Laura Riding Research Articles

The birth of New Criticism: conflict and conciliation in the early work of William Empson, I. A. Richards, Laura Riding, and Robert Graves

Amid competing claims about who first developed the theories and practices that became known as New Criticism - the critical method that rose alongside Modernism - literary historians have generally given the lion's share of credit to William Empson and I.A. Richards. In The Birth of New Criticism Donald Childs challenges this consensus and provides a new and authoritative narrative of the movement's origins. At the centre stand Robert Graves and Laura Riding, two poet-critics who have been written out of the history of New Criticism. Childs brings to light the long-forgotten early criticism of Graves to detail the ways in which his interpretive methods and ideas evolved into the practice of close reading, demonstrating that Graves played such a fundamental part in forming both Empson's and Richards's critical thinking that the story of twentieth-century literary criticism must be re-evaluated and re-told. Childs also examines the important influence that Riding's work had on Graves, Empson, and Richards, establishing the importance of this long-neglected thinker and critic. A provocative and cogently argued work, The Birth of New Criticism is both an important intellectual history of the movement and a sharply observed account of the cultural politics of its beginnings and legacy.

Refracting the Religious: Reworking Origins in H.D., Djuna Barnes and Laura (Riding) Jackson

Cet article explore la relation dialectique aux questions religieuses et spirituelles dans l’œuvre poetique de H.D., de Djuna Barnes et de Laura (Riding) Jackson. En depit d’un profond rejet des systemes et des institutions, leur langage poetique est emaille de references, citations et allusions bibliques dont l’effet est de constituer une poetique d’autorevelation et d’auto(pro)creation. L’analyse des modalites de traitement de la question spirituelle dans l’œuvre poetique de ces auteurs permet de montrer qu’elles refractent le religieux afin d’interroger l’origine et l’originalite de toute creation.

The Value of the Festschrift : A Dying Genre?

With its nearly untranslatable German title, the Festschrift is a charming survivor of a more collegial academic age: essays written by colleagues and former students to celebrate the career of an eminent scholar upon retirement. Such homage is nothing less than a generous and always touching gesture, although it seems that university presses are more and more reluctant to publish such gatherings. As someone who has contributed to a number of Festschriften, I can see why. One is asked to write an essay; one wonders just what would be appropriate. Should the essay engage directly and fully with the honoree's own work? Gordon Turnbull's essay Imagining Selves: Essays Honor of Patricia Meyer Spacks (edited by Rivka Swenson and Elise Lauterbach [Delaware, 2008]) - London Journal, 1762-63, and Frances Sheridan's The Discovery: Imagining the Maternal - is an instance of such genuine and effective engagement. Turnbull echoes Spacks's Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel Eighteenth-Century England (1976) not just his title but his tracing of links between Sheridan's play as Spacks has written about it and fundamental aspects of Boswell's life as rendered his London Journal. Boswell's relationship to his father and his attempts London to form his character are mirrored Sheridan's comedy, Turnbull writes, in strikingly precise and detailed inversion (192). Sheridan had asked Boswell to write a prologue for her play (brutally rejected by her husband, Thomas Sheridan), but the play itself as Turnbull examines it offers a potential mirror for the young man who his journal explores various literary models for self-formation. The play's moral center, Lady Medway, can be seen as a corrective for Boswell's pious mother whose Calvinist lessons had blighted his youth, just as Lady Medway's feckless husband and her upright son, Colonel Medway, reverse the roles and relationship Boswell had with his father. Turnbull explores Boswell's response to the Sheridans and to the play fascinating and completely convincing detail.However, such direct engagement with the honoree's work is rare a Festschrift. More often, one contributes simply what one is currently working on (or indeed an unpublished piece the desk drawer). What happens is that the contributor's current interest is linked, sometimes profitably and extensively, sometimes simply very briefly out of politeness, with the honoree's work. These nods provide only a modicum of unity to such collections, and a Festschrifl is generally a very mixed bag indeed, a book that fact only the dedicatee and some of the contributors themselves will really want to read, or a book that will inevitably be of only partial interest to many. It's hard, especially these dire economic times, to predict the future of the Festschrift, but I would say that it is a dying genre, and Imagining Selves displays the virtues that make this demise a pity as well as the limitations that may make it inevitable.Imagining Selves is, inevitably, a very miscellaneous volume. The title echoes Professor Spacks's influential book: Imagining a Self, although that phrase is so general that not much the way of unity is gained by it. Swenson and Lauterbach group the essays into three parts, thereby claiming at least some unity of theme or approach those sections. But one quickly forgets these very generalized headings - Genre and Image, Reputation and Reception, and Rereading and Retelling - as one reads the essays. That this Festschrift lacks real unity will surprise no one. Nonetheless, there are a number of very good essays here and several truly excellent offerings, like Turnbull's, that save the volume from being merely a gracious tribute. To be sure, there are a couple of pieces that very few readers of this journal will find of interest, since they have nothing to do with the eighteenth century - Jerome McGann's Laura Riding Jackson and Unabashed Storifying; or, The Story of 'Queen Story' and Margery Sabin's Modern Variations on the Theme of Privacy: Language and the Private Self. …

Lawrence of Arabia and the Shaws (T. E. Lawrence, Correspondence with Bernard Shaw and Charlotte Shaw, Volume 4, 1929–35, edited by Jeremy and Nicole Wilson)

Lawrence of Arabia and the Shaws (T. E. Lawrence, <i>Correspondence with Bernard Shaw and Charlotte Shaw</i>, Volume 4, 1929–35, edited by Jeremy and Nicole Wilson)

The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (review)

Reviewed by: The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife Eric Heyne The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife. By Joan Kane. Port Alsworth, AK: NorthShore Press, 2009. 72 pages, $19.00. Language and landscape perform a complex dance for dominance in many of the poems in Joan Kane’s first collection, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife. The poet challenges herself to find the exact words to “recite the ice” (3). There are a handful of historical poems in the collection, including the title poem, but otherwise very little in the way of story. Humanity itself is represented mostly by relics, fragments, “tailings”—as if humans had already disappeared from the planet, leaving behind only fossils to compete with those from other vanished species, like the “petrifying blue” tusk that is all that is “left of the mammoth” (24, 11). The lines and stanzas are short, the syntax abrupt, with sometimes more than one sentence in a short line, and many of the sentences are fragments. The words Kane chooses—brux, sinnet, os, vivianite, ledum, stative—are themselves exotic fossils, revealing their origins in dead languages. The sense I got of the poet as scientific explorer was so powerful that the rare personal moments were startling. A disembodied first person appears often, but in “Exit Glacier” when I came across the lines, “It follows, as surely as I / Had wanted to reach you: / Protected by a thing deeper / Than affection, more jagged,” I was made uncomfortable by the relative intimacy of the rare second person (25). Kane’s poetry reminds me of Laura Riding’s: deeply philosophical, always aware of its status as a linguistic object, pushing the borders of meaning, searching for the place where myth and memory meet. Her biographical note describes her as “Irish and Inupiaq Eskimo,” with degrees from Harvard and Columbia, and the book is dedicated “For my family / For the memory of my grandmothers / taimani qauqrirugut.” Her rural Alaskan upbringing is vividly evoked in the second half of the book, which includes the narrative poems. But especially in the first half, she is reaching out to select readers far beyond Alaska. The title poem for that first section is “Antistrophic,” and I think the turn being made is from west to east, New World to Old World, the memories of childhood making their way to the light through adopted European language. As the sun sets and “shadows cast upwards bough upon bough,” the poet struggles with “the old habit of imperfect definition” (34). The poet must imperfectly define the meaning of our daily lives. How do we grow and change (“I have played with the skulls of [End Page 95] seals” [44])? What does our food say about us (“let us turn the intestines inside out / and eat them” [21])? Why do we make art (“The carving in my hand / Shows half-walrus, half-bear. / They must turn always / From each other” [49])? It is a pleasure and a challenge to ponder Kane’s answers to such questions through the juxtapositions of a book-length collection. Eric Heyne University of Alaska Fairbanks Copyright © 2010 The Western Literature Association

Reading Renunciation: Laura Riding's Modernism and the End of Poetry

Reading Renunciation: Laura Riding's Modernism and the End of Poetry

Editor's Introduction: Female Agency: Development, Resistance, Revision

We are titling this issue of jml “Female Agency: Development, Resistance, Revision.” The essays cluster into three categories with a good deal of overlap. Two deal with a female subject as she undergoes a developmental passage: Tom Fisher’s essay on Laura Riding’s arrival at a renunciation of poetry and Elizabeth Savage’s on Lorine Niedecker’s poetry of female aging and menopause. Another group of essays deal with the representation, in literature and other media, of female roles or types — April Middeljans on the female telephone operator, Sofia Ahlberg on the American girl abroad and Lorraine DiCicco on the single thirty-something woman; these essays examine how the characters in question resist or creatively alter their restrictive roles. Finally, the remaining essays in this issue treat works that counter or revise an entrenched male subjectivity. These include Irmak Ertuna’s essay on Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence as it contrasts Andre Breton’s Nadja; Timothy Mackin’s on Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse as it revises the epistemological ideas of Bertrand Russell; and Helene Meyers’s on Rebecca Goldstein’s treatment of Jewish home-making as a corrective to and bridge between opposing views of the Jewish homeland. As this cursory overview suggests, the issue “hangs together,” as Henry James might say. Although this is the result, in part, of serendipity, it also owes something to our editorial process. I’d like to explain this process to our readers now, as we move into the eighth year of our current editorial leadership. In 2003, only a few years after jml began being published by Indiana University Press, the journal changed its editorial configuration. It moved from a single editor to multiple editors, starting with three co-editors and two senior advisory editors and expanding to our current six co-editors. This may seem a cumbersome arrangement, but it has worked surprisingly well for us. Our method is simple. Laurel Garver, jml ’s managing editor, e-mails us all as soon as a new article comes in. If the topic appeals to one of us, that person immediately makes a claim to be first reader. Another editor versed in the topic will usually volunteer to be a second reader should the essay warrant serious consideration. Once we have claimed a submission, we try to read the work as soon as we can — we encourage electronic

Modernism, the market and the institution of the new

Modernism remains deeply connected to ideas of innovation, and this has created problems for successive generations of writers. For example, how does one create an original work when the 'new' has already been established, marketed and institutionalised? Rod Rosenquist's study focuses on the writers and poets who emerged after Modernism's high-water mark year of 1922, in which Ulysses, The Waste Land and the early Cantos were published. Seeking to refine our own understanding of the high modernists through the frequent difficulties encountered by the generation that succeeded them, this study discusses issues of cultural value, the relationship of history to innovation, and the market for new works in an era already dominated by the likes of Joyce, Eliot and Pound. Containing illuminating examinations of Wyndham Lewis, Laura Riding and Henry Miller, this study will be invaluable reading for those interested in Modernism and its complicated legacy.

A form of tidiness: Laura (Riding) Jackson and the work of poetry-writing

A form of tidiness: Laura (Riding) Jackson and the work of poetry-writing

A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

A work in which a noted critic addresses the problem of silence in contemporary experimental poetry. Silence, as Susan M Schultz argues, is an intellectual and aesthetic force, largely unacknowledged, that is a characteristic feature of much avant-garde poetry, from Hart Crane to Susan Howe; a strategy deployed by various poetic, academic, and aesthetic partisans in efforts to quell competing discourse; and also a potent aesthetic strategy in itself. In a collection of case studies, Schultz examines specific incidents of silence and the impasses it creates in the poetic and academic landscape. She looks at the issue of professionalism, in both poetic practice and the academy, which has become the caretaker of much of modern and contemporary poetry and their competing values. She explores clothing and fashion as central metaphors for this professionalism (what are the 'outfits' and intellectual fashions of the day?), especially the metaphor of language as clothing in the poetry of Laura Riding, Charles Bernstein, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka. Schultz further explores the problem of formalism in the work of Riding and Crane, whose extremity in experimentation led to their silencing by the poetic establishment, a problem later overcome by poets such as John Ashbery and Bernstein. And she examines silence as an aesthetic strategy in itself, particularly in the work of Howe, who wrestles with the Puritan legacy of male pro-fessors in the clergy ministering to female con-fessors. The result is an extended meditation on the precarious balance among competing forces - formalism, professionalism, gender, and voice - in understanding and liberating poetic discourse from the realms of silence and the impasses it creates.

A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry by Susan M. Schultz

I 152 Reviews after World War II. In opposition to thosewho deplore thekind ofnostalgia embodied in theheritage industry,or perhaps in the idyllic childhood memories celebrated by negritude poets like Senghor, he cites Svetlana Boym's recent The Future ofNostal gia, which explores theways inwhich nostalgia can be either restorative or reflective, shaping a certainway of thinkingabout a particular time and place, and granting such memories a transformative and reconstructive power. But whereas Boym focuses on artists exiled fromRussia and Eastern Europe (including Nabakov, Brodsky, Stravin sky,and Benjamin), Su takes a broad range ofCaribbean, African American, Native American, Nigerian, and British writers. Through detailed analysis of textsby Toni Morrison, JeanRhys, V. S. Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, IanMcEwan, Chinua Achebe, N. Scott Momaday, JoanRiley, Leslie Marmon Silko,Wole Soyinka, Paule Marshall, and Evelyn Waugh, Su argues for theconstructive role ofnostalgia fora lostor distant homeland in establishing ethical ideals in a fragmented and dispersed society. Rejecting what he sees as an ethics centred on individualism, Su chooses amodel based on the philosophy of Levinas and his emphasis on the interactive encounters between individuals and responsibility for the 'other',while recognizing the 'other's' difference. This model works particularly well in the analysis ofMorrison, Native American, Caribbean, and Nigerian writers, but seems less appropriate to the com parison of Waugh and Ishiguro in thechapter on theBritish 'estatenovel' (which also refers to Mansefield Park and Howard's End). Su could have discussed more fully the differences between thesewriters and one might have expected him also to link this discussion to the analysis ofNaipaul's Enigma ofArrival in an earlier chapter. One difficulty in reading thisbook is itsshiftingdefinitions of 'nostalgia'. It begins by establishing place as the key point of reference, arguing persuasively for the sig nificance of 'theClearing' (as a place forcommunal gatherings and gradual healing), inMorrison's Beloved. But in the final chapter it is not place but an imagined ideal community which becomes the focus of nostalgia, Abazon inAchebe's Anthills of the Savannah and Aiyero in Soyinka's Season ofAnomy. Nevertheless, both the general argument linking specific kinds ofnostalgia with theethics ofLevinas and thedetailed analysis of thiswide range of texts are suggestive and often illuminating. UNIVERSITY OFKENT, CANTERBURY LYN INNES A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. By SUSANM. SCHULTZ. Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press. 2005. Viii + 247 pp. ?28.50. ISBN 978-o-8I73-5i98-4. It isno easy task to survey contemporary poetry, ofwhich there are countless practi tioners and schools. It is also a question of criticalmethod, ofwhat language we shall use in speaking of the texts of our choice. The Italian Eugenio Montale once wrote thatpoetry is in theclutches of those thatare less fittounderstand it, meaning profes sional critics.On theother hand, who but a professional critic reads 'advanced' poetry? Susan M. Schultz's A Poetics of Impasse is a good example of the ongoing debate on poetry, ofwhich it isdifficult tograsp thebeginning and the conclusion. A professor at theUniversity ofHawai'i and a poet herself, she devotes the introduction (written inverse) and Chapter 7 ('Hawai'i's Pidgin Literature, Performance, and Postcolonial ity') to the relation of poetry and academic politics, e.g. to the rightof local 'pidgin' poets tobe accepted within the 'canon'. Some of this,given thegravity of the discus sion, borders on involuntary parody, and could well be quoted in a fictional satire on academics: 'I do not want to suggest that silence, a focal point in this conversation With myself (a silent one, except for the tapping of thekeys) is a univocal I(as it were) term, for silence needs to be stripped away from silencing [... .]' (p. 21). Impasse, the MLR, I02.4, 2007 II53 titularsubject, has a notable history in twentieth-century literature,fromSam Beckett toHenry Roth. Schultz follows itspresence perceptively in some figuresofmajor, or disputed, standing: the little-known last poems ofHart Crane, thatattempt to break away from his emphatic earlier lyricism (Chapter i), 'Laura Riding's Essentialism' (Chapter 2), the disregarded poems ofGertrude Stein (Chapter 3), and 'JohnAsh bery's Critique ofHarold Bloom' (Chapter 4). Some of thecomments here are astute, and Schultz moves into territories that to some extent are of her own making. There isno...

Her Word For It

P erhaps peter neagoe was feeling lucky when he contacted Laura Riding in 1931, seeking a piece for his anthology, Americans Abroad . He secured contributions from Pound, Hemingway, Stein, and Williams. Was it too much to hope that Riding would offer something? Most definitely – but she did allow him to publish her letter of refusal. It carried a postscript: ‘You say that your anthology will be free from literary politics. If this means neutrality, then I prefer literary politics, as I prefer wrongness to middleness.’ 1 In later decades, a peculiar form of literary politics, born of her relationship with Robert Graves, shaped ideas about Riding and her work. Biographical accounts of Riding have often lacked ‘neutrality’. Such is the case in Tom Matthews's memoir Under the Influence and the biographies of Graves written by Martin Seymour-Smith and Richard Perceval Graves. The promotion of these stories continues: Poetic Unreason , a Graves biopic, is currently under production and being billed as ‘a tale of sexual jealousy and obsession’. 2 As biographer and editor, Elizabeth Friedmann offers an alternative account of Riding's life, along with a selection from the poetry and prose comprising that life's work.

Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding and The Space of Letters

Near the end of Gertrude Stein's American lecture tour (1934–35), she turned her attention to letter writing: because of the writer's consciousness of an audience, she says, letters could never be the purely creative work that her prose poems were, but they usefully put some space between writer and reader. This essay proposes that Stein then wrote Everybody's Autobiography (1937) as a semi-public news-letter. Earlier, in 1930, Laura Riding had tried to interest Stein in the epistolary genre. One of Riding's projects at that time was a collection of letters, which she titled Everybody's Letters (1933). Putting Everybody's Letters and Everybody's Autobiography into dialogue with one another, this essay suggests that what Riding says about letters in her collection anticipates many of the qualities found in Stein's book.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Jean-Michel Rabaté Imagine that you want to write something original and powerful about well-known modernist authors, each of them guarded by more glosses, guides, and Google entries than one can hope to survey in a lifetime. This modernist issue gives you a modest tip, a simple method, which I will abbreviate for easier mnemonic manipulation as the three C's: Complicate, Couple, Contextualize. This is what has been done, with various inflections and tactics, of course, by the authors of this fine group of essays dealing with canonical modernist writers (the usual suspects are almost all there: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and Samuel Beckett; Laura Riding and Joseph Cornell have been thrown in to test the conceptual limits of what we tend to call "late modernism"). These essays attempt to complicate our usual notions regarding the "canon" by reading these formidable authors in hitherto unexplored contexts that either bring new information to bear on the texts (as is the case of Pound's "Seafarer" presented in the framework of The New Age, a context that gives a new political dimension to the famous creative translation from the Anglo-Saxon) or add a dialogical dimension that had not been worked through previously (such as when Cornell is seen dialoguing with Moore, or Stein discussing with Riding the poetic use of private correspondence). With the emergence of these new contexts, "couples" tend to be constituted: they can be real-life acquaintances like Pound and Orage or Eliot and his Swiss doctor Vittoz. These "couples" could also include one-time lovers like Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, deeply frustrated or would-be lovers like Yeats and Maud Gonne, or more distant friends and collaborators like Moore and Cornell, Stein and Riding. These couples encompass the dynamic function of interiorized models, such as philosophers—Bertrand Russell or her own father—for Woolf as she debates whether to accept or reject philosophy, or the critical and literary models provided by a strong predecessor, which Eliot found in Chapman's works. My list seems to imply that only Beckett was left to stand alone—but this is not true, as we see him in front of his mirror, carefully preparing the image of isolation, alienation, and exclusion that served him [End Page v] so well in the launching of his career, according to Stephen John Dilks's not so pious revisionist interpretation. Thus we move from biography to literary and cultural history, a modernist historiography that pays attention to the crucial role played by little magazines, as Lee Garver does innovatively in "Seafarer Socialism: Pound, The New Age, and Anglo-Medieval Radicalism." Yet these essays never bracket off the constitutive function of hermeneutics, as we can see best in Janet Neigh's engaged essay, which takes a feminist and post-colonial problematic as a point of departure. A central cluster focuses on T. S. Eliot, with Steven Matthews, "T. S. Eliot and Chapman: 'Metaphysical' Poetry and Beyond," Amanda Jeramin Harris, "T. S. Eliot's Mental Hygiene," and Jewel Spears Brooker's review essay "Sleuthing Around in The Waste Land," in which she reviews two important books by Lawrence Rainey. Then Woolf is submitted to new couplings and contextualizations by Victoria L. Smith in "Ransacking the Language: Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf's Orlando" and Michael Lackey in "Modernist Anti-Philosophicalism and Virginia Woolf's Critique of Philosophy." Issues of space — the literary space opened by letters, or contained in boxes and in poems defined by strict syllabic counts — produce an interesting contrast between the practices of Stein and Riding on the one hand (as we discover in Logan Esdale's "Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding and the Space of Letters") and Moore and Cornell on the other (as Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta shows in "Acts of Containment: Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell, and the Poetics of Enclosure"). Finally, Yeats's and Beckett's various strategies of self-dramatization and auto-mythification are scrutinized without complacency by Janet Neigh in "Reading from the Drop: Poetics of Identification and Yeats's 'Leda and the Swan'" and by Stephen John Dilks, in "Portraits...

"The Grand Heretics of Modern Fiction": Laura Riding, John Cowper Powys, and the Subjective Correlative

"The Grand Heretics of Modern Fiction": Laura Riding, John Cowper Powys, and the Subjective Correlative

Toward a Pitiless Fiction: Abstraction, Comedy, and Modernist AntiHumanism

Countering the trend of modernist fiction, Wyndham Lewis and Laura Riding sought to eliminate, rather than illuminate, psychological depth. The Wild Body (1927) and Progress of Stories (1936) issue from a critique of the role of empathy in the arts, which is rooted in anxiety about power and culture in mass democracies. Theories of abstraction and of comedy are implicated in these fictions as means to a primary end: the replacement of empathetic response with an "anesthesia of the heart." Lewis hoped to effect a fundamental political transformation, Riding, a spiritual one. In the service of their visions, they used fiction to resist imagining other subjectivities

Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding and The Space of Letters

Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding and The Space of Letters

(Re) Reading Bergson: Frost, Pound and the Legacy of Modern Poetry

(Re) Reading Bergson:Frost, Pound and the Legacy of Modern Poetry Robert Bernard Hass (bio) One of the most conspicuous and troubling features of high modernism is that it never coalesced into the major literary movement its early practitioners hoped for. Despite the myriad manifestos and self-conscious efforts on behalf of the period's leading figures to fashion an aesthetic equal to modern experience, high modernism expired by 1939 and could not be resuscitated (Clausen 94–96, Gelpi 166). Why this happened is one of the most vexing problems in twentieth-century criticism—a problem all the more disquieting because poets and critics alike recognized, almost from the beginning, that something had gone terribly wrong with the modernist experiment. As early as 1927, Laura Riding and Robert Graves had grown critical of the new regime and attributed the decline of the movement to the failure of its practitioners to renounce the "wrongly-conceived habits and tactics of the past" (Riding and Graves 262–263, qtd. in Clausen 87). In other words, what Riding and Graves quickly discerned was that modernism was predicated on an apparent paradox—that in order to express modernity successfully, one had to leap beyond the recent past and revive the poetic resources of dead traditions. The modernist conflation of the particular and universal, the real and mythical, the present and past, the objective surface and its conditioning substrata indicated to them that the poetic "independence" they had hoped for had never been, nor never would be, fully realized. Paradoxically, as radical technique grew more and more sophisticated, the burden of the past grew heavier and heavier and the modernists had stumbled under its weight. Recent explanations of modernism, obviously benefiting from the distance of eighty years, attribute the movement's brevity to a wide variety of eroding agents. Revising their early attacks on the movement as elitist and [End Page 55] politically irresponsible, Marxists blamed the period's decline on the stifling encroachment of a pervasive, consumption-oriented, commodity-driven culture. Focusing on the contrasts between "high" art and mass culture, between anti-bourgeois avant-gardism and its subsequent integration into international capitalism, Peter Bürger and Andreas Huyssen successfully exposed the ideological forces that forced the split between the historical avant-garde and mainstream modernism (Bürger 22, Huyssen 9–11). Defending the legacy of Romanticism, Albert Gelpi attributed modernism's collapse to the tension generated by conflicting aesthetics. In his impressive A Coherent Splendor (1991), Gelpi argued that the problems within modernist poetry originated as a conflict between "Symbolist and Imagist strains," which extended and then reconstituted "the aesthetic issues that defined and then undermined Romanticism" (2). Approaching the problem from a postructuralist framework, Marianne DeKoven, appropriating Derrida's notion of sous-rature, suggested the central problem of modernism was that "modernist form . . . continually [put] itself, including its own self-consciousness, under erasure" and thus created an irresolvable set of textual contradictions that ultimately deconstructed themselves (23). Marjorie Perloff, in a moment of uncharacteristic hyperbole, has recently attributed decline to an entire century of political disasters, suggesting that modernism's "utopian aspirations" were "cut off" by the catastrophes of World War I and II, the rise of totalitarianism, and the Cold War (3). With so many critical discussions of modernism contingent upon highly selective critical frameworks, one might be tempted to indict their authors of myopia. Yet, as this brief overview of scholarship indicates, "modernism" is a slippery term, and one not so easily defined by a single meta-narrative. While each of these explanations has certainly enriched our understanding of modernism's intrinsic problems and contradictions, one topic that has not been explored as a cause of the movement's rise and fall is a critical examination of the period's epistemology. To my mind, one of the most important forces behind the decline of "high modernism" was the modernists' inability to reconcile the epistemological tensions between positivism and vitalism. As the relations between these two important traditions became strained to the point of rupture, modern poets felt compelled to choose between an aesthetic that reflected the ethos of scientific humanism, then the dominant intellectual tradition in Europe, or one that liberated...

(Re) Reading Bergson:Frost, Pound and the Legacy of Modern Poetry

One of the most conspicuous and troubling features of high modern? ism is that it never coalesced into the major literary movement its early practitioners hoped for. Despite the myriad manifestos and selfconscious efforts on behalf ofthe period's leading figures to fashion an aesthetic equal to modern experience, high modernism expired by 1939 and could not be resuscitated (Clausen 94-96, Gelpi 166). Why this happened is one ofthe most vexing problems in twentieth-century criticism?a problem all the more disquieting because poets and critics alike recognized, almost from the begin? ning, that something had gone terribly wrong with the modernist experiment. As early as 1927, Laura Riding and Robert Graves had grown critical of the new regime and attributed the decline of the movement to the failure of its practitioners to renounce the wrongly-conceived habits and tactics ofthe (Riding and Graves 262-263, qtd. in Clausen 87). In other words, what Riding and Graves quickly discerned was that modernism was predicated on an appar? ent paradox?that in order to express modernity successfully, one had to leap beyond the recent past and revive the poetic resources of dead traditions. The modernist conflation ofthe particular and universal, the real and mythical, the present and past, the objective surface and its conditioning substrata indicated to them that the poetic independence they had hoped for had never been, nor never would be, fully realized. Paradoxically, as radical technique grew more and more sophisticated, the burden of the past grew heavier and heavier and the modernists had stumbled under its weight. Recent explanations of modernism, obviously benefiting from the dis? tance of eighty years, attribute the movement's brevity to a wide variety of eroding agents. Revising their early attacks on the movement as elitist and

The Laura Riding Question: Modernism, Poetry, and Truth

Ella Zohar Ophir is lecturer at the University of Toronto. Forthcoming essays include a study of the fictions of Laura Riding and Wyndham Lewis and an inquiry into modernist treatments of everyday life.