IntroductionAs with most cultural "renaissances," it is difficult to find a point of origin for this one. Vincent Starrett has suggested, only half in jest, that the "first note of revolt" was sounded on the night of November 25, 1910, when Mary Garden''s Dance of the Seven Veils in Salomé at the Auditorium Theatre was halted by the Chief of Police. Said Chief Steward, describing Miss Garden''s performance, "she wallowed around like a cat in a bed of catnip."--Jackson R. Bryer On March 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson became the 28th President of the United States. Only the second Democrat to be elected to that august position since the Civil War, he was also the first Southerner since James K. Polk to move into the White House, excepting Andrew Johnson after Lincoln was assassinated. (Lincoln was born in Kentucky but raised in Illinois, and few Southerners outside of Kentucky would have claimed him as one of their own).
The Republican Party had split in the summer of 1912 and spawned the Progressive or "Bull Moose" Party, named for its candidate Theodore Roosevelt, and the Electoral College had given Wilson the nod, though the combined popular vote for Taft and Roosevelt would easily have beaten him had circumstances been different.It was a watershed moment for the country, as Wilson--known for his speech-making ability--duly noted in his inaugural comments:There has been a change of government. It began two years ago, when the House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive majority. It has now been completed. The Senate about to assemble will also be Democratic. The offices of President and Vice-President have been put into the hands of Democrats. What does the change mean? .It means much more than the mere success of a party.
The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without weakening or sentimentalizing it. There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been "Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself," while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves.We have come now to the sober second thought. The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration.
Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto. Meanwhile in Chicago, a forty-ish poet named Harriet Monroe was also beginning a new endeavor. During the previous August she had sent out a letter to poets in England and America whose work intrigued her, soliciting submissions to the magazine--Poetry: A Magazine of Verse--whose first issue she would bring out in October 1912, shortly before the election which brought Wilson to the White House. Arthur Ficke, a lawyer and poet from Davenport, Iowa, responded to Monroe''s message: "Your letter of yesterday has deeply interested me, and I shall be very glad to do anything I can to assist you. The project has a fine ring to it--I rejoice to see that the Bull Moose movement is not confined to politics." In his speech accepting the nomination as the Progressive candidate for President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt said that "the time is ripe, and overripe, for a genuine Progressive movement, nation-wide and justice-loving . representing all that is best in the hopes, beliefs, and aspirations of the plain people who make up the immense majority of the rank and file of both the old parties." Roosevelt ended his speech with the famous words, "We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.
" Arthur Ficke was prescient in conjoining the two movements--one which was attempting to remake the politics of the nation, and the other which would be successful in remaking the established poetic idiom. While Progressivism, both Republican and Democratic, would falter and die in the face of the Great War--and the U.S. involvement in it--Anglo-American modernism would transform contemporary poetry and set the stage for the rest of the century''s work. Two Chicago magazines, Poetry and the Little Review, were instrumental in this endeavor.Five years later, in a retrospective essay, Monroe outlined what that endeavor consisted of:What is the new poetry? and wherein does it differ from the old? The difference is not in mere details of form. It is not merely in diction, though the truly modern poet rejects the so-called "poetic" shifts of language--the deems, ''neaths, forsooths, etc., the inversions and high-sounding rotundities, familiar to his predecessors.
These things are important, but the difference goes deeper than details of form, strikes through them to fundamental integrities.The new poetry strives for a concrete and immediate realization of life; it would discard the theory, the abstraction, the remoteness, found in all classics not of the first order. It is less vague, less verbose, less eloquent, than most poetry of the Victorian period and much work of earlier periods. It has set before itself an ideal of absolute simplicity and sincerity--an ideal which implies an individual, unstereotyped diction; and an individual, unstereotyped rhythm. In presenting the concrete object or the concrete environment, whether these be beautiful or ugly, it seeks to give more precisely the emotion arising from them, and thus widens immeasurably the scope of the art.Great poetry has always been written in the language of contemporary speech, and its theme, even when legendary, has always borne a direct relation with contemporary thought, contemporary imaginative and spiritual life. It is this direct relation which the more progressive modern poets are trying to restore. We should note here Monroe''s use of the word "progressive," a term also used to describe the change-oriented politics of the era.
The growth of this poetic movement in the five years between 1912 and 1917--and the political context within which it flourished--is what this book is about. New York and London are well-known as places where modernist literature developed--but Chicago, the City on the Lake, also played a central role in those years, in large part because of two women, Harriet Monroe and Margaret Anderson, who conceived and nurtured two of the most important literary magazines of the era. The world of bohemian Chicago in those days is not so well known as New York or London--and a century later, it still deserves our attention. IntroductionAs with most cultural "renaissances," it is difficult to find a point of origin for this one. Vincent Starrett has suggested, only half in jest, that the "first note of revolt" was sounded on the night of November 25, 1910, when Mary Garden''s Dance of the Seven Veils in Salomé at the Auditorium Theatre was halted by the Chief of Police. Said Chief Steward, describing Miss Garden''s performance, "she wallowed around like a cat in a bed of catnip."--Jackson R. Bryer On March 4, 1913, Woodrow Wilson became the 28th President of the United States.
Only the second Democrat to be elected to that august position since the Civil War, he was also the first Southerner since James K. Polk to move into the White House, excepting Andrew Johnson after Lincoln was assassinated. (Lincoln was born in Kentucky but raised in Illinois, and few Southerners outside of Kentucky would have claimed him as one of their own). The Republican Party had split in the summer of 1912 and spawned the Progressive or "Bull Moose" Party, named for its candidate Theodore Roosevelt, and the Electoral College had given Wilson the nod, though the combined popular vote for Taft and Roosevelt would easily have beaten him had circumstances been different.It was a watershed moment for the country, as Wilson--known for his speech-making ability--duly noted in his inaugural comments:There has been a change of government. It began two years ago, when the House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive majority. It has now been completed. The Senate about to assemble will also be Democratic.
The offices of President and Vice-President have been put into the hands of Democrats. What does the change mean? .It means much more than the mere success of a party. The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without weakening or sentimentalizing it. There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been "Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself," while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves.We have come now to the sober second thought.
The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration.Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto. Meanwhile in Chicago, a forty-ish poet named Harriet Monroe was also beginning a new endeavor. During the previous August she had sent out a letter to poets in England and America whose work intrigued her, solic.