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"The Bellows / of Experience": the Modernist Love Poem and Its Legacy

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University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository English Language and Literature ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 8-25-2016 "The Bellows / of Experience": The oM dernist Love Poem and Its Legacy Stephanie Spong Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds Recommended Citation Spong, Stephanie. ""The Bellows / of Experience": The odeM rnist Love Poem and Its Legacy." (2016). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/1 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Language and Literature ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Stephanie Diane Spong Candidate English Language and Literatures Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Matthew Hofer, Chairperson Scarlett Higgins Gary Harrison Alan Golding Spong ii “THE BELLOWS / OF EXPERIENCE”: THE MODERNIST LOVE POEM AND ITS LEGACY by STEPHANIE D. SPONG B.A., English and Women’s Studies, College of William and Mary, 2006 M.A., English, University of New Mexico, 2010 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy English The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico August, 2016 Spong iii DEDICATION For Edith and Robert Spong, who believed in this project before it began, and for Sarah LeCates, whose grace reminded me why it was worth finishing. Spong iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project was made possible by the dedicated support of my committee chair, Matthew Hofer, and my committee members, Scarlett Higgins, Gary Harrison, and Alan Golding. I am grateful to the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Foundation whose dissertation fellowship supported me in the final year of writing and revising. I am also deeply indebted to my colleagues who supported and encouraged my writing over the last year: Marie Landau, Julie Williams, Elizabeth Oliphant, Natalie Kubasek, Geneva Becenti, Daoine Bachran, Annarose Fitzgerald, and Calinda Shely. Finally, I want to thank my partner Andrew McCollom who helped me find my balance throughout the writing process. Spong v “THE BELLOWS / OF EXPERIENCE”: THE MODERNIST LOVE POEM AND ITS LEGACY by Stephanie D. Spong B.A., ENGLISH AND WOMEN’S STUDIES, COLLEGE OF WILLIAM AND MARY, 2006 M.A., ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO, 2010 ABSTRACT The vein of experimental love poetry examined in this project takes advantage of the friction generated by charging both form and content with innovation. The troubled relationship between sex and power is knit directly into the long and dynamic history of love poetry, but there has yet to be a published monograph on the modernist love poem and its implications for literary history. This dissertation fills a major gap in scholarship and speaks to the broader social concerns addressed by public discourse on sex, sexuality, and eros. The body of modernist love poetry includes allusions to traditional love poetry—a tradition in lyric extending from the earliest written poems and culminating in nineteenth-century sentimentality—as well as explicit erotic content, satire, polemic, violence, and anxiety. It Spong vi is not neatly bounded by nation, gender, race, or aesthetic approach, but nonetheless, this project examines the consistent presence and achievement of experimental Anglophone poets working with the genre. My dissertation begins with a series of case studies examining the work of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Langston Hughes to elucidate love poetry in its modernist form. The project establishes the place innovative modernist love poetry holds in literary history, and casts forward with two chapters, one on Anne Sexton and Robert Creeley, and another on Harryette Mullen and Bruce Andrews, to illustrate how mid-century and contemporary poets have continued to find new ways of re-imagining the genre. Spong vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . iii INTRODUCTION . 1 CHAPTER ONE “Butter all the beefsteak”: Gertrude Stein’s Diffusion of the Lyric Love Poem . 46 CHAPTER TWO "Ubi amor, ibi oculus": Hypostasis in Ezra Pound's Love Poems . 75 CHAPTER THREE “Knocking Sparks”: The Functional Love Poems of Mina Loy . 106 CHAPTER FOUR “This is all beyond you”: Transgression and Creative Force in the Early Love Poems of William Carlos Williams . 133 CHAPTER FIVE “Astride”: Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s Queering of Love and the Love Poem . 167 CHAPTER SIX “Such a strange disease”: A Pathology of Love in Langston Hughes’s Fine Clothes to the Jew . 201 CHAPTER SEVEN “Into the company of love / it all returns”: The Mediated Love Poems of Anne Sexton and Robert Creeley . 237 Spong viii CONCLUSION New Lyric Studies and New Lyric . 267 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY . 294 Spong 1 Introduction The Love Song and the Love Call Charles Darwin distinguishes between two types of bird calls in The Descent of Man (1871).1 He catalogs as “love song” the sound of the preening male bird who performs as much for the possible competition for his beloved’s affection as for his intended mate. However, a “love call,” Darwin’s term for a warning cry between mates, alerts the beloved to possible dangers or calls for help when dangers encroach. Because of its urgency, the love call affords a directness and intensity that the love song cannot duplicate. While the naturalist can conveniently distinguish between these two modes of communication, modernist poets writing love poetry were forced to contend with the inflections of both the performative song and the warning cry. Modernist love poetry includes allusions to traditional Western love poetry—a lyric tradition including the personal poetry of Sappho, the courtly love poems of the troubadours, the wry wit of Shakespeare, and the earnest sentiment of John Keats—as well as explicit erotic content, satire, polemic, violence, and anxiety. It is not neatly bounded by nation, gender, race, or aesthetic Spong 2 approach, but nonetheless, this project examines the consistent presence and achievement of experimental modernist poets working with the genre. This project attends specifically to the work of experimental modernists because their efforts to make “new” from topoi that signaled what was often considered “traditional” poetry necessitated both new formal approaches to poetic language with free verse (line breaks, inconsistent rhyme, and repetition) and instantiated the love poem’s flexibility as a genre. Memorable poetry often yokes form and content under a common rubric with either one or the other element functioning as the innovative variable. Roland Barthes describes this as the “erotic...seam” where “two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge...and another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours).”2 The vein of modernist love poetry examined here takes advantage of the friction generated by charging both sides of the seam with innovation. In his description of the relationship of romance and political wars in the high middle-ages, Ezra Pound reasons that “the involved forms, and the veiled meanings in the ‘trobar clus’ [closed form],” grew out of living conditions, and that these songs played a very real part in love intrigue and the intrigue preceding warfare, Spong 3 concluding that “If you wish to make love to women in public, and out loud, you must resort to subterfuge.”3 The theme of love features prominently in most of the literary output across history, but love poetry, as Pound’s statement underscores, is tasked with the feat of expressing the ineffable realm of desire and love, licit or illicit, with particular attention to readerly affect. Which is to say: love poetry is meant to do something.4 In the Western world, personal poetry—poetry not tasked with recounting history, battles, death, or great men—dates back to the seventh-century B.C.E. Greece, and was meant to sway, excite, and entice the beloved. As the genre of personal poetry evolved, its aims expanded to include an audience of listeners excited and challenged by the poem and a wider range of affective possibilities including amusement, ambivalence, discomfort, and alarm. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, drawing on the work of Allen Grossman and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, observes a “triangulated situation” in traditional love lyric that extends Pound’s statements on troubadours. In this situation, the “overtly male ‘I’” speaks “as if overheard in front of an unseen but postulated, loosely male ‘us’” about a female beloved. This structure, according to DuPlessis, “positions female figures in the feminine,” and consequently “resists the Spong 4 possibility of effeminacy” for lyric poetry, and love poetry more particularly.5 The Provençal tradition epitomized by poets like Arnaut Daniel and Guido Cavalcanti operates with similar aims to Darwin’s appraisal of the preening birds’ “love song”: the purpose is to perform not only for the beloved, but also for the community of possible competitors, to prove how well you can sing the song.6 While the poetry collected and examined in the following chapters invokes the tradition of the love song and lyric, it also necessitates the affective resources of Darwin’s love call where fear, shock, and anger can portend the struggle to write love poetry in modernity. It is one thing to say politics or
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