Abstract
In August of 1912, Robert Frost boarded the steamship, the SS Parisian, setting sail for Great Britain. Like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot before him, Frost left in search of audiences and outlets for his verse as well as a supportive community of fellow poets. For twenty years he had sent poems to the leading monthlies, including The Century, Scribner’s, Atlantic, Harper’s Weekly, and The Youth’s Companion, with little but discouragement to show for his efforts. “If I ran away from anything when I went to England it was the American editor,” he wrote.1 Frost’s move abroad thus represented a profound disillusionment with the state of the modern American literary marketplace. In his self-described “protest against magazine poets and poetry,” Frost was not alone. Between 1898 and 1910, articles and letters to the editor at major newspapers, such as The New York Times and The Boston Globe, and popular periodicals, including The Saturday Review and Harper’s Monthly, regularly debated if poetry were a dead enterprise, gone the way of the Pony Express. A 1905 symposium on “The Slump of Poetry” in The Critic concluded that the public ignored poets both because they used outmoded forms about irrelevant topics, and because the fast-paced, materialist, scientific nature of modern life inoculated Americans against an appreciation of poetry’s benefits.2
They have helped me to hold reality and justice in a single vision.
—William Butler Yeats
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Notes
Quoted in Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938 (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1970), 3.
Quoted in Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 131. Ezra Pound published the first American review of Frost’s A Boy’s Will in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1 (May 1913) 2, 72–73.
William Braithwaite, “A Poet of New England: Robert Frost, A New Exponent of Life,” BET, 28 April 1915 and 8 May 1915.
Jessie B. Rittenhouse, “North of Boston,” NYT Book Review (16 May 1915), 189.
Louis Untermeyer, “Robert Frost’s ‘North of Boston,’ “Chicago Evening Post (23 April 1915), 11.
Clement Wood, Amy Lowell (New York: Harold Vinal, 1926), 4.
Quoted in James Hoopes, Van Wyck Brooks: In Search of American Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 77.
Little consensus exists among historians over the precise meaning of the term “progressive.” I employ it here to indicate an era, ranging roughly from 1893 to 1920, that witnessed culture-wide reform movements to reshape American society by addressing large-scale problems of industrial organization as well as issues surrounding individual rights and responsibilities. While falling under the ideological rubric of liberalism, progressive reform involved a middle class that at times instituted conservative measures. See Daniel Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History, 10 (December 1982) 4, 113–32.
John Milton Cooper, Pivotal Decades: The United States 1900–1920 (W.W. Norton, 1990).
Maureen Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
Vachel Lindsay, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1928 [1914]), 15–17.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1904 [1815]): 34–35.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1913 [1868]), 528.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (New York: Penguin, 2003 [1889]), 89.
Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” Emerson’s Prose and Poetry. Eds. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).
Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).
See Leah Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” in Book History, Volume 7. Ed. Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 303–20.
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
My understanding of the intimate relationship between reading and self-transformation has been deeply influenced by Barbara Sicherman, “Reading and Ambition: M. Carey Thomas and Female Heroism,” American Quarterly 45 (March 1993) 1, 73–103.
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “‘Nous Autres’: Reading, Passion, and the Creation of M. Carey Thomas,” Journal of American History 79 (1992), 68–95. These essays were published in Sicherman, Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired A Generation of American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993).
Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999).
Sarah Ruth Offhaus, “Mary Talbert and the Phyllis Wheatley Club,” Buffalo Rising, 19 June 2010.
Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Vol. 2. Eds. Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman (New York: Routledge, 2004), 903.
Some book historians speak of quixotic reading and reading protocols as a way to challenge the passive connotations of reading “reception.” See Tabitha Gilman Tenney, Female Quixotism, Ed. Jean Nienkamp and Andrea Collins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 2–14.
Barbara Sicherman makes this argument in “Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women’s Reading in Late-Victorian America,” where she analyzes the subjective uses of reading among late-Victorian upper-middle-class women during the Progressive era in transgressing traditional gender expectations. Sicherman quotes “structures of feelings” from Raymond Williams. In Reading in America. Ed. Cathy Davidson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 201–25.
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George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Reenchantment of the World (New York: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Eleanore Belfiore and Oliver Bennett, The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Martha Nussbaum, “Education for Profit, Education for Freedom,” Liberal Education (Summer 2009), 12 [6–13].
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1989]), xvi.
Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2002).
John Timberman Newcomb, Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity (The Ohio State University Press, 2004).
Michael Thurston, Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
Mark Van Wienan, Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
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Paula Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (New York: Princeton University Press, 2003).
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Cheryl Walker, Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 5.
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Since then, several revisionist studies examining canon formation have appeared, including Paul Lauter Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in United States Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
Walter Kalaidjian, American Culture between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Nelson continues to repair the breach through his “Modern American Poets” website at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, by including the works of neglected poets from the 1900s through the 1920s.
Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
Susan Friedman, “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity, 8 (September 2001) 3, 493–513.
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Modernisms: 1900–1950. Eds. Steven Gould Axelrod and Camille Roman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005).
Henry May, The End of Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992 [1959]).
“Ugliness” had become a controversial subject since Victor Hugo’s famous 1827 preface to his play “Cromwell,” which aired his fascination with the many types of ugliness. In the 1860s Baudelaire continued this fascination, urging writers to look not to the ancients but to contemporary life in all its strangeness; for him, creating beauty entailed creating ugliness as well. For more information, see Virginia Swain, Grotesque Figures: Baudelaire, Rousseau, and the Aesthetics of Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
Robert Crunden, American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885–1911 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xi–xii.
See also Malcolm Cowley, After the Genteel Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1937).
Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915).
Howard Mumford Jones, The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience, 1865–1919 (New York: Viking, 1971).
Willard Thorp, “Defenders of Ideality,” in Literary History of the United States. Ed. Robert Spiller et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 809–26.
John Tomsich A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971).
George Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992).
Joseph Freeman, An American Testament (NJ: Quinn and Boden Company, 1936), 85, 270, vii.
See Frank Kermode Romantic Image (New York: Macmillan, 1957).
Robert Langbaum, The Modern Spirit: Essays on the Continuity of 19th and 20th Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
George Bornstein, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
Albert Gelpi, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Louis Menand, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Carol Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (New York: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Columbia University Press, 1993).
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
Peter McDonald, “Ideas of the Book and Histories of Literature: After Theory?” PMLA (January 2006), 214–28.
William Charvat, Literary Publishing in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959).
Robert Darnton, “What Is The History of Books?” in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). Roger Chartier argues against the notion that texts have “stable, universal, fixed meaning,” insisting instead that readers construct their own significance. Chartier traces an “order of discourse,” that is, the underlying principles that guide the production, commodification, and reception of books in The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Lisa Szefel, “The Creation of an American Poetic Community, 1890–1920” (PhD diss. University of Rochester, 2004).
Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Steven Behrendt, British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
Michael Harrington, Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).
Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry between Community and Institution (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).
See New Directions in American Reception Studies. Eds. James Machor and Philip Goldstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
George Sylvester Viereck, “Recent Poetry,” CO (formerly CL), July 1913, 56.
Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years, 1885–1915 (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc. 1952): 120–21.
Quoted in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer. Ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 24.
Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992 [1978]), 263–67.
Jayne Marek, Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995).
Ann Massa, “The Columbian Ode and Poetry,” Journal of American Studies 20 (2001) 86: 51–69 and “Form Follows Function: The Construction of Harriet Monroe,” in A Living of Words: American Women in Print Culture (1995), Ed. Susan Albertine.
John Newcomb, “Poetry’s Opening Door: Harriet Monroe and American Modernism,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography 15.1 (2005), 6–22.
Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson, 14 October 1916, Folder 7.14, Box 7, AHUT. Letters from the Alice Corbin Henderson papers, reprinted by permission of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Also published in The Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson. Ed. Ira Nadel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 170.
Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909–1965. Ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1973), 8, 23–26.
As Eastman wrote, they regarded “books as an enemy of life’s real joy” and “rejected cultivation of the mind at the expense of the emotion.” Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 33–34, 58. “Experience is all” Oppenheim wrote in Songs for the New Age (1913), 57. In this, they built on the tradition of Anglo-American Romantics who evinced the superiority of lived experience over book knowledge in their poetry and correspondence. Lord Byron wrote: “The great object of life is sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain.” In an 1817 letter, Keats wrote: “O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts.” In “The Tables Turned,” Wordsworth reflected that: “One impulse from a vernal wood/May teach you more of man,/Of moral evil and of good,/Than all the sages can … Enough of Science and of Art; …/Come forth, and bring with you a heart/That watches and receives.” Quoted in Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 43–45.
See Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
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Szefel, L. (2011). Introduction. In: The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118973_1
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