The Comps Reading Project part 15

Prometheus and Other Poems, Mary Devenport O'Neill.

 

This 1929 collection was the first to be written by an Irish woman poet that could be considered "Modernist."  Better known as a playwright in her time, and for hosting a salon attended by the likes of Yeats, AE, and Frank O'Connor.  Strangely, most the poems in O'Neill's sole collection actually feel the most contemporary of all--in contrast to the the rampant neo-Classical collage of most her contemporaries, the stark, meter-less brevity and simple declarative statements of these poems feel exactly like the sort of poems that are being published in today's journals anthologized.  So, though there appears to have scarcely been a second printing since 1929, this collection might ironically be the most directly influential of all the Irish Modernists.  For example, the vignettes of natural environments would not feel out of place in Boland's 1990 Outside History.  Which reminds me: natural wilderness is likewise a place of feminine refuge in Bombal's La ultima niebla--is a similar theme occurring here in Irish lit?

The titular "Prometheus" poem that closes the collection is closer to O'Neill's dramatic instincts, being presented as a play.  As her own rather on-the-nose intro indicates, the tension is between Prometheus and the Story-Teller--the former sees the beauty of the world as it is, the latter sees how the world can provide the raw materials to create and fashion one's own world.  Is this the same tension between Vallejo and Huidobro I cataloged last week?

A Woman in Her Garden, Dulce María Loynaz.

Bilingual edition of the selected poems of the legendary Cuban poet (and boy-howdy, are these bad translations!  Like, barely in the same neighborhood of the originals...).  In contrast to the wildernesses of O'Neill and Boland, Loynaz finds the space for feminine self-realization within the carefully cultivated domestic sphere of the garden.  This quest for freedom is not just gendered; as a survivor of the old aristocratic class, Loynaz was fundamentally at odds with the Cuban Revolution of 1959, vowing to never write poetry again (though she later reneged).  Her own husband went into exile in 1961, but for her national loyalty trumped even the severest political ideology, and so she stubbornly stayed in Cuba till her death in 1997, writing to the end poems that scarcely spread out beyond her own domestic sphere (though with a more expansive historical sphere, as shown by her long poem on King Tut), where there alone she could still be.  She also has a deep infatuation with waters, similar to her fellow Caribbean Burgos (though Burgos came from far less privilege--and was far more explicitly political--than Loynaz).

Marconi's Cottage, Medbh McGuckian.

1992 collection, and the final Irish poet on my list!  A fellow Belfast Catholic and classmate of Seamus Heaney, who himself praised her poetry (oft compared to Rilkes') with: “Her language is like the inner lining of consciousness, the inner lining of English itself, and it moves amphibiously between the dreamlife and her actual domestic and historical experience as a woman in late-20th-century Ireland.” I fear, however, that I have little else to add to that; partly that may just be burn-out; partly that may be just nobody tops Seamus Heaney in pithy phrases; but part of it too may just be that I feel like everything I wrote of Boland or O'Neill or Loynaz I could again repeat here.  I mean, yes, she is a little more explicitly feminist than those other three (though she's no Adrienne Rich--but then, who is?), and she allows the clash between England and Ireland to seep in there more; and there is a more distinctive focus upon seasons I suppose, and the titular poem near the end really is stunning; but otherwise her poetic diction, structures, and topics--waters, seas, flows, lovers, the domestic, nature, individuality ("saying 'we' is dangerous"), etc--all feel more or less the same.  And maybe that just means there are the important obsessions of female modernist poets, the themes that merit closer examination.

Or maybe it's time for me to re-read this poem just to cleanse my palette.  

Antología, Gabriela Mistral [Lucila Godoy Alcayaga].

Selected works of the early-20th century Chilean poet, the only Latin-American woman thus far to win the Nobel for Literature [1945], great advocate for liberalizing public education, and former teacher to no less than Pablo Neruda.  You know, after reading so much "precious" contemporary poetry and opaque Modernist collages, it was frankly refreshing to read just good ol' fashioned religious themed rhyming quatrains for a change!

Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880-1980, Loren Glass.

2004 study on literary celebrity by the Special Topics director of my comps committee.  This particular work analyzes the fraught phenomenon of the celebrity author--those people who claim to disappear behind their works, only to become personalities who loom larger than their masterpieces.  He tracks this change through the best-selling autobiographies of Henry Adams and Edward Bok, to the planned copywrite-extensions of Mark Twain's autobiography, to Jack London's manifold impersonators (including himelf), to Gertrude Stein's identity crisis following her late-period massive commercial success, to Ernest Hemingway's self-constructed hyper-masculanism, to Norman Mailer's failed attempts to recreate the now-extinct modernist macho writer in the post-war period.  Glass cites this as a phenomenon that is now passed, particular in our era where all the major publishers have been absorbed into a few mega-corporations more interested in production of profits than culture--as well as the wider marginalization of literature in the larger culture in general (though given how, say, David Foster Wallace functioned as a literary celebrity in the 21st century, I'm not sure that pessimism is entirely justified).

I need to read one Modernist study a day from now till the end of September to finish my entire Special Topic list, in time to then spend all of October focusing solely upon composing my comps portfolio (I have a firm defense date at last: November 18th!  Send prayers and/or good vibes my way, please!)

Literary Modernism, ed. Irving Howe.

This early 1967 anthology serves as a sort of historical artifact from when academia was still reeling and coming to terms with the then-recent phenomenon of Modernism.  Intriguingly, Stein, Woolf, and other women are blithely excluded from the discussion, while fascist Ezra Pound had yet to be fully recuperated back into the "canon"--indeed, the various essayists therein appear to still be uncomfortable with the whole idea of a Modernist "Canon," inasmuch as most of them can still recently remember when Joyce, Eliot, and Hemingway were all still alive.  They aren't quite ready to bury the past just yet, even while grappling with the fact that these "Moderns" really are the past now; these are scholars struggling with their own complicity in the canonization process.  Unlike later such anthologies, no attempt is made to account for--or even acknowledge--Postmodernism.  Though necessarily disparate interpretations are corralled into this single volume, an over-arching theme does indeed seem to emerge, one that projects the writers' own anxieties onto the period itself, as period of permanent anxiety, neurosis, sickness--and unresolvable at that, or even needing to be resolvable.  In fact, as Howe himself observes in his intro: "A modernists culture sees doubt as a form of health."  The great Modernist question is away from moral questions to metaphysical ones--away from the view through the window pane and onto the pane (and the pain) itself.  To paraphrase in my own words: it's no longer a question of "what does God want of me" or even "is there a God," but rather, "given there is no apparent God, what on earth do we do now??"  These critics also appear to agree with Dievespeen much later in identifying a self-conscious difficulty as the key defining characteristic of literary Modernism.

Spatial Form in Modern Literature, Joseph Frank.
Influential and oft-cited 3-part 1945 essay that, while never using the term "Modernist" (such would have been an anachronism), nevertheless attempts to account for Modernist literature's radical spatial forms.  In Part I, he outlines by means of the Imagists, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Proust, how Modernist writers corralled together disparate moments and sensations into a single complex emotional/sensual image through their prose and poetry.  In Part II, he evangelizes heavily for Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, making numerous comparisons to Shakespeare and her biggest supporter Eliot, getting into heavy plot summary, and situating her in the context of anti-representational modern art and poetry.  In Part III he posits that so-called (and problematically named) "primitive" art arises in certain civilizations not from any lack of skill or development, but from times of great turmoil, when mankind does not feel in tune with the universe, and there is a need to impose some sort of spatial order upon the chaos.  Such was the Modernist age.

The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova.

Leave it to a Frenchman to write a book about world literature that still centers everything in Paris!  Serious, his basic claim is that it's not till a book's been approved by Paris that it becomes "World" literature.  This 2004 study claims to offer a strategy for inclusiveness extended to the margins that is nonetheless still predicated upon the most Western of ethnocentrism, no matter Casanova's hand-wringing protests to the contrary.  How very French.  Though there is a great chapter on "The Irish Paradigm"--and a reminder to check out Edward Sa'id's "Yeats and Decolonization," wherein Yeats is explicitly compared with Neruda (which I'll need to remember to address in my essay on Yeats and Burgos).

A Survey of Modernist Poetry, Laura Riding and Robert Graves.

Scholarly study first published clear back in 1927, when "Modernist" referred not to a canon, but to the actual contemporary moment!  The over-riding preoccupation of these authors is with Modern poetry's self-conscious "difficulty," lending credence to Dievepeen's 2002 argument that it was this difficulty was what most defined this era.  The authors are constantly concerned with how this poetry can be accessed by a hazy, ill-defined "common reader."  (Many sweeping over-generalizations are made in this text, and with zero citations).  Anticipating Calinescu in the '70s, Riding and Graves identify a distinct aristocratic thread of elitism and classicism (both in the sense of social classes and Greek Classic-esque) that undergirds the ethos of the era.  I suppose it is a mark of how far e.e. cummings' star has fallen, that he is by far the most prominent poet cited in this text, while I have scarcely heard him mentioned in any of the more recent studies I've read so far.  

These two have little patience for the Imagists, denigrating H.D. (comparing her unfavorably with Emily Dickinson) and dismissing Ezra Pound out of hand.  They don't seem to mind TS Eliot and James Joyce, and oddly enough love Gertrude Stein (interesting, since apparently it wouldn't be until the '70s that Stein would be fully recuperated into the canon).  They make an effort to point out the humor in Modernist poetry that even today is often elided and ignored.  They are still very much beholden to Victorian Poetry theory, as shown by their willingness to compare Cummings against Shakespeare (the "Bardolitry" continues), unironically and unproblematically deploying terms like "timeless truth" and "Spiritual Elevation", frame the Romantics as unified and uniformly reactionary (and the Modernists as reactions against the reactions), and cite Poe, Rimbaud, and Mallarme as most obvious antecedents to the Modernists.  Most of the study is dominated by close-readings, revealing how New Criticism had already taken over the study of poetry.  All in all, these two claim to be fond of "modern" poetry, albeit with serious caveats.

Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, Lawrence Rainey.

1998 study concerning the complex negotiation the various High Modernists had to perform between the pseudo-aristocratic Patronage system of yore with the realities of the contemporary bourgeois capitalist commodity market system, in order to get their works known, respected, and above all else sold.  Details how Ezra Pound scored a straight up patronage in early-20th century England--right up until his patron killed herself, so he took a cue from the Italian Futurists in behaving like a polemical radical to insult the very bourgeois who gleefully applauded him; theorizes that at least part of Pound's attraction to Italian Fascism had to do with Mussolini becoming his new Patron.  Also examines how the famed, expensive "deluxe" first-edition of Joyce's Ulysses was printed privately because 1) that got around U.S. anti-obscenity laws, and 2) it rendered the text a commodity, an investment, like a fine painting, with higher resale value.  Also tracks how TS Eliot got The Waste Land published through a combo of playing different literary magazines off each other, and getting "patronages" disguised as awards, "pensions," and "investments."  Finally concludes with an examination of the post-'60s recuperation of H.D., who fully retreated into aristocratic patronage, to the point that she was virtually unknown until the PC crowd needed a feminist, lesbian poet to disrupt the Modernist "canon."  Rainey interrogates whether H.D. was really as progressive and feminist as her champions make her out to be, and suggests that her patronage continues into the present day with our contemporary version--college textbooks and required readings, sadly the last bastion of where poetry is still preserved and read today.

Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity, Aaron Jaffe.

Jaffe's 2005 study arguably picks up where Rainey's book left off--in fact, its intro references Rainey directly, how Institutions of Modernism is part of the Henry McBride series, and how a facetious amazon.com reviewer posed as the resurrected McBride himself, demanding to know how such a dry, humorless book came to carry his name, and written by a scholar who doesn't even seem to actually enjoy reading novels and poetry.  But it is exactly this trade-off of Modernist celebrity--how the personalities came to stand in for the works themselves--that most fascinates Jaffe.  He opens and closes with mirror images: the famous pic of Marilyn Monroe reading Joyce's Ulysses, and of TS Eliot keeping an autographed pic of Groucho Marx on his desk.  Low-art trades on the High, just as High-art trades on the Low.  Jaffe has an especially intriguing chapter on "Adjectives," how Ezra Pound's well-known Imagist calls for cutting all adjectives (as Hemingway reported), far from being a manner by which to elide the author altogether, was in fact a strategy for preserving the personality of the author all the more permanently into the style itself.  "Poundian," "Shakespearian," "Eliotic," are all terms Jaffe continually returns to interrogate--particularly to explore how Pound was the least Pounding, Shakespeare the least Shakespearian, for they were not derivative of themselves--which is further ironic, given how nakedly derivative they all were.  

Jaffe explores the nature of Modernist collaboration--how it both undermined and reinforced the authority of the "solitary genius."  Jaffe is especially fascinated with how gendered these differing collaborative roles could be--as well as how transgendered the roles often were.  Although Jaffe never once uses the word "kitch," it is clearly deep on his mind (especially in the Calinescu sense), particularly in his discussion on Barnes and Noble gift-mugs in the epilogue.