The Degenerate Muse

Abstract

America’s modernist poets came of age in a nation struggling to redefine its relationship with poetry and with nature. In the early twentieth century, Darwinian science dictated that as countries became more civilized, their citizens ceased to engage in the invigorating struggles against nature that kept them fit. Civilization led to the medical condition known as degeneration, the morbid deviation of men from a “normal type” that, as Max Simon Nordau argued, was evident in the modernist literature that both reflected and spread the sickness. Eager to save America from becoming a degenerate Europe, Progressive Era reformers prescribed contact with American nature as a means to keep the American race healthy. In order for nature to serve as an antidote for degeneration, however, it needed to remain a realm of hard facts free of all fictions. The American turn back to nature in the early twentieth century had profound consequences for America’s modernist poets. Like other Progressive Era Americans, Harriet Monroe, Ezra Pound, and Marianne Moore heeded the American call to head back to nature for the sake of the nation’s health, but they faced a difficult challenge. Turning to American nature as a means to combat degeneration, they needed to create a form of American poetry that could cure degeneration rather than cause it. Monroe’s, Pound’s, and Moore’s struggles to create and publish poems that that could resist degeneration by keeping faith with American nature influenced ideas about what American poetry should be and do in the twentieth century.