Covenantal Poetics: Jewish, Irish, and African American Modernisms Beyond the Lyric by Joshua Logan Wall A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Julian Levinson, Chair Emeritus Professor Laurence Goldstein Associate Professor Joshua Miller Professor Deborah Dash Moore Associate Professor Gillian White Joshua Logan Wall [email protected] ORCID iD : 0000-0002-6983-4850 © Joshua Logan Wall 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My work on this project was supported by a variety of individuals, but a handful of institutions also deserve recognition for providing me with opportunities to conduct research. Through the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan, I was supported by a Pre- Doctoral Research Fellowship, a Humanities Research Fellowship, a One-Term Dissertation Fellowship, funding for summer research, and a variety of conference travel grants that allowed me to present early versions of this research. The Department of English Language and Literature and the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies also provided funding for conference travel; the Frankel Center, moreover, provided generous research and language study funding during my summers. Special collections libraries and librarians at the University of Texas, Yale University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan were helpful and informative when I visited. I owe particular thanks to my committee members. Archival research has been a central component of this project, and Josh Miller’s advice and encouragement deserves much credit for this. He’s also among the university’s best listeners. Larry Goldstein first introduced me to the poetry of Lola Ridge. During each of our meetings, I’d inevitably be handed a book, magazine, or photocopy and get to experience, again, the joy of encountering a poet or poem for the first time. Gillian White first pointed me toward some of the most important and formative works of scholarship that shaped the contours of this project, from Barry McCrea’s Languages of the Night to Dorothy Wang’s Thinking Its Presence to the works of Virginia Jackson. She ii challenged me to define and hone my understanding and discussion of poetic genre and theory; Covenantal Poetics is better for it. Deborah Dash Moore was among the first faculty members I met at the University of Michigan. Around this time, Julian Levinson told me to take advantage of her presence, because (I paraphrase, but closely) she is among the most intellectually generous individuals in the academy. Every interaction with her over the past seven years has borne this out. And, rightly, she’s never let up on me as a writer, refusing to let me get away with swaths of lazy prose. Scholarship, she’s taught me again and again, tells stories. I believe that my chair, Julian Levinson, has earned the praise he heaped on Deborah Dash Moore for himself. Since I arrived at Michigan, his mentorship has been a constant. He’s indulged my intellectual whims and tangents, contributed a few of his own, but has always known how to identify those things I was truly interested in and guided me back to them. I don’t know what this project would have looked like without him, but I’m pretty sure it would have run well over one-thousand pages. Both my scholarship and teaching have also benefited from the generosity and advice of others within and beyond the University of Michigan, including Jonathan Freedman, Misha Krutikov, Shachar Pinsker, Scotti Parrish, Meg Sweeney, Anne Curzan, Maeera Shreiber, Ranen Omer-Sherman, Sarah Ponichtera, the members of the American Jewish Studies Reading Group, and the Poetry & Poetics Workshop, which provided feedback on early drafts of Chapter 2. Anita Norich and John Whittier-Ferguson both served on my exams committee—though our conversations extended far beyond reading lists. Sasha Hoffman taught me Yiddish, even on the days when I didn’t want to learn it. iii In the English Department office, Jan Burgess, Senia Vasquez, and Thea Bude provided support, guidance, and great tolerance for an array of unwarranted anxieties. I owe thanks as well to staff past and present at the Frankel Center—Stacey Eckert, Brittin Jones, and Michael Goldberg in particular. Denise Looker and Lisa Curtis of EDWP enlivened (and lightened) days otherwise spent writing in a windowless cell with regular doses kindness. I have been blessed throughout my life by the teachers I’ve encountered; many of those who taught me before I arrived in graduate school have a role, direct or indirect, in this work. At the Kentucky Country Day School in Louisville, Kentucky: Carol Brown; my Latin teachers, Dick Aylor and Kathryn Balbach; Andrew Campbell, Michael Goldberg, and Annie Glosky, who first introduced me to modernist literature when I was in high school and who deserve (depending on your point of view) credit or blame for what I’ve chosen to study; and Pat Mulloy. At Northwestern University, Christine Froula nurtured my interest in modernism and gave me the freedom to approach it from sometimes unusual angles in her seminars. And when I go back to proofread essays, I still hear Robert Wallace insisting that I cut every unnecessary word (though I’ve never yet succeeded in doing so). Kathryn Bosher (z”l) taught me how to conduct academic research—but, more importantly, she taught me how to mentor students. As I worked on my undergraduate thesis, she was, I realize now, stunningly generous with her time, talking through my theories about Stesichorus, Greek Sicily, and the epistemology of epic poetry for an hour every week. Her death still leaves me at a loss for words. I miss very deeply the conversations about this project that we were never able to share. Large swaths of Covenantal Poetics were written while sitting a the desk that once belong to my maternal grandfather, Stuart Yussman (z”l) on which also sat a copy of the iv dissertation written by my paternal grandfather, Kenneth L. Wall (z”l). The stories he and Mamaw, Pauline Wall, told me as a child—including simply reading large swaths of Kings and Chronicles aloud—have left their clear imprint on this work. I certainly wouldn’t have realized why Reznikoff’s “Israel” and “King David” were so interesting without them. I think that I may have sent in my application to the University of Michigan from the dining room table of Janis Zinn, who wasn’t yet my mother-in-law, and jotted down some of this project’s final notes in her Hanukkah gift of Google’s latest high-tech device: a spiral notebook. My stepfather, John Hawkins, has been an unstinting supporter over the years. I’m immensely grateful to have him as part of my family. My brother, Zach, has been a source of consistent optimism, even when I’ve been frustrated—and, when that hasn’t worked, has known how to distract me by shifting the conversation to Kentucky basketball or the Chicago Cubs. As I was growing up, my parents made sure to provide me with every educational opportunity that they could. And, I think, that by doing so, they managed to create most of the other opportunities I’ve had in life. My mother, Lisa, is—and I know always will be—a fountain of unconditional everything: that is to say, exactly the kind of mother she has always wanted to be for Zach and me. It may very well have been my father, Ken Wall (z”l), who set me on the path to talking about poems for a career: my first memories of extended literary analyses aren’t from sitting in school, but in his car, as he held forth on the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash, and, yes, Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen. (As my wife can testify, I inherited this tendency along with his record collection.) And Rachel: some people, I guess, are simply beyond words, beyond language, beyond even the upper limit of poetry, where only music can speak. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vii ABSTRACT viii Introduction 1 CHAPTER One A Congregation of Readers: James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones 26 Two Louis Zukofsky and the Poetics of Exodus 74 Three “Out of the Passion Eternal”: Lola Ridge, Counter-history, and the Challenge of Form 123 Four Renewing the Covenant: Charles Reznikoff’s Biblical Translations and Legal Poetry 177 Conclusion 221 BIBLIOGRAPHY 226 vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ILLUSTRATION 1. “The Spring Books of Viking Press, 1927” 13 2. Johnson’s scansion calling for lines of varying anapests and iambs on a draft of 43 “Noah Built That Ark” 3. Johnson’s marginal scansion delineating lines of iambs 44 4. “The Prodigal Son” 52 5. “The Judgment Day” 68 6. “Obliquely urban” Camel ad 112 7. Ads for Helmar Cigarettes and Wrigley’s Chewing Gum 114 8. Der Tog, 8/13/19 115 9. Table of Contents, Broom “American” issue, Vol. 4.2, January 1922 134 10. Advertisement for forthcoming “American” issue, Broom 4.1, December 1921 136 11. “Labor Martyr Immortalized in Poem” 147 12. Mayan statuary included in Broom “American” issue 150 vii ABSTRACT Over the past two decades scholarship has recovered the works of writers ignored or forgotten due to their race, politics, or gender, restoring the largely unknown history of early-20th century American poetry beyond an Anglo-American canon. Yet a new problem has emerged: conventions of poetic reading and scholarship developed around canonical high modernism and postwar lyric continue to obscure the poetic self-theorizing of ethnic and immigrant modernists.