Notes Introduction 1. Frost to Harcourt, 12 August 1915, quoted in Thompson, Robert Frost, 56. 2. The Critic, 46 (January–June 1905), 263–78. 3. Quoted in Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915– 1938 (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1970), 3. 4. Quoted in Amy Lowell, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 131. Ezra Pound published the first American review of Frost’s A Boy’s Will in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1 (May 1913) 2, 72–73. 5. William Braithwaite, “A Poet of New England: Robert Frost, A New Exponent of Life,” BET, 28 April 1915 and 8 May 1915. Jessie B. Rittenhouse, “North of Boston,” NYT Book Review (16 May 1915), 189. 6. Louis Untermeyer, “Robert Frost’s ‘North of Boston,’ ” Chicago Evening Post (23 April 1915), 11. 7. Clement Wood, Amy Lowell (New York: Harold Vinal, 1926), 4. 8. Quoted in James Hoopes, Van Wyck Brooks: In Search of American Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 77. 9. Little consensus exists among historians over the precise meaning of the term “progressive.” I employ it here to indicate an era, ranging roughly from 1893 to 1920, that witnessed culture- wide reform movements to reshape American society by addressing large- scale problems of indus- trial organization as well as issues surrounding individual rights and responsibilities. While falling under the ideological rubric of liberalism, progressive reform involved a middle class that at times instituted con- servative measures. See Daniel Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History, 10 (December 1982) 4, 113–32; John Milton Cooper, Pivotal Decades: The United States 1900–1920 (W.W. Norton, 1990); Maureen Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) and Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 10. Vachel Lindsay, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1928 [1914]), 15–17. 11. Lindsay, Adventures, 15–17. 12. Lindsay, Adventures, 184. 13. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (Indianapolis: The Bobbs- Merrill Company, 1904 [1815]): 34–35. 14. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1913 [1868]), 528; Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (New York: Penguin, 2003 [1889]), 89. 225 226 Notes to Pages 6–10 15. Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” Emerson’s Prose and Poetry. Eds. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). Also see Robert D. Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994). 17. The phrase “lived experience” and the notion of examining poetry as a means to access what individuals in the past thought and felt about ideas comes from Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen who read this introduction and provided critical advice. Ratner- Rosenhagen uses the phrase and meth- odology in her essay, “Conventional Iconoclasm: The Cultural Work of the Nietzsche Image in Twentieth- Century America,” Journal of American History, 93 (December 2006) 3, 728–54. 18. Darnton, “The Great Cat Massacre,” 216. 19. See Leah Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” in Book History, Volume 7. Ed. Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 303–20. 20. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 21. My understanding of the intimate relationship between reading and self- transformation has been deeply influenced by Barbara Sicherman, “Reading and Ambition: M. Carey Thomas and Female Heroism,” American Quarterly 45 (March 1993) 1, 73–103, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “ ‘Nous Autres’: Reading, Passion, and the Creation of M. Carey Thomas,” Journal of American History 79 (1992), 68–95. These essays were published in Sicherman, Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired A Generation of American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 22. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1993). 23. Daniel Wickberg traces the historiography of sensibility in “What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New,” American Historical Review (June 2007), 661–84. 24. Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 25. Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), Sarah Ruth Offhaus, “Mary Talbert and the Phyllis Wheatley Club,” Buffalo Rising, 19 June 2010, and Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, Vol. 2. Eds. Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman (New York: Routledge, 2004), 903. 26. Du Bois, Souls, 109. 27. My thanks to Daniel Albright for his interpretation of this passage. 28. James Oppenheim to James Weldon Johnson, 18 December 1930, JONY. 29. Braithwaite, “Arcturus,” 3 (1942) 1, 40 and 3 (1941) 2, 186. 30. Some book historians speak of quixotic reading and reading protocols as a way to challenge the passive connotations of reading “reception.” Notes to Pages 10–11 227 See Tabitha Gilman Tenney, Female Quixotism, Ed. Jean Nienkamp and Andrea Collins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 2–14. 31. Barbara Sicherman makes this argument in “Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women’s Reading in Late- Victorian America,” where she analyzes the subjective uses of reading among late-Victorian upper- middle-class women during the Progressive era in transgressing tradi- tional gender expectations. Sicherman quotes “structures of feelings” from Raymond Williams. In Reading in America. Ed. Cathy Davidson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 201–25. 32. Michael Bell discusses the importance of feelings—accessed through an examination of responses to literature—in understanding the past and traces the fate of sentimentalism in Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). 33. Angela Sorby, Schoolroom Poets: Childhood, Performance, and the Place of American Poetry, 1865–1917 (Durham, NC: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005). 34. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (New York: Princeton University Press, 1999); Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (New York: Beacon Press, 1997); Alexander Nehamas, Only A Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (New York: Princeton University Press, 2007); Denis Donoghue, Speaking of Beauty (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Dennis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York: Oxford, 2009); Daniel Borus, Twentieth Century Multiplicity (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (New York: Princeton University Press, 2001); George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Reenchantment of the World (New York: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Eleanore Belfiore and Oliver Bennett, The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 35. Martha Nussbaum, “Education for Profit, Education for Freedom,” Liberal Education (Summer 2009), 12 [6–13], Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1989]), xvi. 36. Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). See also Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2002); John Timberman Newcomb, Would Poetry Disappear? American Verse and the Crisis of Modernity (The Ohio State University Press, 2004); Michael Thurston, Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Mark Van Wienan, Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Geoffrey Jacques, A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). See also Twentieth Century Poetry. Eds. Dana Gioia, David Mason, Meg Schoerke (New York: McGraw Hill, 2003). 37. Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Paula 228 Notes to Page 12 Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere: The Emancipatory Project of American Women’s Poetry, 1800–1900 (New York: Princeton University Press, 2003); Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790– 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Cheryl Walker, Masks Outrageous and Austere: Culture, Psyche, and Persona in Modern Women Poets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 38. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 5. 39. Floyd Dell, Homecoming: An Autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1939), and Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933). Since then, several revisionist stud- ies examining canon formation have appeared, including Paul Lauter Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Barbara Foley, Radical