The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale. 1937. Introduction by Marya Zaturenska. 1966. Collier Books. London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd., 1969.
The other day I stumbled upon a copy of Sara Teasdale's
Collected Poems in a delightful little second-hand bookshop which opened recently in the seaside suburb of Devonport. "Sara Teasdale, who she?" I hear you ask.
I guess the massive victory of the American Modernists in the 1920s and 30s has driven underground all knowledge of the poetic world that coexisted - and, at times, competed with them - in the early years of last century.
Dickinson, Melville, Tuckerman, Whitman - all those nineteenth century greats are well known, and continue to be intricately pored over in increasingly minute detail. But what of their immediate successors? What of Edna St. Vincent Millay, the wistful muse of so many lonely hearts, yet a considerable poet in her own right? What of Sara Teasdale, an almost exact contemporary of T. S. Eliot, born (like him) in St. Louis - as, strangely, was Marianne Moore - but with a very different trajectory?
Their poetry is often written off as saccharine and derivative. Much of it undoubtedly was: pale imitations of Emily Dickinson in her first, re-edited and re-punctuated form. But that's not always the case. Take Millay's break-through piece "
Renascence", for instance:
All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I'd started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
...
It's a strange, haunting, claustrophobic poem - not at all the kind of thing one might have expected as a young writer's first published work. It repays attention.
And then there's another poem which has attained fame for an even odder reason - because Ray Bradbury borrowed its title, "
There Will Come Soft Rains", for one of his
most famous short stories:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Who wrote that, I wonder? Sara Teasdale, that's who.
There are many other once celebrated poets from this epoch who - in my opinion, at least - are well worth revisiting: Stephen Vincent Benét, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, Edward Arlington Robinson ... For the moment, though, I'd like to stick to this group of mostly forgotten women poets.
A considerable amount has been done in the past couple of decades to revive interest in Edna St. Vincent Millay: two major biographies have been written, and one would have to concede that she's gradually being readmitted to the canon.
The main problem, still, is the rigid divide that's still supposed to exist between modernists and traditionalists.
Djuna Barnes, for instance, whose novel
Nightwood (1936) was hailed by Eliot as a work of genius, started off as a rather conventional versifier, whose radicalism belonged more to her lifestyle than her literary technique.
Alice Duer Miller, whose verse novel
The White Cliffs (1940) sold over a million copies on both sides of the Atlantic, was previously most noted as an author of rousing pro-suffragette ballads, which had a strong effect on public opinion when her book
Are Women People? first appeared in 1915.
The list of short bio-bibliographies included below has been designed to substantiate the argument that
all of these writers can be more readily understood when contextualised chronologically, rather than being herded into "progressive" and "reactionary" camps. Interestingly enough, the political and social radicalism of traditional lyricists such as Millay, Miller, and Dorothy Parker can be paralleled by the reactionary conservatism of many of their modernist contemporaries. There are, of course, exceptions. The redoutable Lola Ridge wrote verse which was radical in both form and content.
All of them were, in their various ways, daughters of Emily Dickinson: H.D. and Gertrude Stein as much as Elinor Wylie or Edna Sts Vincent Millay. When you list them in order of dates of birth, it becomes pretty clear just how
many powerful women poets were publishing their work in the United States in the teens and twenties of last century, before and after the First World War.
- Lola Ridge (1873-1941)
- Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
- Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)
- Alice Duer Miller (1874-1942)
- Mina Loy (1882-1966)
- Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
- Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)
- H. D. (1886–1961)
- Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
- Djuna Barnes (1892–1982)
- Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
- Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
Secondary Literature
Books I own are marked in bold:
Suicide
Corpse A
They brought her in, a shattered small
Cocoon,
With a little bruised body like
A startled moon;
And all the subtle symphonies of her
A twilight rune.
Corpse B
They gave her hurried shoves this way
And that.
Her body shock-abbreviated
As a city cat.
She lay out listlessly like some small mug
Of beer gone flat.
(1915)
•
Djuna Barnes ... was an American artist, illustrator, journalist, and writer who is perhaps best known for her novel Nightwood (1936), a cult classic of lesbian fiction and an important work of modernist literature.
... Barnes began her career as a freelance journalist and illustrator for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. By early 1914, Barnes was a highly sought feature reporter, interviewer, and illustrator whose work appeared in the city's leading newspapers and periodicals. Later, Barnes's talent ... afforded her the opportunity to publish ... an illustrated volume of poetry, The Book of Repulsive Women (1915).
In 1921, a lucrative commission with McCall's took Barnes to Paris, where she lived for the next 10 years. In this period she published A Book (1923), a collection of poetry, plays, and short stories, which was later reissued, with the addition of three stories, as A Night Among the Horses (1929), Ladies Almanack (1928), and Ryder (1928).
During the 1930s, Barnes spent time in England, Paris, New York, and North Africa. It was during this restless time that she wrote and published Nightwood. In October 1939, after nearly two decades living mostly in Europe, Barnes returned to New York. She published her last major work, the verse play The Antiphon, in 1958, and she died in her apartment at Patchin Place, Greenwich Village, in June 1982.
You can find the full original text of The Book of Repulsive Women here. It certainly sets out to shock, with its portraits of dancers and prostitutes in place of the more conventional Gibson girls of the era. But the rhymes and rhythms are nicely placed and well controlled, however satirical their intent. For the most part, the spirit of Wilde and Beardsley and the naughty nineties breathes out from this opening salvo in Barnes's battle against respectability.
There's a good review of the Fyfield Press reissue of Djuna Barnes' poems by John Sears on the Pop Matters blog (2004):
... Fyfield has collected together for the first time into one slim volume just about all the poems she wrote and published.
As a writer of fiction and poetry ... and major controversial figure (she was a child abuse victim and long-term alcoholic, dying in 1982 at the absurd age of 90), Barnes more than holds her own in the literary pantheon, and yet ... her work resists attempts to categorise it easily alongside such modernist luminaries as Hemingway, Woolf or Eliot. Barnes is much closer to Mina Loy, herself a marginal modernist maverick.
One problem the contemporary editor faces is Barnes’ own reluctance to republish, or even acknowledge, her own earlier work. “In the latter years of her life,” Rebecca Loncraine comments in her informative introduction to this volume, “she seemed determined to keep herself out of print (and out of pocket).” Nevertheless she went on writing into old age, living as a recluse in Greenwich Village, in something close to squalor for 40 years.
... Of the poems themselves much can be said. Barnes writes in a curiously anachronistic style, in which content jars against form, as if children’s nursery rhymes were refilled with material purged by centuries of prurient censorship, and made vibrant, living things again. She’s heavily influenced by late-Romantic excess — these poems abound with echoes of Keats and Shelley: “And so it is, and will be year on year / Time in and out of date, and still on time / A billion grapes plunge bleeding into wine / And bursting, fall like music on the ear”, she writes in ‘Pastoral’, in a seeming parody of Shelley’s own notorious near-self-parody, “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”. Elsewhere her poems are pure Gothic sensibility, a century late ...
In adding to the burgeoning oeuvre of Barnes’ writings available to the contemporary reader, this collected edition of Barnes’ poems is long overdue. It affords valuable insights into a neglected body of work that troubles conventional literary categories and disturbs as much as it surprises, in poems that are, as the editor [Rebecca Loncraine] puts it, both “repellent and compelling.”
•
Bibliography
Poetry:
- The Book of Repulsive Women: 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings (1915)
- Creatures in an Alphabet (1982)
- The Book of Repulsive Women and Other Poems. Ed. Rebecca Loncraine (2003)
- Collected Poems: With Notes Toward the Memoirs. Ed. Phillip Herring & Osias Stutman (2005)
Art:
- Poe's Mother: Selected Drawings. Ed. Douglas Messerli (1996)
Plays:
- The Antiphon (1958)
- At the Roots of the Stars: The Short Plays (1995)
- Biography of Julie von Bartmann. Introduction by Douglas Messerli (2020)
Prose:
- A Book (1923)
- Spillway and Other Stories. 1923 & 1929. London: Faber, 1962.
- Ryder (1928)
- Ryder. Illustrations by the Author. 1956. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979.
- Ladies Almanack (1928)
- A Night Among the Horses (1929)
- Nightwood (1936)
- Nightwood. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. 1936. London: Faber, 1974.
- Vagaries Malicieux: Two Stories [unauthorized] (1974)
- Smoke and Other Early Stories (1982)
- New York (1989)
- Collected Stories of Djuna Barnes (1996)
- The Lydia Steptoe Stories (2019)
- I Am Alien to Life: Selected Stories. Ed. Merve Emre (2024)
Works:
- Selected Works (1962)
- Selected Works: Spillway / The Antiphon / Nightwood. 1936, 1958, 1962. London: Faber, 1998.
- Vivid and Repulsive as the Truth: The Early Works of Djuna Barnes. Ed. Katharine Maller (2016)
Secondary:
- I Could Never Be Lonely without a Husband: Interviews by Djuna Barnes. Ed. A. Barry (1987)
Garden
I
You are clear
O rose, cut in rock,
hard as the descent of hail.
I could scrape the colour
from the petals
like spilt dye from a rock.
If I could break you
I could break a tree.
If I could stir
I could break a tree —
I could break you.
II
O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.
Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air —
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.
Cut the heat —
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.
(1916)
•
Hilda Doolittle ... was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with ... Ezra Pound. During this early period, her minimalist free verse poems depicting Classical motifs drew international attention. Eventually distancing herself from the Imagist movement, she experimented with a wider variety of forms, including fiction, memoir, and verse drama. Reflecting the trauma she experienced in London during the Blitz, H.D.'s poetic style from World War II until her death pivoted towards complex long poems on esoteric and pacifist themes.
She was treated by Sigmund Freud during the 1930s, as she sought to address and understand both her war trauma and bisexuality.
While H.D. wrote in a wide range of genres and modes over her career, during her lifetime she was known almost exclusively for her early Imagist poems. Following a reappraisal by feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s, the significance of her late long poems and prose works was increasingly recognized, and she has come to be understood as a central figure in the history of modernist literature.
The "five women" in question are "the modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and writer and publisher Virginia Woolf." Wade's tenuous hypothesis, that residence in this particular part of London, "Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of interwar Bloomsbury", was a particularly significant event in all of these various lives, proves really just an excuse to give us a write-up about each one of them. Sayers and H. D. were the ones who interested me most going in, but actually Jane Harrision and Eileen Power turn out to be even more fascinating characters.
Anyway, if you're looking for some insights into H.D.'s life around the era of her Trilogy of blitz-inspired poems, this is an excellent starting place. As for the existing biographies, you can find a rather testy account of them in Anthony Madrid's "H.D. Notebook" (Paris Review, 2017):
I don’t like biographies wherein the subject has no stupid ideas, is never self-deceived, and is never a source of legitimate grievance to anyone. To watch a biographer protect her subject from all negative interpretations, and even from the other characters in the story — this is a most unedifying spectacle.
Janice Robinson [H.D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet (1982)] sheltering H.D. from Pound, for instance. Or urging H.D. into hand-holding with D. H. Lawrence. Massaging facts so they can have gone to bed, those two exotic, beautiful creatures. Caroline Zilboorg [Richard Aldington and H.D.: Their Lives in Letters (2003)] explaining away four fifths of Richard Aldington’s character, so his marriage with H.D. can be viewed as a deep and mutually rewarding enterprise. And of course trashing Bryher.
Standing very far apart from those two is Barbara Guest’s biography (Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World, 1985). Guest, whose own poetry I find unreadable, plays perfectly (to my mind) the part of the mature critic. She respects H.D., but H.D. is not her darling. Guest’s tone is that appropriate to a conversation between friends A and B about absent friend C, whom they both love — but.
That, anyway, is the conversation I want to overhear. Not two people trashing a third, but two people soberly comparing notes, the better to understand the yes and the no of the person.
•
Bibliography
Poetry:
- Sea Garden (1916)
- Sea Garden. 1916. Poetry Reprint Series, 2. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.
- Choruses from the Iphigeneia in Aulis and The Hippolytus of Euripides (1919)
- Hymen (1921)
- Heliodora (1924)
- Collected Poems of H.D. (1925)
- Red Roses for Bronze (1931)
- Trilogy
- The Walls Do Not Fall (1942)
- Tribute to the Angels (1944)
- The Flowering of the Rod (1944)
- Helen in Egypt (1961)
- Helen in Egypt. Introduction by Horace Gregory. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1961.
- Vale Ave (1957)
- Hermetic Definition (1971)
- Hermetic Definition. Foreword by Norman Holmes Pearson. A Carcanet Press Publication. Oxford: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1972.
- Collected Poems: 1912–1944 (1983)
- Collected Poems, 1912-1944. Ed. Louis L. Martz. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1984.
Plays:
- Hippolytus Temporizes: A Play in Three Acts (1927)
- Ion (1937)
Fiction:
- Paint it Today (1921)
- Asphodel (1922)
- Palimpsest (1926)
- HERmione (1927)
- Her. Afterword by Perdita Schaffner. 1981. Introduction by Helen McNeil. Virago Modern Classics. London: Virago Press Limited, 1984.
- Bid Me to Live (1927)
- Bid Me to Live. 1960. Afterword by Perdita Schaffner. 1983. Introduction by Helen McNeil. Virago Modern Classics. London: Virago Press Limited, 1984.
- Kora and Ka (1930)
- Nights (1931)
- Pilate's Wife (1934)
- Usual Star (1934)
- The Hedgehog (1936)
- Within the Walls (1941)
- The Gift (1943)
- The Gift. 1969. Ed. Griselda Ohanessian. Introduction by Perdita Schaffner. 1982. Introduction by Diana Collecott. London: Virago Press Limited, 1984.
- Majic Ring (1944)
- The Sword Went Out to Sea (1947)
- White Rose and the Red (1948)
- By Avon River (1949)
- The Mystery (1949–1951)
- Magic Mirror (1955–1956)
Non-fiction:
- Notes on Thought and Vision (1919)
- Borderline: A POOL Film with Paul Robeson (1930)
- Tribute to Freud (1944)
- Compassionate Friendship (1955)
- Hirslanden Notebooks (1959)
- End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound (1958)
- End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound. With the Poems from “Hilda’s Book” by Ezra Pound. 1979. Ed. Norman Holmes Pearson & Michael King. Manchester: Carcanet New Press Limited, 1980.
- Thorn Thicket (1960)
Letters:
- Zilboorg, Caroline, ed. Richard Aldington & H.D.: The Early Years in Letters, 1918-29 (1992)
- Zilboorg, Caroline, ed. Richard Aldington & H.D.: The Later Years in Letters, 1929-61 (1995)
- Zilboorg, Caroline, ed. Richard Aldington & H.D.: Their Lives in Letters, 1918-1961 (2003)
Secondary:
- Robinson, Janice. H.D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet (1982)
- Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (1985)
- Wade, Francesca. Square Haunting: Five Lives in London Between the Wars. 2020. Tim Duggan Books. New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2020.
The Garden by Moonlight
A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.
Firefly lights open and vanish
High as the tip buds of the golden glow
Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,
Moon-spikes shafting through the snow ball bush.
Only the little faces of the ladies’ delight are alert and staring,
Only the cat, padding between the roses,
Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern
As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.
Then you come,
And you are quiet like the garden,
And white like the alyssum flowers,
And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies.
Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone.
(1921)
•
Amy Lowell ... was an American poet of the imagist school ... A member of the Brahmin Lowell family, her siblings included the astronomer Percival Lowell, the educator and legal scholar Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for prenatal care ...
Lowell never attended college because her family did not consider it proper for a woman to do so. She compensated for this lack with avid reading and near-obsessive book collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 (aged 28) after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe ...
Lowell was a lesbian, and in 1912 she met the actress Ada Dwyer Russell, who would become her lover ... The two women traveled to England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who at once became a major influence and a major critic of her work. Pound considered Lowell's embrace of Imagism to be a kind of hijacking of the movement ...
Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925, at the age of 51, and is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery. The following year, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What's O'Clock ...
The problem with Amy Lowell seems to boil down to two things: 1/ she was fat; 2/ she was wealthy. Being overweight made her an ideal butt for the "humour" of the more cadaverous moderns: Pound, Eliot, and H.D. The fact of having money made it easy to suggest that she paid for her own publications, and that they would never have seen the light of day otherwise.
This bias has persisted pretty much to this day. Pound's famous gibe about "Amygism" in contradistinction to "Imagism" has made it easy to dismiss her contributions to the movement (such as it was). The cigar-smoking and masculine clothes have also been used to make her seem simultaneously perverse and ridiculous.
All in all, she did pretty well to keep her end up, given the virulous way she was hounded and despised.
Was she any good as a poet? There's a certain wordiness to much of her verse which can make it a little tiresome to read, but her pioneering efforts as a translator of Chinese poetry certainly deserve attention. It's an early example of the ‘pictographic’ theory of ideograms:
in which each component part of a kanji is treated as a distinct image. Lowell would not have admitted the fact, but the source of the understanding is Fenollosa, and Pound’s popularisation of his work.
This sub-division of characters - which "led to various tortured renderings of common words" - does at least acccount for some of the expansiveness of Lowell's versions of poems rendered far more simply by Witter Bynner or Arthur Waley.
•
Bibliography
Poetry:
- A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912)
- Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914)
- Men, Women and Ghosts (1916)
- Can Grande's Castle (1919)
- Pictures of the Floating World (1919)
- Legends (1921)
- [with Florence Ayscough] Fir-Flower Tablets (1921)
- Fir-Flower Tablets: Poems Translated from the Chinese. Trans. Amy Lowell & Florence Ayscough. 1921. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company / Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1926.
- A Critical Fable (1922)
- What's O'Clock (1925)
- East Wind (1926)
- Ballads for Sale (1927)
- The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell (1955)
- The Touch of You: Amy Lowell's Poems of Love and Beauty. Ed. Peter Seymour [Hallmark Cards} (1972)
- Selected Poems of Amy Lowell. Ed. Melissa Bradshaw, & Adrienne Munich (2002)
Criticism:
- John Keats (1925)
Edited:
- Some Imagist Poets. 3 vols (1915-1917)
Letters:
- Florence Ayscough & Amy Lowell: Correspondence of a Friendship. Ed. Harley Farnsworth MacNair (1945)
Secondary:
- Amy Lowell: A Chronicle, With Extracts from her Correspondence. Ed. S. Foster Damon (1935)
Café du Néant
Little tapers lighted leaning diagonally
Stuck in coffin tables of the Café du Néant
Leaning to the breath of baited bodies
Like young poplars fringing the Loire
Eyes that are full of love
And eyes that are full of kohl
Projecting light across the fulsome ambiente
Trailing the rest of the animal behind them
Telling of tales without words
And lies of no consequence
One way or another
The young lovers hermetically buttoned up in black
To black cravat
To the blue powder edge dusting the yellow throat
What color could have been your bodies
When last you put them away
Nostalgic youth
Holding your mistress's pricked finger
In the indifferent flame of the taper
Synthetic symbol of LIFE
In this factitious chamber of DEATH
The woman
As usual
Is smiling as bravely
As it is given to her to be brave
While the brandy cherries
In winking glasses
Are decomposing
Harmoniously
With the flesh of spectators
And at a given spot
There is one
Who
Having the concentric lighting focussed precisely upon her
Prophetically blossoms in perfect putrefaction
Yet there are cabs outside the door.
(1913)
•
Mina Loy ... was a British artist, writer, poet, playwright, novelist, painter, designer of lamps, and bohemian ... Her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia, and Yvor Winters, among others.
... in 1916 she moved to New York ... Here, she returned to her old Greenwich Village life, engaging in theatre or mixing with her fellow writers. During this period, some of Loy's poems ended up in small magazines such as Little Review and Dial ...
... somewhat mystified by the new kinds of poetry being produced by Loy and her ilk, Pound remarked in a March 1918 piece for Little Review, "In the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of emotion; in that of Mina Loy I detect no emotion whatsoever" ... Instead, in their poetry, they performed "a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and modification of ideas and characters." Pound concludes, "The point of my praise, for I intend this as praise...is that without any pretences and without clamours about nationality, these girls have written a distinctly national product, they have written something which would not have come out of any other country, and ... they are... interesting and readable (by me...)."
In 1923, she returned to Paris. Her first volume of poetry, Lunar Baedecker ... was published this year and was mistakenly printed with the spelling error "Baedecker" rather than the intended "Baedeker".
In 1936, Loy returned to New York and lived for a time with her daughter in Manhattan. She moved to the Bowery, where she found inspiration for poems and found object assemblage art in the destitute people she encountered ...
In 1953, Loy moved to Aspen, Colorado, where her daughters were already living ... Loy continued to write and work on her assemblages until her death at the age of 83.
It's essentially the same gag Mel Brooks uses in Blazing Saddles (1974). The crooked attorney general there is called "Hedley Lamarr", so everyone - including his henchmen - insists on addressing him as Hedy Lamarr, the famous Hollywood actress. In this case, the artist-poet Mina Loy is very easy to confuse with yet another Hollywood acress, Myrna Loy (pictured above) - her junior by more than two decades. They were, admittedly, both extremely elegant, stylish women, but there the resemblance ends.
Mina Loy was the author of The Lunar Baedeker (1923), a title which meant much more at the time than it does now. Think T. S. Eliot's 1920 poem "Burbank With A Baedeker: Bleistein With A Cigar." That poem contrasts the cultured, aristocratic Burbank's wooing of "Princess Volupine" with the coarser progress of the bestial Bleistein, "Chicago Semite Viennese":
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot.
Money in furs. The boatman smiles,
Jessica Burstein's "Poem Guide" to Loy's "Lunar Baedeker" poem unpacks the term for us:
Baedekers were travel guides [during] the nineteenth century. Intended for the Grand Tour tourist hell-bent on cultural capital, Karl Baedeker and his crew outlined what was worth seeing, demarcating how to get somewhere, what to pay whilst doing so, and, when it came to museums, at what objects one should profitably direct one’s gaze.
She goes on to explain that Loy's "Lunar Baedeker" (and, by extension, the collection it serves to introduce) is itself meant as a kind of guidebook:
From cocaine to sleepwalking to forgetting one’s self and “hallucinatory citadels,” Loy’s poem is a tour of the ways, places — such as the moonscape — and times — for it is night — in which we are made strange to ourselves.
The creepy antisemitism of Eliot's own "Baedeker" poem is thus elegantly trumped by this cosmopolitan daughter of a Hungarian Jewish tailor and an English Protestant mother, a heritage and identity she expounded "in great detail in her mock-epic Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923–1925)".
•
Bibliography
Poetry:
- Lunar Baedeker (1923)
- Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables (1958)
- The Last Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger Conover ed. (1982)
- The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger Conover (1997)
- The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy. Ed. Roger L. Conover. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
Prose:
- Insel. Ed. Elizabeth Arnold (1991)
- Stories and Essays. Ed. Sara Crangle (2011)
Dirge Without Music
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
(1928)
•
Edna St. Vincent Millay ... was an American lyrical poet and playwright. Millay was a renowned social figure and noted feminist in New York City during the Roaring Twenties and beyond. She also wrote prose under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd..
Millay won the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her poem "Ballad of the Harp-Weaver"; she was the first woman and second person to win the award ...
Millay was highly regarded during much of her lifetime, with the prominent literary critic Edmund Wilson calling her "one of the only poets writing in English in our time who have attained to anything like the stature of great literary figures." By the 1930s, her critical reputation began to decline, as modernist critics dismissed her work for its use of traditional poetic forms and subject matter, in contrast to modernism's exhortation to "make it new."
... Millay died at her home in 1950, at age 58. She had fallen down the stairs and was found with a broken neck approximately eight hours after her death. Her physician reported that she had suffered a heart attack following a coronary occlusion.
After her death, The New York Times described her as "an idol of the younger generation during the glorious early days of Greenwich Village" and as "one of the greatest American poets of her time." Thomas Hardy said that America had two great attractions: the skyscraper and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The poet Richard Wilbur asserted that Millay "wrote some of the best sonnets of the century."
I guess I first came across the name Edna St. Vincent Millay sometime in the early 80s, while I was making my way through the book above. My M.A. supervisor had recomended that I read some Edmund Wilson, and this chunky compendium seemed the best place to start. I think I had her confused with Ella Wheeler Wilcox to start with - some over-sentimental versifier who'd been left behind by the steamroller of literary history.
Wilson's essay about his long friendship with Millay soon put me right, however. It introduced me to "Renascence", still one of her most striking poems, and painted a vivid picture of the 1920s New York semi-bohemian ambience they'd both shared. Of course he was in love with her - but it sounded as if everyone was.
It was a stroke of luck running across a copy of her Collected Poems in a secondhand bookshop soon afterwards. I spent a lot of time poring over that. I had, of course, already been indoctrinated with the notion that such technically "backward-looking", traditionally patterned verse could not be accommodated within the stern precepts of modern poetry, but somehow I couldn't stop reading it anyway.
After that it was a bit of a shock to read - many years later - Nancy Milford's tell-all, quasi-exposé biography of the ethereal poet. This was no Wilsonian dreamgirl, but a profane, emancipated "new woman" determined to flout convention and scare the horses.
I'm glad that I got to know her poetry before I read the book, though. There's a certain coarseness to Milford's style of writing which tends to compress all her subjects - Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna Millay - into the same mold. Her book is certainly valuable, but it doesn't tell the whole story. Nor does Wilson's essay, for that matter, but I think it gets a bit closer to the truth.
•
Bibliography
Poetry:
- Renascence: and other poems (1917)
- A Few Figs From Thistles: Poems and Four Sonnets (1920)
- Second April (1921)
- The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (1922)
- Poems (UK, 1923)
- The Buck in the Snow, and Other Poems (1928)
- Fatal Interview (1931)
- Wine from These Grapes (1934)
- Conversation at Midnight 1937)
- Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939)
- There Are No Islands, Any More: Lines Written in Passion and in Deep Concern for England, France, and My Own Country (1940)
- Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook (1940)
- The Murder of Lidice (1942)
- Second April and The Buck in the Snow. Introduction by William Rose Benét (1950)
- Mine the Harvest. Ed. Norma Millay (1954)
- Collected Poems. Ed. Norma Millay (1956)
- Collected Poems. Ed. Norma Millay. 1956. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, n.d.
- Take Up the Song (1986)
- Selected Poems: The Centenary Edition. Ed. Colin Falck (1991)
- Early Poems. ["Renascence", "Second April?, & "A Few Figs from Thistles"]. Ed. Holly Peppe (1998)
- Selected poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ed. Timothy F. Jackson & Holly Peppe (2016)
Plays:
- Aria da capo: One-act play in verse (1921)
- The Lamp and the Bell: Five-act play (1921)
- Two Slatterns and a King: A Moral Interlude (1921)
- Three Plays [Two Slatterns and a King, Aria da capo, & The Lamp and the Bell] (1926)
- The King's Henchman: Three-act play (1927)
- The Princess Marries the Page: One-act play (1932)
- Early Works of Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poetry and Three Plays. Ed. Stacy Carson Hubbard (2006)
Prose:
- [as Nancy Boyd] Distressing Dialogues. Preface by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1924)
Translations:
- [with George Dillon] Charles Baudelaire: Flowers of Evil (1936)
- Charles Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal: Translated and Presented on Pages Facing the Original French Text as Flowers of Evil. Trans. George Dillon & Edna St. Vincent Millay. With an Introduction and an Unusual Bibliographical Note by Miss Millay. 1936. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1962.
Letters:
- Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ed. Allan Ross Macdougall (1952)
- Into the World's Great Heart: Selected Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Ed. Timothy F. Jackson. Foreword by Holly Peppe (2023)
Secondary:
- Epstein, Daniel Mark. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. A John MacRae Book. New York: Henry Holt and Company LLC, 2001.
- Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. 2001. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002.
A Suggested Campaign Song
(“No brass bands. No speeches. Instead
a still, silent, effective influence.”
— Anti-suffrage speech.)
We are waging — can you doubt it?
A campaign so calm and still
No one knows a thing about it
And we hope they never will.
No one knows
What we oppose,
And we hope they never will.
We are ladylike and quiet,
Here a whisper — there a hint;
Never speeches, bands or riot,
Nothing suitable for print.
No one knows
What we oppose,
For we never speak for print.
Sometimes in profound seclusion,
In some far (but homelike) spot,
We will make a dark allusion:
“We’re opposed to you-know-what.”
No one knows
What we oppose,
For we call it “You-Know-What.”
(1915)
•
Alice Duer Miller ... was an American writer whose poetry actively influenced political opinion. Her feminist verses influenced political opinion during the American suffrage movement, and her verse novel The White Cliffs influenced political thought during the U.S.'s entry into World War II. She also wrote novels and screenplays..
... Alice Maud Duer was born in Staten Island, New York ... into a wealthy and prominent family ... The family lost their fortune during the Baring Bank failure ... Alice attended Barnard College in 1895, studying Mathematics and Astronomy ... She helped to pay for her studies by selling novels and short essays to Harper's and Scribner's magazines ...
Miller became known as a campaigner for women's suffrage and was an active member of the Algonquin Round Table ... She published a series of satirical poems in the New York Tribune ... later republished in the collection, Are Women People? ... Throughout her life, she wrote successfully for a wide range of genres and produced forty-four books.
In 1940, she wrote the verse novel The White Cliffs, about an American girl who coming to London as a tourist, meets and marries a young upper-class Englishman in the period just before World War I ... The poem was spectacularly successful on both sides of the Atlantic, selling nearly one million copies – an unheard of number for a book of verse. It was broadcast and recorded by British-American actress Lynn Fontanne ... and the story was made into the 1944 film The White Cliffs of Dover. American composer Natalia Raigorodsky composed an opera ... based on Miller’s poem.
Alice Duer Miller was a pretty impressive writer. She seems to have succeeded in virtually every genre she tried: verse (satirical or otherwise), fiction, and movie screenplays. There's little doubt that her pro-suffragette rhymes, printed initially in the New York Tribune before being collected as a book, played a significant part in the eventual ratification of the 19th amendment.
After that her novels, largely centring on the "woman problem" (or rather, men's problems with women having ideas and opinions) were routinely filmed both for Hollywood and other international markets. She also wrote, or collaborated on, several stand-alone screenplays.
Many would see her 1931 verse novel Forsaking All Others as her masterpiece. It's thought to be at least partially based on her own unhappy marriage to Henry Wise Miller, a failed stockbroker and land speculator:
The story in Forsaking All Others is played out in five parts. Part 1: Lee and Wayne meet at a dinner party and exchange some flirtatious banter. Part 2: Interested by Wayne, Lee wonders why he doesn’t contact her until they meet again at a art auction. Part 3: Lunches ensue. Part 4: The affair develops, and Wayne starts using the demands of business as an excuse to avoid joining Ruth at their summer place in Maine.
With Part 5, however, Miller takes her story on an express train from the Jazz Age to the heart of the Victorian era. Ruth, who knows that something is going on, dies tragically from a dramatically-convenient illness. “Is that you, Jim?” she murmurs in her fever before dying in a scene worthy of Ten Nights in a Bar-room. Stricken with grief and remorse, Wayne sails for the Mediterranean. The moral of the story? Vide the Seventh Commandment.
Thwarted love mixed (this time) with an oncoming world war also provided the fuel for her most successful work, the mega-bestselling The White Cliffs.
•
Bibliography
Poetry:
- [with Caroline King Duer] Poems (1896)
- Modern Obstacle (1903)
- Are Women People? a book of rhymes for suffrage times (1915)
- Women Are People! (1917)
- Wings in the Night (1918)
- Forsaking All Others (1931)
- The White Cliffs (1940)
Fiction:
- Less Than Kin (1909)
- The Blue Arch (1910)
- Things (1914)
- The Burglar and the Blizzard: A Christmas Story (1914)
- Come Out of the Kitchen (1916)
- [with others] The Sturdy Oak [A composite Novel of American Politics by fourteen authors] (1917)
- Ladies Must Live (1917)
- The Happiest Time of Their Lives (1918)
- The Charm School (1919)
- The Beauty and the Bolshevist (1920)
- Manslaughter (1921)
- Are Parents People? (1924)
- Priceless Pearl (1924)
- The Reluctant Duchess (1925)
- The Springboard (1928)
- Welcome Home (1928)
- Gowns by Roberta (1933)
- Come Out of the Pantry (1934)
- The Rising Star (1935)
- And One Was Beautiful (1937)
- Irene (1940)
Filmography:
[based on her fiction]:
- Less Than Kin, dir. Donald Crisp (1918)
- Come Out of the Kitchen, dir. John S. Robertson (1919)
- Her First Elopement, dir. Sam Wood (1920)
- Something Different, dir. Roy William Neill [based on Calderon's Prisoner] (1920)
- The Charm School, dir. James Cruze (1921)
- Ladies Must Live, dir. George Loane Tucker (1921)
- Manslaughter, dir. Cecil B. DeMille (1922)
- Are Parents People?, dir. Malcolm St. Clair (1925)
- Someone to Love, dir. F. Richard Jones [based on The Charm School] (1928)
- Honey, dir. Wesley Ruggles [based on Come Out of the Kitchen] (1930)
- Salga de la cocina, dir. Jorge Infante [based on Come Out of the Kitchen] (1931)
- Chérie, dir. Louis Mercanton [based on Come Out of the Kitchen] (1931)
- Every Woman Has Something, dir. Leo Mittler [based on Come Out of the Kitchen] (1931)
- Kärlek måste vi ha, dir. Gustaf Bergman [based on Come Out of the Kitchen] (1931)
- Manslaughter, dir. George Abbott [based on Manslaughter] (1930)
- The Incorrigible, dir. Leo Mittler [based on Manslaughter] (1931)
- The Indictment, dir. Dimitri Buchowetzki [based on Manslaughter] (1931)
- Reckless Youth, dir. Leo Mittler [based on Manslaughter] (1931)
- Lika inför lagen, dir. Gustaf Bergman [based on Manslaughter] (1931)
- The Princess and the Plumber, dir. Alexander Korda (1930)
- Big Executive, dir. Erle C. Kenton (1933)
- Roberta, dir. William A. Seiter [based on Gowns By Roberta] (1935)
- Come Out of the Pantry, dir. Jack Raymond [based on Come Out of the Kitchen] (1935)
- Collegiate, dir. Ralph Murphy [based on The Charm School] (1936)
- The White Cliffs of Dover, dir. Clarence Brown [based on The White Cliffs] (1944)
- Spring in Park Lane, dir. Herbert Wilcox [based on Come Out of the Kitchen] (1948)
- Sabela de Cambados, dir. Ramón Torrado [based on Come Out of the Kitchen] (1949)
- Lovely to Look At, dir. Mervyn LeRoy [based on Gowns By Roberta] (1952)
[screenplays]:
- The Man with Two Mothers, dir. Paul Bern (1922)
- The Exquisite Sinner, dir. Josef von Sternberg (1926)
- The Last Waltz, dir. Arthur Robison (Germany, 1927)
- Rose Marie, dir. W. S. Van Dyke (1936)
- Wife vs. Secretary, dir. Clarence Brown (1936)
- And One Was Beautiful, dir. Robert B. Sinclair (1940)
- Irene, dir. Herbert Wilcox (1940)
- The White Cliffs. 1940. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1941.
The Fish
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash-heaps;
opening and shutting itself like
an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the
sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices —
in and out, illuminating
the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars,
pink
rice-grains, ink-
bespattered jelly fish, crabs like green
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.
All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice —
all the physical features of
ac-
cident — lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, these things stand
out on it; the chasm-side is
dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.
(1918)
•
Marianne Moore ... was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for its formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit. Her Collected Poems (1951) won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
... Moore entered Bryn Mawr College in 1905. She graduated four years later ... having majored in history, economics, and political science. The poet H.D. was among her classmates ... At Bryn Mawr, Moore started writing short stories and poems ... and decided to become a writer.
Moore's first professionally published poems appeared in The Egoist and Poetry in the spring of 1915. Harriet Monroe, the editor of the latter, would describe them in her biography as possessing "an elliptically musical profundity".
In 1916, Moore moved with her mother to Chatham, New Jersey, a community with commuting transportation to Manhattan. Two years later, the two moved to New York City's Greenwich Village ...
Her second book, Observations, won the Dial Award in 1924. She worked part-time as a librarian; from 1925 to 1929, she edited The Dial, a literary and cultural journal ... When The Dial ceased publication ... she moved to ... the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, where she remained for thirty-six years. She continued to write while caring for her ailing mother, who died in 1947.
... She moved back to ... Manhattan in 1965 ... She liked athletics and was a great admirer of Muhammad Ali, writing the liner notes for his spoken-word album I Am the Greatest!
... At the age of 81, Moore received the 1968 National Medal for Literature. The committee overseeing the award stated: "One of the few true inventors of poetry in our time, Marianne Moore, the first lady of poetry, gives us intimations of exquisite perfection" ... She died in 1972, and her ashes were interred with her mother's at the family's burial plot ... in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
There's no question that Marianne Moore is one of the gods of Modernist poetry: she's up there with Eliot, Pound, Stevens and Williams - some would call her the pick of the bunch. The odd thing, despite all that, is the fact that there's no reliable, agreed-upon text of her poetry available today.
The fault - if fault it be - lies squarely with her. She was a tireless pruner and rewriter of her earlier work. Her 1924 book Observations, for example, established her reputation as a poetical innovator.
But to the chagrin of many admirers, Moore eliminated a third of its contents from her subsequent poetry collections while radically revising some of the poems she retained.
These include such classic pieces as "Poetry", which first appeared in a journal in 1919. It went "from 30 or so lines to only three in the 1967 version." Of course, there are many other examples of poets - Wordwsworth, Auden - who insisted on changing famous earlier poems into significantly altered new ones. But in most cases that leaves us with only two major texts to choose from.
Robin G. Schulze's magisterial volume Becoming Marianne Moore supplies the information necessary to judge the original texts of classic Moore poems against the versions created by her in her somewhat misleadingly named Complete Poems (1967, rev. ed. 1981), with its po-faced opening declaration: "“Omissions are not accidents”. However, that only takes us to 1924 - pretty early in her poetic journey.
Which leads us to a genuine, modern-day battle of the books. Poet Grace Schulman's 2003 edition of The Poems of Marianne Moore ordered the poems:
not by their initial book appearances but chronologically. This was the first real collected edition, and gathered some 256 poems.
The 1981 edition of Moore's (so-called) Complete Poems included 125 poems, so you can see that Schulman has almost doubled the tally by including - for the most part - the earlier rather than the later selections and texts.
However, all was not well in Moore-land. In 2017 Heather Cass White published New Collected Poems, a supposedly “definitive edition” of Moore’s poetry, containing (this time round) a mere 188 poems.
In her introduction, White does not address Schulman’s edition ... and explains this discrepancy in contents only indirectly with an editorial essay preceding her notes. In the course of this essay, however, she argues that “the situation since 1981 has been this: Moore’s readers have had available to them approximately half of what she actually published.” Obviously this is not true. Why White has effaced Schulman’s work is a puzzle to me.
William Doreski's review of the new edition of Moore's poetry goes on to explain just how:
White and Schulman differ in their editorial approaches. White has chosen to reprint the poems as they originally appeared in book form or, in some instances, in journals. Schulman reprints revised versions from the 1967 Complete Poems, but includes many earlier versions in her main text or in her notes. She also reprints far more uncollected poems, which is why her edition is bulkier. White arranges her edition on the basis of Moore’s original collections (excluding the Selected Poems edited by T. S. Eliot and the two collected editions Moore herself prepared). Schulman orders her collection mainly on the basis of chronology. On the whole, I prefer White’s ordering, but Schulman’s is instructive.
Which leaves us where, exactly? If we want Moore's latest intentions, we can go to the 1981 Complete Poems. If we want a chronological text of her poems from first to last, some in their original texts, others in their final versions, we can go to Grace Schulman's commodious book. If we want a more accurate reflection of Moore's original effect on her readers, we can go to Heather Cass White's. However, this last option does entail ignoring Moore's right to select and rewrite her own poetry. It assumes implicitly that she was capable of ordering it in books, but after that she somehow lacked "objectivity" about her own work.
My own solution is to have all three editions, 1981, 2003 and 2017, sitting side by side on the shelf. I'd add Robin G. Schulze's, too, if I could afford it. I can see the merits of White's approach. There's a slightly arrogant air to her efforts to prove that she's somehow resolved this basically insoluble problem, though. And Schulman’s methodology, eclectic though it is, at least acknowledges that so protean and self-critical a writer can never be tied down to a single canonical text.
So nobody really won the battle (though White is definitely in the ascendant at present). Readers will just have to make up their own minds individually which version of Moore they prefer: the young rebel or the cranky old nail-parer. At least we now have the tools to do so reasonably conveniently.
•
Bibliography
Poetry:
- Poems (1921)
- Observations (1924)
- Selected Poems. Introduction by T. S. Eliot (1935)
- The Pangolin and Other Verse (1936)
- What Are Years (1941)
- Nevertheless (1944)
- A Face (1949)
- Collected Poems (1951)
- Like a Bulwark (1956)
- O to Be a Dragon (1959)
- A Marianne Moore Reader (1961)
- A Marianne Moore Reader. 1961. A Viking Compass Book. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1972.
- Eight Poems. Illustrations by Robert Andrew Parker (1962)
- Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel and Other Topics (1966)
- The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967)
- Selected Poems. Selected by Marianne Moore (1969)
- Selected Poems. 1969. Faber Paperbacks. London: Faber, 1976.
- The Complete Poems (1981)
- The Complete Poems: Definitive Edition. 1967. New York: The Macmillan Company / The Viking Press, 1981.
- The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. 1967 & 1981. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
- Complete Poems (1994)
- Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924. [includes Observations (1924) in facsimile]. Ed. Robin G. Schulze (2002)
- Poems of Marianne Moore. Ed. Grace Schulman (2003)
- The Poems of Marianne Moore. Ed. Grace Schulman. London: Faber, 2003.
- A-Quiver with Significance: Marianne Moore, 1932–1936. [includes The Pangolin and Other Verse (1936) in facsimile]. Ed. Heather Cass White (2008)
- Adversity & Grace: Marianne Moore, 1936–1941. [includes What are Years (1941) in facsimile]. Ed. Heather Cass White (2012)
- New Collected Poems. Ed. Heather Cass White (2017)
- New Collected Poems. Ed. Heather Cass White. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
Prose:
- Predilections: Literary Essays (1955)
- Idiosyncrasy and Technique (1958)
- Dress and Kindred Subjects (1965)
- Poetry and Criticism (1965)
- The Accented Syllable (1969)
- The Complete Prose. Ed. Patricia C. Willis (1986)
- The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore. Ed. Patricia C. Willis. London: Faber, 1987.
Translations & Adaptations:
- Fables of La Fontaine (1954)
- The Fables of La Fontaine: A Complete Translation. 1954. Rev. ed. Compass Books. New York: Viking Press, 1964.
- Selected Fables of La Fontaine. 1954. London: Faber, 1955.
- The Absentee: A Comedy in Four Acts [dramatization of Maria Edgeworth] (1962)
- Puss in Boots, The Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella [adaptations from Perrault] (1963)
Letters:
- The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore (1997)
- The Selected Letters of Marianne Moore. Ed. Bonnie Costello, with Celeste Goodridge & Cristanne Miller. A Borzoi Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Love Song
My own dear love, he is strong and bold
And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurled—
Oh, a girl, she’d not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world,—
And I wish I’d never met him.
My love, he’s mad, and my love, he’s fleet,
And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams, —
And I wish he were in Asia.
My love runs by like a day in June,
And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He’ll tread his galloping rigadoon
In the pathway of the morrows.
He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start,
Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart, —
And I wish somebody’d shoot him.
(1926)
•
Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild ...) was an American poet, literary critic and writer of fiction. Based in New York, she was known for her caustic wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles.
Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary works published in magazines, such as The New Yorker, and for her role as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. In the early 1930s, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed when her involvement in left-wing politics resulted in her being placed on the Hollywood blacklist.
Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker". Nevertheless, both her literary output and reputation for sharp wit have endured ...
Parker died in 1967, at age 73, of a heart attack ... In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr., and upon King's death, to the NAACP.
"I was a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker ever was," states Melissa McCarthy (playing convicted serial forger Lee Israel) in the film version of the latter's tell-all confessional memoir. There's a certain ironic truth in this. Dorothy Parker has become a kind of literary Mae West: an endless source of smart-alec quotes and devastating asides.
The truth - as usual - is not only more nuanced but also far more interesting than the parody. If you set out to read Parker's Collected Poems in search of a good laugh, you will indeed find plenty of witty light verse. But there's also a love-lorn, romantic strain which matches up more closely with lyricists like Millay, Teasdale and Wylie than it does with contemporary laff-riot-merchants such as Don Marquis or Ogden Nash.
Her prose, too - with the partial exception of her mordant "constant reader" reviews in the New Yorker - is far more bitter and socially conscious than the Algonquin Round Table version of her would ever have been able to achieve.
She is, in short, definitely a more complex writer than popular culture has ever given her credit for. Whether these more heart-felt stories and poems are as good as the knock-down comedy routines is another question, one dependent on individual taste. But I do find it revealing that I've been able to include her in this listing of early twentieth-century women poets as easily as I did in my previous post on Light Verse.
Poetry:
- Enough Rope (1926)
- Sunset Gun (1928)
- Death and Taxes (1931)
- Not So Deep as a Well: Collected Poems by Dorothy Parker (1936)
- Not So Deep as a Well: The Collected Poems of Dorothy Parker. Decorated by Valenti Angelo. 1936. New York: The Viking Press, 1938.
- Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (1996)
- Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker. Ed. Stuart Y. Silverstein. Scribner. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1996.
- Complete Poems. Ed. Colleen Breese (1999)
Short stories:
- Laments for the Living (1930)
- After Such Pleasures (1933)
- Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker (1939)
- Here Lies: The Collected Stories of Dorothy Parker. 1939. Auckland: Penguin, 1944.
- The Portable Dorothy Parker (1944)
- The Penguin Dorothy Parker. 1944. Rev. ed. Introduction by Brendan Gill. 1973. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.
- Complete Stories. Ed. Colleen Breese (1995)
Journalism:
- Constant Reader (1970)
- Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927–28 (2024)
- Complete Broadway, 1918–1923. Ed. Kevin C. Fitzpatrick (2014)
Plays:
- [with Elmer Rice] Close Harmony (1929)
- [with Ross Evans] The Coast of Illyria (1949)
- [with Arnaud D'Usseau] Ladies of the Corridor (1953)
Screenplays:
- [with Alan Campbell, Horace Jackson & Lenore J. Coffee] Suzy [based on a novel by Herman Gorman] (1936)
- [with William A. Wellman, Robert Carson & Alan Campbell] A Star is Born (1937)
- [with Alan Campbell, Laura Perelman & S.J. Perelman] Sweethearts (1938)
- [with Alan Campbell & Frank R. Adams] Trade Winds [story by Tay Garnett] (1938)
- [with Alan Campbell] Week-End for Three [story by Budd Schulberg] (1941)
- [with Peter Viertel & Joan Harrison] Saboteur ( (1942)
- [with Frank Cavett, John Howard Lawson & Lionel Wiggam] Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman (1947)
- [with Walter Reisch & Ross Evans] The Fan [based on "Lady Windermere's Fan" by Oscar Wilde] (1949)
Secondary:
- Keats, John. You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker. 1970. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
- Meade, Marion. Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (1987)
- Calhoun, Randall. Dorothy Parker: A Bio-Bibliography (1993)
from Sun-up
My doll Janie has no waist
and her body is like a tub with feet on it.
Sometimes I beat her
but I always kiss her afterwards.
When I have kissed all the paint off her body
I shall tie a ribbon about it
so she shan't look shabby.
But it must be blue -
it mustn't be pink -
pink shows the dirt on her face
that won't wash off.
: :
I beat Janie
and beat her...
but still she smiled...
so I scratched her between the eyes with a pin.
Now she doesn't love me anymore...
she scowls... and scowls...
though I've begged her to forgive me
and poured sugar in the hole at the back of her head.
: :
Mama says Janie is a fairy doll
and she has forgiven me -
that she's gone to the market
to buy me some sweets.
- Now she's at the door
and a little bag tied to her neck -
I run to Janie
and kiss her all over....
Ah... she is still frowning.
I let the sweets drop on the floor -
mama
has told you a lie.
(1920)
•
Lola Ridge ... was an Irish-born New Zealand-American anarchist and modernist poet, and an influential editor of avant-garde, feminist, and Marxist publications. She is best known for her long poems and poetic sequences, published in numerous magazines and collected in five books of poetry..
... born in 1873 in Dublin ... She was her parents' only surviving child. [Her father] died when Ridge was three years old, and Ridge and her mother subsequently emigrated to Hokitika, New Zealand, when she was six ... In 1895, she married Peter Webster, the manager of a Hokitika gold mine. In 1903 she left Webster and moved to Sydney, Australia with their three-year-old son Keith to attend Trinity College and study painting at the Sydney Art School ...
After her mother died, Ridge emigrated to the United States in 1907 and reinvented herself as Lola Ridge, a poet and painter. She settled in San Francisco and published in Overland Monthly. Ridge placed her son in a Californian orphanage and moved to New York City's Greenwich Village ... she became involved in working class politics and protests, and worked with Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger. Her first book of poetry [The Ghetto and Other Poems] was published in 1918 ... The book was a critical success.
... She wrote and published four more books of poetry ... Her third book, Red Flag (1927) collected much of her political poetry ... she died in Brooklyn in 1941 of pulmonary tuberculosis.
... Along with other political poets of the early Modernist period, Ridge has ... been lauded by contemporary poets for her choice and ability to write about urban spaces in her poems. A selection of her poetry was published in 2007, and a biography ... was published in 2016.
The rediscovery of modernist poet Lola Ridge by local poet and critic Michele Leggott and others made quite a stir down here in li'l old New Zealand. It's true that few of the verses she contributed to local journals in her twenties show much sign of the radical self-reinvention which would take place in Sydney, first, then the United States. But even so ... Everyone has to start somewhere.
It'll be much harder to ignore her in future. The sheer gutsiness of her New York ghetto poems and other reports from the front of the class struggle speak for themselves. She was, herself, an extremely arresting figure, as Katherine Anne Porter reveals in this piece of reportage about the 1927 Sacco and Vanzetti riots:
One tall, thin figure of a woman stepped out alone, a good distance into the empty square, and when the police came down at her and the horse's hoofs beat over her head, she did not move, but stood with her shoulders slightly bowed, entirely still. The charge was repeated again and again, but she was not to be driven away. A man near me said in horror, suddenly recognizing her, 'That's Lola Ridge!' and dashed into the empty space toward her. Without any words or a moment's pause, he simply seized her by the shoulders and walked her in front of him back to the edge of the crowd, where she stood as if she were half-conscious. I came near her and said, 'Oh no, don't let them hurt you! They've done enough damage already.' And she said, 'This is the beginning of the end – we have lost something we shan't find again.' I remember her bitter hot breath and her deathlike face.
The recent publication of Terese Svoboda's critical biography will hopefully have the effect of restoring Ridge to her proper place in the American poetic canon.
•
Bibliography
Poetry:
- The Ghetto, and Other Poems (1918)
- Sun-Up, and Other Poems (1920)
- Red Flag (1927)
- Firehead (1929)
- Dance of Fire (1935)
- Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems. Ed. Daniel Tobin (2007)
- Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge. Ed. Daniel Tobin (2018)
- Verses. Introduction by Michele Leggott (2019)
- Verses. Introduction by Michele Leggott. USA: Quale Press, 2019.
Secondary:
- Svoboda, Teresa. Anything that Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet. Introduction by Molly Crabapple. 2016. Tucson, Arizona: Schaffner Press, Inc., 2018.
from Tender Buttons [A Long Dress]
What is the current that makes machinery, that makes
it crackle, what is the current that presents a long
line and a necessary waist. What is this current.
What is the wind, what is it.
Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark
place is not a dark place, only a white and red are
black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is
scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes
it. A line just distinguishes it.
(1914)
•
Gertrude Stein ... was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania ... and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet.
In 1933, Stein published a quasi-memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. The book became a ... bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature scene into the limelight of mainstream attention ...
Her books include Q.E.D. (1903), about a lesbian romantic affair involving several of Stein's friends; Fernhurst, a fictional story about a love triangle; Three Lives (1905–06); The Making of Americans (1902–1911); and Tender Buttons (1914).
Her activities during World War II have been the subject of analysis and commentary. As a Jew living in Nazi-occupied France, Stein may have been able to sustain her lifestyle as an art collector, and indeed to ensure her physical safety, only through the protection of the powerful Vichy government official and Nazi collaborator Bernard Faÿ.
Where does one start with Gertrude Stein? I suppose, with Tender Buttons. After the comparative realism of Three Lives, her next book was a real step into the unknown:
Stein began composition of the book in 1912 with multiple short prose poems in an effort to "create a word relationship between the word and the things seen" using a "realist" perspective. She then published it in three sections as her second book in 1914.
Tender Buttons has provoked divided critical responses since its publication. It is renowned for its Modernist approach to portraying the everyday object and has been lauded as a "masterpiece of verbal Cubism". Its first poem, "A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass", is arguably its most famous, and is often cited as one of the quintessential works of Cubist literature ... [It] has also been ... criticized as "a modernist triumph, a spectacular failure, a collection of confusing gibberish, and an intentional hoax".
Certainly the book seems designed to be divisive. Here is the text of the poem in question:
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
It's a language experiment, but can it really be called a poem? Myself, I don't see why not, but then I suppose I have the advantage of a century or so of wild excursions into the farther sides of meaning via postmodern poetics. Stein is a pioneer, certainly, but her main innovation, in retrospect, is trying to echo the devices of abstract painting in words on a page. What could possibly go wrong with that?
•
Bibliography
Poetry:
- Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (1914)
- Stanzas in Meditation [1929–1933] (1956)
- Patriarchal Poetry [1927] (1953)
Prose:
- Three Lives (1909)
- Three Lives. 1909. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
- White Wines (1913)
- An Exercise in Analysis (1917)
- The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress (1925)
- The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress, 1906-1908. 1925. London: Peter Owen, 1968.
- Useful Knowledge (1929)
- An Acquaintance with Description (1929)
- Lucy Church Amiably (1930)
- How to Write (1931)
- They Must. Be Wedded. To Their Wife (1931)
- Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein with Two Shorter Stories (1933)
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. 1933. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.
- Blood on the Dining Room Floor (1933b)
- Portraits and Prayers (1934)
- Lectures in America (1935)
- The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936)
- Everybody's Autobiography (1937)
- Everybody’s Autobiography. 1937. Vintage Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 1973.
- Picasso, photo. Cecil Beaton (1938)
- Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938)
- Paris France (1940)
- Ida A Novel (1941)
- Ida: A Novel. 1941. Vintage Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 1972.
- Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (1943)
- Wars I Have Seen (1945a)
- À la recherche d'un jeune peintre. Ed. Max-Pol Fouchet (1945)
- Reflections on the Atomic Bomb (1946)
- Brewsie and Willie (1946)
- Gertrude Stein on Picasso (1946)
- Four in America (1947)
- Mrs. Reynolds (1947)
- The Things as They Are [written as Q.E.D. in 1903] (1950)
- Alphabets and Birthdays (1957)
- Look at Me Now and Here I Am. Ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (1967)
- Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909-45. Ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. Introduction by Elizabeth Sprigge. 1967. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
- Fernhurst, Q.E.D. and Other Early Writings (1971)
Theatre:
- A Circular Play (1920)
- Geography and Plays; with A List (1922)
- Operas and Plays (1932)
- Four Saints in Three Acts [libretto, 1929] (1934)
- The Mother of Us All [libretto, 1946] (1947)
- Last Operas and Plays. Ed. Carl van Vechten (1949)
- Last Operas and Plays. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York & Toronto: Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1949.
Children's Books:
- The World is Round [UK edition illustrated by Sir Francis Rose / US edition illustrated by Clement Hurd (1939)
- The World is Round: Rose's Story. A Book for Children. Pictures by Clement Hurd. 1939. With "The World is Not Flat," an Afterword by Edith Thatcher Hurd. 1986. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988.
Works:
- Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten (1946)
- Reflections on the Atomic Bomb. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (1973)
- Reflections on the Atomic Bomb: Volume I of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. 1973. Los Angeles, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1975.
- How Writing is Written. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (1974)
- How Writing is Written: Volume II of the Previously Uncollected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Robert Bartlett Haas. 1974. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1977.
- Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology with Essays by Judy Grahn (1989)
- A Stein Reader. Ed. Ulla E. Dydo (1993)
- A Stein Reader. Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993.
- Writings 1903–1932. Ed. Harriet Chessman & Catharine R. Stimpson. Library of America (1998)
- Writings 1932–1946. Ed. Harriet Chessman & Catharine R. Stimpson. Library of America (1998)
Letters:
- The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten, 1913–1946. Ed. Edward Burns (1986)
- The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. Ed. Edward Burns & Ulla Dydo (1996)
Secondary:
- Staying On Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas. Ed. Edward Burns. Introduction by Gilbert A. Harrison. 1973. Vintage Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 1975.
- Gertrude Stein: A Composite Portrait. Ed. Linda Simon. 1974. Discus Books. New York: Avon Books, 1974.
After Love
There is no magic any more,
We meet as other people do,
You work no miracle for me
Nor I for you.
You were the wind and I the sea —
There is no splendor any more,
I have grown listless as the pool
Beside the shore.
But though the pool is safe from storm
And from the tide has found surcease,
It grows more bitter than the sea,
For all its peace.
(1917)
•
Sara Teasdale ... was an American lyric poet. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri ... In 1918, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1917 poetry collection Love Songs.
... From 1911 to 1914 Teasdale was courted by several men, including the poet Vachel Lindsay, who was truly in love with her but did not feel that he could provide enough money or stability to keep her satisfied. She chose [instead] to marry Ernst Filsinger, a longtime admirer of her poetry ...
Filsinger's constant business travel caused Teasdale much loneliness. In 1929, she moved interstate for three months, thereby satisfying the criterion to gain a divorce. She did not wish to inform Filsinger, only doing so at her lawyers' insistence as the divorce was going through. Filsinger was shocked. After the divorce she moved only two blocks from her old home on Central Park West. She rekindled her friendship with Vachel Lindsay ... now married with children.
In 1933, she died by suicide, overdosing on sleeping pills, and was interred in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis. Lindsay had died by suicide two years earlier.
It's a very odd juxtaposition. On the one hand, we have Vachel Lindsay, a poet most famous for cringe-making anthems such as "The Congo" (1914) - subtitled "A Study of the Negro Race":
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, ...
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
- still memorable to many of us, I'm sorry to say, from a certain scene in Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society (1989).
On the other hand, we have the ethereal Sara Teasdale, author of some of the saddest love lyrics in the language, among them the bitter "I Shall Not Care":
When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.
I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough,
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.
Unfortunately Teasdale was in love with another poet, John Hall Wheelock, rather than the impassioned Lindsay, so - since she couldn't have Wheelock - she went for St. Louis businessman Ernst Filsinger instead.
A few years later Lindsay got married to 23-year-old schoolteacher Elizabeth Connor (he was 45 at the time). The couple had two children, but the pressure to support his growing family was too much for him. He committed suicide in 1931. Teasdale herself followed suit two years later, in 1933.
As you can see from the article below, though, she was gracious enough to leave $5000 to Vachel Lindsay's daughter Susan.
•
Bibliography
Poetry:
- Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907)
- Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911)
- Rivers to the Sea (1915)
- Love Songs (1917)
- Flame and Shadow (1920)
- Dark of the Moon (1926)
- Stars To-night (1930)
- Strange Victory (1933)
- The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale (1937)
- The Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale. 1937. Introduction by Marya Zaturenska. 1966. Collier Books. London: Collier-Macmillan Ltd., 1969.
Full Moon
My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
The ermine muffled mouth and chin;
I could not suck the moonlight in.
Harlequin in lozenges
Of love and hate, I walked in these
Striped and ragged rigmaroles;
Along the pavement my footsoles
Trod warily on living coals.
Shouldering the thoughts I loathed,
In their corrupt disguises clothed,
Morality I could not tear
From my ribs, to leave them bare
Ivory in silver air.
There I walked, and there I raged;
The spiritual savage caged
Within my skeleton, raged afresh
To feel, behind a carnal mesh,
The clean bones crying in the flesh.
(1923)
•
Elinor Wylie ... was an American poet and novelist ... "famous during her life almost as much for her ethereal beauty and personality as for her melodious, sensuous poetry."
The future Elinor Wylie became notorious ... for her multiple affairs and marriages. On the rebound from an earlier romance she met her first husband, Harvard graduate Philip Simmons Hichborn ... the son of a rear-admiral. She eloped with him and they were married [in] 1906 ... However, "Hichborn, a would-be poet, was emotionally unstable", and Elinor found herself in an unhappy marriage.
... unable to secure a divorce from Hichborn, she left her husband and son, and eloped [to England] with Horace Wylie. After ... Wylie's wife agreed to a divorce, the couple returned to the United States and lived in three different states "under the stress of social ostracism and Elinor's illness."
Elinor began spending time in literary circles in New York City — "her friends there numbered John Peale Bishop, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Van Vechten, and ... [her last husband] William Rose Benét."
... Elinor Wylie's literary output is impressive, given that her writing career lasted just eight years. In that brief period, she crowded four volumes of poems, four novels, and enough magazine articles to "make up an additional volume."
Wylie suffered from very high blood pressure all her adult life. As a result, she was prone to unbearable migraines and died of a stroke at Benét's New York apartment at the age of 43.
In his long review-essay "The Arrested Artisty of Elinor Wylie," John G. Rodwan, Jr. records the astonishing effect her work had on some very well-connected critics and fellow-writers:
“I wonder if there has ever been written a more distinguished first novel,” Sinclair Lewis mused about Jennifer Lorn (1923). Co-inhabitants of Wylie’s since-sunken literary Atlantis raised her flag especially high. Biographer Stanley Olson, who calls his subject by her first name throughout Elinor Wylie: A Life Apart, sums up critical response to Wylie’s Nets to Catch the Wind (1921) by observing: “The technical precision was widely admired, indeed, accused of being too fluent … Elinor’s imagery was startling, and then just as startling was the unrelieved confidence that ran through the book. It was staggeringly precise for a first book.” [Edna St. Vincent] Millay didn’t routinely puff her pals’ work in print; she wrote only one book review. In it she writes: “The publication recently of Elinor Wylie’s Nets to Catch the Wind is an event in the life of every poet and lover of poetry. The book is an important one.” ... both Malcolm Crowley and Wylie’s friend Edmund Wilson “placed her alongside T.S. Eliot as the representative of the happy marriage of erudition and unexpected imagery, of intense emotion tied to a deep respect for form.” Of her second book of poetry, Black Armour (1923), Wilson writes: “Even when her poems are not suffused with beauty, they are alive with intelligence; at worse, she can charm us with her distinguished manner and fascinate us with her literary dexterity.” He also judged her as “next to Edna Millay, probably the most remarkable of contemporary American poets.” Writer Carl Van Vechten, another dimmed literary light, organized a parade in New York City in commemoration of Jennifer Lorn’s publication. Van Vechten believes the novel’s achievement relates to its ambition: “Certainly the perfection of this book is miniature … but this condition should be obvious, that perfect works of art are always on a small scale.” Hamlet and Moby-Dick may be great, Van Vechten allows, but they are not perfect like Jennifer Lorn.
However, as an even greater literary luminary, Bob Dylan, remarked in "Like a Rolling Stone": "Beware doll, you’re bound to fall." The reaction, when it came, had the effect of more or less erasing her from literary history. Which is a shame, because - as even Rodwan acknowledges:
Though Elinor Wylie might not be the first-rate poet she fancied herself to be, she did write some first-rate poems that deserve to be read and remembered.
I'd second that. While the absurdity of her lifestyle may have been of a piece with the gilded era she inhabited:
Wylie didn’t lack ambition as an artist and didn’t regard her subjects as unimportant. Her artistry quite often rose to the level of her ambition. Should the right editor come along to assemble it, a thin collection of her most vibrant poems would be a fine ... monument to all her working and dreaming.
•
Bibliography
Poetry:
- Incidental Numbers (1912)
- Nets to Catch the Wind (1921)
- Black Armour (1923)
- Trivial Breath (1928)
- Angels and Earthly Creatures: A Sequence of Sonnets [aka "One Person"] (1928)
- Birthday Sonnet (1929)
- Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie (1932)
- Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie: Nets to Catch the Wind; Black Armour; Trivial Breath; Angels and Earthly Creatures; Hitherto Uncollected Poems. Ed. William Rose Benét. 1921, 1923, 1928, 1929, 1932. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.
- Last Poems of Elinor Wylie (1943)
- Last Poems of Elinor Wylie: Poems transcribed by Jane D. Wise with Other Poems Hitherto Unpublished in Book Form. Foreword by William Rose Benét. With a Tribute By Edith Olivier. 1943. Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1982.
- Selected Works of Elinor Wylie. Ed. Evelyn Helmick Hively (2005)
Novels:
- Jennifer Lorn: A Sedate Extravaganza (1923)
- The Venetian Glass Nephew (1925)
- The Orphan Angel [aka "Mortal Image"] (1926)
- Mr. Hodge & Mr. Hazard (1928)
- Collected Prose of Elinor Wylie (1933)
- Collected Prose: Jennifer Lorn; The Venetian Glass Nephew; The Orphan Angel; Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard; Fugitive Prose. Prefaces by Carl Van Vechten, Carl Van Doren, Stephen Vincent Benét, Isabel Paterson & William Rose Benét. 1933. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1946.
One could probably make not dissimilar arguments for a number of male poets of this era, once widely celebrated, now left behind by the pitiless juggernaut of modernist orthodoxy. Some may deserve their obscurity, but I can't help thinking that there are a few others who are overdue for a revival.
I've always had a bit of a soft spot for Stephen Vincent Benét, for instance, though I have to say that despite repeated efforts, much of Edwin Arlington Robinson's work - with the exception of a couple of anthology pieces - remains impenetrable to me.
•
Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943)
- Benét, Stephen Vincent. Selected Works. 2 vols. Introduction by Basil Davenport. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1942.
- Benét, Stephen Vincent. John Brown’s Body. 1928. Ed. Mabel A. Bessey. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1941.
- Benét, Stephen Vincent. Twenty-Five Short Stories. With an Appreciation, “My Brother Steve”, by William Rose Benét. New York: The Sun Dial Press, 1943.
- Benét, Stephen Vincent. The Devil and Daniel Webster. 1937. Illustrated by Harold Denison. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965.
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)
- Lindsay, Vachel. Collected Poems. 1923. Rev. ed. with illustrations by the author. 1925. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937.
Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950)
- Masters, Edgar Lee. Spoon River Anthology. 1915. Introduction by May Swenson. Collier Books. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1977.
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
- Robinson, Edward Arlington. Collected Poems. 1929. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937.
- Zabel, Morton Dauwen, ed. Selected Poems of Edward Arlington Robinson. Introduction by James Dickey. 1965. Collier Books. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. / London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1978.
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- category - American Poetry & Drama: Poetry
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