Chapter One
Housing Modernism: Little Magazines and the American Free Verse Movement
The free verse movement in America ⌠crystallized in Alfred Kreymborgâs group of Others. That was a magic moment. No one who was touched by the kindling breath will ever forget the joy of it nor cease to regret that a great fiery wind devoured it. It will be worth while someday to review that frail but vital page in American literary history.
Robert Alden Sanborn
It is with this magazine [Others] and the group that grew up around it that modernism in American poetry really begins. William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, T. S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, Marsden Hartley, Wallace Gould, Alfred Kreymborg himself, Maxwell Bodenheim, and the socialist poets Lola Ridge and James Oppenheim, the anarchist Arturo Giovannitte, dozens of othersâKreymborg produced them all suddenly on the literary stage in America, like a conjurer pulling rabbits from a hat.
Kenneth Rexroth1
Others: A Magazine of the New Verse ran only from 1915 to 1919, its subscription base peaking at 300, yet the little magazine helped launch the careers of many of the most innovative and influential modernist American poets.2 Providing an open forum for unknown writers, this low-budget salon des refuses helped instigate modern poetry in America, providing a stage for the seemingly harmonic convergence of artistic genius known as modernism. Others championed formal innovation and artistic autonomy, dedicating its pages to free verse experiments. These aesthetic interests have been viewed as a sign of modernist poetryâs self-absorptionâits disengagement from social problems, political issues, and historical exigencies. In contrast, I argue that modernist poetry was socially embedded and engaged precisely because of its emphasis on form, but that the social dimensions of modernist formalism are lost when poems are studied in isolation. Little magazinesânon-commercial, small-circulation, low-budget periodicalsâanchor modernist poetry in a social context, situating individual poems in relation to other texts and discourses. These periodicals enable us to see modernist poetry as a product of its time, rather than as an art that transcends or evades time.
Until recently, modernism was promulgated as an irrevocable break from the pastâa sudden, spontaneous revolution of thought and representation. In the effort to escape the shackles of the past, modernist artists claimed artistic autonomy, positioning themselves outside the bounds of social conventions, moral codes, and political causes. Poetry already enjoyed an elevated status as a transcendent art of universal feelings and timeless values.3 The special status granted poetry, combined with modernismâs vehement rejection of an outmoded past, claims for autonomy, and, above all, emphasis on form, conspired to cloister modernist poetry as a separate artistic sphere, allowing the genre to be mystified, mythologized, and misunderstood as a closed, hermetic activity.
Virginia Woolf fosters this poetic mythology in her 1931 âLetter to a Young Poet.â She asserts that the modern poetâs range is ârestricted,â his poetry is âconcentrated and intensified,â and he seems to be âlooking within and not without,â as if describing âa self that sits alone in the room at night with the blinds drawn.â4 Woolf claims to select three poems randomly from an unnamed volume to demonstrate her thesis, quoting lines such as âTo penetrate that room is my desire / The extreme attic of the mindâ and âThere is a dark room, / The locked and shuttered womb.â5
Whether real or parodied, Woolfâs selections could have come out of Others, where a generous sampling reveals an almost morbid fixation on interior spaces:
It is a dangerous place in which to walkâa heart.
Especially oneâs own.
Mary Carolyn Davies, âSongs of a Girlâ (July 1915)
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you
Wallace Stevens, âPeter Quince at the Clavierâ (August 1915)
And four wax candles in a darkened room
Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead
An atmosphere of Julietâs tomb
T. S. Eliot, âPortrait of a Ladyâ (September 1915)
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely,
before my mirror,
waving my shirt around my head,
and singing softly to myself
William Carlos Williams, âDanse Russeâ (December 1916)
I steal into the play-room
Of my mind
And take out the paint box
David Rosenthal, âThe Paint Boxâ (December 1917)
In my heart, the love-lanterns I hung for you are dark.
Harriet Dean, untitled (December 1918)
Shall I too pressâhow much of my essence?â in a cube of spaceâ
Lola Ridge, âEaster Dawnâ (July 1919)
These excerpts provide compelling evidence for Woolfâs judgment that the modern poet has fixed his gaze on his own interior consciousness and isolated himself from the world. Yet each of these poems seeks to make public the private regions of consciousness, and the act of self-exposure is represented as a daring and even âdangerousâ act. Moreover, in many of these poems, the inner sanctum of self is inhabited by anotherâa âyouâ who, by entering the space of the self, exposes its permeability. Even as isolated works, then, these poems are unsuccessfully hermetic. When read as part of a broader little magazine discourse, they constitute what at the time seemed like a bold, ground-breaking, and very public conversation about the nature of intimacy between self and others. By re-situating modernist poems within the public discourse of Others, my study challenges the equation of modernist formalism with solitary aesthetic absorption, demonstrating that the modernist drive to renovate poetic form was part of a cultural movement to re-form the boundaries of selfhood, gender, and sexuality.
In focusing on the little magazine as a social framework for modernist poetry, my study joins recent efforts to open modernist studies to a consideration of broader cultural contexts. The 1998 founding of The Modernist Studies Association, an organization âdevoted to the study of the arts in their social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts,â heralds the trend toward more inclusive, pluralistic, and interdisciplinary definitions of modernism.6 Cary Nelsonâs Repression and Recovery, Kevin J. H. Dettmarâs and Stephen Wattâs Marketing Modernisms, and Lawrence Raineyâs Institutions of Modernism are three recent examples of the effort to broaden the study of modernism to include the social, political, material, and economic practices that shaped artistic and literary production.
In the effort to contextualize modernism, however, poetic form often gets pushed to the margins of scholarly inquiry. Rainey omits the consideration of modernist formal practices altogether, reassessing the cultural and economic impact of The Waste Land without discussing a single line of the poem. He rejects close reading as a practice that leaves âthe ambiguous heritage of modernism in history ⌠desocialized and unexplored.â7 But just as even the most inward looking, formally experimental modernist poems may function as social interventions, close reading can be politically and historically engaged. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis demonstrates in Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures, close reading can be reactivated âto 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.â8 Close reading can thus be used to recover the interconnections between specific features of texts and their contexts; DuPlessisâs plea resonates here: âone wants any study of poetry to engage with poetry as suchâits conventions and textual mechanisms, its surfaces and layersâand not simply to regard the poetic text as an odd delivery system for ideas and themes.â9
My study reclaims formal experimentation as a significant feature of modernism in American poetry, one that should not be cordoned off from studies of the periodâs broader cultural interests, tactics, and effects. Form, in modernist poetry, lies at the intersection of social discourse and aesthetic design.
Formal experimentation was a visible, controversial, and disruptive sign of new and radical thinking, but it was certainly not the only mark of the modern. Indeed, one could say that modernism in America began on or about January 1911, with the publication of The Masses, a little magazine dedicated to leftwing political, artistic, and literary efforts, which favored traditional verse forms. Little magazines thereafter proliferated, allowing writers and artists to recognize themselves as part of a movement with revolutionary hopes for transforming both the public sphere and private life. The number and variety of little magazines published in the first half of the twentieth century in America and abroad evince the plurality and diversity of modernism in its heyday. This study examines the arena of modernist American poetry and poeticsâa subfield of modernism that is itself diverse, including poetic forms ranging from the traditional verse of political journals such as The Masses to the free verse of avant-garde periodicals such as Others. What unites these poetries is a renewed, heady, modernist sense that the new verse forms could reform the world, inside and out.10
To write free verse in the 1910s was to do something radically experimental, unconventional, individualisticâin short, something âOther.â Descriptive terms for the poetry in Others ranged from âesotericâ and âirrational,â to âfree-footed,â âqueer,â and even âpornographic.â11 Yet, as unorthodox and illicit as âvers libreâ seemed, everyone was writing it, parodying it, reading it, or talking about it. Writing for a daily newspaper, Alfred Kreymborg, Othersâs founder and editor, explained: âVers libre, or free verse, as we have come to call it, has taken the place of cubism and futurism in public popularity. The painter has had his inning. The poet is our hero now, to mock and jeer.â12 Kreymborg uses a baseball metaphor to suggest that, despite its correspondence to the French tradition of vers libre, free verse is a genuine American product (âThe pure products of America / go crazyââ William Carlos Williams observes a few years later in his free-verse-for-all experiment, Spring and All).13 Free verse was not merely a popular pastime, it was an expression of the modern consciousness; as Kreymborg puts it: âthe free verse movement is ⌠the foremost expression of the present day.â14
Publishing the most unbridled free verse, Others earned a reputation not only for technical innovation, but also for social rebellion and sexual transgression. According to Kreymborg, Others provoked âa small size riotâ in mainstream presses.15 The magazine was called âa...