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Facts on File Companion to 20Th-Century American Poetry

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Facts on File Companion to 20Th-Century American Poetry THE FACTS ON FILE COMPANION TO 20th-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY CD EDITED BY BURT KIMMELMAN For Diane and Jane, as always The Facts On File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry Copyright © 2005 by Burt Kimmelman All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Facts On File, Inc. 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Facts On File companion to 20th-century poetry /[edited by] Burt Kimmelman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8160-4698-0 (alk. paper) 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title: Companion to 20th-century poetry. II. Kimmelman, Burt. III. Facts On File, Inc. PS323.5.F33 2004 811'.509—dc22 2004050661 Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com Text design adapted by James Scotto-Lavino Cover design by Cathy Rincon Printed in the United States of America VB Hermitage 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS CD ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v FOREWORD vi INTRODUCTION xiv A-TO-Z ENTRIES 1 APPENDIXES I. GLOSSARY 539 II. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 542 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 547 INDEX 550 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CD This volume is the result of the efforts of a good many Christopher Funkhouser, and Nikki Stiller, contributed people who have my deepest gratitude, some of whom essays to this book. I am also profoundly thankful for I may neglect to mention here, fallible memory being the intelligence and time Norbert Elliot, Tom Fink, and what it is. I am beholden to Mickey Pearlman, who con- Sherry Kearns (who also contributed essays), as well as tacted me and urged me to offer my services to Facts Jeff Soloway, donated to the writing of the book’s intro- On File; to Anne Savarese, former Facts On File editor, duction. And I am grateful to Burton Hatlen for his who worked with me to conceive this project and set it wonderful foreword to the book. I must also thank the in motion; to Jeff Soloway, senior editor at Facts On many contributors to this volume, whose knowledge, File, whose patience, care, and acuity have been indis- wit, and graceful writing will surely make it a success. pensable; and to Jessica Allen, whose perspicacity in Lastly, I am, as always, most thankful for the good copyediting has been more than one could have hoped natured love and support of my wife, Diane Simmons, for. I must also thank my colleagues at New Jersey and our daugther, Jane Kimmelman, without whom Institute of Technology for their encouragement and none of this would have been possible. understanding and, in some cases, their participation— especially Robert E. Lynch and Norbert Elliot, who, —Burt Kimmelman along with Doris Zames Fleischer, Robert S. Friedman, v FOREWORD CD 20TH-CENTURY AMERICAN participated in the dominant political mood of the POETRY: SOME GUIDEPOSTS moment, but more often, especially in the imperial epoch extending from World War II to the present, As Burt Kimmelman emphasizes in his eloquent intro- the poets have fiercely questioned beliefs and atti- duction to this volume, all of the poems, poets, and lit- tudes that most other Americans have apparently erary movements described in the pages that follow accepted as simply “common sense,” so that the poet- share a common “Americanness.” Yet the very essence ry community has seemed at times the most insis- of “Americanness” is diversity, the many in the one and tently skeptical and critical of the various American the one in the many, as Walt Whitman, grandfather of countercultures. (Robert Creeley, at the start of the all American bards, insisted: “I hear America singing, / 21st century one of the last surviving members of a The varied carols I hear” (emphasis mine). Thus it may generation of major poets that emerged in the 1950s, be useful to attempt a chart of the various kinds of was recently heard to ask, “How is it that I don’t “Americanness” at work in the poetry written in this know anyone who supports the policies of George W. country during the last 100 years. The chartings that I Bush?”) Yet regional differences have often been no will here propose are chronological as well as regional less important than the historical shifts that have and ideological, for the sense of what it means to be an occurred over the course of the 20th century, for New American, and specifically an American poet, has shift- York is not California, and New England is not the ed over time. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Southwest. We must also recognize radically different United States made its first tentative forays toward aesthetic commitments that have sometimes united, becoming an imperial power, but most Americans still sometimes separated poets across both historical thought of themselves as a people apart, purified by epochs and cultural regions. And in the late decades immersion in a New World Eden. With World War I of the 20th century, the very notion that we can the United States became a significant player on an define a single American identity has been challenged international stage, but the interwar years saw a by poets seeking to speak for a range of previously renewed sense of American uniqueness, often summed marginalized communities defined by ethnicity, gen- up in the label isolationism. Then World War II and the der, and/or sexual preference. ensuing decades saw a full-blown efflorescence of a “On or about December 1910, human nature distinctively American variety of imperialism, as the changed,” Virginia Woolf famously declared, and we nation set out to become the arbiter of the destiny of may date the birth of 20th-century American poetry to the planet. Our poets have sometimes enthusiastically the same pivotal moment. Among the tiny group of vi FOREWORD vii American poets whose careers carried across from the If to my list of the five poets grouped around Pound 19th into the 20th centuries, only three poets survive we add Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein, we have a to find a place in this encyclopedia: Edwin Arlington galaxy of major poets who collectively define the most Robinson, Adelaide Crapsey, and Jeanne Robert Foster. influential poetic movement of the 20th century, inter- Aging anthologies and histories of American literature national modernism. Pound showed no interest in preserve a few other names—William Vaughan Moody, Stevens’s poetry, but Williams came to know Stevens in Trumbull Stickney, George Santayana. However, in New York City during the World War I years, when 1905 the young Ezra Pound, H. D., and William both were members of a group of artists and writers Carlos Williams—Pound and Williams were students that met regularly at the home of Walter Arensberg, a at the University of Pennsylvania, and H. D was a wealthy art patron. Moore also moved on the fringes of friend of both—formed perhaps the first important lit- the Arensberg group, and she, too, came to know and erary fellowship of the new century. Although Pound admire Stevens’s work at this time. In his role as editor and Williams did not come to know and admire of Others magazine during the war years, Williams pub- Marianne Moore until later, Moore and H. D. were at lished Stevens’s poetry, while in the 1920s Moore least aware of one another during the year they spent solicited some of his poems for publication in The Dial. as fellow students at Bryn Mawr, so we may add Moore And in the 1930s Stevens contributed a preface to to form a unique quartet of “Philadelphia modernists.” Williams’s first Collected Poems. Thus we can perhaps Around this nexus of personal relationships a new create a subgroup of New York–area modernists poetic movement would crystallize, although each of encompassing Williams, Moore, and Stevens. Stein was the poets in question would arrive at a unique person- never a close friend of any of the poets mentioned thus al voice. In 1905 Pound and Williams were already far and an outspoken critic of some of them, although writing poetry, but in a distinctly 19th-century idiom: Williams visited her in Paris and admired her work. But They were, in a phrase from Pound’s 1921 poem while she was not part of the network of personal rela- “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” in search of “the sublime in tionships that linked our other poets, she is a crucial the old sense.” But by 1910 Pound was in London, figure in this story, as the most important mediator acutely aware of new poetic possibilities emerging on between Parisian modernism—cubism, fauvism, etc.— the continent. In a series of essays published in 1913 and American writers, artists, and composers. Conrad under the collective title The Approach to Paris, he Aiken, a friend of Eliot’s from Harvard, also perhaps directed American poets toward a serious reading of belongs in this list of major modernists, but to most poets such as Jules Laforgue, Tristan Corbiere, and, observers he has come to seem a lesser figure. Some above all, Arthur Rimbaud, whose work of the 1870s critics would add to the list Mina Loy, a British expatri- pointed the way toward a poetics of radical disjunc- ate who arrived in New York during the World War I tion and indeterminacy.
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