A Forgotten Literary Give-and-Take

Abstract

THE EGOIST, AN INDIVIDUALIST REVIEW, edited by Dora Marsden, BA with assistant editors Richard Aldington and Leonard A. Compton-Rickett, began publication on Thursday 1 January 1914, as a bimonthly. Important writers who contributed to the periodical were James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Marianne Moore, and many other English, American, and European authors of distinction. Some aspects of the work of some of these writers have been overlooked. There is, among much else, a bitter controversy over the merits, or lack thereof, of recent United States poetry, begun in the November–December 1918 number (5:139) by Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, in response to an article, ‘Recent United States Poetry’, by Edgar Alfred Jepson in The English Review for May 1918 (26:419–28). Jepson, a prolific writer of popular novels, has not attracted much critical notice. He is not, for example, in the recently-published Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Jepson wrote, in part, of a ‘new school of poetry – United States poetry’ that it ‘has its accredited masters, stamped authentic by the award of prizes for poems by the school itself. They are its chief representatives; their poetry is the fine flower of its growth: Messrs. Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robert Frost’ (419). Miss Monroe had responded to Jepson's suggestion in the English Review that he write an appreciation of recent United States poetry by sending him twenty-five numbers of Poetry, marking a number of them as typical of recent United States poetry. He elected to quote and damn poems by them, saying of Frost's ‘Snow’, for example, that it was no more than ‘maundering dribble’ (425). The rest of his criticism was in the same brutally sarcastic vein. At the same time, however, he highly praised Ezra Pound and, especially T. S. Eliot. He concluded, after quoting Eliot's ‘La Figlia che Piange’, by writing, ‘It is incredible that this lovely poem should have been published in Poetry in the year in which the school awarded the prize to that lumbering fakement, “All Life in a Life” ’ by Edgar Lee Masters (427, 428).