Notes

INTRODUCTION

1  Bernd Engler’s phrase. Engler is my only predecessor in this field: Die amerikanische Ode, and “From Providential to Secular Rhetoric: Fourth of July Poetry, 1776–1876,” 85–111.

2  Whitley, American Bards, 189. See also Erkkila, “Revolution in the Renaissance,” 17–32. My approach to reclamation has been narrower, except in chapter 6.

3  Native Americans are usually recognized in the historical progress poems, but rarely in the political odes. They are imagined only in past tense, and as Max Cavitch notes, American Elegy, 111, antebellum elegists who treat them find both “a source of self-recrimination” and “the possibility of compensation for losses.” That is, elegies simultaneously lament the disappearance of the Native and assuage the poet-speaker’s guilt.

4  Definitions begin with classical origins, which set up numerous contradictions – Pindar, Sappho, the Greek dramatists, Anacreon, Horace – followed by English variants identified with Cowley’s pseudopindarics and the romantic poets. Here, only one “Horatian” ode, Richard Henry Stoddard’s on Lincoln, makes a brief appearance in chapter 4. The true Pindaric form, rare enough in British poetry, is almost non-existent in American. “The National Ode,” Bayard Taylor’s centennial poem for 4 July 1776, is an example.

5  Compare Rajan, “Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness,” 206.

6  Tucker, Epic, 4. See Lukácz, Theory of the Novel (trans. Anna Bostock); and Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel” (1935), in Dialogic Imagination, 3–40. A parallel is found in Van Wyck Brooks’s The Opinions of Oliver Allston (1941), which sees all modernism as derived from Mallarmé and the art for art’s sake movement, thus trivial when set beside, say, Tolstoy. For a needed argument against the marginalization of poetry by Americanist cultural criticism, see Cavitch, American Elegy, 84 and passim.

7  Jackson, “Poet as Poetess,” 57. Jackson’s argument, given the sui generis nature of Dickinson’s writing, raises the question whether hard cases make bad laws. Note Jonathan Culler’s objection that Jackson “does not tell us how she thinks we should treat Dickinson’s verse if we do not approach it as lyric; whereas I think that a critical history of lyricization should lead us to a more capacious understanding of the lyric tradition that is not restricted either to the idea of the decontextualized expression of subjectivity or … the model of the dramatic monologue.” See Culler, “Lyric, History, and Genre,” 67.

8  Many critics, including Jackson, take it back to John Stuart Mill, who argued that the purpose of poetry is to express feelings and, thus, limited poetry to passive emotion. See his “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” (1833). Poetry, he says, has as its sole object “to act upon the emotions” (345); it “is the natural fruit of solitude and meditation; eloquence, of intercourse with the world. The persons who have most feeling of their own, if intellectual culture have given them a language in which to express it, have the highest faculty of poetry (349). The purview of poetry is thus private feeling, a discovery Mill made during the mental crisis he famously describes in his Autobiography, when he cured his anxiety by reading Wordsworth. Mill the Utilitarian thus rescues poetry by finding a therapeutic use for it. This process, as Jackson also points out (9), is tied to nineteenth-century print conventions for poetry. It was given a major boost by Poe’s valorization of the short poem in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and “The Poetic Principle” (1850). Then Walter Pater, on the other side of the Atlantic, declared that “lyrical poetry, precisely because in it we are least able to detach the matter from the form without a deduction of something from that matter itself, is, at least artistically, the highest and most complete form of poetry,” and that it succeeds best with “a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding” (Renaissance, “School of Giorgione,” 131). I have been unable to find any linkage between Poe and Pater. See also Harrington’s comments on public and private as “categories of understanding that are constructed historically” (Poetry nd the Public, 11; and Blasing, Lyric Poetry, passim).

9  Bernstein, Tale of the Tribe, 4–5. Compare Tate: “There is probably nothing wrong with art for art’s sake, if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago” (Essays, 595).

10  Johnson takes an even darker view, seeing in Mallarmé “the uselessness, the impossibility, of writing poetry, which, for Mallarmé, would be equivalent to the uselessness of living his life.” Such nihilism parallels the “solipsism” that Tate claims his ode is about (Idea of Lyric, 10; and chapter 7 below) and possibly Millay’s “Ode to Silence” as well.

11  Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music; and Martin, Rise and Fall of Meter.

12  Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue,” 144–56.

13  Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 94. As Bernstein points out (Tale of the Tribe, 52), Pound was politicizing 1920s poetry well before the Auden generation politicized the 1930s.

14  Cohen goes to extremes: for example, his assertion that “in the nineteenth century, poetry is not a genre [Cohen’s emphasis]” (Social Lives of Poems, 11). He immediately backtracks, explaining that the century certainly understood “poetry” to be “something distinct from other forms of writing.” He tries again: the abstraction “poetry,” he says, “has no meaningful affiliation with any nineteenth-century object.” But he backtracks: poems “did have clear, legible relations to specific genres, formats, media, modes of circulation …, and nineteenth-century readers knew how to read these relations in ways that twentieth-century readers did not.” Puzzled, I then discover that “magazine verse” took on meaning “through its location in the magazine,” and “this force cannot be isolated or read out of any poem’s words alone” (my emphasis). Cohen’s animus finally reveals itself to be the bogey, still in 2015, of the hypostatized New Critical autotelic poem.

15  Compare Eagleton: “almost all major literary theorists engage in scrupulously close reading,” citing Bakhtin, Adorno, Derrida, Kristeva, and Cixous, among others (How to Read a Poem, 2).

16  Tate’s poem “False Nightmare.” See Adams, Poetic Designs.

CHAPTER ONE

1  On the basis of the commencement program, Smeall believes that Brackenridge recited only his own poem. On the other hand, Freneau published his poem as “Being part of a Dialogue pronounced on a public occasion.”

2  My page references for convenience are given for both versions. Wertheimer also refers to the “1771 text,” but, as Smeall demonstrates, the earliest printed text is 1772.

3  I pursue this relationship in chapter 2. Silverman (Cultural History, 229) rightly notices the “progress poem” as the genre of the “rising glory” poems.

4  This last line prophesying “empire” and developing the “rising glory” metaphor was added in 1795. Smeall describes Acasto’s words as “hesitant, melancholy” – “less a vision than a prayer for vision” (275).

5  Marsh, Philip Freneau, 33–4, emphasizes Freneau’s early conversion to deism, but my point is the persisting attraction to both beliefs.

6  This last line was added in 1809. On early theories of Indian origins, see Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians; and Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian. Much of the literature on Freneau focuses on his Native American themes. Besides Wertheimer, see Cavitch, American Elegy, 72–9.

7  My text of the 1772 collaborative poem is taken from Pattee’s century-old edition as emended by Smeall, 1:49–84.

8  The lines on Braddock are presumably by Brackenridge; but Freneau may here be excising his own lines. For a British reflection on the loss of the colonies, see Davis, “Poem That Ate America,” 125–49.

9  Parini and Miller, eds. Supplements include The Last Poems of Philip Freneau and The Newspaper Verse of Philip Freneau. The prolific, topical, frequently pseudonymous Freneau presents formidable editorial problems, but a new edition is desperately needed.

CHAPTER TWO

1  The genre was identified in 1920 by Griffith, who lists ninety-four titles. An additional thirty-four were added by Aubin in 1934, and others by Swayne in 1936. Crider adds another sixty. Crider’s methodology may be compared with the new “abundance model” described in my introduction, page 4.

2  Crider (122–45) builds on Aubrey Williams’s seminal discussion of the “medieval and Renaissance idea of translatio studii, the idea of transplantation from age to age and from country to country of cultural treasure” (120). His summary focuses on the concept of civis from the Goths to the Britons, paralleled by the enduring idea of Rome as urbs aeterna from Virgil to Augustine to medieval Europe. Biblically, a source is traced to the allegory of the Four Kingdoms in Daniel (a topic that engaged Anne Bradstreet at some length). Politically, it takes up the concept of “mixed government” in which “the one, the few, and the many would act as effective checks on one another” (143, citing James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, 1656). Poetically, “sunlight imagery became a standard accouterment of the historical progress piece in regard to the rise in the East and the westward movement of the arts and sciences” (251) – hence the “rising glory” motif. Tucker keeps this concept active in his Epic.

3  The true date is decidedly earlier, in the early or mid-seventeenth century. As J.B. Bury declared, “it was in the atmosphere of the Cartesian spirit that a theory of Progress was to take shape” (Idea of Progress, 65).

4  See Buxton, “Shelley”; and Levine, “Eighteenth-Century Jeremiad.”

5  Bercovitch contrasts the European “vertical” model of “class harmony” with the New England “road into the future” (Rites, 34).

6  Silverman, Colonial American Poetry, 420–1. In a footnote, Silverman mistakenly describes John Trumbull’s “Prospect of the Future Glory of America” as the “first articulation of the theme in verse,” but prefers the Brackenridge-Freneau poem as more successful. The comment is a rare acknowledgment of Freneau’s aesthetic quality, but see Robert Pinsky’s acute appreciation in “American Poetry and American Life.”

7  Pinsky, “American Poetry,” 10. Freneau, for his part, condemns Dwight indirectly in his poem “The Rising Empire” (1795): “Bards of huge fame in every hamlet rise, / Each (in idea) of Virgilian size.”

8  Edwards, “Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England.” Quoted in Brum, American Thought, 89.

9  Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 144–5. The footnote cites Rush Welter (1820–60). Compare Noble, Eternal Adam.

10  According to White, Anne Bradstreet, 166, the final couplet was omitted from the second printing published posthumously in 1678: “After the restoration of the monarchy, extreme penalties were inflicted on the Regicides and other Puritan leaders … Bradstreet probably thought it best to delete so vindictive a wish from her comments on the Civil War itself.”

11  White, Anne Bradstreet, 170–1, attributes this teaching to John Cotton, who was on friendly terms with the Bradstreets, but it was a widely held Puritan doctrine.

12  Crider’s appendix lists earlier works, including John Donne’s “Love’s Progress” (Elegy 18, written in the 1590s) and his “Progress of the Soul” (dated 1601), but sets them aside.

13  My discussion is indebted here to Tucker, Epic, 21–2.

14  For excellent detailed discussion, see Wertheimer, Imagined Empires.

15  As McWilliams notices, he also foretells a Panama Canal, airplanes, submarines, a universal language, and a system of international commerce as “man’s only deterrent to global war” (“Early Republic,” 161). Comte de Volney in the same year, 1787, envisions a similar assembly of nations to examine and resolve world conflicts: “A scene of a new and astonishing nature then opened to my view. All that the earth contains of people and of nations; men of every race and of every region, converging from their various climates, seemed to assemble in one allotted place; where, forming an immense congress, distinguished in groups by the vast variety of their dresses, features, and complexion, the numberless multitude presented a most unusual and affecting sight” (Ruins of Empires, chap. 19). Barlow’s earliest poem, “The Prospect of Peace,” written for the Yale commencement of 1778, already articulates a millennial vision of the future. Howard, Connecticut Wits, 314–18, discusses Volney’s contribution to Barlow’s revisions in The Columbiad.

16  Phillips, Epic in American Culture, 34, notes that the paper and type were of American manufacture and that spelling incorporated reforms suggested by his Yale classmate Noah Webster. Yet the democratically minded Barlow himself was embarrassed by the material book as an expensive luxury object.

17  When Barlow allows that had Virgil written it “one or two centuries earlier than he did, his readers would have glowed with enthusiasm,” he is probably thinking of the analogy with Dwight’s Conquest of Canaan (1785), with its mythos of providential conquest.

18  Buel, Joel Barlow, 266. There is no evidence that Barlow and Blake ever met, but another common bond with Hayley was through their mutual friend Thomas Paine. In December 1793, when Paine was arrested in Paris during a purge by Robespierre, he left the manuscript of The Age of Reason with Barlow to see through publication. See Buel, Joel Barlow, 179–80; and Leary, “Joel Barlow and William Hayley.” Paine, as is well known, was acquainted with Whitman’s father, and both Whitmans, senior and junior, admired him unreservedly.

19  Bryant, Letter to John Howard Bryant, 24 January 1868, Letters, 5:248.

20  Tucker, Epic, 347, calls attention to similarities between the “elephantiasis” of Philip Bailey’s Festus, which quintupled its size in successive editions from 1839 to 1901; Victor Hugo’s La Légende des Siècles (1859–83); and Whitman’s magnum opus.

21  This epic-but-not-epic argument finds its reductio ad absurdum in Miller, The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction, which argues that Whitman created the American epic by not conforming to epic expectations of form, action, character, setting, subject, and theme. See chapter 3.

22  The classic analysis is Golden, “Passage to Less Than India.”

23  See Erkkila, Whitman, 37–8: “Like Herman Melville in his more optimistic moments, Whitman wrote from an essentially eighteenth-century view of commerce in which, as Joel Barlow said in The Vision of Columbus, ‘the spirit of commerce is happily calculated … to open an amicable intercourse between all countries, to soften the horrors of war, to enlarge the field of science and speculation, and to assimilate the manners, feelings, and languages of all nations.’” On Whitman’s immediate political context, see Reynolds, “Politics and Poetry.”

24  Harold Aspiz, in Paryz, Postcolonial and Imperial Experience, 101.

25  Neither Libertad nor the parenthetical asides to the Mother appear in the earlier versions, “Poem of Many in One” (1856) and “Chants Democratic” (1860). The poem is probably the most heavily revised of all Whitman’s poems.

26  Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 500, notes that popular Darwinism included an expectation, like Emerson’s, that weaker races would eventually become extinct through the intermarriage of races. See his comment on “ethnologist.” Compare Killingsworth, Whitman, 77.

27  I have wondered whether Whitman’s redwood is possibly related to the speaking tree in the Old English “Dream of the Rood.”

28  Paryz, Postcolonial and Imperial Experience, 183, quoting Wertheimer, Imagined Empires 162; and Eperjesi, Imperialist Imaginary, 52.

29  See Westover, “Empire and America,” 130.

30  Crane, Hart Crane and Yvor Winters, 145. John Unterecker, Crane’s biographer, says, “so far as I can discover, Crane had read almost nothing of Emerson.” See Piculin, “Critics,” 191.

31  Kramer, Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” xiv and 59–69. I once conducted a casual survey of Crane’s reading mentioned in his letters. In five months, between December 1919 and May 1920, he mentions Pound’s Pavanes and Divagations, Eliot, Maupassant, Stevens, Barrie’s Daisy Ashford, Twain’s 1601, Waldo Frank’s Our America, Masters, Catullus (translated by Edgar Saltus), Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, Saltus’s Imperial Purple and a play called Heliogabalus, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Burke, Rabelais, Villon, Apuleius, Marianne Moore, Williams, Vildrac (translated by Bynner), Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Stendahl’s Charterhouse of Parma, Paul Gaugin’s Noa Noa, Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, and Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, plus a mass of little magazines – Little Review, the Modernist, Smart Set, Dial, the Liberator, the Pagan, the Plowshare, and the Freeman. True, Crane did read Spengler (at Tate’s insistence), Whitehead, and a few other non-literary writers; but this list, I think, represents his steady diet.

32  See Slate, “William Carlos Williams.” Albert Gelpi places the problem in the incompatibility of Crane’s symboliste poetics with the democratic robustness of Whitman (Coherent Splendor, 383 et seq.). Tate’s review hints at the problem: “Mr. Crane is a myth maker, and in an age favorable to myths he could have written a mythical poem in the act of writing an historical one” (Poetry Reviews, 102).

33  Blackmur, Language as Gesture, quoted in Westover, “Empire and America,” 129. For Tate too, The Bridge is “a collection of lyrics” (Poetry Reviews, 102).

34  Killingsworth, Walt Whitman, 78–80: “The god-poet, we are told, will reclaim the dead earth as a resource to be refined into transcendental Nature fit for nurturing the human soul. But for the present, the earth must remain under the dominion of the engineers and materialists.”

CHAPTER THREE

1  See Johnson’s Life of Cowley: “This lax and lawless versification so much concealed the deficiencies of the barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle, that it immediately overspread our books of poetry” (Lives, 1:32).

2  Mulqueen, “Poetics of Emerson and Poe,” 6. Mulqueen’s is the best of essays that deal with this contrast. See also David Anderson, Garmon, Patrick F. Quinn, and Rubeo.

3  Pound, “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” I.

4  These obiter dicta, reported second hand, are often quoted but rarely cited. “Oh, you mean the jingle-man!” — Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1859, referring to Poe, quoted by Howells from personal conversation with Emerson in “My First Visit to New England [Part 4],” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 89, August 1894, 450, and later collected in Literary Friends and Acquaintance (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900). In her article “Recollections of Poe,” Home Journal, 15 March 1876, Mrs E.O. Smith briefly records a passing conversation with Emerson in regard to “The Raven,” about which she says that Emerson stated: “I can see nothing in it.” On Poe’s views of Emerson, see Silverman, Poe, 265, 492–3, and passim.

5  Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 447. Emerson’s “The Poet” appeared in 1844, while “The Philosophy of Composition” was only published posthumously in 1850. But Poe was known as both poet and critic by the time of Emerson’s essay.

6  Mulqueen, “Poetics,” 5. Harrington, Poetry and the Public, 28–9, argues that poetry is in popular writing of the early twentieth century “not a classification of texts, but an immaterial cure or tonic … Poetry is at once spiritual, practical, and virtually detextualized.” Thus John Stuart Mill’s application of Wordsworth as a cure for his depression had a long afterlife.

7  If the experience of Beauty is mysteriously elevating, the experience of the Unbeautiful is the reverse. Poe explores this possibility in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where Roderick Usher is an artist in every medium, a hypersensitive soul – a literary descendant of eighteenth-century sensationalist aesthetics and Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (could such a man have risen to the occasion of producing descendants). But struggle as he may to create Beauty, his very being is somehow overdetermined by the symbolic construct in which he lives – by “the method of collocation of these stones – in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around – above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn.” The celebrated mirror effects of Poe’s story make it an aesthetic anti-parable, the perverse corollary of his aesthetic theory. Stovall observes a parallel in the story of Margaret in Wordsworth’s The Excursion, Book I, the passage composed in 1797 as “The Ruined Cottage.” Edgar Poe the Poet, 184. Jerome McGann adumbrates the relation of Poe to the doctrine of Sensibility in The Poetics of Sensibility, 96–7 and 146–7, and Brett Zimmerman takes a different approach in “Sensibility, Phrenology, and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’”

8  Omond, English Metrists, 159–65. McGann’s emphasis on intonation is of course an important contribution to this debate.

9  Auden, “American Poetry,” 365, and introduction to Henry James, American Scene, xx–xxi. The later essay is a revision of the earlier.

10  Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 56. Compare Bernstein, Tale of the Tribe, 3–6.

11  Quoted in James G. Williams, Those Who Ponder, 27, from Du Sens: Essais sémiotiques (1970): 313. Compare Emerson’s statement, “the nerves of the world were electrified by the proclamation that all men are born free and equal” with Van Cromphout’s supplement, “It is the proclamation that establishes the reality, though the proclamation derives its authority from the assumption that the reality was already a fact before it was proclaimed” (Van Cromphout, “Language as Action,” 328).

12  The Emersonian line of American poetry tends to a similar fondness for gnomic or proverbial expression. Compare Dickinson, Stephen Crane’s existential parables, Frost, Stevens, not to mention countless newspaper poets (“Only God can make a tree”).

13  Emerson, “Historical Discourse at Concord.”

14  See his letter to Martin Van Buren. The enforced removal known as the “Trail of Tears” did not begin until October 1936.

15  Waggoner, Emerson as Poet, 151–2. Eco-criticism makes much of human dominion over the earth as given in Genesis, and we rightly question Emerson’s naïve assertion in Nature that “Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use” (Essays, 28). Nevertheless, Waggoner’s account of Puritan stated doctrine is correct. See also Paryz on Emerson’s dual conception of value in “the land”: “the land that exists as a physical entity has relatively low value, as it is ‘cheap,’ while the land that can be embraced and explored by the spirit … represents the true value” (Postcolonial and Imperial Experience, 85).

16  The source of Ford’s dictum is obscure. Sandburg’s phrase appears in his poem “Prairie.” My student Douglas Vincent pointed out to me that Emerson, drawing from the Vishnu Purán, allows the Earth’s Song to break down the temporal illusions of humankind, but Earth itself is material and thus illusory. By omitting any consoling idea of transcendence, he avoids a facile transcendence while problematizing illusory human life within the world of diversity.

17  Emerson, Emerson in His Journals 267. Mikics, Annotated Emerson, 517, compares the drinking songs of Hafiz, and cites Emerson’s 1843 journal: “I take many stimulants & often make an art of my inebriation.”

18  Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 2; and Collison, “Emerson and Antislavery,” 180. Reynolds also makes a strong case for Emerson’s anti-slavery position and his support for John Brown, though he remained a “closet radical.” Reynolds, John Brown, 444, 482–4 and passim.

19  I am thinking of Bercovich’s argument in Puritan Origins of the American Self that “if Emerson differs from the chauvinist by his Romantic self-reliance, he differs equally from the Romantic Antinomian by his reliance on a national mission” (175).

20  Emerson’s Journals reveal mixed feelings before and after Webster’s death in October 1852. In July, a couplet: “Why did all manly gifts in Webster fail? / He wrote on Nature’s grandest brow, For Sale” (Emerson in His Journals, 437). But pondering after Webster’s death, he wrote, “Nature had not in our days … cut out such a masterpiece. He brought the strength of the savage into the height of culture…. He was a statesman, & not the semblance of one” (437).

21  Bromwich, “Emerson’s Ode,” 218. See also Emerson, “Trade of New England”; and the discussion in Paryz, Postcolonial and Imperial, 89–91.

22  The allusion is to the Krakow uprising of February 1846, and the bloody consequences of the following months. There is an analogy between the plight of the serfs and that of the African slaves, with perhaps a sympathetic memory of the Polish nobleman Kosciuszko, who fought for the colonies in the American Revolution. Mikics, Annotated Emerson, 511, cites Emerson’s 1846 journal, which indicates scant sympathy with the Poles: “When the last Polander is gone, the Russians are men, are ourselves, & the Pole is forgotten.” Horsman, detecting traces of the leyenda negra, sees Anglo-Saxon superiority looking down on Mexicans, “a mixed inferior race with considerable Indian and some black blood” (quoted in Paryz, Postcolonial and Imperial, 78).

23  Dallal, “Imperialism UnManifest,” 47–83. See also Paryz, Postcolonial and Imperial Experience, chap. 3, 75–96.

24  Journals 9:74, quoted in Dallal, “Imperialism UnManifest,” 55. Compare the following: “These rabble in Washington are really better than the snivelling opposition. They have a sort of genius of a bold and manly cast, though Satanic … Mr Webster told them how much the war cost, that was his protest, but voted the war, & sends his sons to it. They calculated rightly on Mr Webster. My friend Mr Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they could not calculate. The abolitionists denounce the war & give much time to it, but they pay the tax” (Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, June–July 1846, 358–9).

25  Rowe, “Hamlet’s Task,” 21. See Gougeon’s reply: “Emerson,” 185–220.

26  A case for Schiller’s “Das Lied von der Glocke” made by Kenneth Cameron is dismissed by Hansen and Pollin: “All such poems have generic similarities determined by their subject matter.” Although readers “have searched for connections between Schiller’s poem and Poe’s ‘The Bells,’ [and] despite Kenneth Cameron’s creative associations, it is impossible to establish any connection between the ‘Song of the Bell’ and Poe’s text” (German Face, 84).

27  See Frye, Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe; and McGann, Poet Edgar Allan Poe. My own discussion was written before reading McGann.

28  Poe, Collected Works, 3:429–30. For publication of the poem, see also Schultz, “Edgar Allan Poe Submits ‘The Bells,’” 166–81.

29  According to Sorby, Schoolroom Poets, xxix, “scant attention has been paid” to the place of McGuffy’s Readers in teaching children how to read poetry – which included “how to read with their voices, how to breathe while they read, and how to use their bodies as vehicles for performance.” As Sorby’s discussion suggests, elocution inculcated the relationship between printed text, phonics, intonation, dramatic presence, and emotion in poetry.

30  Abrams, Fourth Dimension.

31  Hollander, “Music of Poetry,” 236. For fuller discussion, see Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, 173–80 and passim.

32  Another German parallel is found in Ludwig Spohr’s Symphony No. 4 in F, op. 86, subtitled “Die Weihe der Töne,” “The Consecration of Sound,” written in 1832, after Wordsworth’s ode. Spohr’s symphony, then widely acclaimed, is inspired by a poem of the same name by his friend Carl Pfeiffer, and Spohr requested that the poem be read aloud at every performance. The likelihood that Poe was aware of Pfeiffer’s poem seems slight. Pfeiffer’s poem is printed with translation in the liner notes to Spohr’s Symphony No. 4, conducted by Howard Shelley (Hyperion CDA67622), 2007.

33  Poe, Essays and Reviews 263–4; Jacobs, Poe, 169. Jacobs notes that, by the 1830s, Wordsworth had won wide acceptance in America. According to Stovall, Edgar Poe the Poet, 128, Poe’s response to the Lake Poets here arose “in part from real pleasure in what he read, and in part from a vain and boyish delight in confuting persons of respect and authority.”

34  A precursor is found in “The Solitary Reaper,” where music, abstract sound, and the sounds of an unknown language merge (with a dollop of eroticism) into a single, revitalizing experience. There is a class of romantic poems that valorize auditory experience in terms of spirituality, among them Shelley’s “Skylark,” his “Ode to the West Wind,” and all those Aeolian harp pieces gathered in Abrams’s essay “The Correspondent Breeze,” 25–43.

35  Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” in Pater, Renaissance. 129.

36  Hansen and Pollin in The German Face of Edgar Allan Poe (1995) unfortunately take a purist view, making much of Poe’s errors of citation and grammar, and derogating work that he may have read merely in translation. “Poe’s use of German is second hand and fraught with errors obvious to anyone with formal training in the language” (Hansen and Pollin, German Face, 3). Nevertheless, we learn that tales of Tieck, Hoffmann, and la Motte Fouqué flooded the American mass market (7). Roderick Usher’s library includes the (misquoted) title of Tieck’s “Journey into the Blue Distance” (Das alte Buch und die Reise ins Blaue hinein). As for music, there has been little study of Poe’s knowledge of music. Hansen and Pollin make no reference to it in their book. Yet American musicologists record the influx of German musicians into America from the eighteenth century onward and their hold over the performance and critical attitudes of highbrow music in America throughout the period. One tantalizing curiosity is that Hansen and Pollin confirm “the only German writer Poe read (in translation) with deep appreciation” was Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (85). That author’s best known work, Undine, was the subject of Hoffmann’s best known musical work, his opera Undine, often cited as the first German romantic opera. Poe’s references to music are always rhapsodically romantic.

37  “I lament my want of ear, but never quite despair of becoming sensible to this discipline.” See Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, 326; Abrams, Correspondent Breeze, 25–43; and Matteson, “Emerson and the Aeolian Harp,” 4–9.

38  See Genette, Mimologics; and Eco, Search for the Perfect Language. On the phonosemantics side of the debate, see Magnus, Gods in the Word.

39  Poe’s poem is in fact the begetter of a line of quasi-symphonic poems, largely the productions of Southern poets: Sidney Lanier’s “The Symphony” and poems by Aiken, Fletcher, Tolson, and others, not to mention Eliot and Stevens. Rachmaninoff’s The Bells, which sets Poe’s poem in Russian translation, is a large-scale choral symphony in four movements.

40  Hotson is the most detailed in “Emerson and the Swedenborgians,” plus several other essays, but little since 1930. Mikics, Annotated Emerson, 42, atttributes to Swedenborg’s theory of language Emerson’s oracular proposition in chapter 4 of “Nature,” “Nature is the symbol of spirit.” My curiosity about Swedenborg is indebted to conversation with Leon Surette.

41  A strong case for Swedenborg’s presence is also made in Jane Williams-Hogan’s conference paper “Light and Dark in the Art of Edgar Allan Poe.” Swedenborg’s profound influence on the development of symbolism and imagism is rarely recognized. Wilkinson’s book makes a start. See also Andrzej Sosnowski and John Kelly on Pound.

42  Winters, “Discovery,” 458: “It is one of the great meditations on death to be written since the seventeenth century, along with Le Cimitière Marin, Sunday Morning, and Thanatopsis. It is probably the single greatest American poem of the nineteenth century; and the British poems of the same period which can be compared with it are few indeed.”

43  England, Beyond Romanticism, 279-81, lists anthologies up to 1987 that include Tuckerman’s work. Subsequent biographical information is drawn primarily from England and Golden, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman.

44  See Momaday’s introduction to The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, xix–xxi; plus Golden, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, 44–8. The parodies are noted by Mary Loeffelholz, who suggests astutely that “The Cricket” lies outside the American tradition “exactly because its form and diction are so close to the British tradition of the romantic ode” (“Other Voices,” 302–3).

45  Momaday, introduction, in Tuckerman, Complete Poems, xxiii. See also Donoghue: Tuckerman is a reader of Nature who, refusing Emersonian or Swedenborgian correspondences, “yielded up the consolations of ‘correspondence’ very reluctantly but with a scruple that he could not put by” (“Frederick Goddard Tuckerman,” 368).

46  Burt, “Introduction to Tuckerman,” xiii.

47  “Cricks” is an onomatopoeic version of apocope, dropping a syllable from the end of a word. The five MSS of the unpublished poem differ mainly in matters of punctuation. My text is taken from Ben Mazer’s edition. I quote extensively because the text is still not readily available.

48  An ancient river in Asia Minor that empties into the Aegean Sea near Ephesus.

49  An ancient river near Sparta, the birthplace of Hyacinth.

50  Unidentified. Mazer identifies Xenaphilus as a Pythagorean philosopher said to have written on music.

51  A nereid in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 11:346–406

52  Golden, Tuckerman, 112, notes that “Psammathe, fearing her father’s wrath, exposed her infant Linus, whom she had borne to Apollo. When the child was torn to pieces by dogs, Psammathe’s grief was so intense that it revealed her as the mother. The songs of mourning for Linus became an annual rite, and Psammathe’s dirges became the well-known Linus songs.” The grasshopper possibly recalls Tithonus, a figure of lost love in old age, probably a reference to Tennyson’s “Tithonus,” which was published in 1860 though written many years earlier.

53  He is identified in some footnotes as Tiresias, but I’m not sure on what authority.

54  Mandrake is a poisonous and hallucinogenic Mediterranean plant. Its forked root, thought to look like human legs, was considered a fertility agent and was reported to shriek if uprooted and cause the death of its gatherer. Dorcynium (or more properly “dorycnium”) is also a toxic European plant.

55  Euphorbia is the botanical name for the genus Euphorbiaceæ, the most familiar variety being the poinsettia. Then known as “euphorbia pulcherrima,” these flowers have been sold in the United States during Christmas season from the 1830s. See “Poinsettias at Christmas,” http://www.whychristmas.com/customs/poinsettia.shtml.

CHAPTER FOUR

1  James, American Essays, 93–4. In a second essay published after Lowell’s death, James hedges: it is “ the very nature of the English ode to show us always, at its best, something of the chill of the poetic exercise” (115).

2  See Parrington, Main Currents, 2:451–63; and Brooks, Early Years, 513–37. Duberman, James Russell Lowell, 33, describes Maria as “the abettor rather than the originator of his sympathies.” McGlinchee, James Russell Lowell, 29, remarks that Lowell’s letters and notebooks “indicate a feeling for the suffering poor and show that the Abolitionist spirit was well-rooted in him even before the eventful date of December 2, 1839, when he met Maria White.”

3  Foner quotes this comment to place Lowell on the radical side of Republican ideology (Free Soil, 110). Lowell’s Republican arguments were consistently moral rather than economic.

4  Duberman, James Russell Lowell, 185. Compare 78–9: “Lowell did not deny Negro ‘differences.’ Moreover, he believed that certain differences were innate, not simply environmental.” But in denying racial inferiority, Lowell “fell into the opposite one of lauding the ‘nobler’ qualities of the Negro.” For racist attitudes among the transcendentalists, see Reynolds, Whitman’s America, 219–23.

5  See Aaron, Unwritten War, 32; and Lowell, Letters, 42. The raid at Harper’s Ferry took place on 16 October 1859 and was not resolved until 18 October. Lowell’s letter is dated 24 October.

6  The reasons for Lowell’s silence are subject to speculation. Among them one must consider: (1) that Lowell’s own position was well known; (2) that the nation at large was simply tired of the issue, which had been “solved,” nominally at least, by the Emancipation Proclamation; (3) that Lowell had to speak in his poem to a larger, more encompassing issue; and (4) that he was well aware that, the war accomplished, the most crucial issue facing the nation was reconciliation.

7  The gendering of Jefferson’s phrase is apposite: Lowell was far less progressive on issues of women’s rights than on race.

8  The one strain in Lowell’s work that retains critical favour is his vernacular writing: “A Fable for Critics” and the two series of Biglow Papers. According to Edmund Wilson, he wrote “the best dialect verse ever written in the United States” (Patriotic Gore, 479). Lowell’s preface to the second series of Biglow Papers shows a grasp of American speech and vocabulary that won the praise of H.L. Mencken: “he did a great service to the common tongue of the country and must be numbered among its true friends.” See Mencken, American Language, 84.

9  I do not see Lowell as a transcendentalist, pace Griffin, Ashes of the Mind, 53–4.

10  Griffin (Ashes of the Mind, 33–4) places this discussion of “nation” under a question mark: “It was not an uncontested term in the discourse of 1865. It is clear that the word had been (and, as they saw it, legitimately) appropriated by those in the North who regarded the defeat of the Confederacy as the final victory in a historic, costly but utterly justifiable struggle to save the Union.”

11  Harvard men also enlisted as Confederates, 250 in number, of whom sixty-four were killed. See Richardson, William James, 55.

12  Lowell wrote to Charles Nordhoff, 31 December 1860, “If the Republicans stand firm we shall be saved, even at the cost of disunion. If they yield, it is all up with us and with the experiment in democracy” (Letters, 1:345).

13  Compare Whitman in his 1855 preface, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” (Leaves of Grass, 616).

14  For comments on Italy and Germany, see Lowell, Political Essays, 6:81–2.

15  Democratic Vistas. Compare Tocqueville, “An American attends to his private concerns as if he were alone in the world, and the next moment he gives himself up to the common weal as if he had forgotten them … The human heart cannot be thus divided” (Democracy in America, 350).

16  As Griffin notes, Lowell is intensely focused on the justification for the experience of the war …, a process in which the moral thought – the self-definition – flows effortlessly into the political belief” (Ashes of the Mind, 226). But Lowell’s moral thought is not grounded on Calvinist Providential theology.

17  Foner, Free Soil, chap. 1.

18  Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution, analyzes the degree the Constitution is affected by the demands of slaveholders. Here, Lowell is closer to Garrison than to Salmon P. Chase’s argument that the writers of the Constitution loathed slavery. See Foner, Free Soil, chap. 3.

19  Compare Bercovitch: this covenant was both “a conditional pact between God and a civic community for certain temporal ends … [and] the terms of unmerited redemption for the elect” (Jeremiad, 33).

20  One might add that they had also, de facto, to become capitalists.

21  Lowell was less cognizant of the Native American. He denounced government policies in his youthful Class Day poem – “a despoliation never equaled ‘except by the Saracen disciples of Mahomet’” – but he never took up the cause. See Duberman, James Russell Lowell, 27 and 357. Schaar, it is worth noting, wrote in 1972, at the height of the Vietnam War and the popularity of Richard Nixon. He cites Susan Sontag’s Trip to Hanoi (1968): “Probably no serious radical movement has any future in America unless it can revalidate the tarnished idea of patriotism” (quoted in Schaar, “Covenanted Patriotism,” 235).

22  In “A Fable for Critics,” he writes of himself: “The top of the hill he will ne’er come nigh reaching / Till he learns the distinction ’twixt singing and preaching” (Lowell, Criticism, 201).

23  Text from Stedman, American Anthology, 282–4.

24  Genovese contends that “the Yankee interpretation of the Constitution prevailed not because it was intellectually superior but because the North won a test of physical strength … It would be hard to imagine a clearer example of the doctrine that might makes right – a doctrine supposedly anathema to liberals” (Southern Tradition, 28). Needless to say, I disagree.

25  See McPherson, Battle Cry, 7 and 608–11. On Republicans and Know-Nothings, see Foner, Free Soil, “The Republicans and Nativism.”

26  Compare Emerson’s “Voluntaries”: “When Duty whispers low, ‘Thou must,’ / The youth replies, ‘I can.’” Lowell must have known that these lines alluded to Robert Gould Shaw.

CHAPTER FIVE

1  See, for example, Davis, Cause Lost; and Bové’s sardonic 1986 account of the “Professional Southernist,” who is “both a monumental historian and an antiquarian” and too often “a hagiographer” (“Agriculture and Academe,” 172). Southern studies have matured considerably since then.

2  Many such displays were taken down shortly after I wrote.

3  Hutchison, “Surplus Patriotism,” 141–63.

4  Hubbell quotes Simms: “South Carolina, sir, was the flower of modern civilization. Our people were the most hospitable, the most accomplished, having the highest degree of culture and the highest sense of honor, of any people, I will not say of America, sir, but of any country on the globe” (Last Years, 50–1).

5  Timrod does not consider demographics: half the scattered population was enslaved and forbidden by law (in most states) to be literate. Schools were few, and only a small percentage of the white population was literate. Timrod collaborated with Simms and Hayne to found Russell’s Magazine, intended as a Southern counterpart to the Atlantic Monthly, but it failed. See Parks, Henry Timrod, 79; and Wolosky, Poetry and Public Discourse, 53.

6  Cisco, Henry Timrod, 28–9. Cisco is a Confederate apologist, and his biography betrays his bias. It is the only biography, and there is no edition of Timrod’s newspaper writing, nor of his letters. For a summary of his war experience, see McNeely, “Henry Timrod.”

7  Hubbell, Last Years, 8. “Unionist” did not mean “abolitionist.” Genovese notes: “Virtually every important Unionist in the plantation states and many – probably a large majority – of the Unionists in the border states staunchly supported slavery and argued that secession and war could only result in a general emancipation” (Southern Tradition, 111).

8  Cisco, Timrod, 112. Clare in 1936 praised Judge Bryan’s activity after the war because his “assertions concerning the Constitutional rights of the Ku Klux Klan prevented the conviction of many members” (Harp of the South, 19).

9  Cisco, Timrod, 127–8. Hubbell quotes more extensively from the letter. Paul Hamilton Hayne was an almost selfless supporter of Simms, Timrod, and Lanier. After Timrod’s death, he sought to edit the poems: “I would rather a hundred times over, have brought out Timrod’s book than mine” (Hubbell, Last Years, 99). He was certainly minimizing Timrod’s Confederate loyalties. On the other hand, Reynolds points out that 82 percent of the popular vote in 1860, both South and North, was for Unionist candidates, and even the disunionist Breckenridge was a reluctant secessionist (John Brown, 442).

10  Simms, History of South Carolina, quoted in Clare, Harp of the South, 58.

11  Timrod, Essays, 91. Reynolds notes that earlier apologists for slavery, like Jefferson, considered slavery “a useful but unfortunate system,” but by Timrod’s time they “had come to regard slavery as a highly beneficial – indeed essential – institution”: “The shift in attitude came in the late 1830s, when John Calhoun called slavery ‘instead of an evil, a good – a positive good,’ because it served whites while it civilized blacks” (John Brown, 439).

12  Hanlon, America’s England, 160. Hanlon’s argument is compelling, but he errs in dating “The Cotton Boll” prior to “Ethnogenesis,” and I disagree that “Ethnogenesis” is a “confused” poem. Genovese notes that, after “the bloody June Days in Paris in 1848,” Timrod “was celebrating southern slavery as the model of social relations for a new world order in which republican liberty would flourish for the propertied classes and in which security and at least minimal material comfort would be guaranteed to the laboring masses” (Southern Tradition, 34).

13  Pound had access to M.E. Speare’s anthology A Pocket Book of Verse (New York: Washington Square, 1940), which he found “on the jo-house seat.” It included Lanier’s “Song of the Chattahoochee.”

14  Wilson, Patriotic Gore, 438–9: “The old South which the Southerner idealized, which he may be found idealizing today and which the Northerner has come to idealize too, was mostly located in time in the eighteenth century; and in geography especially in eastern Virginia, colonial and post-Revolutionary, that powerful and wealthy society, self-confident and self-contained and ruled by a few hundred families who were themselves pretty nearly autonomous.”

15  Quoted in Starke, Sidney Lanier, 112. In March 1867, Lanier published under a pseudonym an article attacking “The Sherman Bill” (Centennial Edition, 5:209–12), which was actually an effort by moderates to enact less punitive measures for Reconstruction than the extreme Republicans called for. Clearly, Lanier saw nothing moderate in the move. Citations are from the 1945 centennial edition of Lanier’s works in ten volumes.

16  Blight, Race and Reunion, 57 and 110.

17  James Woodrow was uncle to President Woodrow Wilson, and the two shared a high moral tone. After Lanier’s death, Woodrow was drummed out of the church for espousing Darwinism.

18  See Gabin, Living Minstrelsy, chap. 5, for more details. Lanier’s music MSS are held at Johns Hopkins.

19  Starke, Sidney Lanier, 165, 169. Starke makes this extraordinary statement without citation.

20  Anonymous, “The Duties of Peace,” 424. Journalist Charles Astor Bristed described the Round Table as not always loyal to the North, but “not as coppery as Bardolph’s nose.” It was often severely critical of Lincoln’s conduct of the war. See Mott, History of American Magazines, 320.

21  The essay was written in 1867 but not published until 1871 (5:liii).

22  “The rascals have put my name to it, – when I expressly instructed the Herald not to do so. Not that I’m ashamed of it all, – but May is still in the country and I did not want the negroes to have any ground for twisting me into an enemy” (9:114).

23  1:192–3. The poem claims that reports of bloody Klan violence are Yankee exaggeration and lie. The note suggests that the poem was written in response to Sumner’s Senate speech of 21 December 1870, denouncing President Grant for not suppressing the activities of the Ku Klux Klan (1:376). Blight, Race and Reunion, 108–22, gives a harrowing summary of KKK activities, and the 1872 report of the Congressional subcommittee, which was divided not only along partisan lines but also along lines of historical reporting. Republicans, “while understanding that ‘reluctant obedience is all that is to be hoped for’ from white Southerners’… were adamant about the need for federal enforcement,” while Democrats in “the minority report fashioned an elaborate version of the victimized and oppressed South, and argued vehemently that most of the alleged Klan violence simply had not occurred” (121).

24  See 5:266–7. Feminist arguments against the ethos of chivalry are relevant here: Lanier spoke out heatedly against women’s suffrage in his commencement address to the Furlow Masonic Female College in Americus, Georgia, 30 June 1869, and his views again follow sectional lines: “I am afraid, because certain suggestions float about in the air that a time may come when you will no longer be loveable, when we can not love you, and when, by consequence, chaos will come again. I am afraid, because yonder in Europe, yonder in the North, I hear certain deluded sisters of yours crying aloud that women must vote, that women must hold political office” (5:230). The diatribe continues for several pages.

25  Genovese argues that conservative Southerners “prefer a society of orders based on a hierarchy that recognizes human inequality” and that, while “their viewpoint has often accompanied racism,” the conjunction is only historical, not necessary (Southern Tradition, 27). I am unconvinced.

26  Horsman argues that two of the strongest influences on the concept of Anglo-Saxon superiority in America were Thomas Carlyle and Sir Walter Scott, whose Ivanhoe was the model for romantic Chivalry. Scott and Carlyle were major sources for Lanier. See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 38–42 and 62–5.

27  Starke, Sidney Lanier, 122. Charles Anderson (Lanier, Centennial Edition, 6:330) notes that such events were common; Lanier’s brother Clifford attended one in Kinston, North Carolina, in January 1864.

28  “Alnwyck Castle” (1827) by Connecticut poet Fitz-Greene Halleck expresses similar nostalgia for aristocratic virtues.

29  He read Froissart in the Thomas Jones translation, published in 1845.

30  Introductions to these volumes but not the full texts are included in volume 4 of the centennial edition.

31  De Bellis, Sidney Lanier, 39–45, includes the fullest discussion of “The Jacquerie” and reaches quite different conclusions from mine. Lanier published only a few songs from “The Jacquerie,” but longer fragments of the poem can be found in 1:171–90 – “while Chivalry stood tall and lithe / And flashed his sword above the stricken eyes / Of all the simple peasant-folk of France”

Ere yet young Trade was ’ware of his big thews

Or dreamed that in the bolder afterdays

He would hew down and bind old Chivalry … (172)

See also Lanier, Boy’s Froissart, chap. 88, 262–3. Daniel Helbert, “Future Nostalgias,” 18, has recently (and extravagantly) claimed that “Lanier’s nostalgia for the Middle Ages … is not an escapist fantasy, but rather a conscious, historically informed, ‘reflective nostalgia’ that is didactic, revisionist, and futurist.”

32  His poem, “Clover,” inscribed to Keats, is a “solemn protest against the doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake, which has led so many of our young artists into the most unprofitable and even blasphemous activities,” he wrote in a letter (Starke, Sydney Lanier, 263).

33  Rudy, “Manifest Prosody,” 253. The relation of Medieval Studies to current white supremacist movements in the United States and elsewhere is an ongoing concern. See Sturtevant, “Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages.“

34  Hayne, Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne, 110–11.

35  Howells’ word. Lanier’s eroticism was possibly too much for the prudish Howells.

36  Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire,” 1419. MacPherson notes that the war had “wiped out two-thirds of the assessed value of wealth in Confederate states [much of it in the persons of slaves], two-fifths of the South’s livestock, and more than half its farm machinery. … While Northern wealth increased by 50 percent from 1860 to 1870, Southern wealth decreased by 60 percent” (War That Forged a Nation, 46–7).

37  Compare the similar parable in Lanier’s dialect poem of 1871, “Thar’s More in the Man Than Thar Is in the Land,” in which one Farmer Brown buys cheap land that “couldn’t make nuthin’ but yallerish cotton” from a frustrated farmer, sows wheat and corn, and prospers. “Corn,” written after the 1873 panic, has even greater economic thrust.

38  Starke notes that corn, unlike cotton, will grow on the hillsides, bringing more land into production (Sidney Lanier, 194). Neither Lanier nor Starke considers soil depletion.

39  The centennial edition dates the first draft of “Corn” to July 1874, the first draft of “The Symphony” to March 1875.

40  Lanier once dismissed Timrod: “he had never had time to learn the mere craft of the poet – the technique of verse.” But he reversed his opinion at the behest of Hayne, who wrote to him: “I have heard Timrod, for hours, discuss with scholars of the ‘first water,’ such men as Prof. Gildersleeve, formerly of Göttingen, now of the U. of Virginia, – the profoundest questions associated with both English and Latin prosody, displaying a subtle and minute acquaintance with his subject, which surprised those with whom he conversed. Excepting Edgar Poe, I don’t believe the Southerner, nay the American has ever existed, whose knowledge of the ‘technique of verse’ surpassed Timrod’s” (5:160–1).

41  Kerkering, “Music of Racial Identity,” 149–50. Kerkering argues that Lanier’s insistence on the Anglo-Saxon roots of English prosody aligns with the “cultural analogy that aligned Southerners with the Anglo-Saxons and Northerners with the Normans.” However, Lanier’s interest in Anglo-Saxon was driven “not by lingering sectionalism but by a desire for national reunification.” This ideal reunification is clearly directed at white Americans. When Lanier taps into the notion of a “sense of rhythm which is well-nigh universal in our race” (154), there is a lingering odour of Anglo-Saxon supremacy about it all. An English parallel can be found in William Barnes’s curious volume English Speechcraft (1878), which aims to purge the English vocabulary of all words not of Anglo-Saxon origin. Hopkins, among others, was greatly interested in it.

42  Buck’s “Cantata” is published in American Victorian Choral Music.

43  For Kerkering, the “Centennial Cantata” is the primary exhibit in his analysis of Lanier’s Anglo-Saxonism. He contrasts Whitman, who emphasized the differences between American English and the language of England, whereas Lanier “equates the American and English languages, insisting both are Anglo-Saxon.” Differences between the two nations, he insists, are “separate from and subordinate to the continuity of Anglo-Saxon form … all are unified by the ongoing presence of racial rhythm” (“Music of Racial Identity,” 162). The content of the “Columbian Meditation” amounts to little more than a catalogue of the events of American settlement with an angelic prophecy at the end, and, as such, it is a fragmentary progress poem, a prelude to the more ambitious “Psalm of the West.” But Lanier’s correspondence with Buck, his answer to his critics, and examination of the text itself, reveal preoccupation with the “abrupt vocables” of Anglo-Saxon (148), which, Kerkering argues, “replace the heroic figure of Columbia with the real hero, ‘our Anglo-Saxon tongue’” (154), uniting the New World with the Old in an eternal racial bond. Both Kerkering and Jason Rudy set Lanier in hypothetical debate with Whitman.

44  Rudy argues that “Lanier’s imagining of America through poetic form takes obvious aim at Whitman’s free verse” (“Manifest Prosody,” 257).

45  Allen enumerates them (American Prosody, 291). Rudy discusses many; but pace Rudy (“Manifest Prosody,” 254), these forms emphatically do not include free verse.

46  Could Lanier possibly be echoing here the common belief that the Gullah dialect, prevalent among African Americans of the Georgia and Carolina coast, was a corruption of Old English? Lorenzo Dow Turner later demonstrated that Gullah is largely derived from African languages. See Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949).

47  The entire text is available in The Works of James M. Whitfield, 215–28, and substantial excerpts may be found in Sherman, African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, 86–93. Whitfield was a vocal advocate of the antebellum Negro Emigration movement. He spent his last years in California, where he wrote this poem. See Whitley, American Bards, 21–65. “For Whitfield,” he writes, “the prospect of leaving the United States entirely and of creating an Afrocentric nation elsewhere … [was] not abandoning America so much as transplanting it to another location” (25). Both Whitley’s book and Jennifer Hartding’s article on Whitfield focus exclusively on the 1853 volume America and Other Poems; the Emancipation Proclamation poem is thus not mentioned.

48  Starke, “Agrarians,” 551–2. J. Atkins Shackford’s “Sidney Lanier as Southerner” merely expands upon Starke’s arguments. C. Vann Woodward cites Lanier’s “The New South” in his classic Origins of the New South, 175–6: “It was an inspired vision, and it represented everything that the Southern farmer was not and had not … The new myth fulfilled the old Jeffersonian dream of an independent yeomanry, self-sufficient lords of a few acres. Later elaborations pictured this yeomanry ‘breaking up the plantation system’ … and vindicating the Civil War as the bringer of ‘economic democracy’ to the South. ‘Emancipation freed the poor whites more than it did the Negro!’ This cliché was heard so often that it came to be repeated even by respected Southern historians.”

49  Baltimore, it seems, was not sufficiently Southern for Ransom, who also fails to consider that employment for a flautist was limited and that the deep South is hard on tuberculosis.

50  Subtitle: “Sung on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S.C., 1866.” I am curious about the tune employed since the metrical structure is almost non-existent in current hymn books. Timrod’s poetry mainly ignores chivalry; his use of Tennyson’s Arthurian Idylls is discussed by Christina Henderson, “Nation of the Continual Present.”

CHAPTER SIX

1  Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere, 19. As Kete notes, Griswold’s character portraits “offered a particular model of femininity … that diminished the challenge to conventional gender hierarchy otherwise posed by the concept of a woman participating in the public sphere of the literary marketplace” (31).

2  May, American Female Poets, v-viii. Zophiël is a book-length poem by Maria Gowen Brooks. See Wolosky, Poetry and Public Discourse, 31–44.

3  Modern anthologies include Walker, American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century;Gray, She Wields a Pen; Rattiner, Great Poems by American Women; Bennett, Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets; and Wolosky, Major Voices, plus several volumes in the Schomberg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, especially the four volumes of Collected Black Women’s Poetry edited by Joan R. Sherman.

4  Yeager, “Maternal Sublime,” 21, reads traditional manifestations of the sublime as “political fictions meant to aggrandize the male ego.”

5  On Sigourney, see Phillips, Epic in American Culture, 187–219; on Brooks, see Groves, “Maria Gowen Brooks,” 38–46; on Harper, see Rutkowski, “Leaving the Good Mother,” 83–104.

6  The database itself contains 22,661 poems by women, 92,793 by men. These figures are very rough given different search parameters.

7  Walker repeats the story that Menken’s father was “a free man of color,” but the question of her birth, like much of her biography, is thoroughly ambiguous. See Eiselein’s introduction to Menken, Infelicia and Other Writings, 15–17. Most of Menken’s verse is in relatively free form.

8  Walker, American Women Poets, 73; or Rattiner, Great Poems by American Women, 43. For further discussion, see Prins, Victorian Sappho, 231–4. There were rare attempts at Sapphic metre in English, for example Elizabeth Akers Allen, “Ode to Aphrodite” (1891).

9  For background, including the scandal surrounding Rufus Griswold, see Patterson, “Hermaphroditish Disturbers,” 513–33; Howe, Hermaphrodite, edited with an introduction by Gary Williams.

10  Cavitch, American Elegy, 80–107, discusses the Washington in the funeral elegies.

11  Text from New Poems (1850), 48–50. This work was printed separately, inscribed on the “Order of services at the thirteenth triennial festival and first semi-centennial celebration, of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, at the Melodeon, on Thursday, October 2nd, 1845”; and later as “Ode sung at the grand social banquet given by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society to the American Pomological Society, at its quarter-centennial anniversary, September 12, 1873, in the Boston Music Hall. Words by Miss Hannah F. Gould.” According to Kete, not until Bryant and Sigourney (ca. 1815–17) did Americans begin “to value poetry that stressed the importance of emotions,” and she dates the dramatic shift of taste to circa 1830 (“Reception,” 22). From the evidence of Simms and Timrod, the shift occurred somewhat later in the South.

12  Griswold notes that Napoleon was divisive, that “the splendid genius of Napoleon was not yet revealed in all its magnificence,” but that “those whose opinions were fruits of anything else than passion were commonly led by a conservative spirit to distrust the man and to credit the worst views of his actions” (Female Poets, 38). In other words, Napoleon inspired raptures of the sublime in romantics, but conservative women like Townsend and Sigourney came down firmly in support of moral sentiments.

13  See Savage, Standing Soldiers, 117–22. As Savage explains, the statue became the visual icon of Emancipation for the American public. A replica was erected in Boston, it was pictured in textbooks and on a 1940 commemorative stamp. “As late as the 1960s the monument was still prominently featured in magazine articles about African American landmarks, despite its popular epithet ‘Shine, sir?’” (120). Douglass’s speech was reprinted in an appendix to his Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford: Park Publishing, 1881): 489–502.

14  A text of Ray’s “Lincoln” is printed in Walker, American Women Poets, 361–3; as well as Barrett and Miller, Words for the Hour. Ray’s poems are reprinted in volume 3 Sherman, Collected Black Women’s Poetry.

15  In her book, Bennett notes that the printing is an “excerpt,” but the anthology text is presented as if complete. See Mossell, Work of the African-American Woman, 81–5.

16  These facts are drawn from three sources: Mossell, Work of the African-American Woman; Scruggs, Women of Distinction; and Majors, Noted Negro Women.

17  Benjamin F. Lee was born 18 September 1841 in Bridgeton, New Jersey. In November 1864 he became a student at Wilberforce, graduating in 1872. He became a member of the AME in 1862, was ordained in 1870, and became an elder in 1872. He married Mary E. Ashe in December 1873 and became professor of pastoral theology, homiletics, and ecclesiastical history at Wilberforce. He became president of Wilberforce in 1876. Under his leadership, 1,149 students were registered, and forty-one graduated (Smith, History, 349). In 1884, he resigned to become editor of the AME’s weekly, the Christian Recorder, in which Mary published most of her poetry. In 1892, he resigned and became a bishop of the AME Church, becoming senior bishop in 1915, and retired circa 1921. His professional life was not without controversy; internal differences are hinted at in William Seraile’s biography of another churchman, Fire in His Heart: Bishop Benjamin Tucker. He experienced opposition in his candidacy for bishop (74), he involved himself in labour strife (92), he supported vigorous missionary efforts in Africa and Haiti – to be led by black Christians (118–19, 123, 128) – and he led the opposition to Booker T. Washington’s critique of AME clergy (138). Lee died in Wilberforce, Ohio, on 12 March 1926.

18  The B.F. Lee Theological Seminary at Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida, is named for him, as is the Health Center at Wilberforce University.

19  Payne, Semi-Centenary, 106. The passage continues by condemning a move to “concentrate the colored people of the South … in a particular State or territory, giving said State or territory equal rights with each of the others under the Constitution.” This scheme would have amounted to a form of constitutional gerrymandering or, worse, a reservation system like that foisted upon the Cherokee in Oklahoma. Such a move would be nothing less than concession to wicked prejudice, ignoring “the great principle which gives organic life to the government, which may be embraced in the word homogeneousness” (160).

20  Smith, History, 2:210. Lee goes on to lament that his church “is still assailed by those who ‘count gain Godliness.’” Lee was not alone in his hopefulness. It was a prevailing message of the AME. Compare R.H. Cain’s sermon in Payne, Semi-Centenary, 146–8, and Ransom’s message in 1935 (quoted in Hobson, Mount of Vision, 5): “Fifty million unborn Americans of African descent shall, a few generations hence, lead America to achieve that brotherhood which transforms the children of men into the spirit and likeness of the children of God.”

21  The word “miscegenation” first appeared as the title of an anonymous pamphlet posing as having been written by Lincoln Republicans and recommending racial intermarriage to achieve an improved human race. See Lubin, Romance and Rights, 7–8. Also indispensable is Sollors, Interracialism. As Randall Kennedy notes in that volume, 144–6, interracial marriages were prosecuted more intensively after the war than before because whites, feeling the claims of black equality for the first time, insisted on every method available to ensure white supremacy.

22  Wheatley regularly appeared as a “type” of black intellect in nineteenth-century black poetry, and she was known to white readers, having been included in anthologies of May, Griswold, and Stedman.

23  Hobson, Mount of Vision, xi and 194. “This viewpoint seeks African-Americans’ integration as full partners in the larger society, not on that society’s present terms but on the basis of the changes needed to provide full freedom.” Hobson (14–16) argues that Bercovitch’s term “jeremiad” is inadequate to black prophetic writing.

24  Williams, Harriet Monroe. On “The Columbian Ode” see Massa, “Columbian Ode,” 51–69; Schulze, “Pioneer Modernism,” 68–109; and Ehlers, “Making It Old,” 37–67.

25  The Columbian Ode, headnote. “Cantata,” sung at the opening of the Chicago Auditorium, 1889, appeared in her first volume Valeria. “Washington,” “Lincoln,” and “Democracy” are reprinted in Rattiner, Great Poems.

26  Monroe’s autobiography, Poet’s Life, 120, includes an original plan that even more closely fits the progress poem template. She devotes considerable space, 108–44, to the exposition and her brother-in-law, architect John Wellborn Root. Larson, White City, 22, says that Monroe herself was in love with Root: her 1896 biography of him “would have made an angel blush.”

27  Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, chap. 7, esp. 215 and 230.

28  Paraphrased from Neal, “What Remains.”

29  Badger, Great American Fair, 104. See Wells, Reason Why; and Horan, “Ida B. Wells-Barnett,” 132–50.

30  I confess to straining my definition of ode to include this poem.

31  Bennett, introduction to Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets, xxxviii–xxxix. There is a biography: Rhodehamel and Wood, Ina Coolbrith. Her visit to the exposition is described on pp. 224–7 of their book. There is also a portrait of Coolbrith in her San Francisco “bohemian” milieu in Tarnoff, The Bohemians. Besides her closest friends Bret Harte and George Stoddard, she entertained Yellow Bird (John Rollin Ridge), Jack London, Joaquin Miller, Ambrose Bierce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Austin, John Muir, and Isadora Duncan in “the most famous artistic salon in northern California” (Walker, American Woman Poets, xxiii). Coolbrith’s poem is printed in Walker, American Woman Poets, 326–9.

32  Rain-in-the-Face’s own recollection of the famous battle was recorded by Charles Alexander Eastman: “When the troops were surrounded on two sides, with the river on the third, the order came to charge! There were many very young men, some of whom had only a war staff or a stone war club in hand, who plunged into the column, knocking the men over and stampeding their horses. The soldiers had mounted and started back, but when the onset came they dismounted again and separated into several divisions, facing different ways. They fired as fast as they could load their guns, while we used chiefly arrows and war clubs. There seemed to be two distinct movements among the Indians. One body moved continually in a circle, while the other rode directly into and through the troops. Presently some of the soldiers remounted and fled along the ridge toward Reno’s position; but they were followed by our warriors, like hundreds of blackbirds after a hawk. A larger body remained together at the upper end of a little ravine, and fought bravely until they were cut to pieces. I had always thought that white men were cowards, but I had a great respect for them after this day. It is generally said that a young man with nothing but a war staff in his hand broke through the column and knocked down the leader very early in the fight. We supposed him to be the leader, because he stood up in full view, swinging his big knife [sword] over his head, and talking loud. Someone unknown afterwards shot the chief, and he was probably killed also; for if not, he would have told of the deed, and called others to witness it. So it is that no one knows who killed the Long-Haired Chief [General Custer]. After the first rush was over, coups were counted as usual on the bodies of the slain. You know four coups [or blows] can be counted on the body of an enemy, and whoever counts the first one [touches it for the first time] is entitled to the ‘first feather.’ … Many lies have been told of me. Some say that I killed the Chief, and others that I cut out the heart of his brother [Tom Custer], because he had caused me to be imprisoned. Why, in that fight the excitement was so great that we scarcely recognized our nearest friends! Everything was done like lightning. After the battle we young men were chasing horses all over the prairie, while the old men and women plundered the bodies; and if any mutilating was done, it was by the old men. I have lived peaceably ever since we came upon the reservation. No one can say that Rain-in-the-Face has broken the rules of the Great Father. I fought for my people and my country. When we were conquered I remained silent, as a warrior should. Rain-in-the-Face was killed when he put down his weapons before the Great Father. His spirit was gone then; only his poor body lived on, but now it is almost ready to lie down for the last time. Ho, hechetu! [It is well].” See Eastman, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, 147–51.

33  Most of my information is from Hinsley and Wilcox, Coming of Age in Chicago. The Inuit sued successfully in court and won freedom from confinement, but organizers after the fair refused to transport them back to Labrador and continued to exhibit them (42–5).

CHAPTER SEVEN

1  J.F. and Adaline Glasheen, “Moody’s ‘An Ode in Time of Hesitation,’” 121. On the basis of his new fame, the Harvard Monthly requested a poem, so Moody produced “The Anniversary,” published that October. It baldly repeats the themes of the “Ode,” but Moody never reprinted it.

2  Decatur’s expedition against the Barbary Pirates is an exception.

3  Lovett, “Introduction,” xlix–l. Compare Brown, Estranging Dawn, 135–6. The fixation on Moody’s masculinity may reflect anxieties felt after the Oscar Wilde scandal. Brown notes Moody’s “distaste for effete aestheticism” (41). Daniel Gregory Mason does not comment on Moody’s physical bearing, except that his manner was “awkward, so that undergraduates of a complacent local clique found it easy to dismiss him as ‘Western’” (Some Letters, vii). Brown’s biography is sparse in its probing of Moody’s psychology or his ideas about poetics, politics, or religion. There are two collections of correspondence, but much is left unpublished.

4  Although Moody as a young art student created a life-size image of the Venus de Milo (Brown, Estranging Dawn, 7), and his letters seem attentive to women around him, he was offended by women on bicycles – “to the healthy male mind, woman is not a forked animal” (28) – and wrote more than once on the “evil effects of domestic love” (85).

5  According to Brown, “Arguments for America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ and annexation of the territories were strong. In response, an Anti-Imperialist League had been formed, and it gained wide support in both Chicago and Boston. In Chicago there were rallies in the spring and fall of 1899, supported by most of Moody’s friends – Paul Shorey, William Morton Payne, and H.B. Fuller had publicly urged attendance at one of them. William Jennings Bryan, who had roused Moody’s attention in 1896, spoke out against expansionism. A large contingent of Harvard faculty, headed by President Eliot and William James, ranged themselves on the side of the League” (Estranging Dawn, 115). Fred Harrington says there were such leagues in a dozen cities before 1900 and a central association with headquarters in Chicago (“Movement,” 223).

6  Lovett, “Introduction,” xliii–xliv; and Brown, Estranging Dawn, 103–4. William James’s younger brother Wilky, an officer under Shaw, was wounded at Fort Wagner and never fully recovered. James Russell Lowell’s nephew Charles married Josephine Shaw Lowell; as his widow she became a prominent social activist. See Waugh, Unsentimental Reformer. The Boston Transcript was a Republican newspaper that nonetheless opposed McKinley’s expansionist policies in the Philippines (Harrington, “Movement,” 214).

7  “Lincoln suggested more than once that black troops may have tipped the balance in favor of a Union victory. Black troops at the end of the war made up about 10 percent of Union armies. Lincoln once said, ‘the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops constitute the heaviest blow dealt to the rebellion … at least one of those important successes could not have been achieved when it was but for the aid of black soldiers’” (Marcus, “Shaw Memorial,” 8). Black Union soldiers elicited a Confederate law condemning any white officer in command to be summarily executed. The notorious massacre at Fort Pillow followed. Ironically, the first black regiment was raised in South Carolina: it was immediately disavowed by the Confederate government (Marcus, “Shaw Memorial,” 5), which finally passed a law by a vote of 40 to 37 allowing for black soldiers only in the last desperate weeks of the war (MacPherson, Battle Cry, 831–8). Allusions by Southern apologists to “thousands” of black soldiers in the Confederate army are a belated lost cause fantasy (Blight, Beyond the Battlefields, 154).

8  According to Flint, “No poems written before 1900 even hint at the possibility that Colonel Shaw’s sacrifice was in vain. Quite the contrary, all earlier poems have seen Shaw’s mission as divine, his sacrifice successful” (“Black Response,” 212). As Stephen Whitfield notes, Dunbar composed his tribute “in an era in which an average of over two blacks a week were lynched” (“Sacred,” 21). There is also a sonnet on Shaw by Henrietta Cordelia Ray.

9  Washington, “Shaw Monument,” Papers 4:300–2. Washington’s account of the event is in chapter 14 of Washington, Story of My Life 1:111–12. Saint-Gaudens, Reminiscences 1:108.

10  Blight, Beyond the Battlefields, 160. See also Blight, Race and Reunion, chap. 8 and passim.

11  Hofstadter’s “Cuba, the Philippines, and Manifest Destiny” places the war in the context of 1890s phenomena, including the maturation and bureaucratization of American business, the rise of populism, and – invoking the voice of Frederick Jackson Turner – the “closing” of the frontier. See especially Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 148–9.

12  The ratification vote was close, winning by only two votes, while an amendment to pledge Philippine independence, analogous to the Teller Amendment, was defeated by Vice-President Hobart’s tie-breaking vote. See Harrington, “Movement,” 222.

13  Harrington, “Movement,” 216. The list of those affiliated with the movement includes many of the most prominent literary and political figures of the day: Charles Francis Adams, Jr, Jane Addams, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Edward Atkinson, Ambrose Bierce, Andrew Carnegie, Grover Cleveland, John Dewey, Finley Peter Dunne, Henry Blake Fuller, Hamlin Garland, Samuel Gompers, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Dean Howells, Henry James, William James, Josephine Shaw Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, William Vaughn Moody, Carl Schurz, Mark Twain, and Henry Van Dyke, among many others. Twain was one of the most outspoken; his anti-imperialist essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” appeared in the North American Review for February 1901. Stuart Miller sees elitism on both sides of the question, claiming that “both sides tended to be contemptuous of the common man” (Benevolent Assimilation, 120).

14  Beisner, Twelve against Empire, 165. Beisner’s chapter on Carnegie details his peculiar self-contradictory positions (165–85). Those with business interests in Hawaii, fearful of competition, also opposed the war.

15  Compare Bellah, Broken Covenant, 38. Beveridge, “Support of an American Empire,” 704–12.

16  Rafael, “White Love,” 186. Estimates of casualties in the conflict vary widely, but all confirm a significant loss of life on both sides. Richard Welch says that 126,500 American soldiers saw service, suffering 4,200 killed and 2,800 wounded: this represents “a casualty rate of 5.5 percent, one of the highest of any war in American history.” The Filipino side suffered between 16,000 and 20,000 killed (other estimates being much higher). “In addition, perhaps 200,000 Filipinos died of famine, disease, and other war-related calamities,” many in a widespread epidemic of cholera. Financial cost to the US was over $400 million, “a figure twenty times the purchase price paid Spain (Welch, Response, 42).

17  Stephen J. Whitfield, 23. See Marks, Black Press. Support was not unanimous: see Frances Harper’s pacifist appeals “Do Not Cheer, Men Are Dying” and “The Burdens of All,” both 1900.

18  Cuban independence was granted in the 1898 treaty by virtue of the anti-imperialist Teller Amendment, but Senator Platt of Connecticut argued the constitutionality of America’s right to acquire and govern new territories; Senator Hoar vigorously dissented (Gillett, Hoar, 245–51). In 1902, the Platt Amendment placed severe restrictions on Cuban sovereignty and asserted American interests (mainly in the sugar industry), including a perpetual lease for a military base at Guantanamo. York, Architecture of Address, 157, appears to misread Moody completely, writing that his “real purpose” is “to consecrate the beaches of the world with American blood – starting with the beach in South Carolina, then turning to the beaches of Cuba and the Philippines implicated in the Spanish-American War.”

19  Brown, Estranging Dawn, 106. No one has ever suggested that the mountaineering figure in Robinson’s own ode “The Man against the Sky” (1916) may represent Moody. See also Brown, “Moody and Robinson,” 185–94.

20  Bratlinger, “Kipling’s White Man’s Burden,” 172. He notes that many found Kipling’s preaching to Americans, and particularly “The White Man’s Burden,” offensive. In Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 179–80, Gatewood writes, “Dozens of poems entitled ‘The Black Man’s Burden’ appeared in the months immediately following the publication of Kipling’s work,” and he cites an editorial in The Colored American (18 March 1899): “With all due respect for the alleged genius of one Rudyard Kipling, his latest conglomeration of rot about the ‘white man’s burden’ makes us very, very tired. It has ever been the dark races who have borne the world’s burdens.” Theodore Roosevelt, despite relatively inclusive views of blacks, was less tolerant of Indigenous peoples. In The Winning of the West (1889), he saw wars with “the savages” through the lens of social Darwinism, depicting them as “righteous,” however horrible, whether waged between American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, or New Zealander and Maori.

21  See poems by Herbert Bashford and Joaquin Miller in Edmund Stedman’s 1900 anthology American Poetry, plus Robert Frost, “Once by the Pacific,” Robinson Jeffers, “Continent’s End,” Yvor Winters, “The Slow Pacific Swell,” Muriel Rukeyser, “Palos Verdes Cliffs,” Thom Gunn, “The Discovery of the Pacific,” Galway Kinnell, “On the Oregon Coast,” and Alicia Ostriker, “Staring at the Pacific, and Swimming in It.” Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Prayer to the Pacific” presents an Amerind speaker looking with longing at her Asian place of origin.

22  Milton, Prose Selections, 258–9.

23  Moody calls Areopagitica Milton’s greatest prose work: “Milton’s revolutionary spirit next led him to attack the censorship of the press. The time-honored institution of the censorship he saw to be an intolerable hindrance to freedom of thought,” and he launched against it “all the thunders and lightnings of his magnificent rhetoric” (Moody, Lovett, and Boynton, First View, 142).

24  Part of Senator Teller’s motivation was more commercial than magnanimous. Colorado, his home state, was a major producer of beet sugar, in competition with Cuban sugar. There was also widespread fear of Spanish-speaking, black, and Catholic immigration – a fear still today reflected in the ambiguous status of Puerto Rico. These fears, however, did not seem to affect Moody.

25  Moody, in 1904, planned to watch election returns through the night with his friend Edwin Arlington Robinson, expressing feelings of regret that “the vision in the light of which our country was created and has grown great, will soon fade, and one more world-dream will have been found impossible to live out … the America that we have known and passionately believed in, will be no more” (Letters to Harriet, 211). Roosevelt won in a landslide, defeating Alton B. Parker, who won only the Southern bloc. Shortly thereafter, Roosevelt discovered Robinson’s poetry, personally wrote a review of it, and – indirectly at Moody’s suggestion – offered Robinson a government sinecure. Details are outlined in Percy MacKaye’s introduction in Moody, Letters to Harriet, 26–9.

26  Quoted in Blight, Race and Reunion, 5. Morgenthau, incidentally, was dismissed as advisor to the State Department by President Johnson because of his criticism of the Vietnam War.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1  “Narcissus as Narcissus,” in Tate, Essays, 593. On Graves and early New Criticism, see Childs, Birth of New Criticism. Also Foust, “Aesthetician of Simultaneity” 17–25.

2  “Three Types of Poetry,” in Tate, Essays, 196. Harrington argues, “it is this lumping of all notions of utility” – whether political or moral or spiritual or therapeutic – “that marks the crucial rhetorical intervention of modernist critics in shaping the social form of poetry” (Poetry and the Public, 38). Morrison argues that this emphasis on aesthetic inutility is a politically subversive position intended to undermine “the rapaciously utilitarian technocracy of the modern world – and specifically of the Northern states – as well as a legalistic, rational individualism which was eroding authentic community and faith” (49). Both statements are true, but they obscure the transformation of poetic inutility from a descriptive to a prescriptive counsel.

3  Adams, “Black Cottages,” 39–52.

4  See Garner, “Anxious Odes,” 93–9; and Bromwich, “Parody,” 333. Hollander writes that Tate’s “Ode” is “a poem full of the beauty of broken echoes,” and he finds sources as well in Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams (Figure of Echo, 96–8).

5  See Underwood, Allen Tate, 6, on the deliberate confusions over Tate’s birthplace.

6  Tate, Memoirs and Opinions, 33; Kuhn, “Speaking from the Earth,” 171–84, reads Tate’s ode in the context of nineteenth-century lost cause poetry; unfortunately, he tends to blur the line between specific allusion and conventional trope.

7  According to Underwood, Allen Tate, 125, Tate was incensed by the “liberal attack” against the conservative Christian values prevalent in the South. He was thus driven to a defensive position, without of course embracing biblical literalism. See Jancovich, Cultural Politics, 22–3.

8  Hammer’s book should be supplemented by Underwood’s judicious critique (Allen Tate, 339–40).

9  Tate, “Poetry of Ideas,” 172–3. Bercovitch remarks, “Adams is not a Victorian sage calling halt to a rampant industrial capitalism. He is a prophet reading the fate of humanity, and the universe at large, in the tragic course of American history … To this end, Adams offers himself as a chronometer, in a self-portrait which despite its many vivid personal touches evolves into something of a mythic representation of non-being” (Jeremiad, 195–6).

10  Claire Sprague’s introduction to Brooks’s early work is the only place where I’ve seen these famous essays of Brooks and Eliot brought together; but she gets the relationship wrong. Eliot’s “selective, discontinuous version of the English literary tradition is the outstanding contemporary example,” she says, of Brooks’s arbitrarily constructed past (Brooks, lii). Rather, Eliot sees each element of his tradition as subject to revaluation but one may not simply wish it away. Gray, “Cultural Truths,” 39, condemns the “Stalinist notion” that the past is free “to be shaped according to the prejudices of the present.”

11  Fry begins The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode with a meditation on Tate’s figure at the gate: “Not only is the ode from its first appearance a vehicle of ontological and vocational doubt … but it also raises questions more steadily than any other poetic mode about the aesthetic shibboleth of the unified whole” (1–2). My student Robin Feenstra suggests an analogy between Tate’s man at the gate and the speaker of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush.”

12  Stewart’s hostile analysis is worth noting. Tate originally wrote “Heraclitus and Parmenides”: “Heraclitus taught that knowledge is based on perception and all unity disintegrates into flux … Parmenides taught that what truly is cannot change or be divided; therefore the phenomenal world in which change appears is a delusion. Their systems do not agree, but in the poem the philosophers symbolize aspects of scientific naturalism. Heraclitus stands for the physicist’s argument that the known world consists of random movements of particles; Parmenides represents the scientific view that the true reality is shaped by impalpable universals … Tate replaced Heraclitus with Zeno … [but] the point, however, remained the same” (Burden of Time, 379–80). Stewart dismisses the poem as “a piece of rather facile pessimism” (383).

13  “As I look back over my own verse, written over more than twenty-five years, I see plainly that its main theme is man suffering from unbelief; and I cannot for a moment think that this man is some other than myself.” Quoted in Rubin, Wary Fugitives, 81, from a 1950 symposium.

14  See Humphries, “Cemeteries,” 54–67. Valéry also appeals to “Zénon, cruel Zénon! Zénon d’Elée!” The Eleatic philosophers are credited with the concepts of infinity and dialectic, and Zeno is prized for his logical paradoxes. Tate, however, denied reading Valéry before 1928. See Tate, Memories and Opinions, 52. Compare Kuhn, Allen Tate, 225ff.

15  Kingsley, “Texts,” 176–7. Kingsley shows that Tate’s alterations of the first 1926 version are more stylistic than substantive. Bishop notes that Tate removed the dates 1861–1865 from below the title of the earliest versions, weakening the memorial tone of the poem (Allen Tate, 85).

16  I thus disagree with Ernest Suarez and others who read the poem as wholly negative (“Writing the South,” 799).

17  Squires, Allen Tate, 82, notes that “when Aeneas prays at his father’s grave, a serpent wriggles up from the earth. The serpent was the spirit of his lineage, the spirit of the past, present, and future of the house.”

18  Underwood, Allen Tate, 291 and 402. A wrinkle in Tate’s racial hierarchy appears in his assumption that the white race is inferior to the Chinese and that Caucasians would relate to the Chinese in a biracial society as Negros to Caucasians (Genovese, Southern Tradition, 88).

19  The remark appears in a private letter to John Wheelwright, but Underwood refers to parallel passages in Tate’s “A View of the Whole South,” Essays, 423–5, 426.

20  Underwood, Allen Tate, 292 and 403. Compare Davidson to Tate, 21 July 1930, Donald Davidson Correspondence, 250–1. Warren’s essay supports the status quo of segregation but scandalized Davidson by allowing that the black worker had been systematically exploited in the South. See Jancovich, Cultural Politics, 25.

21  Anonymous, I’ll Take My Stand, 62. Owsley was the author of State Rights in the Confederacy (1925), then considered the standard work on the subject.

22  Suarez, “Writing the South,” 806, notes Tate’s embarrassment at publication of the Kirstein letter, plus “a mixture of guilt and defensiveness” in his postconversion correspondence.

23  Underwood’s biography includes an account, innocently headed “Sources and Acknowledgements,” of the difficulties confronting Tate’s biographers, quoting Ned O’Gorman, who relinquished a projected biography because the record is not only littered with “lies, deceptions, half truths, fake truths, family loyalties, friendships, literary feuds,” enough that “render even a birth date suspect,” but there remains the question of “Allen’s erotic life”: “He lived out a literary ‘soap opera,’” and “many of the ladies with whom Allen slept are alive … Many of them are distinguished, and some of them are ‘celebrities’” (Allen Tate, 418). For another approach to Tate’s conversion, see Haddox, “Contextualizing the Catholic Turn in Southern Literature,” 173–90. Haddox argues that Tate was attempting “to preserve the iconicity of southern literature beyond all historical change by investing it with the authority of an absolutist faith” (174). Such an argument, though true, overlooks the spiritual component of Tate’s conversion.

24  Fuller discussion of Tate and Maritain appears in Kuhn, Allen Tate, 193ff.

25  The most extensive discussion is Davis, “Turning to the Immoderate Past,” 241–53.

26  Tate, a Southern Democrat, viewed a vote for Hoover with contempt (Rubin, Wary Fugitives, 75). The first-generation modernists who were Tate’s models, Eliot and Pound, had already decided that democratic capitalism was dysfunctional. See Surette, Dreams, xii and passim. Bové also discusses the biographies in “Agriculture and Academe,” 184–93.

27  Lost cause historians have frequently argued that the Civil War was unnecessary. Reynolds states the counter-argument in John Brown, 438–9 and passim.

28  Tate’s emphasis. In 1929, Tate wrote to Davidson, “We cannot merely fight against centralization; we must envisage a centralization of a different kind, having organization and discipline” (Donald Davidson Correspondence, 230–1. quoted in Genovese, Southern Tradition, 73).

29  More than once Tate praises General Nathan Bedford Forrest, noting his personal kindness to his slaves (Jefferson Davis, 41), but he is silent on Forrest’s responsibility for the massacre of black POWs at Fort Pillow and his postwar organization of the Ku Klux Klan.

30  Tate endorses the views of Thomas R. Dew, president of William and Mary University, and the even more outspoken views of William Harper, a justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court: “Dew called upon Christianity to justify slavery, while his opponent, the abolitionist Devil, was quoting Scripture for his own purpose. But while he fortified his arguments with the two authorities most convincing to the Southern mind – the Bible and the literature of the Ancients – he thoughtfully added that slavery was economically profitable” (Tate, Jefferson Davis, 43). As Bradford says, “Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself – Equality with the capital ‘E’ – is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle” (Genovese, Southern Tradition, 72).

31  Tate to Davidson, 9 November 1929, Donald Davidson Correspondence, 241. As Kuhn points out, Tate later claimed that agrarianism was “ultimately a religious rather than a political movement,” and that “the economy was only ‘the secular image of religious conviction’” (Allen Tate, 143). Tate, unlike Eliot, may also have been guided by Spengler’s argument for impersonal historicist forces beyond human control. See Surette, Dreams, 37.

32  In response to his editor Seward Collins’s espousal of fascism, Tate said: “I am so deeply opposed to fascism that I would choose communism if it were the alternative to it.” See Tate, “Fascism and the Southern Agrarians”; and Underwood, Allen Tate, 202–9 and 239–42. Genovese argues that the South was guilty of the racial oppression of African Americans but relatively free of other prejudices like anti-Semitism or anti-Catholicism (Southern Tradition, 25).

33  I cannot help adding that, as I write, Genovese’s description is unrecognizable in the face of current Republican policy. Genovese takes pains to separate his “Southern tradition” from both libertarianism and the religious right of literalist Protestantism. The devotion of Republicans to capitalist free market economy remains constant. The present-day South has clearly lost contact with Genovese’s “Southern tradition” over the past two decades.

34  Point number 4 refers to a Christian individualism constrained by social agreement, not by government, and thus open to differences of denomination, including Catholic, but hostile to atheist free thinking and presumably to non-Judaeo-Christian religions. Non-Christian faiths were hardly a consideration to conservative thinkers, and the Confederacy itself was close to declaring itself a Christian nation; but separation of church and state prevailed (Genovese, Southern Tradition, 44–5). Point number 2 simply points to the opposite vice of the North – the lack of a coherent social and religious morality. Point number 5 implies states’ rights but, more generally, values a diversity of local social attitudes over national or international (or legislated) “melting pot” homogeneity. This last point suspiciously resembles a code for white Anglo-Saxon homogeneity, at least in the South, which had never experienced the integrated diversity of widespread immigration.

35  Tate, “Where Are the People?,” 231–5. Or, as Bradford insists, dominance of the “atomistic or impersonal corporate business and the omnicompetent state are for the Agrarians two faces of one phenomenon. Both lead finally to Marxism” (Remembering, 69).

36  The complex developments of agrarianism during the 1930s can be traced conveniently in Bingham and Underwood, Southern Agrarians and the New Deal, which reprints two crucial essays by Tate, “The Problem of the Unemployed: A Modest Proposal” and “A Whole View of the South,” as well as writings by many others. The introduction surveys the extensive critical literature, both literary and historical. Agrarians, states’ rights notwithstanding, were fairly sympathetic to Roosevelt’s New Deal, and social scientist Herman Clarence Nixon, included in I’ll Take My Stand, chaired the 1935 Southern Policy Commission, the closest agrarian to have direct influence on Roosevelt’s Brain Trust (Bingham and Underwood, Southern Agrarians, 7). See also Shapiro, “Southern Agrarians.”

37  Alfred St Clair’s opinion in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, chapter 23; and Bradford, Remembering, 69–70. Bradford was still denouncing “compulsory integration in the schools” (71) in 1985.

CHAPTER NINE

1  Even in 1989, Jeffrey Walker introduced the subjects of Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem – Whitman, Pound, Crane, Williams, and Olson – as “splendid failures.” Each one, Walker argues, speaks “with a voice equipped to foster revolutionary change in their reader’s consciousness … and ultimately to alter and direct the national will.” Each seeks “victory in the forum of public (ethical, political, economic) values” (xi–xii).

2  I would add the three Nightmare Poems, unusual examples of science fiction in verse and significant contributions to the genre. His story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1937) has been made into an opera by Douglas Moore and a classic film by William Dieterle. “The Sobbin’Women” (1937, after the Sabine Women) became the Stanley Donen musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). See Gilpin, “Stephen Vincent Benét and the Silencing of John Brown’s Body,” in Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives, 106–19.

3  Jancovitch’s analysis, Cultural Politics, 49, does its best to clarify: “Tate did not claim that the act of writing should be autonomous from society, and in fact was highly critical of any such position. He argued for intellectual independence, but only to the extent that the act of writing should not be dominated by economic or political interests and so denied its own specificity. Writers should engage with society through a critical investigation of that society.”

4  Filreis labels him “conservative” but also notes that he had praise for Genevieve Taggard. See Filreis, Counter-revolution, 6 and 16.

5  Filreis, Counter-revolution, 61. See Filreis’s discussion of Zabel (Counter-revolution, 61–3 and 191–3) as well as Harrington, Poetry and the Public, 6. Some accounts portray these efforts by the New Critics as a kind of conspiracy to “take over” the teaching of literature in universities; they saw it as a principled effort to improve cultural education.

6  When Harrington identifies Tate’s position with that of “conservative liberalism” he is not being paradoxical but, rather, pointing out the shifting meanings of the word “liberal” taking place at the time. Insofar as Tate’s idiosyncratic thinking can be categorized, he is correct in describing it in terms of nineteenth-century classical laissez-faire liberalism, as opposed to the rising social liberalism of the New Deal 1930s. Harrington mentions Tate’s celebration of “a putative agrarian squirearchy in the antebellum South” (58), but he does not press the relationship to slavery and post-slavery social conditions, nor does he discuss the shift from classical to Keynesian economics. Tate’s imputation that the artist somehow had more independence when his patrons were aristocracy and clergy, rather than the “cash-nexus,” is also dubious. To Tate and most writers, the word “liberal” referred to newer efforts of social reconstruction. The older view was invested in social stability, slowing down the democratization of politics, and balancing the tensions between “individual autonomy on the one hand and the desire for cultural consensus on the other” (60). Harrington supplements but does not supplant Jancovich’s analysis in Cultural Politics.

7  Monroe, “Art and Propaganda,” 210–15. Herzog’s chapter is worth consulting, but it does exaggerate the “elitism” of Poetry’s policies, given the journal’s advocacy of the populist Chicago Renaissance poets. See also Pound, Letters; and Williams, Harriet Monroe. Henry Rago, editor 1955–69, continued the non-political policy after the war. See Filreis, Counter-revolution, 20.

8  Nelson, Repression and Recovery, 22. Compare Harrington’s analysis of the American poetry reading public in the preceding decade, Poetry and the Public, 21ff.

9  Fenton, Benét, 278. For Benét’s politics, see 276–96 and passim. Compare Jancovich’s categorization of four camps opposed to the rising New Criticism: those who “supported a cultural market and the cash nexus; Neo-Humanism; Marxism; and academic scholasticism” (Cultural Politics, 14). Academic scholasticism – a belief in fixed canons, knowable history, and a single correct interpretation for every text – has, I think, few survivors. Supporters of a cultural marketplace that determines literary value by book sales are an influential but silent group, at least in academia. New Humanism no longer calls itself that, but its faith in rational, secular, non-romantic cultural values is widespread. Marxism remains formative in much of current academic theory. These categories still have no place for leftist non-Marxist New Dealers like Benét, MacLeish, and Sandburg.

10  I use the “right” versus “left” metaphor only for convenience. Pound and Stevens, for example, shared few political beliefs apart from admiration for Mussolini.

11  “The “terrible corpse of France” is obscure to me, unless it is the French communist novelist Henri Barbusse, who died in August 1935. See Gold’s “Homage to Barbusse” in Change the World, 154–8.

12  “Towards a Proletarian Art,” in Gold, Mike Gold, 67–8. Whitman, he added, “still lived in the rough equalitarian times of pioneer America,” but his successors “were caught in the full rising of the industrial expansion” and “could not possibly escape its subtle class psychologies” (69).

13  See Schwartz, “Poetry of Allen Tate”; Macdonald, “Kulturbolschewismus Is Here”; and Segall, “Kulturbolschewismus Is Here.” Segall’s article is relatively nuanced; Macdonald reveals a strong personal animus against MacLeish.

14  Denning sees Gold and his Marxist confreres as one segment of a larger “Popular Front,” but his definition of this movement is so broad that discussion at times becomes confusing. The Popular Front was forged, he says, “from the labor militancy of the fledgling CIO, the anti-fascist solidarity with Spain, Ethiopia, China, and the refugees from Hitler, and the political struggles on the left wing of the New Deal.” It became “a radical historical bloc uniting industrial unionists, Communists, independent socialists, community activists, and émigré anti-fascists around laborist social democracy, anti-fascism, and anti-lynching.” He then stirs “Socialist, feminist, and syndicalist insurgencies” into the mix (Denning, Cultural Front, 4). Denning’s approach is useful for seeing past the orthodoxies of each segment, but it requires him to situate each figure according to his or her particular concerns. Lowney, History, 9, attempts to bracket it historically between the 1935 shift in Soviet policy, “which subordinated the revolutionary claims of class warfare to the formation of a united front with liberal and leftist organizations against fascism,” and the 1939 non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin.

15  Compare the nine essential elements in Mike Gold’s definition of proletarian literature in “Proletarian Realism,” including his belief that “every poem, every novel and drama, must have a social theme or it is mere confectionery” (Mike Gold, 207), even though two pages earlier he claimed that proletarian literature is a “living thing … not based on a set of fixed dogmas.”

16  Articles by David Barber and John Timberman Newcomb appeared simultaneously in 1990 exploring this view. Newcomb focuses on the distance between MacLeish and his mentors Eliot, Pound, and Yeats: he “is not best seen as a high modernist” but in his “politically and culturally progressive conceptions of the character, function, and value of poetry” (“Archibald MacLeish,” 9).

17  Harrington, Poetry and the Public, 30; later, Harrington discusses a Good Housekeeping article by Gene Stratton-Porter titled “Let Us Go Back to Poetry,” depicting poetry reading and writing as an essential part of a “traditional, rural, pious, conservative” culture (42–4). Every discussion of MacLeish focuses on his “conversion” and his demand for a public poetry. But received opinion, while it may admire MacLeish’s civic conscience, still favours the lyric poetry.

18  Respectively, secretary of state for Truman, national security advisor to Kennedy and Johnson, justice of the Supreme Court, Massachusetts governor, and then secretary of state for Eisenhower.

19  Donaldson, MacLeish, 173. MacLeish met Pound only twice.

20  The first appeared in New Republic, 14 December 1932. See MacLeish’s complimentary letter to Tate dated circa July 1933 (Tate, Letters, 261–2).

21  Herner, Diego Rivera, 247. Joseph Freeman’s attack under the pseudonym Robert Evans appeared in New Masses, January 1932. Siqueiros’s appeared in May 1934, after the destruction of the mural.

22  Herner, Diego Rivera, 247–8. Rockefeller himself is shown taking a woman’s hand “while a group of high society ladies play cards and behind them a tray of champagne glasses is passed around” (252). Important space was given to soldiers wearing gas masks and equipped with technology for killing (253).

23  As Filreis puts it, “this interpretive practice enabled the communist literary critic to read antagonism to revolutionary change as latent even when the writer under question was consciously a near or imminent ally,” and he quotes another reviewer to say that one became so adept “that it was easy to prove how political reaction lurked behind the purest love sonnet” (Counter-revolution, 199). Needless to say, the method has not died out. MacLeish replied to a similar accusation by Rolfe Humphries: “I am not a Fascist and have never been one. I am as strongly opposed to a dictatorship of the Right as of the Left – more strongly in fact because a dictatorship of the Right is an actual possibility in America … I believe in the classic American tradition of democracy as the only form of government which offers intellectual and personal freedom and responsibility to an adult human being” (MacLeish, Letters, 268).

24  Donaldson, MacLeish, discusses Frescoes 226–33. See 263–4 for the directive from Moscow.

25  Donaldson, MacLeish, 237. Sandburg himself was the son of immigrants and spoke with a strong Swedish accent. (His readings of poetry are among the most beautiful ever recorded.) Even in the 1880s, notes Trachtenberg, labour forces were largely made up of immigrants and “seemed to represent a foreign culture, alien to American values epitomized by successful representatives of capital” (Incorporation of America, 88).

26  Segall, “Kulturbolschewismus,” lays emphasis on the humanist group led by Irving Babitt and P.E. More, with whom Tate had a major dispute.

27  For controversies following MacLeish’s essay, see Donaldson, MacLeish, 335–8. Harrington notes that, while MacLeish turned to cheap prints and radio plays, Tate and Ransom “had abandoned the popular press for academic quarterlies” (Poetry and the Public, 50).

28  See Donaldson, MacLeish, 333–40. Compare Barber, “Image of Mankind,” 47–8: “MacLeish insinuated that those opposing his point of view were leaning toward treason … He appeared to want to burn books and regiment minds in the interests of a party line.”

29  This includes Pound’s Eleven New Cantos (1934), which MacLeish knew upon publication. See MacLeish, Letters, 263–4.

30  The “coarse ambitious priest” suggests Father Coughlin. See Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 227–34.

31  “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral,” in the song “Wovon lebt der Mensch” from Die Dreigroschenoper.

32  Barber’s analysis of MacLeish’s public voice is acutely critical, though ultimately positive. Public poets “must accept a measure of responsibility for established institutions … [and] live with their complicity,” but he finds that, while MacLeish accepted his responsibility, “he demanded that others accept responsibility also – his idea of it … MacLeish’s poetry of that era did not show a mind exploring complexity or its own relation to power.” He was clearly one of Cary Nelson’s “naïve, idealistic, pre-Vietnam” poets who “imposed a unitary vision of America on the actual culture he lived in” (“Image of Mankind” 39).

33  “There was Thomas Jefferson who saw the spiritual promises of a new world of the human spirit, and thought they were promises made to the idea, the ideal of MAN. There was John Adams who saw the fat farms, the busy trade, of the new Republic, and thought their promises were made to the well-to-do and the intelligent – the Aristocracy of Wealth and Talents. There was Tom Paine who saw the wild American shore and vast American forests and thought the promises … [were] made to all men everywhere. The poem tells of these men and tells how the promise did not come true of itself for any of them … Unless the people of a country, the whole people of a country, make the promises come true for the sake of the people, others will make them come true. And not for the sake of the people. For the sake of others” (Burnett, This Is My Best, 123–4). The unflattering portrait of John Adams seems to me better suited to Alexander Hamilton, whom MacLeish elsewhere describes as “the Scotch bastard from St. Kitts” who took away the revolution and, with the money-lenders, “buried it in the world’s greatest document” (MacLeish, Letters, 281).

34  Tate attacked Marxist criticism as “positivistic,” focused entirely on doctrine as opposed to the specifically poetic properties of poetry. Compare Jancovich, Cultural Politics, 50.

35  “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way kill as many as possible.” Senator Harry S. Truman, who added, “I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances” (quoted in Kennedy, Freedom Fear, 482).

36  Kennedy, Freedom Fear, 472. MacLeish attacked them in print and in public addresses as “the enemy not of the government of this country, but of its people” (Donaldson, MacLeish, 355–6). See MacLeish, A Time to Act, 9–31.

37  Cole, Isolationists, 419. Cole, who discusses Lindbergh extensively, also wrote a favourable biography. FDR for his part was convinced that Lindbergh was a Nazi (Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 433) and actively discredited him. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, however, “found no grounds for legal action against him” (Cole, Isolationists, 484–7).

38  He was Poet in Residence at Princeton from 1939 to 1942, but the position had no security. He “left Princeton in the summer of 1942” for the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, on the invitation of fellow-agrarian Andrew Lytle and remained there for rest of the war (Squires, Tate, 147–56). Squires’s chapter reminds us too that Tate was busy writing some of his best critical essays, that he fielded “a staggering number of requests for help in obtaining awards and scholarships” (147), and that he undertook the mentoring of pupils like Robert Lowell and John Berryman.

39  He wrote to Andrew Lytle on 26 January 1942: “In this dilemma, I am considering an army or navy job … There are all kinds of jobs in both branches” (Tate, Lytle-Tate Letters, 178), but Lytle discouraged him: “You were speaking of it primarily as a stop gap, but it might prove to be a right long gap,” adding, “but then all men may need the experience of war” (180).

40  Tate, Lytle-Tate Letters, 152–3; Donald Davidson Correspondence, 321. Bishop was offered a position but died of a heart attack a few days after accepting.

41  MacLeish addressed such “scornful voices and cynical voices” in a February 1941 speech: “You have heard … the voices which urge the Americans to be realistic and to think of no one but themselves … the voices which argue that American towns are too far away for bombs to reach and therefore that falling bombs mean nothing in America – the voices which tell us that fascism will win in the end and that it is useless, therefore, and unwise beside, to say what fascism is, or to give American aid to those who fight against it, or even perhaps to fight to save ourselves – the voices which tell us that the world will never be perfect; that we can’t police the world; that we’ll have to trade with the winners whoever they are” (Time to Act, 39–40).

42  The reference to Lord Lothian is curious. A proponent of appeasement in Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet, he remained Churchill’s ambassador to the United States. In this diplomatic position, he alighted from his plane in November 1940 and, “with flatfooted lack of ceremony” announced to waiting reporters, “Well boys, Britain’s broke. It’s your money we want” (Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 465). Lord Lothian died suddenly the following month, but not before Hitler had made him the channel of secret peace overtures to Britain.

43  Underwood, Tate, 244. See the entire discussion of the complex entanglements, 239–44. Singal remarks that “throughout this period Tate’s actual pronouncements on social policy closely resembled those of the New Deal liberals, while his rhetoric often came out sounding quasi-Marxist” (War Within, 250). He cites Malcolm Cowley’s surprise that Tate, “writing from an apparently opposite point of view … arrived at the same sort of social judgments that a good radical critic might reach” (251). On the other hand, his equation of capitalism with laissez-faire and the New Deal with Marxism strongly suggests the McCarthyist thinking of the 1950s.

44  Tate, Republic of Letters in America, 197, 198. Emerson’s “Ode to W.H. Channing” also seems indebted to Drayton’s stanza. The ode genre has had a close relationship to political empire at least since Horace. See Gregerson, “Ode and Empire,” 117–28.

45  St John Perse (Alexis Léger) was a French poet and diplomat exiled by the Vichy government. He had been translated by T.S. Eliot himself, and was greatly admired by both Tate and MacLeish. Tate first met Léger when both were employed by the Library of Congress during the war. “We had come at the invitation of our friend Archibald MacLeish,” wrote Tate in 1950, “who has done more than any other American to convey to our public the quality of St.-John Perse’s art” (Memoirs, 76). For MacLeish’s relationship with Léger, see Donaldson, MacLeish, 324–35. Léger had intended to give up writing poetry, but eventually he gave MacLeish an envelope containing his work Exils, with a note, “Do what you want with it. It has at least afforded me the opportunity of making this gesture of confidence towards a poet I admire and a man I love.”

46  The invasive species of beetle had become a major pest in the 1930s.

47  John Peale Bishop praised the poem in typescript, but remarked, “There is a confusion in your emotional attitude toward the war – which God knows I share – but I am not sure you have resolved the conflict, or, for that matter made clear the issues that clash” (Tate, Republic of Letters, 199). MacLeish records a story told by St John Perse, which may have a bearing on Tate’s Lama: “In the middle of the Gobi Desert, someone translated for him the beautiful guttural pronouncement of a migrant lama: ‘Man is born in the house, but he dies in the desert.’ For days he puzzled over the deeper romantic meanings of the phrase, until in a lamasery on the border of the desert he had it explained to him in brutally mundane terms. ‘A dying man must be exposed outside the tent so as not to infect the dwelling-place of the living.’ So much, Léger added, ‘for the incurable associations of ideas of literary culture!’” (Donaldson, MacLeish, 325).

48  Tate intensely disliked Stewart’s book. See Tate, Lytle-Tate Letters, 381–2.

49  Bradford remarks that Tate’s view of history “goes against the grain of the widespread American assumption that our future history will (as has our past) follow a linear progression toward perfection,” but that “the stumblings of the Ugly American all across the globe, the record of our well-meaning attempts to export and impose (on an international scale) a way of life that is not, even yet, fully acceptable to its own citizenry, to and upon other peoples with very different histories and characters … have not exposed Tate as a poor prophet” (“Angels at Forty Thousand Feet,” 55–6).

50  Compare Cleanth Brooks’s chapter “The Heresy of Paraphrase” in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, where he compares the meaning of a poem to that of a painting: “it is a pattern of resolved stresses” (203).

51  Robert Archambeau sketches the historical entanglement of aesthetics and ethics from Shaftesbury and Schiller through Coleridge to I.A. Richards in “One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism.” Lyric poetry – the lowest of the classical genres – was valorized in John Stuart Mill’s 1833 essay “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” which may be the common source of both Poe’s and Walter Pater’s preference for the short poem. See introduction, note 8.

CHAPTER TEN

1  Maxwell Anderson and John Hyde Preston, in Thesing, Critical Essays, 37 and 151; Parks, “Millay,” 45; Gould, Poet, 109.

2  Michailidou, “Edna Millay,” 7–22. Thesing summarizes the ups and downs of Millay’s reputation in his introduction, Critical Essays, 5–20. For discussion of the Ransom-Tate attacks, see (for example) Patricia Klemans in Thesing, Critical Essays, 202–4; Ostriker, Stealing, 47–8; Clark, Sentimental Modernism, 249–50; Walker, Masks, 5–7. Ransom and Tate were anticipated by Edd Parks’s 1930 Sewanee Review article. Ransom’s essay has boomeranged against his own reputation.

3  Gould’s unscholarly biography gives no sources, but this is the relevant passage: “I’ve not finished the ode – though I’ve done a good bit on it and some other things besides – you bum, the people downstairs do play the piano! – It’s as bad as 19th Street for a truly music-loving population – ‘I shall hate sweet music my whole life long’!” (Millay, Letters, 12 July 1919, 89).

4  This poetry, rejoices Atkins, “was pre-symbolist, pre-vorticist, pre-Dada, prejazz, pre-imagist, pre-vers-librist” (Millay, 112).

5  Roland Barthes, quoted in Schweik, Gulf So Deeply Cut, 6.

6  Here I am particularly indebted to my students Sarah Pesce and Joel Szaefer.

7  Kramer, “Art of Silence,” 153–64, suggests that female poets are not “bards” but “sibyls.”

8  Jackson and Prins, “Lyrical Studies,” 521–3. Zellinger’s “Edna St Vincent Millay and the Poetess Tradition” does not mention “Ode to Silence.”

9  Dickie and Travisano, “Introduction,” in Gendered Modernisms, x, rightly deplore the textual barriers to a number of women poets. The comment about nineteenth-century poets is paraphrased from Wolosky, Poetry and Public Discourse, 2. Rukeyser’s poems have been re-issued in much improved form, but she is in need of scholarly attention. As for Taggard, her poems are out of print, and my own inquiries to Harper met with disinterest. Millay, for all her prominence, also needs to be edited properly so that later works, like Conversation at Midnight (1937) and The Murder of Lidice (1942), are brought into the canon.

10  Tate, Poetry Reviews, 45. His phrase “dignified popularity” is, I suspect, intended tacitly to exclude Millay as undignified. His time frame, “the last five years,” supports this.

11  Berke, Women Poets, 28. May Days is a fascinating collection, including work by modernists like Bodenheim, cummings, Lindsay, and Sandburg; left-wing poets like Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, Joseph Freeman, Louis Ginsberg (Allen Ginsberg’s father), Mike Gold, Rolfe Humphries, John Reed, Louis Untermeyer, and Edmund Wilson; prominent women like Léonie Adams, Louise Bogan, Babette Deutsch, Amy Lowell, Millay, Elinor Wylie, and Marya Zaturensky; and Harlem Renaissance figures like Claude McKay and Jean Toomer. Any profits were promised to International Workers’ Aid.

12  Drake, First Wave, 175, quotes a letter to Josephine Herbst: “Mike is writing at last & cigar in mouth pronounces as many bromides about women & Art as he once did about communism … one can be very fond of him, but never get any comfort from him of an intellectual sort.” Drake’s citations from Taggard’s letters suggest a far more acute feminist observer than do any of her published writings. Denning in Cultural Front, 127, notices its leftist “gender unconscious,” “the belligerent masculinism of the proletarian avant-garde and the militant labor movement and the sentimental maternalism of the Popular Front representations of women … Figures like Michael Gold and Philip Rahv saw themselves threatened by both a ‘feminine’ genteel tradition and a ‘feminine’ mass culture.”

13  Nina Miller also treats Taggard as a feminist writer, though she offers a critique: “Several points bear repeating here: first, alongside the implicit critique of a culture which denies female sexuality and power, there is in Taggard an equal, if not stronger, tendency to fall back into the widely prevalent notion of female sexuality as inherently pathological. Second, simply at the level of relative emphasis, male violence has not nearly the prominence of destructive female sexuality in the poems and furthermore tends to be subsumed to sexual violence per se. Just as often, the suggestion of male violence is deflected by an ostensibly larger object of critique, such as bourgeois materialism. So while violence in men reflects their societal victimization, destructiveness in women has the status of a biological essence. Third, the use of conventional paradigms of love and gender identity as the framework for their very critique suggests the belief — or hope — that these are not incompatible projects, that change can and should be contained within traditional gender relations” (“Aestheticized Love,” 75). Barbara Foley and Paula Rabinowitz argue that the dominant narrative of the literary left in the 1930s is masculinist; but both focus on prose fiction and disagree with each other on major points. See Foley, Radical Representations, 40–2.

14  Daniels, Coming to America, chap. 11, provides most of my information, but he does not mention the Red Scare of 1920.

15  In postwar years, the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born worked on behalf of many individuals facing deportation because of the notorious McCarran Act, but it was itself harassed with litigation by the federal government, and much of its energy “was directed against a 1953 order by the Attorney General of the United States that the Committee register with the Subversive Activities Control Board (SACB) as a Communist-front organization. The case was in litigation for thirteen years. In April 1965, the Supreme Court, unable to settle the constitutional issues involved in the case without fresh evidence, sent the case back to the SACB. In April 1966, the SACB vacated the registration order against the Committee, thus bringing the litigation to an end.” There is apparently no evidence that the committee had ties to the Communist Party. See the note on the University of Michigan Library Collection of Papers at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/sclead/umich-scl-acpfb?rgn=main;view=text.

16  Text from Taggard, Long View (1942).

17  Bergman, “‘Ajanta’ and the Rukeyser Imbroglio,” has detailed the internal politics that led to the petty and grossly sexist hatchet job done on Rukeyser by the editors of the Partisan Review. Rukeyser was accused by the Trotskyite editors of “backsliding” and excessive “Americanism,” partly because she had been hired by MacLeish to work in the government’s Office of War Information. Bergman shows that the editors were repelled by populist elements in Rukeyser’s aesthetic, which they considered beneath the dignity of high art. Dwight MacDonald and Clement Greenberg led the attack “on any artist’s involvement in popular media” (Bergman, “Rukeyser Imbroglio,” 560). Bergman does not mention Dwight MacDonald’s personal enmity towards MacLeish, evident in his 1957 Memoirs of a Revolutionist, which perhaps recoiled against Rukeyser. This episode was preceded by John Wheelwright’s doctrinaire Marxist and misogynistic review in 1938. During and after the war, Rukeyser was under close surveillance by the FBI. See Kertesz, Poetic Vision, 177–81 and 271–6; plus Daniels, “Muriel Rukeyser and Her Literary Critics,” and Flynn, “‘The Buried Life and the Body of Waking,’” both in Dickie and Travisano, Gendered Modernisms.

18  Benét rejected the book for the Yale series in 1934 in favour of Agee’s Permit Me Voyage, but tried to find it a publisher. Failing that, he bent the rules and chose it for 1935. Later, he helped Rukeyser secure a grant for her Willard Gibbs biography. See Benét, Letters, 244–7, 269–70, 409.

19  Rosenthal, Our Life, discounts Rukeyser’s early Marxism: she was “a writer in the optimistic activist-idealist tradition of meliorism that runs through American philosophical thought” (51–2). Rosenthal was writing in 1950 when “Marxism” was a dangerous alarm signal.

20  See above, chapter 2, 54–5.

21  Kertesz (Poetic Vision, 8), citing Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry (221), writes perceptively that she wanted “to stand against the idea of the fallen world, a powerful and destructive idea overshadowing Western poetry.” If Crane considered himself a visionary poet, Rukeyser claimed that she “did not want a sense of Oneness with the One so much as a sense of Many-ness with the Many. Multiplicity no longer stood against unity. Einstein, Picasso, Joyce, gave us our keys” (223).

22  Louis Untermeyer described it as “perhaps Miss Rukeyser’s most important work up to date”: “In a steadily mounting chorus of contrasted voices, the poem proceeds to its affirmative climax” (quoted in Kertesz, Poetic Vision, 170–1). Thurston, Making Something Happen, 206–7, reads the poem as a movement through the seasonal cycle that “develops the characterization of Brown as a messianic figure,” though “Brown’s rising is neither mystical nor meek.”

23  DuBois’s biography was published in 1909. The name of the Kansas town is now given as Osawatomie. Battle Hymn is a play by Mike Gold. Jacob Lawrence, the African American artist, produced several canvases and prints on the subject of Brown. On the fraught relationship between DuBois and the Popular Front, see Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, esp. chaps. 2 and 6.

24  Witonski, “Language of Water,” 338, cites Craig Werner’s “three-part process” typical of an Adrienne Rich poem but also many of Rukeyser’s: first, a “conceptual framework” based on some understanding of the past; second, “a chaotic flux of experience” in which the original principles “inevitably prove less clear in practise than they seem in theory”; and third, a reconsideration of ideas in relation to that experience. Notice the resemblance to Abrams’s account of the greater romantic lyric.

25  The first and third quotation are from Brown’s final words; the second I cannot locate.

26  See Janet Kaufman, “‘But Not the Study’: Writing as a Jew,” on Jews facing annihilation in Europe and pressure to assimilate in America (47) and Rukeyser’s relationship to Jewish thinkers who “transcended the boundaries of Judaism” (51).

27  Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 166–7. As Witonski points out, the book is unconventional partly in its advocacy of outsider art: “Anticipating the Beats, the Black Arts Movement, the feminist movement, and many others, Rukeyser includes blues, American Indian songs, songs by children, sailors, soldiers, lumberjacks, mental patients” (“Language of Water,” 346).

CHAPTER ELEVEN

1  See especially Bérubé, Marginal Forces: “Canonization is a different affair for writers of different races “precisely because American writers of different races have historically been assigned radically different author functions” (61).

2  Dan McCall, who wrote in 1966, is quoted in Farnsworth, Tolson, 173; Bérubé, Marginal Forces, 203; and McHale, Obligation, 62–3.

3  The political weather of Texas played a part. David Gold, “Nothing Educates Us Like a Shock,” 226, writes: “The University of Texas Board of Regents [in 1944], fearing Godless Communism, homosexuality, and President Roosevelt in equal measure, waged a bitter campaign against left-leaning faculty, attempting to fire tenured sociology professors who supported the New Deal, firing untenured instructors for their support of federal labor laws, and trying to ban John Dos Passos’s USA from English classes. When President Homer Rainey protested these and other actions, he himself was fired … earning the university a nine-year censure by the AAUP.” Gold’s essay examines Tolson’s teaching methods and his conception of rhetoric. Compare Thomas, Extraordinary Measures, 105–7, on Texas racism in the 1930s.

4  Farnsworth, Tolson, 156, comments that “by 1950 Tolson was distinguishing Marx from Soviet communism as markedly as he distinguished Christ from the Christian churches of America.”

5  Flasch says that Tolson stopped writing “for several years” after this rejection, but Farnsworth, Tolson, 62–6, shows that Flasch was probably taking her interviews with Tolson too literally. At this point in Tolson’s development, he was just emerging from the shadow of nineteenth-century poets to Sandburg, Masters, and Frost as representative moderns.

6  Farnsworth, Tolson, 40. He cites Tolson’s critique of Harlem Renaissance writers who “portrayed the sensational features of Negro life, which were exploited for the entertainment of white readers,” contrasting the “new school of Negro writers,” including Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, who were more “earthy, unromantic, and sociological.”

7  Flasch, Toslon, 72, and Farnsworth, Tolson, 108–9, both speculate on the process, but neither version can be confirmed. See also Schultz, Afro-Modernist Epic, 47–8. Tolson never set foot in Liberia, but he read voraciously, including glowing reports in the magazine Liberia Today, published by the Liberian Embassy in Washington (Schultz, Afro-Modernist Epic, 39).

8  Flasch, Tolson, 74, cites her source as Dudley Randall, “Portrait of the Poet as Raconteur,” Negro Digest 15 (January 1966): 56. Despite Farnsworth’s denial, the story sounds convincing, and I see no reason for either Tolson or Randall to have invented it. Tate’s attitudes towards race were well known. Oliver Cromwell Cox, Tolson’s colleague at Wiley College, quotes one chilling sentence from Tate in his classic study Caste, Class, and Race, 560: “Lynching will disappear,” wrote Tate in 1934, “when the white race is satisfied that its supremacy will not be questioned.” Tolson cites Cox’s book in footnote 143.

9  Tolson enrolled at Fisk in 1919 and then transferred to Lincoln University in 1920, so he was too early to have mingled with Tate and the Fugitives across town; but Tolson well understood that his participation in such a group would have been unthinkable.

10  Farnsworth, Tolson, 145–6, quotes a 1961 letter in which Tolson comments ironically on Shapiro’s feud with the “Eliot faction.” Shapiro argues that Libretto is “the Negro satire upon the poetic tradition of the Eliots and Tates” (quoted by Flasch, Tolson, 80) – a claim that would absurdly reduce the claims of the poem. Compare Thomas, Extraordinary Measures, 112.

11  Farnsworth, Tolson, 146. Bérubé, Marginal Forces, 172, notes that Tate’s imprimatur was less troublesome in 1953 than it was in 1965.

12  See Farnsworth, Tolson, 169. Countee Cullen may be the “pedant / with a gelded look” in lines 2–3.

13  Tolson thus goes unmentioned in The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 because African American poetry is covered solely in an essay on the Black Arts Movement. Harlem Gallery is treated negatively by McHale because Tolson’s “cultural politics are those of an earlier generation” (Obligation, 60).

14  The implications of the Marcus Garvey/W.E.B. DuBois debate over Liberia have not been explored in relation to Tolson’s poem. Farnsworth, Tolson, 20, notes that the central character in an early unfinished novel by Tolson is Marcus DuBois. Although DuBois mentions Liberia only in passing in The World and Africa, Dejong, “Affect and Diaspora,” 112, notes that he “was invested in the success of Liberia because it represented the possibility of an autonomous and flourishing postcolonial African democracy – one that might set an example for other cultures within and around the black Atlantic.” Hobson, Mount of Vision, 90–103, gives a useful summary from the viewpoint of a religious historian.

15  Farnsworth, Tolson, 165, refers to Tolson’s praise of George Schuyler’s Slaves Today, a novel about Schuyler’s experience during a three-month stay in Liberia in 1931. He laments the conditions of native Liberians, stating in his foreword that his purpose is to “help arouse enlightened world opinion against this brutalizing of the native population in a Negro republic” (6).

16  Nielsen, “Deterritorialization,” 245, argues that Tolson saw Eliot as a “dead end” and allied himself with “more pluralist modernists … like Williams, Hughes, and Crane contra Eliot.”

17  Dejong has pointed out to me the apparent error in Tolson’s footnote 363, referring to Acts 5:32–6. Acts 4:32–6 is where we are told that the earliest Christians held all things in common. Brunner’s notes further confuse the citation, referring to chapter 3 and then quoting chapter 4. In his article, Dejong argues that, to Tolson, “democracy is enacted not merely as a system of political organization, but as a state of affective codependence” (“Affect and Diaspora,” 119).

18  “What do you think of Eliot’s The Wasteland?” Crane asked Gorham Munson. “It was good, of course, but so damned dead” (Crane, Letters of Hart Crane, 105).

19  Traces of Pound’s Cantos can be found in Tolson’s reference to the river, not the city, Wagadu (88); the voyage of Hanno (n480); the reference to Frobenius (n419); and to Guido d’Arezzo’s musical notation (519), celebrated in Canto 83. C.K. Doreski’s article in the Pound journal Paideuma focuses on the Cabbage and Caviar prose.

20  Brunner, Cold War Poetry, 142. Like most critics, Brunner conflates the progress poem with the “epic.” Brunner’s footnotes to Tolson’s Libretto (including footnotes to Tolson’s footnotes), printed in Cary Nelson’s Anthology of Modern American Poetry, are a major achievement of scholarship, invaluable to the study of Tolson’s poem.

21  Thomas, Extraordinary Measures, 117, remarks that Libretto offers an “Afrocentric alternative to Pound’s syllabus – not because the poets chose different sources, but because Tolson offers a quite different perspective for reading them.” Dejong, “Affect and Diaspora,” 127, suggests the term “Afro-futurism,” borrowed from Mark Dery.

22  Tolson, “Poet’s Odyssey,” 191: “The Latin word for poet is ‘seer,’ a ‘prophet.’ The Hebrews seemed to have the same idea in the Old Testament, as we see in the Psalms of David and the Songs of Solomon.”

23  It is so used in Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep (1934). The phrase recalls Karibu wee! (line 84), translated in Tolson’s note as “the rooster crows,” a sign of African hospitality. Emma Lazarus’s poem “The Crowing of the Red Cock” is a statement of militant Zionism.

24  Songhay at the height of its power under Askia the Great “was a remarkable state from any point of view. Its organized administration, its roads and methods of communication, its system of public security, put it abreast of any contemporary European or Asiatic state. It was as large as Europe.” The emperor “was obeyed with as much docility on the farthest limits of his empire as in his own palace.” “Gao, Timbuktu, and Jenne were intellectual centers, and at the University of Sankoré gathered thousands of students of law, literature, grammar, geography, and surgery. A literature began to develop in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The University was in correspondence with the best institutions on the Mediterranean coast. Art, especially in building and manufacture, reached a high level. The system of labor rested in part on domestic slavery, but that slavery not only protected the slave from exploitation and poverty, but left the way open, with no barrier of class or color, for him to rise to high positions of state. The clan organization of the artisans gave each one a chance for individual taste in his work and no fear of hurry or hunger” (DuBois, DuBois on Africa, 211).

25  The phrase may also allude to Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Green Pastures (1930), the first on Broadway with an all-black cast. it shocked audiences by portraying “De Lawd” as a black man. I wonder if “gravel” is not an undetected misprint for “gavel.”

26  As Leonard points out (Fettered Genius, 217), Tolson reads Tennyson’s ode as a poem about “the defeat of tyranny.”

27  Line 194, so identified in Tolson’s note.

28  DuBois’s The World and Africa mentions Liberia only in passing. Charles Morrow Wilson’s Liberia (1947) concentrates on the present-day nation, with great emphasis on the rubber industry; his slender account of the founding (9–17) mentions Henry Clay and Jehudi Ashmun, but none of the other names in Tolson’s poem.

29  Leonard, Fettered Genius, 217, emphasizes Tolson’s reference to Zola in footnote 56 as “an artist who can spur the conscience of mankind to the ideals that Liberia allegedly represents.”

30  See above, 70–2.

31  Tolson mentions Bushrod Washington’s “signatures of blood” (109) as a sign of his slave dealings, but Francis Scott Key’s complex dealings are unspoken. Key owned slaves and emancipated his own, but he was a determined anti-abolitionist who for that reason had to resign from the Board of the American Colonization Society.

32  Cox argues that caste is a product of ancient cultures, “while race, as it is known in the modern world, grows out of the capitalistic need for designating a large group of people as a cheap supply of labor and hence is of relatively modern origin” (Farnsworth, Tolson, 56). Cox devotes a chapter to detailed critique of Myrdal, whose work he derides as “mystical” (Caste, 509–38).

33  Brunner is doubtless correct in identifying Tolson’s source as William J. LaVarre (1898–1991), though he cannot produce an exact citation. LaVarre worked for the US State Department and wrote several books about his travels up the Amazon in South America, but not Africa.

34  Tolson’s note mentions French linguist and ethnographer Maurice Delafosse but gives no specific citation, except to say that he feared mass production technologies introduced by missionaries and traders “would contaminate art for art’s sake in Africa” (footnote 168). Delafosse’s The Negroes of Africa: History and Culture (1931) contains much discussion of these “living encyclopedias,” but I find none of the fear Tolson mentions; instead, Delafosse concludes with a note of qualified optimism. The African Negroes, he writes, have been isolated too long from “the more favored Europeans”: “they have lost much time and will not be able to catch up in a day or a century” (281).

35  “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head” (Matthew 8: 20). Brunner’s note 224–6 mentions an Anglo-American foray to Mt Ararat in search of Noah’s ark, accused by the Soviets (not unreasonably) of spying.

36  Or eleven if one counts only instances of “Selah.” I do not suspect any numerological significance.

37  An online dictionary gives examples: “die höhere physische Belastungsfähigkeit eines Sportlers” translates “an athlete’s higher greater physical resilience,” or “höhere Bildung” translates “higher education.” One idiom, “höhere Gewalt,” translates “act of God.”

38  See footnote 404. Tolson may be remembering that Rimbaud gave up his art to participate in French African colonialism and the slave trade. See Rimbaud also in footnote 422.

39  DuBois, in The World and Africa, mentions that he sailed to France aboard the Orizaba in 1918 to “try to impress upon the members of the Peace Conference sitting at Versailles the importance of Africa in the future world,” but he says, “I was without credentials or influence” (8).

40  The word reappears twice in the final part of the poem: in line 629 the Höhere are inhabitants of an ideal “cosmopolis,” elevated above tribalism. In line 731, the Höhere are equated with the “Violent men” – that is, the advocates of the American Declaration of Independence, the colonial leadership that quickened “the death-in life of the / unparadised” (732–3).

41  Compare Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” pt. 5: “For two gross of broken statues, / For a few thousand battered books.”

42  Footnote 555 refers to “Blake, The Bard,” probably his poem “The Voice of the Bard” (in which the word “tomorrow” does not appear), but possibly to Thomas Gray’s Pindaric ode “The Bard,” for which Blake made illustrations.

43  Tolson’s model was probably the Parliament of Man passage in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”: “Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d / In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. / There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, / And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.” That does not negate my point about Barlow. See Tolson, “Poet’s Odyssey,” 192.

44  Brunner does not identify Seretse Khama (Cold War Poetry, 641–2), a tribal chief in colonial Bechuanaland who was educated at Oxford and married a white English woman. There was such outrage at the interracial marriage in both England and in Africa that he was forced into exile in order to avoid possible military action by apartheid South Africa. Later, in the 1960s, Khama became the progressive first president of independent Botswana and was knighted by the British Crown. See Dutfield, Marriage of Inconvenience.

CHAPTER TWELVE

1  Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 6–7. He defines the “anti-jeremiad” as “the denunciation of all ideals, sacred and secular, on the grounds that America is a lie” (191). Ginsberg in “Howl” certainly sees the hypocrisy of America, but he does not denounce idealism itself. On the “anti-jeremiad” and Beat writers, see 191–7. Georgelos, in “Allen Ginsberg and the American Jeremiad,” argues from a Marxist perspective that, “while appearing to oppose the nation and threaten its existence through the vehemence of his or her protest, the American Jeremiah can be said to reinforce the very culture he or she protests through an alternative vision of the national mission” (27); Ginsberg’s long lines may “breathe life and power into his reader so that he or she also becomes cosmic,” but this very act is a form of implied “imperialism” (31). Ginsberg’s anti-jeremiad, like the jeremiad proper, ultimately maintains the American order.

2  Davies, Whitman’s Queer Children, 91–106.

3  Lee, “‘Howl’ and Other Poems,” 367–88; and Ramirez, “Ghosts of Radicalisms Past,” 47–71.

4  See 1876 preface. See Reynolds’s discussion (Whitman’s America, 391–403), placing Whitman’s notion of “adhesiveness” in its contemporary context.

5  “A Supermarket in California.” The sexual inheritance is part of Beat mythography, repeated in Edmund White’s introduction to Ginsberg’s interviews: “He had slept with Neal Cassady (the model for Kerouac’s ‘Dean Moriarty’), who’d slept with Gavin Arthur (President Chester Arthur’s grandson), who’d slept with Edward Carpenter (the English Victorian champion of homosexual love), who’d slept with Walt Whitman” (Ginsberg, Selected Interviews, xiii).

6  See Boone, “Gay Language as Political Praxis”; and Shaw, Frank O’Hara.

7  The words were Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s, quoted in LaFeber, Cold War, 45.

8  Personal memory.

9  To be fair, McLuhan himself was still preoccupied in The Mechanical Bride (1951) with machinery and print.

10  Not surprisingly, Ginsberg was invited by R.D. Laing to speak at a conference. See Miles, Ginsberg, 393 and 398.

11  Ginsberg’s interview allows that Carl Solomon “was having problems because he was getting shocked.” But he left hospital, after a period of “questioning my sense of my own reality,” not (like many others) with “a total self-rejection.” “It gave me a tolerance toward doctors.” Later in the Langley-Porter Clinic in San Francisco he sought psychotherapy from one Dr Hicks, which proved beneficial.