Seeking the True Contrary: The Politics of Form and Experience in American Modernism, 1913-1950 Jude P. Webre Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 ! © 2017 Jude P. Webre All rights reserved ! Abstract Seeking the True Contrary: The Politics of Form and Experience in American Modernism, 1913-1950 Jude P. Webre This dissertation reconstructs the tradition of “democratic modernism” in the United States from its origins in the fertile avant-garde circles of the early 1910s through the maturation of American modernism as a cultural institution in the 1920s, the subsequent challenge to its authority by the radical social movements of the 1930s, and culminating in the ideological battles and profound geopolitical shift during and after World War II. It focuses on the overlapping intellectual careers of four literary figures – William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Burke, Archibald MacLeish, and Charles Olson – against the background of a wider cohort that included Marianne Moore, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson, F. O. Matthiessen, Melvin Tolson, Ruth Benedict, Edward Dahlberg, Dwight Macdonald, and Allen Ginsberg. The dissertation argues that debates over form and experience, strongly influenced by the writings of Ezra Pound and John Dewey, defined these central figures’ efforts to conceptualize a democratic subject grounded in aesthetic experience. For the democratic modernists, the poetic subject became a metaphor for a fully realized democratic subject, and “poetry” came to symbolize more than just verse but also a heightened aesthetic orientation towards society that could serve as the basis for cultural reform and, for a time, revolutionary transformation. In reconstructing democratic modernism as a tradition, this dissertation aims to rethink the origins of the postwar counterculture as the political and philosophical heir of radical democracy in the interwar period. As the counterculture emerged in the shadow of the Cold War, leading figures such as Olson and Ginsberg helped shift the political ideals of the 1930s left ! towards aesthetic practice, preserving a cultural space for radical democracy between official anti- Communism and the aesthetic autonomy professed by intellectual elites. It concludes that the “true contrary” that Olson urged his fellow poets and artists in the late 1940s to seek through aesthetic practice had been there before him and continues to be a relevant stance within American society. This tradition proposes that through an active and critical inquiry into the conditions of one’s experience and the values that make them up, any person through receptivity, imagination, and poetic speech, broadly construed, can mediate the seeming oppositions in our society, creating new forms of understanding, ritual, and symbolic experience. Table of Contents Introduction 1 1. The Poetics of Experience 12 2. From Symbolism to Revolutionary Symbolism 66 3. Poetry as Public Speech 123 4. Come Into Space 171 Epilogue: The Descent Beckons 222 Notes 229 Bibliography 247 i ! Acknowledgements This long journey began nearly thirteen years ago, when a college dropout/bookstore clerk/bass player with a seemingly insatiable desire to learn made his way on a snowy Feburary night to an information session for the School of General Studies at Columbia. The road from “damaged goods” to Doctor of Philosophy has seen more peaks and valleys than I can count. But that desire to learn was satiated, and I managed to meet many wonderful friends and mentors along the way who made even the low moments full of camaraderie and intellectual stimulation. I never cease to feel fortunate to learn from the brilliance and dedication of my History colleagues at Columbia, whether in seminar or over cocktails and beers: Alex Cummings, Eric Frith, Romeo Guzman, Tim Shenk, Natasha Wheatley, Ana Keilson, Justin Reynolds, Tom Meaney, Simon Taylor, Stephen Wertheim, Sam Biagetti, Keith Orejel, Ollie Murphey, Asheesh Siddique, Alana Hein, Ben Serby, and George Aumoithe. Beyond the History Department, I am grateful to have found friends from other disciplines and teaching in the Core Curriculum whose moral support in the latter stages of the dissertation meant so much to me: Joe Blankholm, Jon Carter, Sophie Pinkham, Robyn Jensen, Lindsay Gibson, Zachary Roberts, Elizabeth Tinsley, and Emily Shortslef. Likewise, it is an understatement to say that my students during my six years of teaching at Columbia and Barnard saved me when I wondered if I had the fortitude to see this through. Their diligence and idealism preserved my faith in the profession and taught me how much I love teaching. My friends outside of Columbia, many of whom were never quite sure what I was up to there, provided me sanity, perspective, and fun whenever I needed it: Johanna McKeon, Naomi Kroll Hassebroek, Ethan Murphy, Julia Den Boer, Vasaré Rastonis, Steve Koester, Sarah Gentile, Sam Hightower, Anne Brink, and the best handpicked siblings an only child could ever ask for: Ruby Fitch, Jack Martin, Ben Wildenhaus, and Danny Magariel. Two refuges bear particular ii ! mention: lovely Port Townsend, Washington, whose spirited citizens took me in on multiple occasions; and the world of musicians I’ve played with throughout grad school, who allowed me to keep my first love alive and well. As I have tried to figure out how to be a historian and humanist, I am grateful for mentors whose belief in me and generous attention, whether they knew it or not, gave me confidence in my abilities: Barbara J. Fields, Robert Caro, Herb Sloan, Maura Spiegel, and Martin Segal. In this respect, I cannot say enough about the core members of my committee who were there from my orals to my defense: Samuel Moyn, whose patience, good nature, and daunting intelligence allowed me to believe I could study Kant; Michael Golston, whose precise and analytic mind is matched only by his superlative taste in music; and Casey N. Blake, who as an advisor has always been thorough, exacting, and deeply invested in making my project the best it could be, while still providing a humane and encouraging voice amidst my various stages of doubt. I met another Casey N. – Ms. Hedstrom – only a few days before I completed this dissertation, but it felt as if, in her, I had met a boon companion for what the process of writing it had taught me. Her sense of humor, originality, razor-sharp mind, and love of Philadelphia, animals, and history have given me a lovely place to arrive at the end of this particular journey. Most of all, I think of those who are no longer here to see me reach this goal, but without whom this kid from rural Louisiana would not have embarked on it at all. My grandparents, Damase and Genevieve Webre, are still my moral compass and model for a life well lived and full of love. My mother Susie, whose incredible focus and dedication to the life of the mind, however eccentric her interests at times, gave me a fine model of a scholar. And my father Rodney to whom this is dedicated: the gentlest of souls, a Southern gentleman and lover of art and music, papa bear. His sensibility and values lie at the core of this project; I miss our conversations nearly every day. iii ! For Papa, who taught me to appreciate, the fences and outhouses built of barrel-staves and parts of boxes, all, if I am fortunate, ` smeared a bluish green that properly weathered pleases me best of all colors. —WCW, “Pastoral” (1917) iv ! ! Introduction In the Winter 1946 issue of Partisan Review, the premier modernist literary journal in the United States at the time, there appeared at the back of the issue a peculiar short essay by Charles Olson entitled “This is Yeats Speaking.” Compared to many of Partisan Review’s contributors, Olson was largely unknown outside of a few intellectual circles in New York and Washington, D.C. and the small community of Herman Melville scholars. During the war, he had written propaganda for the Office of War Information and served in the 1944 campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt before leaving politics to dedicate himself to poetry, which he had only recently begun to write.1 In the essay, Olson assumed the voice of the late Irish poet William Butler Yeats speaking from the seventh sphere of Dante’s Paradiso about his friend Ezra Pound, who was then being held on charges of treason for radio broadcasts that he had made for the Mussolini government. Olson/Yeats offers a lucid defense of Pound, not so much apologizing for his actions as urging the distinguished community of writers in the Partisan Review, many of whom had known Pound for decades, to try him in their own aesthetic court of appeals: “There is a court you leave silent—history present, the issue the larger concerns of authority than a state.” The “authority” at stake for Olson was the poet’s authority within the “world of whiggery,” that is modernity defined by science, capitalism, and liberal democracy. Pound’s generation of modernists had opposed this world in their dedication to aesthetic formalism, the belief that the work of art constitutes a sacred telos set against “a leveling, rancorous, rational time.” In retrospect, the real richness of Olson’s essay, however, concerns not so much Pound’s predicament as the opening his situation provided onto the politics of the immediate postwar moment. The specific audience that the essay addressed was Olson’s own generation of younger ! 1 ! writers emerging from the war. “You are the antithetical men, and your time is forward, the conflict is more declared,” Olson/Yeats urges them, “it is [for] you to hold the mirror up to authority, behind our respect for which lay a disrespect for democracy as we were acquainted with it.” Olson clearly offered the essay as a literary call to arms, taking Pound’s fate as a cautionary example, but to what purpose? The key phrase is one that reflected Olson’s deep familiarity with Yeats’s occult writings inspired by William Blake: “true contrary.” He argued that almost no one understood “the contraries which are now engaged.