Hart Crane Research Articles

Retratos de escritores: la écfrasis en la literatura de Augusto Monterroso

"This article examines the references to portraits of authors in four short fragments of Monterroso’s work. In an essay in La vaca, the author refers to a portrait of Tolstoy and in his diary La letra e there are references to portraits of three other authors: Søren Kierkegaard, Hart Crane and, curiously, Monterroso himself. For this analysis on the intermedial relations between literature and art, we rely on the studies of Pimentel (2003), Sager Eidt (2008) and Artigas Albarelli (2013), among others. The aim of this research is to reveal how Monterroso integrates a highly original look at these portraits in his texts. The study of ekphrasis in Monterroso opens up an unknown world and allows us to approach his work from new perspectives, particularly those related to the shifting concept of identity, both of the portrayed authors and of Monterroso himself.Keywords: intermediality; art; literature; identity; caricature"

Unpublishing as Form: Hart Crane, Jack Spicer, and the Thresholds of Periodical Publication

Abstract Rejections are a given in any poet’s career. This essay considers how rejections and the idea of the unpublished fragment might shape poetic form, how practical decisions might turn into aesthetic ones. Both Hart Crane and Jack Spicer had careers among magazines, the experiments of their writing entwined with ephemeral publishing cultures and communities. This essay explores how, through their own distinct experiments with splintered forms of the long poem, magazine rejections also created opportunities in Crane’s and Spicer’s poetry. Both poets turned practical processes into aesthetic experiments, exploring the states between writing, submission, publication, and acceptance or rejection.Yet practical decisions can turn into aesthetic ones. Indeed, the playful tension between practicality and aesthetics sits at the heart of poetic form. Crane and Spicer both incorporated rejections—unpublished poems or poems waiting on publication through various submissions—into the form of their work.

Visionary Company: Hart Crane and Modernist Periodicals

Visionary Company: Hart Crane and Modernist Periodicals

INDIAN MYTHS AS THE BASIS OF HART CRANE’S MYTHMAKING

The article focuses on the specific significance of the myths of the indigenous peoples of North and South America for the formation of a special artistic creation of Crane’s “myth to God” (the definition of the poet). The purpose of the research is to identify and analyze the ancient mythologies used by Hart Crane to construct the future of America, which will be inspired by the new myth. This new myth, according to Crane, will emerge from the synthesis of all mythologies existing on the American continent, the achievements of all cultures whose peoples participated in the discovery and development of the New World, and the incredible success in the development of civilization that the Americans achieved. Crane’s poetry space is homogeneous. Probably somewhat eclectic, but homogeneity is achieved by a purposeful orientation to the subordination of all components to the American idea, that is, Crane’s space is a poetic melting pot. In accordance with the indicated homogeneity, in conducting the research the synergy of literary methods is used: biographical, which made it possible to follow the works from the initial idea to their creation; cultural-historical, due to which the characteristic features of the era of modernism are identified in the poet’s works; comparative, which makes it possible to compare the elements of work of different poets (not only modernists, but also remotely distant literary periods); ritual-mythological, intended for direct analysis of the paradigm of Indian myths; historical-functional, which made it possible to identify the reception of Crane’s works from total non-acceptance to the granting of program status; systemic-holistic, to which all the above-mentioned methods are subordinated, because it helps to highlight the main core (idea) of works (Crane’s “myth to God”), to which all other images, motives, plots, etc. are subordinated. In Hart Crane’s works, almost every word holds a mythological potential, it always functions in its original meaning, based on which the mythical context prevails. It can be the name of Pocahontas or the name of Atlantis, stirring up myths about the Indians and the conquest of America by the whites, or about the love of Pocahontas and Captain Smith, about Plato’s mythological Atlantis and the migration of the first settlers across the Atlantic, which in Crane’s time had also become a myth. Or maybe the seagull is one of Crane’s favorite images: an ordinary bird that circles over the Brooklyn Bridge and a permanent character in Native American mythology, in which the boundlessness of freedom and the ingenious mind of a trickster are combined. That is one verbal marker of Crane – the seagull – holds and simultaneously produces several meanings, from concreteness to the symbolism of the myth, as the majestic image of the Brooklyn Bridge, which removed the mythological dimension, became the new myth created by Hart Crane.

Hart Crane’in “Carmen De Boheme” Şiirinde Figür Olarak Carmen ve Çello

Poetry and music have long been existing as parallel and interconnected fields throughout the history of art. Poetry and music bear considerable resemblance where the words, become synonymous with sounds in crafting expression. In other words, it can be said that music is essentially the embodiment of verbal expression in sound. With this similarity in mind, it is clear that Hart Crane’s overlooked poem “Carmen de Boheme,” which is to be analyzed in this study, is notably influenced by Bizet’s opera Carmen. Therefore, in this poem where the cello figure is mentioned, the cello partition of Bizet’s Carmen opera has been examined as required by the poem. This analysis delves into how these two art forms, poetry, and music, can harmonize thematically and figuratively. To explore this relationship, the poem is examined through the lens of figure-ground theory, allowing for the scrutiny of various figures that contribute to the establishment of a sensual and feminine atmosphere within it. This exploration sheds light on the intricate relationship between poetry and music, demonstrating their capacity to intertwine and enrich each other.

The Architectonics of Hope: Fragments of Life and Text in Walter Benjamin and Hart Crane

Abstract This essay develops a comparative account of Walter Benjamin’s and Hart Crane’s architectonic metaphors for text, culture, and history. I argue that theorist and poet alike employ parallel conceptual frameworks that analogize the “building” of the text to the condensation and constellation of disjunctive historical materials, thereby resisting progressivist conceptions of literary and cultural tradition. I further highlight the ways in which, for both figures, experiences of built images are ever-mediated, in contrast to certain strains of extant scholarship that interpret Crane’s poetry and Benjamin’s philosophy as dependent on the fiction of immediate affective experience, as if sensory perception were not always-already conditioned by the mediating abstractions of cognition and memory. Motivated by the personal and political struggles both men faced as outcasts, their visions of the fragmented cityscape as imbued with a complex, compositional logic of form and history ground, at once, the possibility of textual communicability and the preservation and transmission of memory—personal, collective, historical, and cultural. It is by virtue of this shared formal-historical logic—and the faith in a better future persisting therein—that I develop and defend Benjamin’s and Crane’s “architectonics of hope.”

Possessed by Poe: Hart Crane’s Tribute to il Miglior Fabbro in a Symbolist-Modernist Context

The article explores the ways in which Hart Crane, Stéphane Mallarmé and Mina Loy pay homage to Edgar Allan Poe in their respective poems. A comparative exegesis of the tributes in question reveals the connections as well as the differences between the ways the two American modernist poets and the French symbolist approach the legacy of their eminent American predecessor. A critical juxtaposition of Crane’s, Mallarmé’s and Loy’s poetic texts seems particularly worthwhile in view of the fact that Poe is regarded as one of the fathers of both French symbolism and American modernist poetry, which, in turn, are strongly interconnected. Consequently, the analysis undertaken in the present article results in broader conclusions concerning what, in the context of American and French literature, may be referred to as the symbolist-modernist continuum.

The Sound of Silence: Saint Cecilia and Celestial Music in Hart Crane and Stéphane Mallarmé

The article examines Hart Crane’s and Stéphane Mallarmé’s approaches to music as exemplified by two poems: the former’s “Sonnet” and the latter’s “Saint.” Linked by the figure of Saint Cecilia, the patroness of music, the two works do more than just explore similar motifs. In fact, both are aesthetic statements on the role of music in verse, on the poet’s predicament and on a certain concept of poetry rooted in the symbolist-modernist continuum, of which Crane’s oeuvre is an example. My analysis takes into account Boethius’s and Kepler’s theories of music, Platonism, with which symbolist poetry is inextricably linked, the concept of pure poetry and the notion of the music of the spheres, central to both poems.

Women and Sculptures: Femininity in Hart Crane’s Ekphrastic Poems

The article explores two poems by Hart Crane, “Interludium” and “To the Empress Josephine’s Statue,” both of which are examples of ekphrasis. Inspired by two sculptures of women, Gaston Lachaise’s La Montagne and Vital Debray’s statue of Joséphine de Beauharnais, the poems in question are at once representations of works of art and of femininity. It is as such that they are scrutinized in an analysis which focuses on poetry, the visual arts and femininity. The article deals with Crane’s use of ekphrasis as a genre, but also with his resections on time and space, the domains of poetry and sculpture respectively. It also delves into a number of connections evidenced in “Interludium” and “To the Empress Josephine’s Statue”: the one between creation and procreation, understood as maternity, and thus between art and femininity, as well as the ones between femininity on the one hand, and nature, mysticism, morality and history on the other.

Weldon Kees and the Poetic Landscapes of Despair

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the efforts to renew an interest in the poetry of Weldon Kees, a more or less forgotten American poet of late modernism. The main argument of this paper is that Weldon Kees, while a belated poet of modernism, successfully swerved away from the earlier poetics of modernism and proved capable of constructing a unique poetics of despair and alienation. In many ways, an heir of Hart Crane’s tragic sense of life, Kees’ misreading of Hart Crane was highly fertile and crucially conducive to the creation of his own visionary poetics. In the first part of our discussion, a more generalized overview of Kees’ poetry is developed, while in the second part, we analyze the four Robinson poems which constitute the nucleus of Kees’ existential aesthetics. Notwithstanding the fact that despair is a ubiquitous presence in Kees’ poetry, it does not manifest itself as an inhibiting force; on the contrary, while despair is inextricably linked to his tragic fate, it also acts as a major creative impetus, which helped Kees express his relationship to the world and, consequently, his place in it.

Linda Freedman, <i>William Blake and the Myth of America: From the Abolitionists to the Counterculture</i>

We seem to be living in a golden age of scholarship on Blake’s reception, and Linda Freedman’s William Blake and the Myth of America is a welcome addition to this critical canon. As Freedman notes, the recent scholarly antecedents of her study include the collections Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture (ed. Steve Clark, Tristanne Connolly, and Jason Whittaker, 2012), Blake, Modernity and Popular Culture (ed. Clark and Whittaker, 2007), and The Reception of Blake in the Orient (ed. Clark and Masashi Suzuki, 2006), as well as Colin Trodd’s monograph Visions of Blake: William Blake in the Art World, 1830–1930 (2012) and Edward Larrissy’s Blake and Modern Literature (2006). Freedman’s book, which benefits from sixteen color illustrations embedded throughout the text, also follows hot on the heels of the even more lavishly illustrated William Blake and the Age of Aquarius (ed. Stephen F. Eisenman, 2017). Yet, as she acknowledges, the contents of William Blake and the Myth of America connect it more specifically to William Blake and the Moderns, the 1982 collection edited by Robert J. Bertholf and Annette S. Levitt, which prepared the ground for the current crop of Blakean reception studies; figures from that book who reappear in Freedman’s monograph include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Theodore Roethke, Robert Duncan, and Allen Ginsberg.

‘Exploiting magnificence’: Hart Crane versus T. S. Eliot on the matter of diction

ABSTRACT Critics have long noted the fact that Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930) can be read as an optimistic response to the pessimism of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). As Langdon Hammer has persuasively argued, Crane’s species of modernism rejects the representation of early twentieth century society as in decline or decay by showing it to be in the process of ascent or becoming. Yet, the nut and bolts of Crane’s rejection have yet to be analysed in relation to Eliot’s poetry and criticism. In this paper, by contrasting passages of The Bridge and The Waste Land, I demonstrate that diction is one of the key ways Crane affirms, contra Eliot, aspects of modernity. While Eliot argued, throughout the 1920s, 30s and 40s, that accurately portraying the twentieth century required a language similar to contemporary speech, Crane flouted this tenet, instead deploying ‘magniloquence’–a term Eliot used to deprecatingly describe elements of Milton’s poetry and James Joyce’s prose. Crane’s The Bridge can be read, therefore, as a text which manages to do what Eliot thought not only impracticable, but impossible: represent the modern world resplendently.

Miriam Fuchs, Life Writing, and Life

Miriam Fuchs, Life Writing, and Life Craig Howes (bio) Others contributors to this collection will movingly and accurately capture what Miriam was like as a coeditor, coauthor, crew member, and dear friend. Except for the paddling, I knew her in all of these roles, but I will begin this Biography tribute with some words about her as a researcher and scholar. Her biography on the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa English Department website listed her principal interests as modernism and modern American literature, twentieth century women’s literature, autobiography theory and criticism, and “all modes of life writing.” Her academic journey explains how her interests became her recognized expertise. She received her BA in 1970 from SUNY Buffalo, a major center for the study of modern and contemporary literature. The title of her 1979 NYU doctoral dissertation was “‘Persistent Pattern and Significant Form’: The Conceptual and Formal Impact of The Waste Land on Selected Anti-Realistic American Novels,” and she would go on to publish essays on T. S. Eliot, William Gaddis, Nathanael West, and Hart Crane. What she soon became best known for, however, was her work on women and modernism. She published extensively on Djuna Barnes and H.D. She edited and included her own work in Marguerite Young, Our Darling: Tributes and Essays. And in 1989 she coedited with Ellen G. Friedman the collection Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Their introduction has been called “practically a monograph” in itself, and the volume played an important role in “the continuing feminist project of the recovery and foregrounding of women writers.” This landmark collection was reprinted in 2014 by Princeton University Press as part of its Legacy Library series. In the mid-1980s, Miriam’s interest in modernism brought her to Hawaiʻi for a seminar conducted by the noted William Butler Yeats and Hart Crane scholar John Unterecker. Shortly afterwards, she resigned her associate professorship at Elizabeth Seton College and settled permanently here. For Miriam, moving to a world center for modernism studies like Honolulu after years of toiling in the literary and cultural backwater of New York City was an easy decision to make—after all, Jack Unterecker and Leon Edel had already done the same thing. But I suspect that someone named Alan Holzman probably had something to do with it as well. She [End Page 135] spent her first years as a visiting assistant professor in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa—she always remembered who was collegial, and who was . . . otherwise. She came on the tenure track in 1989, in 1993 she was tenured and promoted early, and she became a full professor in 2003. As a lifewriting scholar, Miriam’s status is indisputable. Part of the University of Wisconsin Press’s renowned Studies in Autobiography series, her 2004 book, The Text Is Myself: Women’s Life Writing and Catastrophe, fulfilled Susanna Egan’s prophetic assessment: “Miriam Fuchs is breaking new ground. Her remarkable exploration of catastrophe writing will be important in autobiography studies and fascinating to all who care about self-representation as a mode of survival.” This book brought Miriam’s many interests together—modernism, women’s literature, autobiographical fiction, art, and Hawaiʻi and the Pacific—in her outstanding opening chapter on the diaries of Queen Liliʻuokalani, but also in the book’s dedication: “To the women paddlers—Lanikai, Kumulau, Bora Bora.” I’ll let other contributors to this tribute address the autobiographical dimensions of a book entitled The Text Is Myself, mentioning only its major theme: “however much the past may be shaped into a discernable storyline, it is the uncertain present that preoccupies these writers.” And of course, Miriam had a long and profoundly influential impact upon Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and the Center for Biographical Research. Cynthia G. Franklin offers some personal and detailed remarks on their collaborations as coeditors and friends; let me set the stage with an origin story, and a few personal notes. When I took over as editor of Biography in 1994, I asked Miriam to replace me as one of the literary editors; a year later, she was listed as “literary editor in chief...

Mirroring Practice: Poets Respond to Jasper Johns

Mirroring Practice: Poets Respond to Jasper Johns Brian Teare (bio) The first opportunity I had to see a Johns retrospective—at SFMOMA in 2013—I declined. Instead I spent several afternoons in the Jay Defeo retrospective hung in galleries opposite his. That I preferred Defeo had little to do with Johns, whose work I didn’t know. I associated his oeuvre with the male, white, monied bias of museums, and left it at that. I remain grateful I didn’t give his retrospective my time then—that Defeo show was life-changing! And because by the time I was first asked to consider writing about Johns, I had grown less dismissive, if not less wary. Researching Agnes Martin’s art and writing had introduced me to the art world and milieu of Johns’s early years in lower Manhattan, and had resulted in a book, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. That might be why Carlos Basualdo, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Sarah B. Vogelman, exhibition assistant, asked me to collaborate. We met in the PMA’s curatorial offices during the summer of 2019. Carlos envisioned something elaborate that would take place live in the PMA’s galleries during their half of Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, the other half of which the Whitney would host. He wanted poets to write Johns-inspired poems, since some of his most poignant work of the 1960s references either Modernist poet Hart Crane or New York School poet Frank O’Hara, MOMA curator, art critic, and friend. Carlos envisioned readings that would be performative and perhaps even governed by chance, in honor of John Cage, an early interlocutor and another friend. I was about to leave Philadelphia and couldn’t see how I’d pull anything together from a distance; and though I’d started to familiarize myself with Johns’s long career, I couldn’t yet see what his work might mean to me. I said no with some regret. Two years later I heard again from the PMA, this time from Linnea West, Manager of Adult Public Programs. COVID-19 had delayed the opening of Mind/Mirror, and the museum had decided to move online most of their programming around the retrospective. Would I be interested, Linnea asked, in writing Johns-inspired work, commissioning new poetry from three other poets, and organizing an online reading? This time I said yes, knowing already who I’d ask. Unlike me, Rick Barot, Khadijah Queen, and Cole Swensen have practiced ekphrastic art for most of their careers. I consider myself apprentice to their divergent approaches, the distinctive ways they place poetry in the expanded field of abstract visual art. In bringing us together to work under the sign of Johns, I hoped that our disparate ekphrastic strategies—meditative lyric, gestural collage, lyric essay—might mirror the heterogeneity of Johns’s own career. I was not disappointed. Mind/Mirror prompted some viewers [End Page 94] to ask how Johns, an avowedly apolitical establishment artist, could be relevant now. Our work highlights the fact that poetry at its root—poiein—means to make, and extends the long lively dialogue between painters and poets that includes Johns and O’Hara. Importantly, though, our work expands that dialogue beyond the white gay male coterie that fostered Johns’s early work and includes critical inquiry into the limits of poetic language that mirrors his paint and his canonization. We treat his paintings, biography, and milieu as subject matter, and also treat poetic language as a material with plastic properties like those of paint. Our poems mirror his painting sometimes through traditional representational means—description, figuration, narration—and at other times through radical abstracting tactics—processes of layering, cutting, and scraping—and at other times through their appearance on the page as visual icons. One kind of ekphrasis, Barot argues in “Cross-Hatch,” “is a catalyst for observation, association, and dream . . . like the flaneur’s arc of walking, seeing, and reverie.” Another kind of ekphrasis, Queen suggests in “Collage, unfinished,” “is to make / a mess—unpolished / or profane,” to engage with “the complex play of destruction.” Another kind of ekphrasis, offers...

“Those blessed structures”: Robert Lowell’s Architectural Aesthetic

Abstract This article reads Robert Lowell’s poetry in terms of its engagement with architecture. It argues that at crucial moments in American history, and in Lowell’s life, the architectural environment of the various places he called home (including Boston, Maine, Ohio, New York, and Kent, England) offered a perspective, a language, and a set of forms through which to negotiate personal, historical, and cultural change. This is a process that he achieved, in part, with reference to the work of other poets including Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, and William Carlos Williams. By moving beyond a general reading of place, and towards a specific and granular reading of architectural figuration, I show that Lowell is able to contemplate and eventually to restructure the relationship between tradition and innovation—a process that is vital to his developing poetics.

The Poet’s Mistake by Erica McAlpine.

<i>The Poet’s Mistake</i> by Erica McAlpine.

Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine

<i>Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the</i> Dial <i>Magazine</i>

Image as a Symbol: The Symbolic Connotations of Brooklyn Bridge in the Poems of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Brooklyn Bridge,” Hart Crane’s “To Brooklyn Bridge” and Marianne Moore’s “Granite and Steel”

This study expounds the symbolic significance of “Brooklyn Bridge” as a main image in the poetry of Mayakovsky, Crane and Moore. From a Marxist perspective, the Russian Futurist poet Mayakovsky believes that Brooklyn image foreshadows the ideas of class inequality in America. Moreover, it suggests the poet’s inherent belief in St. Augustine’s connotations of the city of Cain. In “To Brooklyn Bridge,” the American poet Crane proves that the image of “Brooklyn Bridge” turns to be a standpoint at which he indulges in self-meditations and a poetic experience related to religious mysticism. Through her poetic style which is described as that of “Wild decorum,” the American poet Moore believes that Brooklyn image is symbolic of the gloomy nature of a materialistic life in America. Consequently, she shares with Crane the same religious perspective stressing that the present image of Brooklyn Bridge stands for man’s original sin. Her viewpoint shows that the image of “Brooklyn Bridge” can raise philosophical views related to David Hume’s skeptical materialism. Thus, the researcher’s analysis proves that the symbolic connotations of “Brooklyn Bridge” as a main image in the three poems leads to a unified poetic experience.

Hart Crane: The "Architectural Art"

Hart Crane:The "Architectural Art" Jo Gill (bio) In the near-century since the publication of The Bridge (1930), Hart Crane has been widely recognized as the poet of urban modernity, or, in his own words, as a "suitable Pindar for the dawn of the machine age."1 He has been acclaimed as celebrant and critic, by turn, of America's myth of itself and as a pioneer cartographer of the queer spaces of the modern metropolis.2 Paradoxically, perhaps, it is his rendering of the late nineteenthcentury Brooklyn Bridge (designed by John Roebling, started in 1869 and opened in 1883), which has been taken as central to his vision of early twentieth-century America's tensile complexity. I don't demur from this position; but I do argue that for Crane it was not only the Bridge as manifestation in stone and steel of his nation's past, present and future, that mattered. As important were the larger technologies, practices, and discourses of architecture which produced the Bridge, determined his experience of it, and shaped his understanding of its significance. Another way of putting this is to say that the Bridge (and The Bridge) are necessary, but not entirely sufficient, components of Crane's construction of modernity and that to understand his emerging vision of America, we need to look to his larger engagement with contemporary architecture in all of its variety and potency. The purpose of this article, then, is to bring Crane's architectural interests to the fore, to address the specificity of architectural allusion in his poetry, and to move beyond an assessment of the Bridge's symbolic value and towards a more granular reading of the way architecture functions across his oeuvre, of the forms it takes, and the meanings it assumes. It goes without saying that poetry provides Crane with a medium in which to [End Page 1] discuss architecture. More importantly, architecture provides him with a way of thinking and speaking about poetry. First in early poems from White Buildings (1926) and subsequently in The Bridge, he engages in an assessment of architectural effect while also testing the capacity of poetry to deliver such an account. So, while The Bridge is a poem about the Brooklyn Bridge, it is also a poem about poetry. Crane is not alone among his contemporaries in reading architecture as an important index of the age.3 Wallace Stevens's idea of order derives in part from his understanding of the aesthetics of architectural modernity (see, for example, the steel crossbeam in the closing stanza of "The Motive for Metaphor," the austere style of "Anecdote of the Jar," and the meditation on use and ornament in "Architecture").4 Carl Sandburg, from his Chicago Poems (1916) onwards, portrays the materiality of the city's distinctive architecture. In William Carlos Williams's work ("Flight to the City" and "Young Love," for example, from Spring and All of 1923), architecture's new dynamism frees the imagination.5 Contemporary little magazines such as Others frequently featured poetry on architectural themes, including Sherwood Anderson's "Song of the Soul of Chicago" (1917) which echoes Sandburg and anticipates Crane in its opening lines: "On the bridges, on the bridges, swooping and rising, whirling and circling. Back to the bridges, always the bridges."6 Each of these poets grapples with new ideas about form and function or, in architectural critic Sigfried Giedion's terms, with "the ways in which space, volumes, and materials existed for feeling."7 But it is Crane for whom the association between poetry and architecture is most potent. For Crane, the two disciplines, poetry and architecture, are mutually constitutive and interchangeable. In his 1930 essay, "Modern Poetry," he asserts that "poetry is an architectural art."8 And at times, for example in the closing section, "Atlantis," of The Bridge, his prolonged meditation on the properties of the Bridge is couched almost entirely in the language that one might use to describe the properties of poetry. He speaks of its upward sweep (the reach towards transcendence), of its use of line and light ("[l]ong tiers of windows" which "crown the hill and gleam"), of sound (whispering, sibylline voices), pattern (flicker, stream...

Decadence in the Age of Modernism ed. by Kate Hext and Alex Murray

Reviewed by: Decadence in the Age of Modernism ed. by Kate Hext and Alex Murray Richard A. Kaye Decadence in the Age of Modernism. Ed. Kate Hext and Alex Murray. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. $54.95 (cloth); $54.95 (eBook). This collection brings new attention to modernism's self-repression—and the repression by critics—of its origins in fin-de-siècle decadent poetics. Examining a tantalizing range of Anglo-American writers, the contributors variously make a case for decadent writing as entwined with modernist achievements. Running through the volume, too, is an emphasis on the ways in which decadent literature determined a queer poetics that stood astride modernism in the writing of familiar writers such as Djuna Barnes, Ronald Firbank, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, Mina Loy, H.D., Hart Crane, and Carl Van Vechten as well as lesser-known figures such as Margaret Sackville, Ada Leverson, Bruce Nugent, and Donald Evans. The trio of decadent/queer/modernist concerns informs the essay by Vincent Sherry, whose 2018 book Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence is itself a pioneering work tracing the neglected sinews linking modernist artistry and decadent aesthetics. Here Sherry considers the legacy of decadence in the fiction of Woolf, Joyce, Barnes, and Beckett, in which queer, minor characters (St. John Alaric Hurst of Woolf's The Voyage Out, Baron Felix in Barnes's Nightwood) wander like ghosts from the Wildean past. Drawing on the argument of Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Sherry suggests that these writers found considerable value in forgoing a viable, erotically normative future. The modernist reliance on a decadent midVictorian legacy informs Howard Booth's essay on Lawrence's adoption of Swinburnean tropes in his fiction, particularly Swinburne's use of the Pan figure and the theme of nympholepsy, the belief originating with the Ancient Greeks that human beings could be inhabited by nymphs. For Lawrence, such tropes "imagine a resolution of the split and division between humankind and the world" (186). In later fiction such as St. Mawr (1924), however, Lawrence will come to see such breaches as unbridgeable as he sought to conceive of a futurity beyond or without modernity. [End Page 797] Wilde's imprisonment for "gross indecency" casts a shadow over much of this volume. Nick Freeman explores post-1895 writers such as John Edmund, Max Beerbohm, and Hector Hugh Munro (Saki), all of whom borrowed the stylistic strategies of decadent writing while dispensing with, through playful satire and elegant evasiveness, its immoral or scandalous scenarios. Kristin Mahoney revisits the career of Wilde's friend Ada Leverson, whose parodic fictions provided a light critique of dandyism even as they sought to find a place in decadence for feminist aspirations. Joseph Bristow brings fresh insight to the legacy of late-Victorian aestheticism in the work of another feminist, the poet and pacifist Margaret Sackville. Sarah Parker explores the Baudelairean elements in the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who sought to invigorate the spirit of Les Fleurs du Mal (she was one of the volume's first female translators) with irony, humor, and a markedly American idiom. This volume resurrects a number of forgotten modernists indebted to the decadent movement. Douglas Mao discusses the literary career of the Greenwich Village poet Donald Evans, whose press Claire Marie published Stein's writing. Mao considers the place of "cuteness" and "naughtiness" in Evans and Stein's work, two features of 1890s sensibility that become denigrated in an age of high modernist seriousness and austerity. Kirsten MacLeod offers a fine reading of Van Vechten's 1923 Jazz-age novel The Blind Bow-Boy, where decadent and camp aesthetics commingle (the novel's title is a campily lascivious reference to a line in Romeo and Juliet: "… the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt shaft"). Michèle Mendelssohn draws on original archival research to explore the life and work of the African-American writer Bruce Nugent, whom Mendelssohn describes as "one of the few African American writers" of the Harlem Renaissance "with the audacity to challenge homophobic prejudice and explicitly portray interracial sensuality" (a characterization that perhaps overly...