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New Verse Anthologies, 1913-53 Warren Scott Hec Ney Loyola University Chicago, Wscottcheney@Gmail.Com Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2014 Anthologizing Modernism: New Verse Anthologies, 1913-53 Warren Scott heC ney Loyola University Chicago, [email protected] Recommended Citation Cheney, Warren Scott, "Anthologizing Modernism: New Verse Anthologies, 1913-53" (2014). Dissertations. Paper 891. http://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/891 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2014 Warren Scott heC ney LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO ANTHOLOGIZING MODERNISM: NEW VERSE ANTHOLOGIES, 1913-53 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY W. SCOTT CHENEY CHICAGO, IL MAY 2014 Copyright by W. Scott Cheney, 2014 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I must begin by thanking my mentors at Loyola University Chicago. Dr. Victoria Anderson mentored and challenged me in the ways I thought about composition pedagogy. Dr. Badia Ahad presented African-American literature like no other teacher and patiently answered my many questions. Dr. Paul Jay provided helpful advice and opened up the field of cultural studies for me in his Networked Public Culture seminar. Dr. Pamela Caughie pushed me to seek excellence as a graduate student, and her untiring work as an advocate for every graduate student in English is extraordinary. Dr. Steven Jones first helped me to critically interpret technology and games. He also introduced me to the field of textual studies and has pushed me to make stronger arguments about bibliographic details in my research. Dr. Jack Kerkering mentored me as a literature teacher and graciously welcomed me into his office for many discussions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. Without his thorough comments and engaging questions, my dissertation would not be what it is today. Finally, Dr. David Chinitz spent countless hours reading and patiently commenting on my (very) rough early chapters. His comments have completely overhauled my writing process, and I am a better writer and thinker because of it. His sage advice helped me to avoid many pitfalls, and he was the one who set me on my present career path. In my seventeen years in higher education, I cannot point to a professor who has taught me more about a subject or who has patiently helped as I have grown as a reader and critic of literary texts. Thank you. iii I must also express my gratitude to Dr. Samuel Attoh and Dr. Patricia Mooney- Melvin of the Loyola University Chicago Graduate School for offering me assistantships and training as a teaching assistant. I would like to especially thank Dr. Jessica Horowitz for her encouragement and her work organizing the Dissertation Boot Camp with Dr. Dina Berger. I am indebted to the staff of the many libraries where I have had the privilege to carry out my research. I always felt more than welcome, and this dissertation would not exist without access to these archives: University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, Northwestern’s Deering Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library, Yale’s Beinecke Lirbary, Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Library, University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center, Southern Methodist University’s DeGolyer Library, Chicago’s Newberry Library, and of course, Loyola University Chicago’s Cudahy Library. I owe a debt of gratitude to the donors of the Gravett-Tuma Research Award that made trips to these libraries possible. I also need to thank Emily Walhout, Jack White, Kenvi Philips, Marcus Mumford, Martin Ley, Nick Munagian, Russell Martin, and Blaine Swen. Finally, and most importantly, I must thank my family. To my parents, Warren and Cheryl, who gave me a love of learning and a desire to teach. To my brothers, Greg and Brian, for their support in this seemingly never-ending process. To my daughters, Elayna, Ava, and Adeline, who endured bedtime without Daddy many nights as I wrote and whom I hope will find a love for poetry. And of course, to my best friend and the love of my life, Rebecca, who supported me in my failures, who embraced me in my victories, and who always reminds me what is most important in life. In closing, I offer the achievement of this project to Jesus Christ, who has taught me that I am not defined by my work but by his deep love for me. iv For my family, Rebecca, Elayna, Ava, and Adeline TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES vii INTRODUCTION: NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETRY ANTHOLOGIES AND TWENTIETH CENTURY INNOVATION 1 CHAPTER ONE: EZRA POUND’S DES IMAGISTES: MYSTERY AND (IM)MATERIALITY IN THE FIRST NEW VERSE ANTHOLOGY 17 CHAPTER TWO: “FOR THIS IS OURS!”: LITERARY REGIONS AND CULTURAL OWNERSHIP IN THREE NEW VERSE ANTHOLOGIES, 1915-17 78 CHAPTER THREE: “NOT JUST ANOTHER POETRY ANTHOLOGY”: BRAITHWAITE, JOHNSON, AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN POETRY 137 CONCLUSION: “REVISED AND ENLARGED”: MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY COMPREHENSIVE AND NEW VERSE ANTHOLOGIES 194 BIBLIOGRAPHY 205 VITA 222 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. H.D. “Imagiste.” Cover of Poetry, Vol. 1, Issue 4 (Jan.1913), Modernist Journals Project. 40 Figure 2. Verses, Translations, and Reflections from “The Anthology.” Poetry Vol. 1, Issue 4 (Jan. 1913): 118, Modernist Journals Project. 43 Figure 3. Cover. The Glebe 1.5 (Feb. 1914), Northwestern University Library. 51 Figure 4. Orange dust cover of the New York Boni edition of Des Imagistes (1914), Beinecke Library, Yale University. 52 Figure 5. Cover of the New York Boni Edition of Des Imagistes (1914), Beinecke Library, Yale University. 54 Figure 6. Cover of the London Poetry Bookshop edition of Des Imagistes (1914), Beinecke Library, Yale University. 55 Figure 7. Cover of the New York Shay edition of Des Imagistes (1917), Beinecke Library, Yale University. 57 Figure 8. “Fragments” from the New York Boni edition of Des Imagistes (1914), Deering Library, Northwestern University. 61 Figure 9. John Gould Fletcher’s transcribed translation of “Fragments” from Des Imagistes (1914), Beinecke Library, Yale University. 65 Figure 10. Lowell’s copy of Some Imagist Poets (1915), Houghton Library, Harvard University, AC9 .L9517 .A915s 1915 (A). 96 Figure 11. “Statuary gallery, Boston Atheneum,” New York Public Library, image ID: g90f370_063f. 97 Figure 12. Alfred Kreymborg’s Others: An Anthology of the New Verse (1917), MW Books, mwbooks.ie/mwbooksire/166352.jpg. 111 Figure 13. Macmillan Co. publisher’s device, The New Poetry (1917), Google eBook. 123 vii Figure 14. Two editions of The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922 and 1931). The 1922 edition (Library of Congress, via the Internet Archive) and the 1931 edition (from SUL Ross Library), respectively. 183 viii INTRODUCTION NINETEENTH-CENTURY POETRY ANTHOLOGIES AND TWENTIETH CENTURY INNOVATION A pile of poetry anthologies sat on the desk of a borrowed study carrel at the Northwestern University library when I began my research in 2009. Most of the anthologies were from the nineteenth century—some, like Allan Ramsay’s 1711 The Tea- Table Miscellany, far earlier. When I opened the dark green cover of an 1863 edition of Frances Turner Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language, I noticed that the publisher had embellished the title page and section headings with floral insignias and crests (not to mention butterflies, vases, and bells).1 These embellishments were not the only feature that made this edition noteworthy. When I opened the book, I found actual flowers pressed between many of the pages of the anthology, and some of the other pages revealed grease marks in the shapes of flowers. The physical remains of these flowers summon pleasant images of a relaxed reader who may have read the book in a spring meadow or a cultivated garden, using the anthology pages to preserve flowers from his or her surroundings. However the previous reader actually interacted with the text, the connection between poetry anthologies and flowers also exists on another level. Barbara Korte explains that the term 1 This is a change from the first edition of Palgrave’s famous anthology, which came out in July of 1861 and is discussed below. The call number for this particular edition at Northwestern University is 821.04 P16 1863. 1 2 “anthology” itself comes from the “Greek anthos = flower and legeín = to gather”; thus anthologies are a kind of literary bouquet (“Flowers” 2). The poems Palgrave chose to include in his Golden Treasury were selected for their beauty and lasting value; in much the same way, this particular reader selected especially beautiful flowers to place between the pages of Palgrave’s anthology.2 The form of poetry anthologies was not a new idea in the nineteenth century; in fact, the history of the form goes back thousands of years to what is often called the Greek Anthology—a modern term and not the title of one ancient work.3 Though there are fragments of earlier collections, Meleager of Gadara’s Stephanos (or Garland) is the first known poetry anthology and dates to approximately 100 BC (Greene 53). Anthologies of English poetry begin in 1557 with Richard Tottel’s Songes and Sonnettes, commonly known as “Totell’s Miscellany.” It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century, however, that single-volume poetry anthologies became popular.4 This development 2 William Stanley Braithwaite’s 1904 sonnet “On a Pressed Flower in My Copy of Keats” draws upon the apparently common practice of pressing flowers in books of poetry. The first four lines read: “As Keats' old honeyed volume of romance / I oped to-day to drink its Latmos air, / I found all pressed a white flower lying where / The shepherd lad watched Pan's herd slow advance” (Lyrics 37).
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