Abstract
In the fall of 1912, after living in a palatial villa in Florence, Italy, for seven years, the Buffalo, New York-born banking heiress Mabel Dodge sailed into New York’s harbor. Upon seeing the Statue of Liberty, she broke into sobs. “We have left everything worthwhile behind us,” she wept to her young son, John. “America is all machinery and moneymaking and factories—it is ugly, ugly, ugly!” Within a few months, her tears abated as she became involved in staging the Armory Show Exhibit of modern art and determined to make her homeland, if not beautiful, at least more open to art and culture. “I would upset America,” she vowed. Then, a thought hit her. As she recalled in a memoir: “I was going to dynamite New York.” In her Greenwich Village home on Fifth Avenue she established a salon that brought together a volatile mix of Wobblies and writers, anarchists and artists, bohemians and birth control advocates. “It seems as though everywhere, in that year of 1913, barriers went down and people reached each other who had never been in touch before,” she wrote. “There were all sorts of new ways to communicate, as well as new communications. The new spirit was abroad and swept us all together.”1
A NOISELESS, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres, to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.
—Walt Whitman
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Notes
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 102, 112.
Also quoted in Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village, the American Bohemia, 1910–1960 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 16.
Elmer Gertz, Odyssey of a Barbarian: The Biography of George Sylvester Viereck (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1978), 40.
Ralph Melnick, The Life and Work of Ludwig Lewisohn, Vol. 1 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 94–104.
Viereck, Ninevah and Other Poems (New York: Moffat, Yard & Co., 1912 [1907]), xiv–xv.
Untermeyer, “The Haunted House,” The New York Times, 13 July 1907.
Bradley, “Prolonging Strains of A Dying Song,” The New York Times Book Review, 22 June 1907, 407.
Floyd Dell, Homecoming: An Autobiography (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Inc., 1933), 287.
Steven Watson, Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), 29.
Monroe, “The Bigness of the World,” Atlantic Monthly, 108 (September 1911) 3, 372 [371–75].
Monroe, “The Motive of the Magazine.” Poetry (October 1912), 27–29.
Edith Wyatt, “On the Reading of Poetry,” Poetry, 1 (October 1912) 1, 25.
Monroe, review of The Vaunt of Man and Other Poems, Poetry, 2 (April 1913) 1, 26.
Monroe, review of The Lonely Dancer, and Other Poems, Poetry, 4 (April 1914) 1, 31.
Monroe, “The New Beauty,” Poetry, 2 (April 1913) 1, 22–24.
Floyd Dell, “To A Poet,” Chicago Evening Post Literary Review (4 April 1913), quoted in Monroe, Poet’s Life, 310.
Monroe, “The Open Door,” Poetry, 1 (November 1912) 2, 62.
Monroe, “Tradition,” Poetry, 2 (May 1913) 2, 67–69.
Henderson, “Art and Photography,” Poetry, 6 (April 1915) 1, 99–101.
Tietjens, World, 24. For an analysis of Henderon’s contributions to the magazine, see Jayne Marek, Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995).
Monroe, “Review of Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems,” Poetry, 8 (May 1916), 2, 90–93.
Monroe, “Incarnations,” Poetry, 2 (May 1913) 2, 104. Assistant Editor Alice Corbin Henderson seconded the endorsement of Lindsay: “He is realizing himself in relation to direct experience.” Henderson, “Too Far From Paris,” Poetry, 4 (June 1914), 3.
Monroe, “Poetry’s Banquet,” Poetry, 4 (April 1914) 1, 25–28.
Monroe, “Introduction” to Lindsay, The Congo and Other Poems (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914), v–ix.
Randolph S. Bourne, “Sincerity in the Making,” The New Republic, 1 (5 December 1914), 26–27.
James Kraft, Who Is Witter Bynner? A Biography (Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 1995), 24.
Harriet Monroe, “Review of Witter Bynner The New World,” Poetry, 7 (December 1915), 3, 147–48.
Monroe, “Give Him Room,” Poetry, 6 (April 1915) 1, 81–83.
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© 2011 Lisa Szefel
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Szefel, L. (2011). Curating a Community, Engineering a Renaissance: A New Infrastructure for the “New Beauty”. 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_4
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