Modernity and the pleasures of automobility in middle-class poetry of the American West, 1910–1935

Abstract

During the early twentieth century, the automobile was perhaps the most visible and symbolically freighted of the machines and technologies of modernity that so transformed the experience of time and space. While visual arts, fiction and film of the period were fascinated with the automobile, the poetry of canonical American modernism has less to say. In contrast, popular, middle-class poetry offers a direct and sustained engagement with early motoring as perceptual, somatic, kinesthetic experience – as a source of pleasures and anxieties distinctly modern. After considering some features of the contemporary discourse on automobility, this essay reads closely a body of poetry appearing in popular Western US periodicals between 1910 and 1935. In ways distinct from narrative modes, these lyric poems complexly register the desires, pleasures and anxieties of automobility as an experience of modernity, not least as a ‘return’ from urban space to an ostensibly authentic rural, pastoral or wilderness landscape.