LITERARY URBANISM, VISUALITY AND MODERNITY by JOHN BRIGHT TEPE III A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham October 2009 [Type text] University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract Literary Urbanism and the Symbolist Aesthetic argues that the modern city influences urban writers to develop particular literary-visual practices that translate urban experience into poetry and prose. Chapter one considers how urban planning in Paris during the Second Empire inspired Charles Baudelaire‘s theories of modernity and aesthetic history. Chapter two discusses how A.C. Swinburne translates Baudelairean modernity into an English literary perspective through Sapphic poetry, and the importance Swinburne‘s association with painters has in this process. Swinburne‘s friendship with James McNeill Whistler, for example, results in the ekphrastic poem ―Hermaphroditus,‖ which uses sculpture to comment upon the modern city‘s potential to heighten perceptual consciousness. Chapter three studies the application of ekphrasis in urban writing, especially the way in which Arthur Symons‘ poetry uses symbols to render an immediate awareness of the city. Symons‘ reception of French Symbolist poetics opens chapter four, and introduces T.E. Hulme and Henri Bergson as theorists who develop a means of thinking the city through internal consciousness, not geographic space. This initiates chapter five‘s interest in how Pound and Eliot use metaphors of illumination to articulate how perceptions of the city arrive through transposition and refraction. For John B. Tepe Jr. and Emily E.S. Tepe Constance H. Cone and Michael M. Cone I wish to thank, first and foremost, my supervisor Deborah Longworth for the vital encouragement, guidance, and unfading critical eye that saw this project through its most formative stages to its final printed manuscript. I am grateful to the College of Arts and Law, for providing me with a research scholarship from 2007-2009, and to the Faculty of English Department for fostering such an inclusive and supportive research environment. I would like to thank the Princeton University Rare Book and Manuscript Library for granting permission to reproduce selections from their Arthur Symons Papers in this manuscript. I am indebted to Rita Barnard at the University of Pennsylvania for taking an interest in my work and pushing me towards graduate school, and to Debra Rae Cohen pushing me further and harder at the University of Arkansas. To my family and friends, I could not have completed this project without the love and support you sent from both sides of the Atlantic and from across the North Sea. Finally, I would like to thank my husband Paul for providing oceans of support during the more difficult moments of writing and review, and for his enthusiasm and spirit during the triumphant moments of success. This thesis follows MLA standards for punctuation, including double quotation and full stop and comma placement within quotation marks. English standards have otherwise been followed for spellings. Table of Contents Introduction: The Symbolist City ........................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: Baudelaire and the Spaces of Parisian Modernity ......................................................... 28 I. Mnemonic Art and Urban Vision ............................................................................................... 33 II. Paris and the Second Empire .................................................................................................... 40 III. Reading Paris: The Parisian Prowler and The Flowers of Evil .................................................. 48 IV. Writing Paris: Visual Paradigms in Poetical Images ................................................................ 53 Chapter Two: Whistler, Manet, and Swinburne: Translating Baudelairean Modernity into England .......................................................................................................................................................... 73 I. Edouard Manet and Eton College ............................................................................................ 82 II. Swinburne and Sappho: Seeing London Through Ancient Greece .......................................... 87 III. Swinburne, Sappho, and Violent Modernity ......................................................................... 101 Chapter Three: Entering the Invisible City: Urban Writing and the Ekphrastic Image................... 119 I. Seeing London, Writing London .............................................................................................. 123 II. Ekphrasis, Enargeia, and Eternal Youth ................................................................................. 132 III. Michael Field and Ekphrastic Identity ................................................................................... 142 IV. Arthur Symons and Decadence: Ekphrasis, Impressionism, Symbolism............................... 151 Chapter Four: From Symbolist Spaces to the Urban Temporalities ............................................... 169 I. Symbols, Words, Time ............................................................................................................. 171 II. Theorising the City, Theorising the Mind ............................................................................... 187 III. The Intense, Cindery, City: Bergson and Hulme on Metropolitan Consciousness ................ 195 Chapter Five: T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot: North American Subjectivities and the City 205 I. T.E. Hulme, Henri Bergson, and the Poetic Consciousness in the City .................................... 205 II. Ezra Pound, South Kensington, and Urban Historicism ......................................................... 216 III. T.S. Eliot, The City, and the Philosophical Tradition .............................................................. 232 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................... 252 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................... 267 Introduction: The Symbolist City Julian Wolfreys has recently noted in Writing London that the materiality of the city coexists alongside the materiality of language.1 The metropolis keeps us alive by providing the environment in which we communicate with one another; it allows us to speak, and thereby provides for our psychological well-being. The link Wolfreys identifies between material language, i.e. text, and the city is at the heart of this study, which itself examines how images of the urban environment manifest in literary and poetical works, and how subsequent literary images of the city impact the writing processes of the urban author. This enquiry investigates how literary urbanism is representative of both a specific form of cultural modernity and the very techniques writers and artists use to bring the matter of the city into print. More particularly, my argument focuses on the concept of modernity and its representation in late nineteenth and early twentieth century poetry and prose as a specific, urban-based visual practice. The ways in which individuals perform, represent, and manipulate the codes enforced by the built environment lie at the heart of this study. Further, because my argument focuses upon visuality, it has a considerable interdisciplinary interest and uses examples taken from the fine arts and criticism from the history of art to best explain its points. The aesthetic concepts presented in essays like Baudelaire‘s The Painter of Modern Life and paintings like Manet‘s Olympia describe artistic techniques that rupture conventional ways of looking to allow for varied 1 representations of time and space in the city. The modelling of modernity as a visual concept grapples with literary urbanism in a number of ways, first being how the city, as an architectural and geographical being, manifests spatially in the body and in the mind of the city dweller. Subsequently, visual modernity considers how the city dweller, through body and mind, perceives the city; and from here, how the city and the city dweller together allow for representations of urban life to arise in literature and the fine arts. In drawing these three concerns together, the thesis focuses on how artists work within a ―symbolist‖ city which functions doubly as a resource for technical method and as a resource for poetic and painted subjects. This symbolist city combines the aesthetic concerns of the visual artist with the practical demands of living and working in the urban environment. It represents at once the physical, sensing body and the practices employed by the mind to fold the sensed environment