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Laura Riding's the Life of the Dead “A FAIRER HOUSE THAN PROSE”: VERSE AND ITS OTHERS IN AMERICAN POETRY, 1850–1950 A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by John Andrew Hicks May 2012 © 2012 JOHN ANDREW HICKS “A FAIRER HOUSE THAN PROSE”: VERSE AND ITS OTHERS IN AMERICAN POETRY, 1850–1950 John Andrew Hicks, Ph. D. Cornell University 2012 A Fairer House than Prose: Verse and Its Others in American Poetry, 1850– 1950 traces the shifting meanings of the seemingly self-evident terms verse and prose, and argues that nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry marks a peculiarly rich and active moment, during which the boundaries between verse and prose were repeatedly renegotiated, elided, and exploited. The verse-prose distinction is seen as both a formal concern, with the rise of free verse and the prose poem threatening to unsettle each side of the divide, and a philosophical distinction with broader rhetorical stakes, as modernity comes to be seen as essentially prosaic. The poets most deeply involved in these renegotiations—Laura Riding, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein among others—had widely divergent aims and poetic principles; nevertheless, their shared interest in the margins between verse and prose can be read as a critical response to the philosophical truism that modernity is “prosaic,” and its corollary that prose, not verse, is the mode of language most adequate to giving an account of the modern world. The chapters examine how three genres at work in the margins of the verse- prose distinction— the prose poem, prosimetrum, and the genre I call the prosed poem—offer important insights into aesthetic developments of the time. The chapters also address methodological difficulties in examining formal effects characterized by the removal or avoidance of poetic shaping, a phenomenon I refer to as “subtractive form.” A theoretical conclusion traces the critical genealogy of the conflation of prose with modernity in much continental philosophy and critical theory backwards through Walter Benjamin and German Romanticism. In looking through the eyes of Williams, Riding, Stein, and others at the shifting valences of prose, verse, and their various intermixtures, I argue, we must arrive at a less reassuring picture of our grasp of modernity, and may in turn better understand how poets wrestling with the essence of their medium may engage in more open-minded, active philosophical thinking about modernity than some of its most influential chroniclers and theorists. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH John Andrew Hicks was born in North Little Rock, Arkansas. He attended Catholic High School for Boys in Little Rock and matriculated to the University of Virginia upon graduation. While at the University of Virginia, he worked on the staff of the Virginia Literary Review, eventually serving as poetry editor and then managing editor. He graduated in 2002, earning a B.A. with high distinction in English and also completing a Religious Studies major and a minor in French. In the fall of the same year, he entered the English department at Cornell University, earning an M.A. in 2006 and completing the Ph.D. in 2012. Since 2008, he has worked in the publications department at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where is currently an assistant editor. iii For Betsy “Hwæt, . .” iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As a devoted reader of others’ acknowledgments, it is a great pleasure at last to be writing my own and to thank all those who offered advice and support leading up to and during the writing of this dissertation. My parents, Basil and Mary Hicks, made sure I was surrounded with books and music every moment I wasn’t in the pool or out in the woods. They have provided unflagging support ever since. The first conversation I ever had about the chicken-and-egg question of style and substance was with my brother, Basil III. My grandfather, Basil Sr., taught me about close reading long before I ever heard the term. He and my grandmother, Mary Dale, supported my long education in every way. At Cornell, I have been lucky to be a part of the Theory Reading Group and other, more ad hoc gatherings around shared interests. I have overstayed my welcome talking about ideas in this dissertation at the residences of Alan Young-Bryant, Alexis Briley, Rob Lehman, Audrey Wasser, Alex Papanicolopoulos, Charity Ketz, Douglas McQueen-Thomson, Becky Colesworthy, Robin Sowards, Daniel St. Hilaire, Ben Glaser, Daniel Wilson, Heidi Arsenault, Aaron Hodges, Sarah Pickle, Bradley Depew, and Jess Keiser. In trying to decide whether I should refer to these individuals as friends, colleagues, or brilliant scholars whose work I admire, I am delighted that the choice seems both impossible and a little bit silly. I am braced to learn how rare the community we enjoyed may have been as we continue to disperse. My committee, led by Roger Gilbert, has shaped this project in ways I am still discovering. Roger continually helped to refine the questions I was asking and pressed me to stay ever more alert to each poet’s particularity. Debra Fried has been a model teacher, mentor, and prosodist; her ear for style is attuned to a vast array of periods and genres. I suspect that the depth of her reading, like Thoreau’s pond in winter, has underground connections to more ponds of still greater depths. Jonathan Culler v listened patiently to many half-cooked ideas, but it was his open-mindedness that ultimately helped me to limit the scope of the project and set its shape. A course with Richard Klein on Oulipo helped sharpen my thinking about formal constrains. I am grateful for his sustained enthusiasm for the project, and also for a memorable conversation in which he dissuaded me from writing on Mallarmé’s “Prose pour Des Essientes,” at least for now. My committee and the ethos at Cornell in general encouraged me to pursue a wide range of topics, including some that seemed to fall squarely outside the period and nationality of my area of specialization. This work would have a diminished horizon without the guidance of Neil Saccamano and Peter Gilgen on philosophical aesthetics and other aspects of eighteenth-century literature I might not have encountered in a program with more rigid guidelines. Several conversations with Cynthia Chase in the late stages of writing proved inspiring, and helped reassure me that these questions have relevance beyond the immediate project. Before coming to Cornell, I also had a number of excellent teachers who deserve acknowledgement. At the University of Virginia, courses with Stephen Cushman allowed me to plunge into the history and theory of poetic form without hesitation. Studying with Jerome McGann was like learning to read English all over again. Larry Bouchard’s hermeneutics course taught me to be suspicious of my own suspicions, and made me a kinder reader. Stephen Arata, Claire Lyu, Allan Megill, and Pete and Lisa Spaar each made a lasting impact; Eleanor Kaufman allowed me to join a seminar far beyond my abilities at the time, and later provided kind assistance in Los Angeles. Fellow students at Virginia, including the contributors and staff of several student publications, made reading, writing, and sometimes arguing about literature seem like a perfectly reasonable occupation that could continue indefinitely. After Cornell, but before completion, I relocated to Los Angeles. I am grateful to Christopher Looby and Eleanor Kaufman at UCLA for assistance with library vi access and numerous other kindnesses. Benjamin Bishop and Patricia Goldsworthy have proved to be the kind of friends and colleagues I worried I might only meet at Cornell. Nathan Brown kept me in the loop about the buzzing but decentralized community of scholars in Southern California and thoughtfully forwarded an email advertising a position at the Getty Research Institute. Correspondence and the occasional visit in Los Angeles from Alex P. kept me connected to many of the questions we had been working on in parallel. Brave in the face of bewilderment, Alex taught me how to keep working on Stein. Aaron and Sarah went out of their way to stay in touch and meet in person whenever possible, and our friendships grew in spite of the distance. In addition to years of sustained dialogue, a visit from Alan at a crucial moment helped jumpstart the project and set it on course to completion; he also served frequently as on-call roadside mechanic for the final stretch. When Alan and Alexis arrived in Los Angeles together, they brought something of the pace of life from Ithaca with them, proving that location isn’t destiny—gold is where you find it. For more than ten years now, and through the duration of this project, Betsy Moriarty has offered brilliant advice, a sharp eye and ear for language, companionship whether near or far, and the occasional reality check. She performed triage on the first and worst drafts of everything, as well as structural advice in later stages. In addition to her influence on the text, her patience when the pages were blank was extraordinary. Her support has been such a constant presence that it has become unfamiliar, a hapax legomenon whose meaning I can only hope to understand by repeating it back. It is a great pleasure to dedicate A Fairer House than Prose to her as a small expression of my gratitude. The people named above have contributed many improvements and valuable insights to the pages that follow, but any and all mistakes are entirely my own. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgments v Contents viii List of Figures ix Introduction: Verse and Prose 1 Chapter 1 18 Some Problems Posed by the Poem Prosed: Laura Riding’s The Life of the Dead Chapter 2 71 William Carlos Williams and the Poetics of Pace Chapter 3 143 The Curious Case of Stein’s Tender Buttons Conclusion 190 “Through Apparent Digressions.—The Idea of the Poem is Prose”: On Badiou and the Poem Bibliography 219 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.
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