The Modernist Defense of Poetry in Prose and Verse Nathaniel Farrell Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 ©2013 Nathaniel Farrell All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Modernist Defense of Poetry in Prose and Verse Nathaniel Farrell The defense of poetry is a centuries-old genre that shapes the verse of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. Arguments from the defense of poetry become models for the imagery in their poems and for their own poetic voices. These arguments include defending poiesis as the ennobling essence of poetry; attacking ornament as a property of mere verse; and yoking popular poetry to the vice of over-ornamentation. By drawing together their growing frustration with the prose defense, their internalization of its priorities and prejudices, and their residual commitment to poetic ornament, this cohort of modernist poets produce a genre of poem fraught with contradiction: images of the bad poet and the ignorant masses from the defense become central to modernist poetry. Seminal texts like “In a Station of the Metro,” “Poetry,” The Waste Land and Spring and All register the defense’s actual political purpose: policing class hierarchies within the democratizing republic of letters. Table of Contents Introduction: What is (the Defense of) Poetry? Defending Poetry between Verse and Prose . 2 Ornament and its Vicissitudes . 11 Poiesis and the Poverty of Poetry . 30 Chapter One: Classing Bad Poetry “The Serious Artist” and Pound’s Pedagogy of the Ineducable . 63 Monstrous Ladies: Ornamentation in The Waste Land . 95 Chapter Two: Moore Defending Defensiveness Crossing Over and Doubling Back: Moore’s “Poetry” . 141 “Armor Seems Extra”: Defending Poetry, Defining the Self. 156 Chapter Three: Pound/Williams: Whose Era? Us-or-Them Anti-Populism and the Era Wars . 181 “These People are Human,” or Democratic “Bull” Williams . 201 Chapter Four: Damnation by Ornamentation Subways, Stadiums and the Crowd’s-eye View . 223 Ornament, Excrescence, and the Public Health of Language . 245 i Conclusion: Modernist Poetry’s Democratic Genius . 270 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first thanks goes to Martin Puchner with whom I began this dissertation over five years ago and whom I have known more than twice that long. Those who appreciate his work on the manifesto will recognize his influence in my ideas about the defense of poetry. Those who have met him will know his kindness and his brilliance. For my belief that politics makes the intellectual life worth living, I owe thanks to Bruce Robbins. I ask myself the hard questions in his voice. I especially thank Michael Golston for the camaraderie with which he has enlivened me these last two years. This project may not have been completed without his guidance. The love of poetry is a gift. I hope to share mine as generously as Michael shares his. This project also may not have been completed without the inspiration of my wife, Musa Gurnis. I thank her for the faith and the help she has given me. I owe special thanks to my parents, Richard and Maria Farrell, whose love and support has been always unconditional. Lastly, I thank the friends who have been like family to me, in particular those whose work has shaped my definition of poetry: Matvei Yankelevich, Julien Poirier, Filip Marinovich, Anna Moschovakis, and Ryan Haley. Friendship like theirs is at the heart of the community I want to live in. iii To the memory of my grandfather. iv 1 Introduction: What is (the Defense of) Poetry? 2 Defending Poetry Between Verse and Prose It is characteristic of this decade that one’s friends and acquaintances would rather have one defend a position at length than define it accurately in a work of art. —Ezra Pound No modernist defense of poetry will ever will be as famous as Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (1580) or Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1821). In fact, the only bona fide modernist defense, Ezra Pound’s “The Serious Artist” (1913), begins by announcing the genre’s fall into anachronism: “It is curious that one should be asked to rewrite Sidney’s Defence of Poesy in the year of grace 1913.”1 The statement is prescient. In some fashion, most English- language defenses are a rewrite Sidney’s, which itself is more remarkable for its eloquent synthesis of continental defenses than its own newness.2 The defense of poetry is and has always been a forum for rehashing earlier defenses, an intertextual genre drawing from regularly rehearsed ideas about what poetry is and does.3 In addition to drawing diachronically from past defenses, the defense also draws synchronically from other genres of poetry discourse, such as 1 Ezra Pound, “The Serious Artist,” Literary Essays, ed. T.S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 41. 2 The groundbreaking work excavating those influences is made by J.E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York: Macmillan-Columbia University Press, 1899), 268-274. See also Cornell March Dowlin, “Sidney and Other Men’s Thought,” The Review of English Studies 20.80 (1944): 257-271. A corrective of the excesses of this trend can be found in Robert M. Strozier, “Poetic Conception in Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘An Apology for Poetry’,” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 2 (1972): 49-60. On Shelley’s sources, including his use of Sidney, see Lucas Verkoren, A Study of Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’: Its Origin, Textual History, Sources and Significance (Amsterdam, 1937). 3 René Wellek and Austin Warren offer a good account of this basic feature: “The nature and function of literature must, in any coherent discourse, be correlative. The use of poetry follows from its nature: every object or class of object is most efficiently and rationally used for what it is . Similarly, the nature of an object follows from its use: it is what it does.” See René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace / Harvest, 1956), 29. 3 the ars poetica, the preface, the review, the literary history or biography, and the academic study. While the form of the defense frequently changes as other genres rise and fall, the content has been relatively consistent, especially on the degradation of popular poetry—which makes the defense necessary in the first place—and the cause of that dereliction: the popularity of verse ornament and the deplorable neglect of poetry’s sine qua non, whether fiction-making (Sidney); imaginative sympathy (Wordsworth, Shelley); organic structure (Coleridge); or new form (Pound, Williams). All of the regular features of the genre are present in Pound’s defense: a definition of poetry (p. 42, 52, 56); an account of its socio-political role (42); a history of poetic achievement (48-49); an anthropological account of the development of language (50-51); an statement on human psychology (41); a rebuttal of attacks on poetry (47); a statement on the variety of poetic genres (45); a smattering of exempla (51, 53); a comparison between the poet and other professionals (43-45, 47); an analogy between poetry and other fine arts (51, 56); a castigation of bad poets and bad poetry (43-44, 47-48; 54-55); and an examination of the difference between prose, verse, and poetry (49-55). These topics can be traced to the different preoccupations of different eras’ entries in the genre. The catalog of poetic genres, for example, is hardly noteworthy in “The Serious Artist” but occupies considerably more space in early modern defenses and receives considerable attention in Shelley’s defense.4 Modernist defenses are disproportionately invested in the last two features on my list: the problem of bad poets and, after the disassociation of verse and poetry, the relationship between poetry and prose. These 4 Shelley discusses the rise and fall of genre, from “Homer and the cyclic poets” to “the dramatic and lyrical Poets of Athens” to “the bucolic writers, who found patronage under the lettered tyrants of Sicily and Egypt.” Shelley, A Defence of Poetry; or, Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled ‘The Four Ages of Poetry,’ in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), 518- 521. Sidney breaks poets down into three kinds: hymnists or devotional poets; scientific, philosophical, or historical versifiers; and proper fiction-making poets. Sidney, Defence of Poesy, Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 217-218. 4 topics receive far more attention in “The Serious Artist” than earlier defenses. This section will show how modernist defenses also inherit class prejudices from the history of the genre where the verse definition of poetry and bad poets represent the popular encroachment on the republic of letters. The period I cover in this dissertation roughly corresponds to the years between the first and second publications of “The Serious Artist” (1913-1954), during which time the defense Pound outlines begins to shape the first-wave of modernist poetry.5 But this story is less about influence than about the mutation of the genre of the defense of poetry from prose to verse, the classism of the defense’s anti-ornamental poetics, and the contradiction that comes from middle- class modernists’ adoption of aristocratic arguments developed to police plebeian poetry. Certainly, the modernist defense championed by Pound in the early teens can be traced through a number of prose pieces by modernist poets as well as the proxy defenses issuing from the academy by I.A.