A highly well-placed literary friend asked me, after reading my now-famous condemnation of the Modernists: but surely this group was as important as the Romantic Poets were in their time?
And it seems to me, he politely stated, the Modernists compare favorably to others who were writing between 1915 and 1925.
I’m not too sure.
First, Dorothy Parker, Edna Millay, Eugene O’Neil, Amy Lowell, EA Robinson, F. Scott Fitzgerald were not paying attention to Williams, Eliot, Moore, and Pound back then. Hardly anyone was.
Second, The Modernists, as generally advertised and understood, were:
Not popular with the public. Strike one.
Encouraged the semi-educated to write trash and call it poetry. Strike two.
Censored not the whole of the past, but all that was beautiful and popular in the past, insincerely choosing figures whom they believed were difficult and obscure like themselves—this being their sole criterion. Eliot championed Donne and Laforgue. Pound, Villon and the Earl of Dorset. They vilified or ignored Poe, Shelley, Milton, Shakespeare, Byron, Tennyson, Millay. Writers most of us read. Strike three.
Even those, like my learned and respected friend, who favors some of them, will admit this to be true of the Modernists in general.
So why do we adore these bums?
Because if you are not perceived as a reader of James Joyce and Ezra Pound, you will draw suspicion upon yourself as someone who can’t finish Moby Dick, and prefers the love lyrics of Keats and Millay—you are therefore dead to the literary world and that is all there is to it. No discussion required.
One must like the Modernists, therefore, and defending them is done quite easily.
First, you defend Pound by the fact that he liked Dante, Chaucer, Whitman, and Browning. Even though not one person in the universe appreciates Dante, Chaucer, Whitman, or Browning because of Pound.
And even though Pound, in his own writing, has none of the charm, or greatness, of Dante, Chaucer, Whitman, or Browning.
Pound’s book-length textbook of literature, the ABC of Reading: its literary judgement is a jumble of hodgepodge, epigrammatic, ejaculations. He hates on Petrarch and Byron. I see. You love Chaucer and Dante, but hate Byron and Petrarch. Got it.
And there’s nothing wrong with hating someone—it’s fun—as long as you show us why.
Pound does not. Where is the close-reading? It doesn’t exist. He sets himself up as someone who knows. But he doesn’t know. How does Pound make us love or hate someone? That’s the question which goes unanswered upon even a cursory examination of Pound’s work.
But all of this doesn’t matter. It just goes back to the Moby Dick/Ulysses syndrome.
If you haven’t read all of Pound (who in their right mind could?) you must concede that important writings must exist (they actually don’t) which connect Pound to other famous authors. Pound, wearing this armor, becomes untouchable, just as Moby Dick is untouchable and just as Ulysses, and all literary bulk in general, is immune to quaint reason.
Pound translated (stole) a few good pieces. All he wrote that is good is either an outright translation or suspiciously archaic-sounding and tied to other translators and their papers.
Pound was associated with Eliot—the one truly talented Modern who was focused enough to write a few good essays, a few good poems. Pound was associated with Joyce, the great talent who is mostly known for writing two large works that people don’t read—but occasionally pretend they have.
And now we are done with Pound and the Modernist Tower, or the pre-and post-all that’s good-Pit—full of bones of Goethe, Poe, Byron, and Millay.
There’s two more strategies I’ll touch on that people use to defend the Moderns.
They slip in authors who don’t belong—they attempt to falsely expand the Modernist roster. Or, they leave out figures who tarnish the Modernist gleam.
Wallace Stevens had discussions with Santayana in 1900 which changed him forever. Way before Pound. Stevens bumped into Williams sometimes, but the polished, formalist, philosophical Stevens has nothing to do with the scraggly Williams.
The Emperor of Ice-cream (Stevens and his wife slept in separate bedrooms), overrated or not, does not belong with Pound’s Modernism.
Sorry. You can’t have Stevens.
You can have Moore—her brittle poetry is more Victorian than the Victorians. She hasn’t the warmth of Millay, whom the Modernists hated.
The starting lineup: Moore, Pound, H.D. (Once Pound’s girlfriend, a minor “Imagiste”) Williams, and Eliot (Eliot was actually good in the way Stevens was good; Pound hardly deserves him, really).
Frost. You can’t have Frost. He witnessed the Pound/Amy Lowell feud in England first-hand. Frost was not impressed with Pound, didn’t join his clique, was not a joiner in general, and the best of his work is not like theirs at all.
Frost is not allowed to buttress the Modernist clique. He belongs more with EA Robinson and Millay. They thrived in the 1920s and 1930s while Pound and Williams sulked, almost entirely unnoticed. Eliot, H.D., and Moore were not exactly famous, either.
Robert Penn Warren’s HS and college textbook, Understanding Poetry, finally got Pound and Williams noticed, post WW II, when they were old men. Stevens was old by the time he enjoyed a little fame, too. Even Frost. (20th century poetry, unlike 19th century poetry, was a poetry of old men.)
Robert Penn Warren knew Malcolm Cowley—childhood school chum of Kenneth Burke—Burke was part of the 1920-1929 Dial magazine clique run by rich boy Scofield Thayer (prep school chum of Eliot’s) who heaped annual Dial prizes on Eliot, Pound, Moore, Williams, EE Cummings, and Burke.
Cowley was a Modernist poet, like his dissipated friend Hart Crane (his dad made a fortune in candy) and Crane’s dissipated friend, Harry Crosby (nephew to J.P. Morgan).
Hart Crane, Harry Crosby, and Malcolm Cowley do belong to Pound’s mad Modernist clique. But they tend to get left out, as Pound looks better standing next to Stevens and Frost—than he does standing next to Crane and Crosby. The latter are to whom Pound really belongs.
Just imagine Eliot, H.D., Pound, Moore, Williams, and Hart Crane, hardly read, in the early 20th century. Have you got this in your mind?
Now compare them to Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge! Are you kidding me?
It’s embarrassing, really.
Malcolm Cowley championed Faulkner, another difficult Modernist, more spoken of than actually read, the convenient ‘Southern token author’ gifted to the Modernists since Poe was out, person non grata, uncool, trashed.
Cowley was also one of a host of failed-poet, journalist, literati who wrote about the “lost generation” and the poets of “exile,” romanticizing unread poets like Ezra Pound because he drank in Paris with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, novelists; sat in the parlor once or twice with poet Gertrude and Leo Stein, modern art collectors.
This is a real perk the Modernist clique enjoys. They are linked, forever, in the public’s mind, with people who actually sold books and made a mint in the modern art world. The Modernists sun themselves in the romantic headlines of “exile.” Never mind neurotic Eliot and Pound were always comfortable and family-supported. Yes, poor Eliot was humiliated by Lord Bertie Russell, who slept with Eliot’s wife in exchange for a place to stay in London—“comfortable” is not quite the proper word to describe Eliot’s sometimes harrowing existence, nor Pound’s, who messed around with fascists. But the larger point here is that “lost” Hemingway and Fitzgerald (who loved Keats) had nothing to do with Pound and Modernism. Hemingway may have been unsentimental and plain, but he didn’t learn this from Pound—the word Modernist in this context is meaningless.
As literary persons, we have a duty, I think, not to succumb to what has to be seen as the greatest literary con of our lifetime.
Where did Pound lead? To the white whale, (thar she blows!) Charles Olson and his wacky disciples.
Modernists, it’s time to sober up already.