The View From Key West: Toward a Global South Atlantic Lyric Marvin Alfred Campbell Lemoyne, Pennsylvania B.A., English, Vassar College, 2006 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Literature University of Virginia July 2015 1 Acknowledgments I am immensely fortunate to have received endlessly generous training, support, and mentorship from a wonderful department with a vibrant intellectual community. The co- directors of my dissertation, Jahan Ramazani and Jennifer Wicke, have supported and believed in my work and me more than I can ever adequately thank them for, and it means the world to me. I am honored to have been their students at the University of Virginia, benefiting from their teaching, scholarship, critical acumen, and professional and personal support. Stephen Cushman has deeply influenced this project and my development as a scholar and teacher as well. Working with, and alongside, him has been a great and matchless gift—one of my most cherished memories was a course I took under his tutelage during my early years in the department and I continue to be inspired by his pedagogical example. Courses, conversation, and research collaboration with Michael Levenson throughout my years at UVa have been enormously beneficial as well, helping to inspire my enthusiasm for the profession. I am grateful to other faculty members—Elizabeth Fowler, Deborah McDowell, Anna Brickhouse, and Rita Felski—who have supported my work and with whom I have had fruitful conversations in its conception. The continued support and friendship of Don Foster—whose mentorship at Vassar College and beyond—has also meant a great deal to me, having far exceeded his obligations to me as my teacher. I would not have entered graduate school if not for him. At the University of Virginia, I benefited from the financial support of a Commonwealth fellowship, a South Atlantic Studies Fellowship from the Virginia 2 Foundation of the Humanities, and generous travel and research grants, which allowed me to do vital archival work and share my scholarship at conferences. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge all that I owe to my mother, Susan, and my sister, Penelope—they are more than my family; they are my life. Without them, I would be nothing—or nowhere. They have believed in me when I have not believed in myself and have ensured that everything I have ever done, including this work, is for them. 3 Abstract The View From Key West: Toward a Global South Atlantic Lyric “The View from Key West” argues that the map of American modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics cannot be drawn without the Global South Atlantic that operates from Key West—a liminal space for writers of the twentieth-century to rethink nation, race, sexual difference, and gender within a transnational frame. Though the increasingly global dimensions of literary study remain focused on the novel, crossings have been equally significant to Anglophone poetics. As Jahan Ramazani’s work has repeatedly shown, there exists a “traveling poetry” even when poets remained fixed, because poems travel—literally and figuratively. “The View from Key West” offers one such mapping of a travel, looking to the South Atlantic, instead of the North, for an understanding of how a phase of American literary history has been formed, shaped, and inflected. From the peninsular tip of the United States to the larger Gulf Region and beyond, the Global South Atlantic has facilitated a crosscultural exchange where poets in the United States, Caribbean, and Americas dissolve national borders and geographical boundaries, alongside conceptual ones of culture and identity, at the same time as they run up against the gaps, tensions, and violence, of a sharp power differential left by the Middle Passage. Focusing on the work of Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Audre Lorde, Langston Hughes, Derek Walcott, and Jean Toomer, my study shows how American poetry both remapped itself and was itself remapped by this wide array of Anglo-American, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean poets. 4 Launching investigations into Cuba, Brazil, Aruba, Central America, the Galapagos, St. Lucia, on the one hand; and the Plains States, the Midwest, the Southern United States, and New York, on the other, they reveal at once the productive cross-connections and insurmountable tensions that define the relationship between North and South. By rendering the hemisphere as mutually constitutive in this way, the Global South Atlantic Lyric decenters the former in favor of a fluid, free-ranging matrix without a center, placing into conversation poets who are often segregated by race as well as nation, crediting investments in social reality and identity to others, such as Stevens, who are not often credited with them, and revealing that American literature— like American history—must be viewed through the lens of South Atlantic, which begins in Key West and extends infinitely outward. 5 Table of Contents 1. Introduction: The Crucible 7 2. Wallace Stevens’s “Comprehensive Island Hemisphere”— 25 From Key West To Cuba 3. Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay— 92 Greater Key West and the African Diaspora 4. Elizabeth Bishop and Audre Lorde: “Driving Into the Interior” of the Hemisphere—From Nova Scotia to Tierra Del Fuego 125 5. Derek Walcott’s Poetry of Homecoming in a Global South Atlantic 202 6. Works Cited 243 6 Introduction: The Crucible Can we imagine Hart Crane without the Caribbean or Elizabeth Bishop without Rio? – William Logan, April 8, 2007 New York Times William Logan begins his review of The Selected Poems of Derek Walcott by arguing for the importance of place to Anglo-American poetics. After pointing to Byron and Shelley in Italy and Greece, Eliot and Pound in London, he ends the catalogue with this rhetorical question before addressing a Walcott who has “crossed so many borders, his poems read like a much-thumbed Baedeker.” In doing so, Logan not only rehearses Walcott’s placement within a poetic tradition his work itself foregrounds, but suggests— as neither other readers of Walcott nor even Walcott himself have done—that he stands especially close to its American modernist phase. The poet of St. Lucia occupies the same space as Elizabeth Bishop, who spent fifteen years in Brazil, and Hart Crane, who resided for a summer off the coast of Cuba, on the Isle of Pines. Walcott’s affinities to both are well known, the poet at once attracted to Crane’s dense, allusive rhetoric and epic ambition and Bishop’s skeptical orientation to place and travel that quarrels with the cultural assumptions of tourism—i.e., Logan’s Baedeker. But despite Walcott's particularly close kinship to Bishop and the relevance of place to all three poets, the contours of their shared hemispheric geography remains unacknowledged. If we have not been able to imagine these writers without such locales, as Logan suggests—and it is not clear, in Crane’s case, that we have not, critics having rendered him national through The Bridge, his paradigmatic epic of nation formation—we have certainly 7 proven able to elide their contiguity, effacing a major poetic lineage that crosses lines of nation, gender, race, and sexual identity. This is a mistake—for these three poets and more, for the whole of American poetics. Bishop’s wide-ranging peregrinations from the 1940s to the late 1960s, in which she interfused Nova Scotia, Brazil, Aruba, Mexico, and the Galapagos; Crane’s investments in the Caribbean and Mexico in 1926 and his twilight year in 1933; and Walcott’s own vexed crossings between North and South that began during the 1980s, belong to a still larger and richer map of American and Caribbean poetics that converge in Key West.` Here, at the southernmost point of the continental United States, the largest of the Keys—closer to Havana than Miami, as Bishop herself remarked to her students at Harvard later in life—modernist poetics built on a nineteenth-century hemispheric consciousness informing a trans-American ideal in Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, José Martí and Rubén Darío, to forge what I call, drawing on Joseph Slaughter, a Global South Atlantic. This critical concept is one that, according to Slaughter, aims to explore different ways of positioning Atlantic Studies in relation to the Global South … focusing on how artists and intellectuals from the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and other Southern zones imagine the Atlantic … [and] how individuals, governments or political movements, social imaginaries, texts or other cultural artifacts, and markets do (or do not) cross the oceanic space between Africa, Latin America, and surrounding “Southern” regions; and the larger structures of knowledge and power that enable or inhibit these flows (Slaughter). For a wide-ranging phalanx of mid and late twentieth-century poets that also includes Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Jean Toomer, and Claude McKay, 8 the Global South Atlantic provides a liminal, transnational space to dissolve national borders and geographical boundaries, reveal investments in difference (racial, sexual, class based), and revise social and literary history for the ultimate benefit of the New World, triangulating the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe to draw out their crosscurrents and intersections. Part of the “transnational turn” that has redefined literary study, this formation re- orients a map of American literature still overly indebted to F.O. Mattheissen’s American Renaissance, a modernism embedded within Eliot’s “mind of Europe” and its attendant culture capitals of New York, London, and Paris; and geographies of African American culture and the African diaspora in the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Atlantic. From such a dynamic matrix that engages with conceptions of black and white internationalism emerges a hemispheric modernism.