Satyriast's Beatitudes: John Rodker's Hymns

Abstract

“He is both creative and procreative, and his own volume of Hymns, which was one of the last things to come from his press, combines these two libidos to such an extent that it is necessary to keep the book hidden in the piano”—so wrote Wallace Stevens of John Rodker on September 25, 1920 (“Letters” 383). Rodker’s second book of poems, Hymns, had appeared in April. Stevens appreciated Rodker’s work as a poet and as a printer, and in writing to him on October 6, Stevens called Hymns “that admirable book” (“Letters” 383). This might give us pause. What was it about the poetry of a man chiefly remembered, if at all, as the publisher of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, that Stevens liked? Stevens was by no means unequivocal in his praise. “Rodker’s publications last winter were by all odds the most sympathetic of the year,” he enthused to Harriet Monroe on December 2. But then he qualified: “There is, of course, a cliche of the moment as well as a cliche of the past: and I rather think that Rodker merely represents the cliche of the moment” (Letters 221). Rodker’s poetry often provoked this ambivalence. Sometimes it seemed radically modern, refusing to truck with hackneyed tradition. Sometimes that modernity seemed merely superficial, representing only a passing vogue. After Richard Aldington attacked Hymns in the October issue of Poetry, Maxwell Bodenheim leapt to its defense. “Rodker is constantly groping for new methods in poetic style,” he urged, “and because he sometimes attains these roads, he must naturally arouse the anger of those who believe that poetry should stand still” (“In Defense of Rodker” 170). Even Bodenheim allows for a degree of worthy failure. In turn, Monroe appended a brief note to Bodenheim’s letter, confessing that she felt “strain, rather than achievement, in Mr. Rodker’s beautifully printed Hymns.” 1 Stevens’s praise is further complicated by the fact that Hymns appeared in April, in the spring. Perhaps Stevens was referring loosely to “last winter.” Perhaps he meant some of the other works which Rodker’s Ovid Press had been busily producing: Pound’s Fourth Canto in October 1919, Wyndham Lewis’s Fifteen Drawings in January 1920, and Eliot’s