ,
“Sea Surface Full of Clouds”
–
“Some Friends from Pascagoula”
“Stars at Tallapoosa”
“The Comedian as the Letter C”
, n.
“The Jack-Rabbit”
“The News and the Weather”
“The Silver Plough-Boy”
, n.
“The Virgin Carrying a Lantern”
“The Worms at Heaven’s Gate”
–
“Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise”
–,
n. , n. , n.
“Two Figures in Dense Violet Light”
–
Stewart, Garrett
–, ,
“trans-segmental drift”
Stock, Noel
Stoddard, Lothrop
, , ,
Stoker, Bram
n. ,
Stopes, Marie Carmichael
–,
Strachey, Ray
–, ,
struggles, social
, –, , n. (von
Hallberg on)
ideological
linguistic
new entitlements
, –,
post-Reconstruction
subjectivity
and social location
, –,
citizenship
–, n.
“conglomerate titles”
–, ,
in humanist ideology
in poetry
, , , n.
in society
, , , ,
in theory
, (R. Williams n. ),
(Kristeva n.
)
modern subjectivity
, ,
tension between group and individual
, ,
–, –,
suffrage
woman suffrage
, , , , –,
including hunger strikes,
n. , n.
extension of male franchise
, n.
Sundquist, Eric J.
, n. ,
Suleiman, Susan Rubin
,
Svarny, Erik M.
Sweeney, see Eliot, T. S.
Swerdlow Amy
syntax, see poetry as mode
syphilis
–, n. , n. , n. ,
n.
Index
Tambimuttu, see March, Richard
Tantillo, Maura Shaw, see Fout, John
Tate, Trudi
,
Teasdale, Sara
Terrell, Carroll
Thomas, Lorenzo xi
Thomas, M. Carey
n.
Thompson, Robert Farris
n. ,
Tickner, Lisa
, , , ,
Toll, Robert C.
Tomas, John
,
Tomlinson, Charles
tom-toms
–, n. , n.
Torgovnick, Marianna
,
Torok, Maria, see Abraham, Nicolas
Transitional Man, see Newer Man
Trimberger, Ellen Kay
n. ,
Tuma, Keith
, – n. , ; see also
Shreiber, Maeera
Uitti, Karl
–,
Untermeyer, Louis
, , n. , , n. ,
n. ,
Vail, Lawrence
n.
Van Vechten, Carl
,
Nigger Heaven
n.
Vanity Fair
,
Vendler, Helen
, ,
Venuti, Lawrence xii,
, , ,
Vicinus, Martha, see Duberman, Martin
Vickers, Nancy
,
Volosinov, V. V.
,
voudou
–; see also hoo-doo
Wall, Cheryl
,
Warren, Austin, see Wellek, René
Watten, Barrett
, , ,
Washington, Booker T.
, , n. ,
Weeks, Jeffrey
, n. , n. ,
Weininger, Otto
, ,
Wellek, René, and Austin Warren
,
Wells, Ida B.
,
whiteness
, –, , , , , , –,
, , , , , , , , , ,
, , , –, –, , ,
n.
, n. , n. , n. ; see also
Euro-American
Whitman, Walt
, , , n.
Widdowson, Peter
Wilde, Oscar
,
Williams, Bert
, , n. , n.
Williams, Raymond
, , , , , n. ,
n. ,
Williams, William Carlos xiv,
, , , , ,
, n. , n. , n. ,
Al que quiere
, n.
gender ideas
–,
“La Flor”
–
Spring and All
, n.
“The Uses of Poetry”
“To a Young Housewife”
, –
“Transitional”
–
Wilson, Edmund
,
Wintz, Cary D.
,
Wolff, Janet
,
Wolfson, Susan J.
, ,
Woll, Allen
, n. ,
Wonham, Harry
,
women
historical conditions
Woolf, Virginia
, , –, , , n.
, n. ,
World Columbian Exposition
,
World War I
, , , –, –, , ,
, , n. , n. , n. ,
n. , n.
Wright, Almroth E.
, , n. ,
Wylie, Elinor
Wynter, Sylvia
,
Yalom, Marilyn, see Middlebrook, Diane
Wood
Yeats, W. B.
, , , , n.
Yehoash
, , n.
Yiddish
, , , , –, –, ,
, –, n. , –, n. ,
n.
Zangwill, Israel
–,
Zayas, M. de
–, ,
Zukofsky, Louis xiv,
, , –, , n.
, n. ,
An “Objectivists” Anthology
“Poem Beginning ‘The’ ”
, –, n.
“Sincerity and Objectification”
Index
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