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Red Or Dead: States of Poetry in Depression America

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Red Or Dead: States of Poetry in Depression America Red or Dead: States of Poetry in Depression America by Sarah Elizabeth Ehlers A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Professor Alan M. Wald, Chair Professor Howard Brick Professor June M. Howard Professor Yopie Prins Associate Professor Joshua L. Miller ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The same year I began my Ph.D. work at the University of Michigan, my father lost the coal-mining job he had worked for over twenty years. That particular confluence of events had a profound effect on me, and I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the ways in which my personal feelings of anger and frustration—my sense of being somehow out-of-place—influenced my thinking and this project. Certainly, it was one of the catalysts for my deep interest in the U.S. literary Left. Like so many others, I am indebted to Alan Wald for my understanding of Left literature and culture. Alan has been, probably more than he knows, an example of the kind of scholar I hope to be—even, I admit, an ideal ego of sorts. I continue to be as awed by his deep knowledge as I am by his humility and generosity. Yopie Prins taught me how to read poetry when I already thought I knew how, and my conversations with her over the past five years have shaped my thinking in remarkable ways. From my first days in Ann Arbor, June Howard has been a source of intellectual guidance, and her insights on my work and the profession have been a sustaining influence. Joshua Miller has patiently allowed me to use more of his time than I’ve perhaps deserved. In addition to his critical intuition, I’ve been bolstered by his confidence in my ideas. All of my teachers at Michigan have been important interlocutors, especially Sara Blair, Howard Brick, Gillian White, and John Whittier-Ferguson. If not for Gregg Crane’s willingness to lead a cohort of Ph.D. students to Chicago, I might never have stumbled upon the idea for ii this project. For all of their help, I owe great debts to Jan Burgess, Senia Vasquez, and Linda Dietert. I was energized by the intellectual community created by my colleagues in the U.S. Literatures and Cultures Consortium at the University of Michigan. I cannot imagine these past five years without them—or without my close friends in Ann Arbor, especially: Chris Barnes, Katie Brokaw, Nan Z. Da, Rachel Feder, Asynith Malecki, Caroline Miller, Nate Mills, Ben Pollack, Rebecca Porte, Sheera Talpaz, and Steve Spiess. Asynith graciously stepped in to help me translate Jacques Roumain’s letters to Langston Hughes, and Rebecca lent her brilliant insights to early drafts of Chapter 1. The University of Michigan English Department and the Rackham Graduate School provided financial support over the past five years, including sponsoring travel to conduct archival research. In addition to those sources of support, I am grateful to the staffs at the Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago, the Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, and the Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library for their help locating and accessing materials. The University of Chicago Library granted permission to quote from Harriet Monroe’s personal papers and from the Poetry, A Magazine of Verse records. The estate of Langston Hughes granted permission to quote from Hughes’s unpublished diaries and manuscripts as well as reproduce images from his 1930s scrapbooks. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact the estates of those other figures whose unpublished materials I cite. A portion of Chapter 1 was previously published as, “Making It Old: The Victorian Modern Divide in Twentieth-Century American Poetry,” in Modern Language iii Quarterly, Vol. 73, issue. 1, pp. 37-67. Copyright, 2012, University of Washington. I thank the present publisher, Duke University Press, for permission to reprint it here. My parents, Byron and Janine Ehlers, have labored to support my education, and I am forever grateful for the love and support they’ve given over the years. James and Deborah Berger were always ready with encouraging words, and they graciously helped with childcare so that I could research at Yale. Molly Larson, in addition to being a best friend, provided a place to stay while I finished archival work in Chicago. In the midst of contemplating poetry’s death, my son, Jonah, has shown me all the best parts of being alive, and every glimmer of hope in the following pages is a mark of his new presence in the world. My husband, Jason Berger, has long been my very best (and most energetic) interlocutor—if not my favorite antagonist. But even his brilliance is no match for the deep love with which he constructs our life world, across time zones and among the clatter of dirty dishes and the clutter of half-read books. If not for the fact that I feel as if everything I do is also already ours, I would dedicate this work to him. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ………………………………………………………………………..ii List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………... vi Introduction The Critical Condition of Depression-era Poetry ……………………………………….. 1 Chapter 1 Here Lies Harriet Monroe: The Death of Poetry and the Death of Poetry ………………………………………….. 26 Chapter 2 The Left Needs Rhythm: Poetry Speaks the Depression ………………………………………………………….. 82 Chapter 3 Langston Hughes’s Snapshots of Haiti: Photography and the Formation of Radical Poetics …………………………………... 129 Chapter 4 Haiti to the Universe: Jacques Roumain’s “Death of Poetry” and the Radical Politics of Form …………….. 181 Epilogue Hart Crane’s Skull …………………………………………………………………….. 233 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………….. 242 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 First Page of Haiti Scrapbook ……………………………………………….. 139 Figure 2 Loose Pages from Haiti Scrapbook …………………………………………. 144 Figure 3 Scottsboro Boys in Jail at Birmingham ……………………………………... 167 vi INTRODUCTION The Critical Condition of Depression-era Poetry And what age has not thought itself at the death-bed of poetry? —Francis Gummere, Democracy and Poetry (1911) On December 10, 1929, poet and publisher Harry Crosby was found dead in a New York studio with his lover Josephine Rotch Bigelow. The event garnered attention for a moment: daily newspapers speculated about a suicide compact, the upper-crust Boston community where Crosby was born was scandalized, and fellow artists offered tributes both ridiculous and heartfelt (Exile’s Return 283-84). But all was just as quickly forgotten, and Crosby—that rake who epitomized the disillusionments of the Lost Generation and the excesses of the Roaring Twenties—fell into the dusty vault of literary history as the stock market faded to black. As Malcolm Cowley recounts in Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (1934), Crosby’s death was “crowded out by other news” as stocks continued to fall.1 Cowley suggests that the story of Crosby’s suicide “carries us outside his [Crosby’s] own story, that of a minor poet, into the history of an era about to end” (273). Indeed, Crosby’s lavish bohemian lifestyle was at variance with the changes in everyday 1 In 1951, Cowley revised Exile’s Return to downplay his political conclusions; this is the edition I refer to here. 1 life being brought on by the Wall Street Crash. Panic be damned, Crosby bought and sold stocks only to “make up for certain past extravagances” and so that he might “enjoy life” while he could. One night in 1929, he drunkenly cabled his father, demanding: “Please sell $10,000 worth of stock. We have decided to live a mad and extravagant life.” When his father said no, Crosby reiterated his refusal to “take the question of money seriously” because “for the poet there is love and there is death and infinity and for other things to assume vital importance is out of the question” (Exile’s Return 280). But by that time, major historical and aesthetic shifts were underway. The realities of economic crisis changed how upper- and middle-class intellectuals like Crosby could live and, at the same time, prompted a re-conceptualization of art’s relationship to those very realities. Beyond the fact that his lifestyle was too extravagant for hard times, Crosby’s belief in the “hallucination of the word” and his endorsement of the dictum, “plain reader be damned,” seemed puerile, at best, given the increasing visibility of the impoverished masses and the felt need to incite them to political action. For Depression-era poets, there would be more than love and death and infinity. There would be scarcity and strikes and May Day parades. It was for this reason that Cowley suggests that Crosby had died “at the right time,” for as the economic downturn continued: … a new conception of art was replacing the idea that it was something purposeless, useless, wholly individual and forever opposed to the stupid world. The artist and his art has once more become a part of the world, produced by and perhaps affecting it; they had returned toward their earlier and indispensable task of revealing its values and making it more human. But the changes in aesthetic ideals and in manners of life were merely the symptoms of a vaster change. Behind the religion of art was the social system that made it possible—the system that encouraged false notions of success and a mistaken form of reaction against them; the system that uprooted artists and workers from their homes, that produced the Wall Street boom and financed the 2 middle-class migration to Europe.
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