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EPHEMERAL ARRANGEMENTS: MATERIALITY, QUEERNESS, and COALITION in U. S. MODERNIST POETRY by PAUL BRADLEY BELLEW a DISSERTATION Pr

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EPHEMERAL ARRANGEMENTS: MATERIALITY, QUEERNESS, and COALITION in U. S. MODERNIST POETRY by PAUL BRADLEY BELLEW a DISSERTATION Pr EPHEMERAL ARRANGEMENTS: MATERIALITY, QUEERNESS, AND COALITION IN U. S. MODERNIST POETRY by PAUL BRADLEY BELLEW A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of English and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2014 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Paul Bradley Bellew Title: Ephemeral Arrangements: Materiality, Queerness, and Coalition in U. S. Modernist Poetry This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by: Mark Whalan Chairperson Karen Ford Core Member Paul Peppis Core Member John Schmor Institutional Representative and J. Andrew Berglund Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded September 2014 ii © 2014 Paul Bradley Bellew iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Paul Bradley Bellew Doctor of Philosophy Department of English September 2014 Title: Ephemeral Arrangements: Materiality, Queerness, and Coalition in U. S. Modernist Poetry This dissertation searches for a body of queer modernist poetry while at the same time attempting to rework the definition of “queer.” In chapter I, I use a reconceptualization of queerness not as an abstract, theoretical rendering of the breakdown of identity categories but in its fundamental, historical sense: a political coalition made up of individuals with different subjective sexual identities who are similarly marginalized in decidedly sexual terms. Thus, this project seeks to locate texts that demonstrate moments of empathy, intersection, and cooperation between LGBT speakers, characters, or editors and people with different sexualities, races, or abilities. In this project, I avoid traditional, well- known texts of modernism in favor of recovering forgotten work by non-heterosexual authors who have been at one time or another marginalized in the canon and in society at large—Amy Lowell, Langston Hughes, and Hart Crane. In order to rediscover this overlooked work by formerly forgotten poets, the project utilizes archival research and a material methodology in which I analyze poems not just in the abstract but in their original, ephemeral locations and venues: archival manuscripts, little magazines, and book-length collections. In chapter II, I uncover an experimental editorial method that Lowell pioneered in her Some Imagist Poets anthologies in which, rather than selecting and editing the iv selection as a traditional editor, she offered equal space to each contributor to choose and arrange their own suite of poetry. In chapter III, I analyze Hughes’ “A House in Taos” in both its first publication in a Mexico-based literary journal then in one of his own understudied collections, arguing that the poem represents an interracial, bisexual triad. In the chapter on Crane, I analyze several versions of a poem about a young man with a cognitive disability with whom Crane was acquainted while vacationing in Cuba, showing that, when the poem is set outside of the U. S. border, the speaker evinces a deep empathy for the marginalized young man. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Paul Bradley Bellew GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene University of Colorado, Boulder Metropolitan State University, Denver, CO Front Range Community College, Westminster, CO DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, 2014, University of Oregon Master of Arts, English, 2008, University of Colorado at Boulder Bachelor of Arts, English, 2004, Metropolitan State University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: British, Irish, and U. S. modernism Poetry and poetics Queer theory PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, 2009-2014 PUBLICATIONS: Bellew, Paul Bradley, Matthew Hannah, Amy Legette, and Emily McGinn. “Comparing Marks: A Versioning Edition of Virginia Woolf's ‘The Mark on the Wall.’” Scholarly Editing, 35 (2014). Web. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my chair Professor Mark Whalan for his dedicated mentorship throughout the dissertation process. I must also express my gratitude to the other members of my committee—Professor Karen Ford, Professor Paul Peppis, and Professor John Schmor. I would also like to thank Professor Helen Southworth for aiding in the development of my methodology and Dr. Emily McGinn for her thoughtful comments on much of this work. vii For my best friend Angela. Thank you for your love and support. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 Modernism, Recovery, and Marginalization ......................................................... 1 Queer Theory and Modernism ............................................................................... 7 Ephemera and Archive ........................................................................................... 14 Material Methodology ........................................................................................... 16 II. “AT THE MERCY OF EDITORIAL SELECTION”: AMY LOWELL, LOUIS UNTERMEYER, AND THE MODERNIST MISCELLANY .................................... 20 Hi-Jacking Imagism ............................................................................................... 29 Highbrow Anthologies ........................................................................................... 37 Editing the Imagist Anthologies ............................................................................ 41 Middlebrow Anthologies ....................................................................................... 47 American Poetry 1922: A Miscellany .................................................................... 52 Lowell in the Miscellany ........................................................................................ 55 Conclusion: The Power of the Editor ..................................................................... 70 III. “WAITING FOR NOTHINGNESS”: TRANSNATIONAL REGIONALISM AND QUEER NIHILISM IN LANGSTON HUGHES’ “A HOUSE IN TAOS” ....... 73 Hughes, Greenwich Village, and Taos .................................................................. 82 Regionalism, Race, and Palms............................................................................... 90 A Book of Lyric Poems ......................................................................................... 103 Fields of Wonder .................................................................................................... 113 Conclusion: Queer Nihilism .................................................................................. 121 ix Chapter Page IV. “MY TRESPASS VISION”: DISABILITY, SEXUALITY, AND NATIONALITY IN HART CRANE’S VERSIONS OF “THE IDIOT” .................... 123 The Morbid Tradition in Crane Criticism .............................................................. 128 The Isle of Pines and The Bridge ........................................................................... 141 “East of Yucatan” .................................................................................................. 146 Key West: An Island Sheaf and Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy” ........................... 155 Conclusion: Contradictory Closures and the U. S. National Boundary ................. 170 V. CONCLUSION ....................................................................................................... 176 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 185 x CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Modernism, Recovery, and Marginalization Cary Nelson, an early advocate of literary recovery and canon expansion, points out in his 1989 book Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 that, despite an incredibly rich variety of authors, styles, and texts in the period, the conservative decades that followed the period we call modernism cemented a very narrow selection of representative texts: By the 1950s a limited canon of authors and texts was already in place. Academic critics had come to concentrate on close readings of a limited number of texts by ‘major’ authors. And the professorate, largely white and male and rarely challenged from within its own ranks, found it easy to reinforce the culture’s existing racism and sexism by ignoring poetry by minorities and women. (35) For Nelson, “the history of canonization is pervasively racist, sexist, and anti- intellectual,” “reinforces a romantic ideology of timeless individual achievement and a disdain for lived experience,” and “polices our notions of literariness and the social functions of poetry” (37). In his book, then, Nelson works to recover both forgotten work by marginalized minorities and political radicals and also to uncover the forces that excluded them from the canon. Nelson was not alone as an early adopter of canon expansion: texts like Houston A. Baker’s Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987) and George Hutchinson’s The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1995) sought to include the literatures of African American authors in the modernist canon, while work such as Bonnie Kime Scott’s anthology The Gender of Modernism (1990) and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the 1 Twentieth Century (1990) worked to uncover and break down a patriarchal system of literary value in which women
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