Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2013 The al ws of verse : the poetry of Alice Meynell and its literary contexts, 1875-1923 Jared Hromadka Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Hromadka, Jared, "The al ws of verse : the poetry of Alice Meynell and its literary contexts, 1875-1923" (2013). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1246. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1246 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. THE LAWS OF VERSE: THE POETRY OF ALICE MEYNELL AND ITS LITERARY CONTEXTS, 1875-1923 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Jared Hromadka B.A., Louisiana State University, 2004 M.A., Auburn University, 2006 August 2013 for S. M. and T. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Special thanks is due to Dr. Elsie Michie, without whose encouragement and guidance this project would have been impossible. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................................................iii LIST OF FIGURES.........................................................................................................................v ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................................vi INTRODUCTION: MEYNELL AMONG THE MODERNS.........................................................1 CHAPTER 1 “THE LAWS OF VERSE”: RHYTHM AND SUBMISSION IN MEYNELL’S LAST POEMS..............................................36 CHAPTER 2 THE EXPRESSIONAL AND THE FEMININE: MEYNELL’S EARLY POETRY..................................................................................................75 CHAPTER 3 USES OF METER ACROSS THE TURN OF THE CENTURY: MARY COLERIDGE, MEYNELL, POUND.............................................................................110 CONCLUSION: “SUMMER IN ENGLAND, 1914”.................................................................160 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................178 VITA............................................................................................................................................187 iv LIST OF FIGURES 1. List of blasts from BLAST No. 1..................................................................................................2 2. Alice Meynell, frontispiece to Alice Meynell: A Memoir by Viola Meynell.............................10 3. Alice Meynell, frontispiece to The Poems of Alice Meynell: Complete Edition.......................11 4. Gustave Doré, The Transfiguration.........................................................................................166 5. Icon with the Transfiguration, mosaic, late twelfth century....................................................167 v ABSTRACT Like other poets who came to prominence in the nineteenth century but continued to publish well into the twentieth, Alice Meynell’s work has come gradually to be occluded by the work of her younger contemporaries, among them T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The available scholarship records this process of occlusion in the form of an almost complete absence of serious discourse on Meynell’s work following her death in 1922 until the beginnings of a modest revival of interest in her writing beginning in the 1980s. This study aims to address that gap by giving a more complete account of Meynell’s stylistic development and technical procedures in the field of poetry than has heretofore been available. Examining select specimens of Meynell’s verse in the light of prosodic theories current at the time both she and her Modernist contemporaries were writing further allows us to see, in place of the familiar narrative of Modernism’s revolutionary break with its immediate literary past, continuities between nineteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of what meter is and how it works. Rather than attempting to catalogue the work of writers producing metrical poetry in the early twentieth century, this project looks to the work of one poet and relies on intensive analysis of only a few of her poems to trace out a literary genealogy between figures who all but never meet in critical discourse. This approach demonstrates how Meynell’s poetry, especially in its engagement with prosodic convention, provides a bridge which can link the work, on the one hand, of Victorians like Coventry Patmore and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge to, on the other hand, major architects of Modernism like Pound and Eliot, generating, ultimately, a new and alternative perspective for interpreting poetry as a cultural practice in one of its most contested historical phases. vi INTRODUCTION: MEYNELL AMONG THE MODERNS Behind the great, black capitals of the title running diagonally across its fuchsia cover, the first issue of BLAST, dated June 20, 1914, proclaims, “Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town!” (Lewis, BLAST 1 7).1 The new magazine’s appearance had been advertised in The Egoist for April 1 with the slogan, “END OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA” (Weaver 140). Despite its apocalyptic self-promotion, BLAST would not live past its second issue, but the first, in particular, remains a crucial statement of the high Modernist aesthetic just beginning to emerge in London on the eve of the First World War. BLAST No. 1 makes its statement most explicitly and forcefully in the series of manifestoes comprising its first thirty pages and signed by its major contributors, among them the magazine’s editor, Wyndham Lewis, and the twenty-eight-year-old poet Ezra Pound. These manifestoes orient BLAST’s aesthetic within the literary and cultural milieu of 1914 by means of long and typographically striking lists of persons, things, and ideas arranged beneath the contrasting headings, “BLAST” and “BLESS.” The first item to be blasted is London’s “CLIMATE,” a “DISMAL SYMBOL,” a “VICTORIAN VAMPIRE” that “sucks the TOWN’S heart” (11). Next comes “FRANCE” with her “PARISIAN PAROCHIALISM” (13) and, then, “THE BRITANNIC ÆSTHETE” (15), “HUMOUR” (17), and “SPORT.” And on the last page of this rhapsody of blasts, in a cloud of names presented as almost afterthoughts in smaller type and no particular order, halfway down the length of the page from “Codliver Oil,” we find “Clan Meynell” (21) (see fig. 1). A reader of 1914 would probably understand the clan to include its patriarch, Wilfrid Meynell (1852–1948), a writer and influential publisher of magazines intended primarily for English Roman Catholics. Wilfrid’s son Francis (1891–1975) makes a likely candidate for blasting as well: not only was he the proprietor of a private press issuing rather precious editions of literary works, but he had also recently gained a certain notoriety for “left-wing opinions” and 1 Figure 1. List of blasts from BLAST No. 1 (ed. Wyndham Lewis; London: John Lane, 1914; 21). 2 consorting with socialists (Badeni 231-232). Though Francis might seem like a sympathetic figure for the avowedly revolutionary project proselytized in BLAST, the magazine consistently refuses to align itself with revolutionary politics, preferring instead to make its address “TO THE INDIVIDUAL” (Lewis, BLAST 1 7). Its most overtly political statement is a patronizing appeal “TO SUFFRAGETTES” to “stick to what you understand” and “LEAVE ART ALONE, BRAVE COMRADES!” (151–152). Francis would go on to draw public ire for claiming a conscientious objection to serving in the war, and he would tangle with Pound over the title of the Catholic Anthology 1914-1915, Pound’s collection of works from leading Modernist poets (Moody 280). But, undoubtedly, the most prominent member of Clan Meynell would have been Wilfrid’s wife and Francis’s mother, the poet, journalist—and suffragist—Alice. The matron of Clan Meynell’s implicit inclusion among the names of the blasted serves Lewis’s manifesto as a signal of what the London Vortex most assuredly ought not to be. As Alice Thompson, this one among the objects of BLAST’s derision had authored, in 1875, a volume of poems titled Preludes that early garnered praise for its sensitivity and delicacy of expression. No less a Victorian tastemaker than Ruskin referred to a few of the selections as “the finest things I’ve seen or felt in modern verse” (qtd. in Badeni 52). After her marriage in 1877, Alice Meynell would come to enjoy a considerable reputation as a journalist, political activist, and writer of prose essays. Her next independent volume of poetry, Later Poems, would not be published until 1901. Though Later Poems exhibits a formal complexity, emotional reticence, and, sometimes, moral ambiguity entirely unlike the verbose and effusive lyrics and dramatic monologues in Preludes, Meynell’s reputation as a poet would continue to be conditioned by responses to the earlier work, and, as the years of her hiatus from poetry between 1875 and 1901 wore