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Modernist Sensibilities in the Poetry of Elizabeth Madox Roberts

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Modernist Sensibilities in the Poetry of Elizabeth Madox Roberts Modernist sensibilities in the poetry of Elizabeth Madox Roberts Item Type Thesis Authors Paolini, Christopher A. Rights Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States Download date 30/09/2021 13:20:40 Item License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/767 Paolini 1 Modernist Sensibilities in the Poetry of Elizabeth Madox Roberts by Christopher A. Paolini In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS in The Department of English State University of New York New Paltz, New York, 12561 December 2018 Paolini 2 MODERNIST SENSIBILITIES IN THE POETRY OF ELIZABETH MADOX ROBERTS Christopher A. Paoini State University of New York at New Paltz ___________________________________ I, the thesis advisor for the above candidate for the Master of Arts degree, hereby recommends acceptance of this thesis. _____________________________________________________ H. R. Stoneback, Thesis Advisor Department of English, SUNY New Paltz Approved on 22 December 2018 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in English at the State University of New York at New Paltz Paolini 3 Table of Contents: 1. The Modernist “Spirit” 4 2. Poetry in Prose and The Time of Man 24 3. Modernist Sensibilities and Jingling in the Wind 43 4. Roberts in Colorado: Romantic Imitations, Modernist Intimations, and In the Great Steep's Garden 84 5. Roberts in Chicago: A Modernist Education—Poetry, The Poetry Club, Early Modernism, and Under the Tree 98 6. (New) Songs of Innocence and Experience, or Singing Beyond the Genius of Under the Tree: High Modernist “Wholeness” and Unity / Continuity in Song in the Meadow 156 Appendix 182 Works Cited 184 Paolini 4 I. The Modernist “Spirit” In an interview conducted by Rena Niles for the Louisville Courier-Journal (January 8th, 1939), Elizabeth Madox Roberts recalls an anecdote from her early childhood. In her McGuffey's Reader, a popular elementary school primer, she read the following sentence: “Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a poet.”. She read it and read it again, and said to herself: “Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a poet—and that's what I am—a poet.” She was 8 years old. She did not use the future tense. She did not say “ I will be . .” She said: “I am a poet.” (Niles 38) In her forthcoming (the first definitive) biography of this largely underrepresented American (that is, Kentuckian) writer, Something of Myself—Elizabeth Madox Roberts: A Life of Struggle for Female Identity in Twentieth-Century American Literature, Jane Eblen Keller uncovers what was most likely the actual source engendering such an epiphany of brash-bright child resolve: from a series of readers composed by one James Baldwin, a School Reading by Grades, Sixth and Seventh Year Combined, published in 1897 (thus aging our “poet” to a ripe sixteen years of age), and noting that Elizabeth Barrett Browning, indeed, “was an English poet” (Keller 68). Regardless of where Miss Roberts observed the declaration, and whether she was a child or a young adult, this origin story stands as a crucial component of the writer's mythos within the American literary consciousness. It is a myth that, although written, remains essentially tucked away in imaginary attics with many real documents in them: little magazines, newspaper clippings, and promotional pamphlets collected by some astute chronicler of a period within Anglo-American literature that has given rise to some of its most enduring works, especially those embodying one of the most iconic shifts in literary sensibility and accomplishment since the founding of the tradition.1 1 According to David Perkins, in A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Vol. 1): “The transition from Romantic and Victorian to 'modern' modes of poetry is one of the fundamental shifts in the history of the art. If we look to English verse of the past for instances of comparable transition, only three suggest themselves: the emergence of the poetry of the Renaissance in the sixteenth century, of neoclassic verse Paolini 5 If, then, we are to identify and begrudgingly accept a myth that surrounds and encompasses the writer at the impasse of this present moment, it would hinge on the disheartening assumption of (and the romantic prospect of compensating for) an “undue neglect.” It is true that Roberts' name is not as well-known as many of her contemporaries, even within the Southern literary tradition, a tradition in which her work should be as well-acquainted to the discerning reader who places, say, the Nashville Fugitives and Southern Agrarians alongside William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and Flannery O'Connor and acknowledges this party as dignitaries of a “Southern Renascence.” During her lifetime, however, she was a popular success with both critics and the general reading public. The Time of Man (1926), was chosen for the Book-of-the-Month Club, while The Great Meadow (1930) and A Buried Treasure (1931) were honored as Literary Guild selections. Robert Penn Warren was a fervent admirer, claiming that “By 1930 … it was impossible to discuss American fiction without reference to Elizabeth Madox Roberts” (20), as was Ford Madox Ford, citing her as one of “those chief ornaments of Southern writing” (The March of Literature 829), but more significantly as a figure who, even among a crowd of Modernist heavyweights, “stands almost supremely alone” (“Elizabeth Madox Roberts” 286). He proclaims that, between her first two novels, The Time of Man and My Heart and My Flesh (1927), a whole quality had been added to literature itself – as if literature itself had a new purpose given to it, as if what literature could do had been extended in its scope, as if the number of emotions that literature could convey had been added to, and as if the permanent change that every book must work upon you had been given a new region in which to exercise itself. (Ibid. 285) After pausing for a moment to process the caliber of the compliment, it becomes crucial to note that Ford's critical essay, in his approximations that situate Elizabeth Madox Roberts in the same toward the end of the seventeenth century, and of Romantic poetry in the early years of the nineteenth century” (293). Paolini 6 conversation as James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, give not only the reputation, but the very character of our understanding of the writer's body of work “a new region in which to exercise itself.” To go about reconsidering Roberts as a writer participating within the Modernist tradition, that is, recasting the texture of her style and the character of her sensibility within a milieu attuned to some very different cultural idioms and reverberations than those of Southern, Agrarian, or Regional literatures (although certain concurrences are inevitable), is a task that demands a strong directorial vision and conviction. The “Introduction” to Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents (1999) wastes no time in declaring the editors' position on the forever-contentious “-ism”: the first sentence, in full revisionist hyper-theorizing characteristic of “Modernist studies” in the decades following the preeminence of the New Criticism, asserts that “Modernism is not a movement” (xvii). In a similar vein, sociologist Daniel Bell, perhaps echoing W. B. Yeats' “The Second Coming,” can find in it “no center” (qtd. in Kavaloski 1). It is rational to concede with Peter Nicholls that what is sometimes constructed as “a sort of monolithic ideological formation” is more accurately “a highly complex set of cultural developments at the beginning of the twentieth century” (Nicholls vii). But to conceive of Modernism as “a term that masks conflict and upheaval and any number of contradictory positions” (Kolocotroni, Goldman & Taxidou xvii) while denying it any function as an idea of order seems to imply that it may only be considered a “movement” if it is entirely homogenous in action, thought, and presentation, or else it disregards the potentials of direct influence and traceable conversations that began accumulating with architectural design around 1890—and one need only begin parsing any thorough source-work (Michael H. Levenson's A Genealogy of Modernism is especially illuminating) to have their opinion on the latter fallacy swayed. The poles erected over what is indeed, or allowed to be, denoted by the term Paolini 7 “Modernism,” as well as the full range of contention in between, stem, if not from any ignorance or stubbornness, from the incredible flexibility of the linguistic root. Matei Calinescu's Five Faces of Modernity (rev. 1987) opens with the simple claim (though incredibly loaded, as his scholarship proves) that, “During the last one hundred and fifty years or so, such terms as 'modern,' 'modernity,' and more recently 'modernism,' as well as a number of related notions, have been used in artistic or literary contexts to convey an increasingly sharp sense of historical relativism” (3), although “the idea of modernity was born during the Christian Middle Ages” (13). As early as the late fifth century, “modernus” found wide usage as a term both transcending and in opposition to “antiquus,” and its polemical divisiveness in arguments over the aesthetics of poetry extends at least as far back as 1170 (Calinescu 14-15). The history of the “modern” idea has been, and continues to be, perpetuated by an inherent antagonism, while its longstanding usage makes it a term as fluid as time itself—one that, for one drawing invisible distances rearward from a “contemporary” crux, sits as stable as shifting sands. (To put it simply: one man's modernity is another man's antiquity.) To find some compromise within, or else forge a reconciliation towards a distinct literary conception of “modernism”—a majuscule “Modernism”—and use it as a lens through which to appraise the writings of Miss Roberts is not an altogether novel pursuit.
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