Modernist Women's Poetry and the Limits Of

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository LINES OF FEELING: MODERNIST WOMEN’S POETRY AND THE LIMITS OF SENTIMENTALITY BY MELISSA GIRARD DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Cary Nelson, Chair Professor Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania Professor Stephanie Foote Professor Siobhan Somerville LINES OF FEELING: MODERNIST WOMEN’S POETRY AND THE LIMITS OF SENTIMENTALITY Melissa Girard, Ph.D. Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009 Cary Nelson, Adviser Modernist sentimental poetry is frequently cast as an unfortunate literary and cultural mistake. In an era defined by its novel feats of poetic ambition, modernist sentimental poetry seems inexplicably to regress to the familiar forms and feelings of the nineteenth century. Alongside the modernist proliferation of “new” poetic forms, modernist sentimental poetry has thus been seen as decidedly “old”: an atavistic remnant of an earlier time and place, out of sync with high modernism’s progressive aesthetic vision. This is a foundational rift, which continues to divide the field of poetic modernism. Poets like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D. are routinely credited with formal theories of poetic innovation. In stark contrast, the so-called “sentimental” poets who comprise this study, figures such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, Genevieve Taggard, and Louise Bogan, have been categorized as conventional lyric poets. Critics have believed, wrongly, that their poetry is coextensive with the aesthetic and political aims of nineteenth-century sentimentality. Through a series of detailed textual and historical readings, “Lines of Feeling” demonstrates that this diverse group of modernist women poets reinvented the traditional form of the sentimental lyric in response to modernity. In so doing, they competed directly with the avant-garde to redefine the proper form and function of modernism. This dissertation thus represents a critical extension of the vital recovery efforts that have reshaped the field of modernist studies since the 1980s. I draw heavily on the foundational revisionary modernisms of scholars such as Rita Felski, Cary Nelson, and Bonnie Kime Scott. ii My work echoes their collective thesis that a turn to cultural and historical context is necessary if we are to reform the fundamentally impoverished vision of “modernism” we have inherited from the mid-century American academy. However, in turning to context, I seek not only to recover this poetry’s vital political and historical collaborations, but also to restore its complex aesthetics. In the 1920s, this influential group of female poets and critics melded nineteenth- century sentimental discourse with modernist aesthetics to produce a provocatively new poetics. Over the next two decades, with the rise of the New Criticism and its concomitant professionalization of literary studies, aesthetic theories such as these, produced by popular poets and journalists, were lost to the field. The New Critics did not simply restrict the canon of modernist poetry; more fundamentally, I argue, they obscured the diverse and often divergent array of aesthetic and critical methods that constituted modernism in the 1920s. As a result, we have lost the aesthetic theories, values, and strategies for reading that arose from within popular poetry and that made sense and meaning out of it. We have lost, in other words, its poetics. Chapter 1 begins in the 1930s and 40s as “modernism” begins to coalesce in the writings of Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and Cleanth Brooks. In their influential “close readings,” I uncover a problematic of “formlessness” in regard to popular women’s poetry. When the New Critics looked at modernist sentimental poetry, its formal innovations—indeed, its very formal substance—seemed to disintegrate before their eyes. But this was methodological chicanery. Because modernist sentimental poetry experiments with the dynamic materials of affect, gender, and sexuality, it relies on body, culture, and politics to enact its effects. These contingent poetic strategies have proven resistant to the New Critics’ ontological conception of poetic form. Despite more than three decades of revisionary scholarship, this methodological problematic, inhering within the New Criticism, persists today. We still have yet to read—let alone to value iii fully—the aesthetic innovations of popular modernist poetries. To advance these claims, Chapter 1 provides an extended historical and formal analysis of Millay’s landmark political poem, “Justice Denied In Massachusetts.” Published first in 1927, this poem served in the 1930s as a key piece of evidence in the New Critics’ campaigns against her. I argue that the New Critics’ dismissal of “Justice” had less to do with the poem’s radical politics than with their collective inability to identify and to interpret its sophisticated formal experiments. As a historical alternative to the New Criticism, Chapter 2 recuperates the sophisticated poetic theories of Louise Bogan. Poetry reviewer at The New Yorker for thirty-eight years, Bogan began publishing criticism in 1923, simultaneous with the appearance of her first volume of poetry, Body of This Death. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, as her career as a poet waned, Bogan emerged as one of the leading poetry critics of her day. She published more than three hundred reviews in The New Yorker alone, while also contributing frequently to influential magazines such as The New Republic and Poetry. In 1951, Bogan also published the book-length study, Achievement in American Poetry, which departs importantly from the dominant New Critical methodology of its age. Within this rich critical corpus, Bogan repeatedly contests the New Critics’ limited conception of “modernism.” She accuses Tate and Ransom, in particular, of cultivating a “heartless” aesthetics: a poetics in which form is sheared from affect. In contrast to the New Critics’ polarizing vision, Bogan insists that subjective and objective poetries, “personality” and “Impersonality,” productively commingled in the early twentieth century. In the popular women’s poetries of the World War I era—works by Millay, Teasdale, Taggard, and Elinor Wylie—Bogan identifies the roots of this hybrid aesthetics, which she terms a “line of feeling” in modernist poetry. My chapter reclaims Bogan’s long-neglected body of criticism as a necessary corrective to the New Criticism. I argue, moreover, that Bogan’s distinctive poetic iv genealogy—her “line of feeling”—has the potential to significantly revise our narratives of modern and postmodern poetic innovation. With Bogan’s theories as a new foundation, I am able to revalue the objective experiments present within the work of popular poets, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale, who are typically dismissed as conventional lyricists. Chapter 3 examines Millay’s sophisticated mass-cultural experiments surrounding her 1922 collection, A Few Figs from Thistles. Published almost simultaneously with The Waste Land, A Few Figs similarly revolutionized the methods for reading modernist poetry. Borrowing from the rising industry of advertising—as well as her Imagist contemporaries—Millay deftly manipulated her audience’s increasingly visual orientation. Photographs, performances, and a highly cultivated celebrity image supplemented A Few Figs and helped to account for its overwhelming success throughout the 1920s. By re-assembling the multiple contexts within which A Few Figs initially circulated—newspapers, periodicals, and poetry readings—I demonstrate that it represents a dynamic form of poetic innovation, which relied on the Impersonal mechanisms of mass culture to alter the way readers engaged with poetry. Chapter 4 similarly challenges Teasdale’s status as a “personal,” subjective poet. Widely denigrated, Teasdale continues to be seen as a quintessential “poetess”: demure, genteel, and decidedly un-modern. In a close study of Teasdale’s uncollected and unpublished poetry, I uncover a sophisticated body of work that challenges this stereotypical conception. I focus on a long-neglected archive of anti-war writings, housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Missouri Historical Society, which Teasdale produced in response to WWI. These poems are politically radical, advancing a powerful critique of America’s economic policies, gender politics, and increasingly violent nationalism. But they are also aesthetically v innovative. Within this grief-stricken poetry, Teasdale modernizes ancient forms, such as the pastoral and the sapphic (an intricate stanzaic form modeled on Sappho’s verse), in order to produce a haunting reflection on the value of affective poetry in a time of trauma. In the wake of war, seemingly immobilized by her grief, Teasdale breaks with classic sentimental conventions and inaugurates a radically new era of sentimentality. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have waited a long time to thank the people who have made this project possible. Thanks are due first to Cary Nelson. He believed in this project before it ever deserved it, and he remains its strongest supporter. I am forever indebted to him for his intellectual example, dedicated mentorship, and fierce advocacy

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