London, Paris, and New York all have their chroniclers, and now Chicago gets her due. A city of enormous contemporary literary vitality, it also was the home of a profoundly generative burst of creativity that helped shape modernism as we know it. Robert Alexander locates this efflorescence in its historical context, and then lets the participants speak for themselves. Part oral history, part anthology, and assembled from names well known and not (including Ford Madox Ford, Sherwood Anderson, W.E.B. DuBois, Edgar Lee Masters, and Eunice Tietjens), in A Robin’s Egg Renaissance, Alexander has assembled a chorus of voices that shaped modernist aesthetics on the shores of Lake Michigan, with after effects in places and years far beyond.
London, Paris, and New York all have their chroniclers, and now Chicago gets her due. A city of enormous contemporary literary vitality, it also was the home of a profoundly generative burst of creativity that helped shape modernism as we know it. Robert Alexander locates this efflorescence in its historical context, and then lets the participants speak for themselves. Part oral history, part anthology, and assembled from names well known and not (including Ford Madox Ford, Sherwood Anderson, W.E.B. DuBois, Edgar Lee Masters, and Eunice Tietjens), in A Robin’s Egg Renaissance, Alexander has assembled a chorus of voices that shaped modernist aesthetics on the shores of Lake Michigan, with after effects in places and years far beyond.
A Robin's Egg Renaissance: Chicago Modernism & the Great War
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A Robin's Egg Renaissance: Chicago Modernism & the Great War
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Overview
London, Paris, and New York all have their chroniclers, and now Chicago gets her due. A city of enormous contemporary literary vitality, it also was the home of a profoundly generative burst of creativity that helped shape modernism as we know it. Robert Alexander locates this efflorescence in its historical context, and then lets the participants speak for themselves. Part oral history, part anthology, and assembled from names well known and not (including Ford Madox Ford, Sherwood Anderson, W.E.B. DuBois, Edgar Lee Masters, and Eunice Tietjens), in A Robin’s Egg Renaissance, Alexander has assembled a chorus of voices that shaped modernist aesthetics on the shores of Lake Michigan, with after effects in places and years far beyond.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781945680670 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | White Pine Press |
| Publication date: | 11/14/2023 |
| Pages: | 350 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
Minneapolis, MinnesotaDate of Birth:
August 23, 1952Place of Birth:
Chicago, IllinoisEducation:
B.A. in Russian Language and Creative Writing, Michigan State University, 1976Read an Excerpt
Introduction As with most cultural “renaissances,” it is difficult to find a point of origin for this one. Vincent Starrett has suggested, only half in jest, that the “first note of revolt” was sounded on the night of November 25, 1910, when Mary Garden’s Dance of the Seven Veils in Salomé at the Auditorium Theatre was halted by the Chief of Police. Said Chief Steward, describing Miss Garden’s performance, “she wallowed around like a cat in a bed of catnip.” —Jackson R. Bryer On March 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson became the 28th President of the United States. Only the second Democrat to be elected to that august position since the Civil War, he was also the first Southerner since James K. Polk to move into the White House, excepting Andrew Johnson after Lincoln was assassinated. (Lincoln was born in Kentucky but raised in Illinois, and few Southerners outside of Kentucky would have claimed him as one of their own). The Republican Party had split in the summer of 1912 and spawned the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party, named for its candidate Theodore Roosevelt, and the Electoral College had given Wilson the nod, though the combined popular vote for Taft and Roosevelt would easily have beaten him had circumstances been different. It was a watershed moment for the country, as Wilson—known for his speech-making ability—duly noted in his inaugural comments: There has been a change of government. It began two years ago, when the House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive majority. It has now been completed. The Senate about to assemble will also be Democratic. The offices of President and Vice-President have been put into the hands of Democrats. What does the change mean? . . . It means much more than the mere success of a party. . . . The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people. . . . Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without weakening or sentimentalizing it. There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been “Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,” while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves. . . . We have come now to the sober second thought. The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration. . . . Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto. Meanwhile in Chicago, a forty-ish poet named Harriet Monroe was also beginning a new endeavor. During the previous August she had sent out a letter to poets in England and America whose work intrigued her, soliciting submissions to the magazine—Poetry: A Magazine of Verse—whose first issue she would bring out in October 1912, shortly before the election which brought Wilson to the White House. Arthur Ficke, a lawyer and poet from Davenport, Iowa, responded to Monroe’s message: “Your letter of yesterday has deeply interested me, and I shall be very glad to do anything I can to assist you. The project has a fine ring to it—I rejoice to see that the Bull Moose movement is not confined to politics.” In his speech accepting the nomination as the Progressive candidate for President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt said that “the time is ripe, and overripe, for a genuine Progressive movement, nation-wide and justice-loving . . . representing all that is best in the hopes, beliefs, and aspirations of the plain people who make up the immense majority of the rank and file of both the old parties.” Roosevelt ended his speech with the famous words, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” Arthur Ficke was prescient in conjoining the two movements—one which was attempting to remake the politics of the nation, and the other which would be successful in remaking the established poetic idiom. While Progressivism, both Republican and Democratic, would falter and die in the face of the Great War—and the U.S. involvement in it—Anglo-American modernism would transform contemporary poetry and set the stage for the rest of the century’s work. Two Chicago magazines, Poetry and the Little Review, were instrumental in this endeavor. Five years later, in a retrospective essay, Monroe outlined what that endeavor consisted of: What is the new poetry? and wherein does it differ from the old? The difference is not in mere details of form. . . . It is not merely in diction, though the truly modern poet rejects the so-called “poetic” shifts of language—the deems, ’neaths, forsooths, etc., the inversions and high-sounding rotundities, familiar to his predecessors. . . . These things are important, but the difference goes deeper than details of form, strikes through them to fundamental integrities. The new poetry strives for a concrete and immediate realization of life; it would discard the theory, the abstraction, the remoteness, found in all classics not of the first order. It is less vague, less verbose, less eloquent, than most poetry of the Victorian period and much work of earlier periods. It has set before itself an ideal of absolute simplicity and sincerity—an ideal which implies an individual, unstereotyped diction; and an individual, unstereotyped rhythm. . . . In presenting the concrete object or the concrete environment, whether these be beautiful or ugly, it seeks to give more precisely the emotion arising from them, and thus widens immeasurably the scope of the art. . . . Great poetry has always been written in the language of contemporary speech, and its theme, even when legendary, has always borne a direct relation with contemporary thought, contemporary imaginative and spiritual life. It is this direct relation which the more progressive modern poets are trying to restore. We should note here Monroe’s use of the word “progressive,” a term also used to describe the change-oriented politics of the era. The growth of this poetic movement in the five years between 1912 and 1917—and the political context within which it flourished—is what this book is about. New York and London are well-known as places where modernist literature developed—but Chicago, the City on the Lake, also played a central role in those years, in large part because of two women, Harriet Monroe and Margaret Anderson, who conceived and nurtured two of the most important literary magazines of the era. The world of bohemian Chicago in those days is not so well known as New York or London—and a century later, it still deserves our attention. Introduction As with most cultural “renaissances,” it is difficult to find a point of origin for this one. Vincent Starrett has suggested, only half in jest, that the “first note of revolt” was sounded on the night of November 25, 1910, when Mary Garden’s Dance of the Seven Veils in Salomé at the Auditorium Theatre was halted by the Chief of Police. Said Chief Steward, describing Miss Garden’s performance, “she wallowed around like a cat in a bed of catnip.” —Jackson R. Bryer On March 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson became the 28th President of the United States. Only the second Democrat to be elected to that august position since the Civil War, he was also the first Southerner since James K. Polk to move into the White House, excepting Andrew Johnson after Lincoln was assassinated. (Lincoln was born in Kentucky but raised in Illinois, and few Southerners outside of Kentucky would have claimed him as one of their own). The Republican Party had split in the summer of 1912 and spawned the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party, named for its candidate Theodore Roosevelt, and the Electoral College had given Wilson the nod, though the combined popular vote for Taft and Roosevelt would easily have beaten him had circumstances been different. It was a watershed moment for the country, as Wilson—known for his speech-making ability—duly noted in his inaugural comments: There has been a change of government. It began two years ago, when the House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive majority. It has now been completed. The Senate about to assemble will also be Democratic. The offices of President and Vice-President have been put into the hands of Democrats. What does the change mean? . . . It means much more than the mere success of a party. . . . The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people. . . . Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without weakening or sentimentalizing it. There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been “Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,” while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves. . . . We have come now to the sober second thought. The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration. . . . Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto. Meanwhile in Chicago, a forty-ish poet named Harriet Monroe was also beginning a new endeavor. During the previous August she had sent out a letter to poets in England and America whose work intrigued her, soliciting submissions to the magazine—Poetry: A Magazine of Verse—whose first issue she would bring out in October 1912, shortly before the election which brought Wilson to the White House. Arthur Ficke, a lawyer and poet from Davenport, Iowa, responded to Monroe’s message: “Your letter of yesterday has deeply interested me, and I shall be very glad to do anything I can to assist you. The project has a fine ring to it—I rejoice to see that the Bull Moose movement is not confined to politics.” In his speech accepting the nomination as the Progressive candidate for President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt said that “the time is ripe, and overripe, for a genuine Progressive movement, nation-wide and justice-loving . . . representing all that is best in the hopes, beliefs, and aspirations of the plain people who make up the immense majority of the rank and file of both the old parties.” Roosevelt ended his speech with the famous words, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” Arthur Ficke was prescient in conjoining the two movements—one which was attempting to remake the politics of the nation, and the other which would be successful in remaking the established poetic idiom. While Progressivism, both Republican and Democratic, would falter and die in the face of the Great War—and the U.S. involvement in it—Anglo-American modernism would transform contemporary poetry and set the stage for the rest of the century’s work. Two Chicago magazines, Poetry and the Little Review, were instrumental in this endeavor. Five years later, in a retrospective essay, Monroe outlined what that endeavor consisted of: What is the new poetry? and wherein does it differ from the old? The difference is not in mere details of form. . . . It is not merely in diction, though the truly modern poet rejects the so-called “poetic” shifts of language—the deems, ’neaths, forsooths, etc., the inversions and high-sounding rotundities, familiar to his predecessors. . . . These things are important, but the difference goes deeper than details of form, strikes through them to fundamental integrities. The new poetry strives for a concrete and immediate realization of life; it would discard the theory, the abstraction, the remoteness, found in all classics not of the first order. It is less vague, less verbose, less eloquent, than most poetry of the Victorian period and much work of earlier periods. It has set before itself an ideal of absolute simplicity and sincerity—an ideal which implies an individual, unstereotyped diction; and an individual, unstereotyped rhythm. . . . In presenting the concrete object or the concrete environment, whether these be beautiful or ugly, it seeks to give more precisely the emotion arising from them, and thus widens immeasurably the scope of the art. . . . Great poetry has always been written in the language of contemporary speech, and its theme, even when legendary, has always borne a direct relation with contemporary thought, contemporary imaginative and spiritual life. It is this direct relation which the more progressive modern poets are trying to restore. We should note here Monroe’s use of the word “progressive,” a term also used to describe the change-oriented politics of the era. The growth of this poetic movement in the five years between 1912 and 1917—and the political context within which it flourished—is what this book is about. New York and London are well-known as places where modernist literature developed—but Chicago, the City on the Lake, also played a central role in those years, in large part because of two women, Harriet Monroe and Margaret Anderson, who conceived and nurtured two of the most important literary magazines of the era. The world of bohemian Chicago in those days is not so well known as New York or London—and a century later, it still deserves our attention. 10. W. E. B. Du Bois from The Souls of Black Folk The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation. Today, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fiber of the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully? For this much all men know: despite compromise, war, and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South the black farmers are bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime. That is the large legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not. I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there in the King’s Highway sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveler’s footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now behold a century new for the duty and the deed. The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line. * * * A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cotton-fields. This, then, is the Cotton Kingdom— the shadow of a marvelous dream. And where is the King? Perhaps this is he — the sweating plough-man, tilling his eighty acres with two lean mules, and fighting a hard battle with debt. So we sit musing, until, as we turn a corner on the sandy road, there comes a fairer scene suddenly in view— a neat cottage snugly ensconced by the road, and near it a little store. A tall bronzed man rises from the porch as we hail him, and comes out to our carriage. He is six feet in height, with a sober face that smiles gravely. He walks too straight to be a tenant—yes, he owns two hundred and forty acres. “The land is run down since the boom-days of eighteen hundred and fifty,” he explains, and cotton is low. Three black tenants live on his place, and in his little store he keeps a small stock of tobacco, snuff, soap, and soda, for the neighborhood. Here is his gin-house with new machinery just installed. Three hundred bales of cotton went through it last year. Two children he has sent away to school. Yes, he says sadly, he is getting on, but cotton is down to four cents; I know how Debt sits staring at him. Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of the Cotton Kingdom have not wholly disappeared. We plunge even now into great groves of oak and towering pine, with an undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery. This was the “home-house” of the Thompsons— slave-barons who drove their coach and four in the merry past. All is silence now, and ashes, and tangled weeds. The owner put his whole fortune into the rising cotton industry of the fifties, and with the falling prices of the eighties he packed up and stole away. Yonder is another grove, with unkempt lawn, great magnolias, and grass-grown paths. The Big House stands in half-ruin, its great front door staring blankly at the street, and the back part grotesquely restored for its black tenant. A shabby, well-built Negro he is, unlucky and irresolute. He digs hard to pay rent to the white girl who owns the remnant of the place. She married a policeman, and lives in Savannah. * * * This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy— the rich granary whence potatoes and corn and cotton poured out to the famished and ragged Confederate troops as they battled for a cause lost long before 1861. Sheltered and secure, it became the place of refuge for families, wealth, and slaves. Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to toll. The red-clay sub-soil already had begun to peer above the loam. The harder the slaves were driven the more careless and fatal was their farming. Then came the revolution of war and Emancipation, the bewilderment of Reconstruction— and now, what is the Egypt of the Confederacy, and what meaning has it for the nation's weal or woe? It is a land of rapid contrasts and of curiously mingled hope and pain. Here sits a pretty blue-eyed quadroon hiding her bare feet; she was married only last week, and yonder in the field is her dark young husband, hoeing to support her, at thirty cents a day without board. Across the way is Gatesby, brown and tall, lord of two thousand acres shrewdly won and held. There is a store conducted by his black son, a blacksmith shop, and a ginnery. Five miles below here is a town owned and controlled by one white New Englander. He owns almost a Rhode Island county, with thousands of acres and hundreds of black laborers. Their cabins look better than most, and the farm, with machinery and fertilizers, is much more business-like than any in the county, although the manager drives hard bargains in wages. When now we turn and look five miles above, there on the edge of town are five houses of prostitutes, two of blacks and three of whites; and in one of the houses of the whites a worthless black boy was harbored too openly two years ago; so he was hanged for rape. And here, too, is the high whitewashed fence of the “stockade,” as the county prison is called; the white folks say it is ever full of black criminals— the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor. 15. from Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Ezra Pound A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste An “Image” is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term “complex” rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application. It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art. It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works. All this, however, some may consider open to debate. The immediate necessity is to tabulate A LIST OF DON’TS for those beginning to write verses. But I cannot put all of them into Mosaic negative. To begin with, consider the three rules recorded by Mr. Flint, not as dogma—never consider anything as dogma—but as the result of long contemplation, which, even if it is someone else’s contemplation, may be worth consideration. Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their meters. Language Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions. Don’t retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths. What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow. Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music. Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it. Don’t allow “influence” to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of “dove-gray” hills, or else it was “pearl-pale,” I cannot remember. Use either no ornament or good ornament. Rhythm and Rhyme Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e. g., Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare—if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels and consonants. It is not necessary that a poem should rely on its music, but if it does rely on its music that music must be such as will delight the expert. Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them. Don’t imagine that a thing will “go” in verse just because it’s too dull to go in prose. Don’t be “viewy”—leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don’t be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it. When Shakespeare talks of the “Dawn in russet mantle clad” he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents. Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap. The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on being a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman class work. Freshmen in poetry are unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable classroom. They are “all over the shop.” Is it any wonder “the public is indifferent to poetry”? Don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don’t make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause. In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others. Naturally, your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural sound, or their meaning. It is improbable that, at the start, you will be able to get a rhythm-structure strong enough to affect them very much, though you may fall a victim to all sorts of false stopping due to line ends and caesurae. . . . A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure; it need not be bizarre or curious, but it must be well used if used at all. . . . Good prose will do you no harm, and there is good discipline to be had by trying to write it.
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"The reader sees the genesis of modern poetic aesthetics and progressive politics unfolding simultaneously through an array of perspectives."—Holly Iglesias