Dashing revolutionaries and sowers of chaos at Pound’s house in Paris, 1923: Joyce, Pound, Quinn, Ford.
I have a theory (and I never hear anyone, not even the “right-wing” talk about this).
The political rot of the well-meaning intellectual Left began during the World War One era.
The sweet, Dionysian upsurge did not begin in the 1960s. That was the flowering (of some real beauty in popular music). The seeds (at least many of them) were planted when T.S. Eliot was young and the Great War loomed.
The 1960s happened early. They happened around 1912—which featured the emergence of these clique members:
Ezra Pound (London, Paris, Rapallo, Nazi),
William Carlos Williams, (New Jersey, met Pound at UPenn)
T.S. Eliot, (London and Bloomsbury by way of Harvard)
H.D. (Pound’s girlfriend who married Richard Aldington, Englishman WW I soldier)
John Crowe Ransom (Tennessee “The New Criticism” textbook “Understanding Poetry used in schools from 30s to 70s)
and Ford Maddox Hueffner (changed his name to “Ford” due to anti-German feelings) a novelist and writer for the British War Propaganda Bureau (and signed up to fight at the age of 42!), Ford in 1909 met expat Pound off the boat in London and later (not many know this) was a Creative Writing program official in America.
In 1912 (around the time Virginia Woolf claimed “everything changed”) Poetry magazine was started by Harriet Monroe in Chicago in an entrepreneurial spirit.
Harriet Monroe wrote to a lot of industry titans in Chicago to raise money—she died in Peru in 1936, she first read the poems of Pound (discovered in a bookseller’s London shop ) on a trip to China.
Ezra Pound was one of the first to respond to Harriet Monroe’s solicitations when she was starting her magazine—Pound immediately was published in Poetry and became its foreign editor. He quarreled with her in letters and called her a “she-ass” behind her back but she remained loyal to him. T.S. Eliot’s first publication (“Prufrock”) was in Poetry. Pound got his free-verse friend Williams published in Poetry, of course. Harriet Monroe didn’t take to the obscurantist “new” as much as Pound wanted.
Monroe published lovely verses by Sara Teasdale and Edna Millay but Poetry also allowed the ugly “new” an “in.”
Try reading Poetry today if you want to experience the tedious, the over-observing, and the over-explaining—lyricism in rigor mortis.
Monroe had been a journalist in the arts for many years and had had limited success trying to publish her own poems in magazines. How good a poet was she? She was OK.
She published a Pound poem in Poetry in 1919—a translation by Pound of a poem in Latin—and when it was ridiculed by a Latin scholar, Pound was so embarrassed, even though he was a regular contributor (and foreign desk editor) he didn’t appear in Poetry again until 1933.
Poetry, as you may know, still publishes today. Their editor-in-chief (I used to see him around before he was Poetry editor when I lived in Harvard Square) had to resign recently because he published a poem in which the poet’s grandmother was quoted in the poem saying mildly racist things—the poet did not approve of what his grandma said, but the poet and his poem, as well as Don Share, the editor, despite profuse apologies, and having never “sinned” before, were cancelled.
Poetry (now a wealthy “foundation” due to a Lily Pharmaceutical grant), during its first 90 years of existence was always in financial difficulty—and often on the verge of going under. By the early 1970s their subscription list was 6,000. Adlai Stevenson’s wife came to the rescue once (then changed her mind) and Eleanor Roosevelt hosted a benefit which turned out to be a success. Carl Jung lived in a small castle called Bollingen and the subsequent estate funded Poetry from time to time.
Right after WW II, the Bollingen Poetry Prize was born. One of its first recipients was Ezra Pound (of course!) then in a mental hospital after his pro-Nazi adventures in WW II.
Outrage against Pound’s award was mighty, but distinguished figures like TS Eliot, who, that year, 1949, won the Nobel and was one of the Bollingen judges) defended Pound.
Interestingly, that same year Eliot attacked Poe as a fraud in “From Poe to Valery.” In the 1930s, when Eliot was hiding from his mentally unstable wife (Eliot later put her in an institution and never visited), Eliot attacked the poet Shelley in the annual Norton lectures at Harvard.
But back to Harriet Monroe.
When Monroe was writing for the Chicago Tribune, she covered the 1913 Armory Show, the first time European Avant-garde Art was shown in America.
Duchamp’s “Nude Descending A Staircase” got the most attention.
Duchamp would visit America and hang out with Alfred Kreymborg’s literary clique which included Williams, Stevens, and Louis Ginsberg (a nudist camp poet and Allen’s father. )
Monroe, whose brother-in-law was a modern architect, felt the art of poetry was still “stuck in the nineteenth century.” She didn’t like the art that much (most Americans hated modern art when they first saw it) but Monroe felt the new Armory Show art was a “bomb” in a good way, “shaking up” the art world.
John Quinn, a modern art collector himself (people in-the-know became even wealthier buying the avant-garde art of the future for dirt cheap; this new-found wealth certainly helped Modernism generally) made the Armory Show happen. Quinn delivered the opening remarks. Quinn even successfully petitioned Congress to make it easier to import art—there would have been no Armory Show without the work of Quinn.
The dapper Mr. Quinn was Eliot and Pound’s attorney. He negotiated “The Waste Land” deal which included Eliot winning the hefty monetary Dial Magazine Prize and being published by the original producer of Dracula. (Portions of “The Waste Land” do have a Bram Stoker vibe.)
John Quinn was also a member of British intelligence and an associate of Aleister Crowley. (Not even a good conspiracy theorist can make this stuff up.)
Pound had to use Monroe’s rival, The Little Review, (also a small Midwest magazine) to publish what was considered obscene—excerpts of James Joyce. (Harriet Monroe was a revolutionary, but had her standards.) The “new” writing which Pound favored often got its biggest p.r. boost from obscenity trials.
For a book to become a “classic,” just get it banned.
It was the new “cool” of 20th century writing—definitely not “stuck” in the 19th. (Though Baudelaire was made famous by obscenity charges in the 19th century. No one is ahead of their time like the French!)
Defending “modern” poetry as practiced by Pound and his friends as “precise” and “concrete” and having none of the “sentimental” and “flowery” flaws of the “old” writing has been a windy, institutional, tsunami—friendly to poetry which is obscure, brittle, and painfully faux-classical.
Pound’s simple, binary, formula: Old, bad, New (with a bit of faux old) good, has fanatically and persistently spread its social impact everywhere, but mostly in terms of cultural Marxism, which it mirrors.
In 1912 Monroe (and Pound’s) literary ink-bomb exploded. (Pound’s unique brand of leftist fascism was more prophetic than anything else Pound, the ingenious crackpot magpie, did.) The ink has since turned into electricity and the rebels are now the status quo. Crazy is now what we do. Crazy is now what we know.
Salem Editors
Salem, MA 12/4/2023