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Pastoral Modernism: an American Poetics

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Pastoral Modernism: an American Poetics Pastoral Modernism: An American Poetics Jennifer Tai-Chen Chang Washington, DC M.F.A., University of Virginia, 2002 B.A. University of Chicago, 1998 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Literature University of Virginia May, 2017 Committee: Jahan Ramazani, Director Michael Levenson, Reader Elizabeth Fowler, Reader Claire Lyu, External Reader PASTORAL MODERNISM: AN AMERICAN POETICS TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract……………………………………………………………………………....i Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………...iii Introduction ………………………………………………………………………....1 1. William Carlos Williams and the Democratic Invitation of Pastoral………………26 2. Pastoral and the Problem of Place in Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows……………73 3. The Pisan Cantos an the Modernity of Pastoral: Discourse, Locality, Race…………115 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………...160 ABSTRACT Pastoral Modernism: An American Poetics uncovers the re-emergence of an ancient literary mode as a vehicle for both poetic innovation and cultural investigation in three exemplary America modernist poets: William Carlos Williams, Claude McKay, and Ezra Pound. In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States experienced dramatic demographic changes due to global migration, immigration, and the Great Migration, which effectively relocated black life from the country to the city. Further, the expansion of cities, as physical locations and cultural centers, not only diminished their distance from the countryside, but also altered rural topographies into suburban and commuter towns. This dissertation argues that by turning to the pastoral mode American modernist poets documented these shifting demographics and topographies, revealing the integrality of place to cultural and social identity. William Carlos Williams’s pastorals—from his early short lyric poems to later world-building epics—reflect on how new populations of immigrant and blacks created political fissures in his small town of Rutherford, NJ, while necessitating a reconsideration of American space and cultural identity within the formal context of modernist poetics. For Williams, questions of cultural topography come to inform the typography and lineation of his poems. While the poems of Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows are largely set in New York City, the Jamaican-born inscribes Diasporic history into his pastoral lyrics by observing the confluences of weather and geography in the islands of Manhattan and Jamaica and, moreover, expresses a critique of American life, exposing tropes of nature as capitalist commodities. McKay illuminates how the social and emotional distances that pastoral historically tracks as geographical distances become absorbed into the very experience of modernity for marginalized individuals, whether they are in the city or the country. The final chapter turns to Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, in which his fusing of pastoral and poetic experimentation encompass a surprising, yet unintentional, transnational and multicultural American community. In reading Pound’s pastoralism as a foil to Williams’s and i McKay’s embrace of American potentialities and their inevitable culmination, this final chapter posits the future of culture as balancing the accidents and intentions of both history and poetic design. How do poems reflect and, at the same time, remake our world? Pastoral Modernism: An American Poetics investigates how modernist poets attempt to innovatively answer this question in their pastoral writing. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Writing is solitary, but words and thoughts are, at their best, born of social exchange. Many people contributed to the critical imaginary of this dissertation, and I owe each a debt of gratitude that I can never adequately repay. At UVA, Steve Arata’s course on late Victorian literature impressed upon me the remarkable sociality of Thomas Hardy’s natural environments, and it was the opportunity to consider the forests of The Woodlanders as a space of community formation that spawned my first thoughts about the culture of nature. Steve kept his door open to me long after I was his student, and I will always be grateful to his willingness to talk more about writing, Joseph Conrad, and the weird joys of academia. It was not until I audited Elizabeth Fowler’s seminar on environmental thought and early modern literature that I began to see the capaciousness of pastoral as a literary mode. Studying poetry with her has been transformative to how I read, write, and think about what poems do and can be. Her example is a touchstone in my life as a poet-scholar, and her participation in the final stretch of my dissertation has been a true gift. Jahan Ramazani never made the project of writing a dissertation feel impossible or unimportant, and for this my gratitude is only outmatched by my sense of fortune in having so excellent and steadfast a dissertation director. The precision of his critique, his enviably lucid thinking, and, above all, his passionate faith in poetry’s power to connect us to each other have been an inspiration to me as a scholar, teacher, and writer. I’m grateful to Michael Levenson for his persistent enthusiasm in this project. His generous responses to drafts emboldened me to trust my critical instincts and make more vigorous claims, and his exemplary work as a pedagogue continues to inform my faith in the humanities classroom as a space for community. I’m grateful, too, to Clare Lyu for agreeing to serve as the external reviewer of this dissertation and for doing so with such eloquence and acumen. iii Many hours were spent standing in Jim Miller’s doorway at GW, talking about Claude McKay and the Harlem Renaissance, conversations that informed the revision of my second chapter. Although Jim passed away before I could show him the final version, I will be forever grateful for his voice, his career advice (“Stop raising your hand at department meetings!”), and his dazzling wit, which made me adore him and love our profession, despite everything. I had the enormous luck of serving on the judging committee for the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Prizes at the Claremont Graduate School with Charles Altieri, whose work I had long admired and who became a most wonderful interlocutor. Charlie’s tireless exuberance for aesthetics and poetry and his unnecessarily ardent support for my critical and creative work gave me the much needed push to finish two longstanding projects, including this dissertation. All along the way, many friends took walks with me, offered to read countless revisions, housed me on research and conference trips, and nurtured my thinking about poetry, pastoral, race, and modernism. Thank you to Brian Glavey, Julia Hansen, Mai-Linh Hong, Jenny Johnson, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Cecily Parks, David Lee Rubin, Jolie Sheffer, and Lisa Russ Spaar. At GW, Daniel DeWispelare, D. Gilson, Robert McRuer, Ayanna Thompson, and Gayle Wald have been amazing colleagues and cheerleaders. I am especially grateful to Gabriel Haley for reading the earliest drafts and to David Francis and Madigan Haley for reading some of the last. Thank you to Jim Cocola, whose collaborations on MLA and MSA panels sharpened my conceptualization of pastoral. Cherene Sherrard-Johnson took a chance on my ideas on Claude McKay for her Companion to the Harlem Renaissance (Blackwell-Wiley 2016), and her fine editorial eye made the chapter significantly better. Nathan Hensley at Georgetown invited me to join his department’s iv Environmental Humanities Symposium, which led to me think more about Empson and the modernity of “some.” Towards the end, a fortuitous reunion with my undergraduate professor, Robert van Hallberg, reminded me why I was pursuing a Ph.D. and reinforced the need to finish, and I’m immensely grateful to him for sparking my initial curiosity in The Cantos. Through the years, this dissertation benefited from the counsel of librarians at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Poetry Collection at the University of Buffalo, and the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin. In particular, Jim Maynard at Buffalo and the very endearing librarian with the Ezra Pound tattoo at the Ransom Center provided indispensable guidance in the archive. The first conversation I had about my dissertation was with my classmate Evan Rhodes. I wanted to see his prospectus and learn more about his research. Little did I know then that I would have the last conversation about my dissertation with him, nor that it would be a family celebration of sorts. There has been no greater friend to my heart and my thoughts. To Evan, I owe my humblest and most enduring gratitude for patiently waiting as I tried to find the best words in their best order. v Pastoral Modernism: An American Poetics Introduction The Nature of Modernity Ezra Pound’s directive “Make it new” is perhaps the chestnut of modernism, but the language of this phrase reflects our conventional understanding of a cultural movement and moment that was, at heart, a call to innovation. It would seem strange then to reorient modernism, particularly American modernism, by focusing on a literary mode that began with Theocritus (circa 310-250 B.C.), caught the fancy of Renaissance courtesans, and abounds with Romanticist associations. However, as James Longenbach and Rebecca Beasley have emphasized, the “it” that must be made new is often, in fact, quite old, and numerous modernist poets found cause to make the timeworn mode of pastoral new. 1 Pastoral began as “short poems of rural life (descriptive, narrative, amatory) often in dialogue for and supposedly uttered by simple rustics,” but as a literary mode focused on “herdsmen and their lives,” it has been at once a social form and an expression of the ethos or attitudes of a culture.2 That pastoral re-emerges quietly yet tenaciously in the work of twentieth-century American writers is remarkable for underscoring how pastoral absorbs persistent questions about person and place in the context of social, cultural, and political milestones that would irrevocably alter the way we perceive and write about American experience.
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