Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-48300-1 - Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 Rachel Blau Duplessis Frontmatter More information GENDERS, RACES AND RELIGIOUS CULTURES IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY, – In Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, Rachel Blau DuPlessis shows how, through poetic language, mod- ernist writers represented the debates and ideologies concerning New Woman, New Negro, and New Jew in the early twentieth century. From the poetic text emerge such social issues of moder- nity as debates on suffrage, sexuality, manhood, and Afro- American and Jewish subjectivities. By a reading method she calls “social philology” – a form of close reading inflected with the approaches of cultural studies – DuPlessis engages with the work of such canonical poets as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and H.D., as well as Vachel Lindsay, Mina Loy, Countee Cullen, Alfred Kreymborg, and Langston Hughes, writers, she claims, still mar- ginalized by existing constructions of modernism. This book is an ambitious attempt to remap our understanding of modern poetries and poetics, and the relationship between early twentieth-century writing and society. is Professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Writing Beyond the Ending (), H.D.: The Career of that Struggle (), The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (); she is also editor of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (), and coeditor of both The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics () and The Feminist Memoir Project (). She is a widely published poet. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-48300-1 - Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 Rachel Blau Duplessis Frontmatter More information © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-48300-1 - Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 Rachel Blau Duplessis Frontmatter More information Editor Ross Posnock, New York University Founding editor Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Advisory board Nina Baym, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University Ronald Bush, St John’s College, Oxford University Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Myra Jehlen, Rutgers University Carolyn Porter, University of California, Berkeley Robert Stepto, Yale University Recent books in the series . . Poe and the Printed Word . . The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study . Writing America Black: Race Rhetoric and the Public Sphere . Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, – . Blacks and Jews in Literary Dialogue . Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Inc. Afrocentrism, Antimodernism, and Utopia . Blackness and Value: Seeing Double . Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority . Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine . Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture . . Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in American Literature © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-48300-1 - Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 Rachel Blau Duplessis Frontmatter More information © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-48300-1 - Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 Rachel Blau Duplessis Frontmatter More information GENDERS, RACES, AND RELIGIOUS CULTURES IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY, – RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS Temple University © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-48300-1 - Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 Rachel Blau Duplessis Frontmatter More information cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press Th e Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521483001 © Cambridge University Press 2001 Th is publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2001 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library isbn 978-0-521-48300-1 Hardback isbn 978-0-521-48335-3 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Information regarding prices, travel timetables, and other factual information given in this work is correct at the time of fi rst printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-48300-1 - Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 Rachel Blau Duplessis Frontmatter More information To Robert Saint-Cyr DuPlessis © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-48300-1 - Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 Rachel Blau Duplessis Frontmatter More information © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-48300-1 - Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 Rachel Blau Duplessis Frontmatter More information Contents Acknowledgments page xi Entitled new: a social philology of modern American poetry “Corpses of poesy”: modern poets consider some gender ideologies of lyric “Seismic orgasm”: sexual intercourse, its modern representations and politics “, , ”: some episodes in the construction of modern male whiteness “Darken your speech”: racialized cultural work in black and white poets “Wondering Jews”: melting-pots and mongrel thoughts Notes Works cited Index ix © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-48300-1 - Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 Rachel Blau Duplessis Frontmatter More information © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-48300-1 - Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 Rachel Blau Duplessis Frontmatter More information Acknowledgments A full-year research and study leave from Temple University in – helped this book into being; I am very grateful for it. The remarks and responses of audiences to some of these materials were instructive; I would like to acknowledge such sites of my continu- ing education as University of Maryland, College Park; the Columbia University Seminar in American Studies; University of Kansas; Tulane University; Université de Montréal; Drew University; St. Mark’s Poetry Project; University of Wisconsin; more than a few meetings of the Modern Language Association, and the inaugural conference of the Modernist Studies Association (). Temple University’s graduate stu- dents in modern and contemporary poetry were lively co-conspirators for some of the ideas in this project. Susan Stanford Friedman, my friend and long-distance colleague, deserves deep thanks for her sustaining remarks and vision, her encour- aging sense of the contribution this book might make, and for an inci- sive one-word mantra. She took time from her unremitting schedule to give the first chapter a crucial reading. Both Lorenzo Thomas and Aldon Nielsen offered informative encouragements to my explorations of Africanist representations. I am also indebted to serious scholars of Mina Loy, among them Carolyn Burke, Roger Conover, and Marissa Januzzi (as well as being indebted to Loy herself for three of the chapter titles). An anonymous reader of this book for Cambridge University Press jostled me in several important ways, and provoked me whether I tried to assimilate or had to resist the remarks offered. Ross Posnock deserves my gratitude and respect for his approval of this book as the guard changed. I also owe a note of thanks to Susan Chang who first acquired this book and special thanks to Ray Ryan, the editor at Cambridge on whose watch this was finally published. At Temple University, I have drawn upon the wisdom and theoretical incisiveness of several of my colleagues in the English Department. xi © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-48300-1 - Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 Rachel Blau Duplessis Frontmatter More information xii Acknowledgments Lawrence Venuti gave a penetrating and discerning reading to the first chapter. Miles Orvell read an early version of chapter and offered warm and pointed comments. Daniel O’Hara reminded