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Modernist Women Poets: Generations, Geographies and Genders

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A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 November 2019) | Viewed by 45837

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Special Issue Editor

Dr. Jane Dowson

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Guest Editor

Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature, Department of English, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK
Interests: women's poetry; contemporary poetry; postcolonialism; women’s writing; modernism and the 1930s
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Feminist scholars have crucially proved that female poets count in orthodox categories of High Modernism. We have demonstrated their centrality to intellectual Anglo-American [‘Eliotic’] experimentation that fed into and from the European avant-garde. Into the twentieth-first century, modernist projects shy away from the exclusions of a capitalized monolithic Modernism that was bound by a narrow interwar period, linguistic abstruseness, and masculinized cultural imperialism. Instead, modernist studies have been enriched by pluralizing chronologies, styles, and locations. We now have categorization through generations or a non-periodizing intermodernism, the anti-elitist middlebrow, and postcolonial geomodernisms. Accordingly, this Special Issue aims to discuss poets who enhance the breadth of modernist literary practices while maintaining modernism as a meaningful and identifiable aesthetic. Thus, we shall take as the cohering concept a complex relationship to gender and to modernity that manifests in a self-consciously complex treatment of language. We hope to explore writers across the generations that modernist histories now recognize: Gertrude Stein’s contemporaries, born around the cusp of the twentieth century and flourishing during the 1920s and 1930s; the next generation who came to their peak in the 1950s and include Elizabeth Bishop or Stevie Smith; and the third generation who published into the 1980s. While we welcome new gender-based approaches to the now prominent American innovators, Millay, Moore, HD, Lowell, and Loy, we hope for essays that attend to more explicitly female-centred work of, say, Denise Levertov or Charlotte Mew. We particularly want contributions that delve into intersectional identities and literature beyond the Anglo-American framework, by such writers as Anna Akhmatova, Angelina Weld Grimké or M. NourbeSe Philip. Each essay will take account of recent critical work and illuminate how the poet or poets fashion an aesthetic concerning their lives and professions as women writers in a turbulent time.

Dr. Jane Dowson
Guest Editor

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Keywords

Twentieth-Century Women Poets
Modernist women writers
Feminist literature
Intersectional feminism
Geomodernism
Intermodernism
Middlebrow
Postcolonial poetry
Gertrude Stein
Marianne Moore
Edna St Vincent Millay
H.D.
Mina Loy
Elizabeth Bishop
Charlotte Mew
Denise Levertov
May Sinclair
Anna Akhmatova
Angelina Weld Grimké
M. NourbeSe Philip
Edith Sitwell
Stevie Smith

Published Papers (12 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 300 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Counting Form: Gender and the Geometries of Address, in Frances Presley and Carol Watts

by Alice Entwistle

Humanities 2020, 9(2), 48; https://doi.org/10.3390/h9020048 - 3 Jun 2020

Viewed by 2054

Abstract

This essay treats two innovative site-specific sequences produced by women in the first decade of the twenty first century. Both are explicitly interested in the relationship between geometry, writing (as material and political practice) and geo-cultural space, a relationship each finds inflected to some extent by gender emphases. Starting from the premise that any piece of writing is itself a place, the essay considers the self-conscious textualities of its primary texts—one concerned with Exmoor; the other with a sheep-farm in rural mid-Wales—in the light of their different, if similarly rural and relatively remote, contexts. Presley’s ‘Stone Settings’ explores the relationship between some of the quasi-geometrical Neolithic stone arrangements dotted across Exmoor, and the mediation of their apparently Euclidean sometimes barely visible forms in/as text. Watts’ work-in-progress Zeta Landscape mobilises in the ‘analytical’ or ‘projective’ (ie non-Euclidean) geometry of its title the complex weave of routine care-giving and accountancy charging the contemporary (Michel Foucault’s ‘distributive’) pastoral. Both sequences wryly suggest that poetic form can finally no more adequately figure place than the abstractions of mathematical discourse can utter the cultural ecology of any environment, however concrete-seeming. Aided by Jacques Derrida’s powerful essay ‘White Mythology’, the account comes to rest on the equally equivocal recognition of the in/effectuality of metaphor in any kind of address, critical or creative. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Women Poets: Generations, Geographies and Genders)

11 pages, 243 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Modernist Women Writers and Whimsy: Marianne Moore and Dorothy Parker

by Will May

Humanities 2020, 9(1), 24; https://doi.org/10.3390/h9010024 - 6 Mar 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3153

Abstract

This article assesses the work of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) and Marianne Moore (1887–1972) in relation to the aesthetic category of whimsy. It considers how whimsy has been used as a term of dismissal for American women poets, outlines ways both writers’ receptions have been informed by this context, and explores questions of cost, worth, and value raised by their work. It situates whimsy in relation to Sianne Ngai’s account of diminutive modes in Our Aesthetic Categories (2015) and suggests why American women’s modernist poetry can be a useful context for exploring the aesthetic and cultural associations of whimsy. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Women Poets: Generations, Geographies and Genders)

16 pages, 980 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“Sing the Bones Home”: Material Memory and the Project of Freedom in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

by Lisa Fink

Humanities 2020, 9(1), 22; https://doi.org/10.3390/h9010022 - 22 Feb 2020

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 5504

Abstract

M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book-length poem Zong! represents maritime materialities below the sea’s surface in relation to aesthetic geographies of the sea in the aftermath of slavery as an abyss of loss, thereby extending modernist aesthetics while offering a strategic and revisionary response to male-centered modernist writing. Keen attention into the sea as an innovating and renewing source reveals that the poem imagines the sea as a literal, formal, and thematic agent for the “decontamination” of language—which, Philip maintains, is contaminated by imperialism—and of the received history about slavery. The poem focuses its investigation on the case of the 1781 Zong massacre and the Gregson v. Gilbert maritime insurance case that arose in its wake. Zong! mourns the massacre of 150 Africans who were thrown overboard so that owners of the slave ship could collect insurance money on lost “cargo”. In conversation with Caribbean poets and thinkers, such as Grace Nichols, and African oral traditions, the poem explores forms of memory that go beyond the non-history officially afforded to the enslaved and their descendants. Throughout the poem, the sea is a site of decontamination through which Zong! stages its attempt to recover the unrecoverable. While many scholars have understandably focused on the events aboard the ship, a small number of ecocritical readings have highlighted the poem’s engagement with the materiality of the sea. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism and black feminist theories of the human, this article will discuss the sea as a material geography, going deeper to investigate the poem’s rarely discussed focus on biological and chemical materiality as juxtaposed to representations of black women’s flesh, arguing that it functions as a feminist provocation to both human exceptionalism and the racial boundaries of the human. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Women Poets: Generations, Geographies and Genders)

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18 pages, 252 KiB

Open AccessArticle

‘I’ve Put a Yule Log on Your Grate’: Lynette Roberts’s ‘Naïve’ Modernism

by Siriol McAvoy

Humanities 2020, 9(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/h9010003 - 19 Dec 2019

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2347

Abstract

In this article, I suggest that Lynette Roberts develops a ‘naïve’ modernism that emphasizes tropes of folk art, home-made craft, and creative labour as a therapeutic response to war and a means of carving out a public role for the woman writer in the post-war world. Bringing high modernist strategies down to earth through an engagement with localized rural cultures, she strives to bridge the divide between the public and the private in order to open up a space for the woman writer within public life. As part of my discussion, I draw on Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s contention that literary style—conceived broadly as ‘attitude, stance, posture, and consciousness’—is crucial to modernist writers’ attempts to think in—and beyond—the nation. Embracing a liberating openness to experience and ‘amateurish’ passion, Roberts’s ‘home-made’ style challenges imperial constructions of nationhood centred in authority and control with a more collective, constructivist, improvisatory concept of belonging (Roberts 2005, p. xxxvi). Probing the intersections between folk art, national commitments, and global feminist projects in British modernism, I investigate how a radically transformed ‘naïve’ subtends the emergence of a new kind of feminist modernism, rooted in concepts of collective making and creative labour. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Women Poets: Generations, Geographies and Genders)

16 pages, 263 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“From Scotland to the World”: The Poetry of Hope Mirrlees, Helen Adam, Muriel Spark, and Veronica Forrest-Thomson

by Dorothy McMillan

Humanities 2019, 8(4), 184; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8040184 - 10 Dec 2019

Viewed by 3349

Abstract

The four poets that provide the material for this chapter did not know each other and they probably did not know each other’s work. However, they had important formative experiences in common: They were all educated in Scotland and they all left Scotland after that early education. Yet, they all retained special, although different, ties to that country, to its history, and its writing. They were all “modern” in their poetry, sometimes bizarrely so: Of each of them it could be said, “There was no one like her.” This strangeness they also share, as they share a willingness, even desire, to shock, a muddling of contemporary and archaic, of real and legendary. Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s “Hold on to your seat-belt Persephone” is an indicative phrase. I aim to show that these serially inimitable modern writers have complicated and intertwined Scottish and international connections. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Women Poets: Generations, Geographies and Genders)

18 pages, 250 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Tourism and Taxonomy: Marianne Moore and Natasha Trethewey in Jefferson’s Virginia

by Linda Kinnahan

Humanities 2019, 8(4), 180; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8040180 - 24 Nov 2019

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2681

Abstract

In the poetry of modernist Marianne Moore and contemporary American poet Natasha Trethewey, we find tours of historic places that are associated with the country’s founding history. How does the activity of the tour contemplate the ways in which historical knowledge takes shape and around what priorities and ideals? Exploring this question, these poems stage touristic encounters that serve not only to document the places visited but to question the frames by which a site is “seen” in relation to—often in support of—selected versions of American history. The impact of systems of classification and categorization that are common to the development of taxonomic thought, embraced by Thomas Jefferson and other early Americans, comes under inspection in these touristic poems. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Women Poets: Generations, Geographies and Genders)

15 pages, 296 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“It’s Just a Matter of Form”: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Experiments with Masculinity

by Sarah Parker

Humanities 2019, 8(4), 177; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8040177 - 20 Nov 2019

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 6079

Abstract

Edna St. Vincent Millay occupies an uncomfortable position in relation to modernism. In the majority of criticism, her work is considered the antithesis to modernist experimentation: as representative of the ‘rearguard’ that rejected vers libre in favour of fixed poetic forms. Indeed, most critics concur that whilst Millay’s subject matter may have been modern and daring—voicing women’s sexual independence, for instance—her form was decidedly traditional. Millay also troubles notions of modernist impersonality by writing seemingly autobiographical lyrics that showcase feminine emotions. In this paper, I aim to challenge this view of Millay by focussing on the two avant-garde works that mark the outset and the zenith of her career: Aria da Capo (1921) and Conversation at Midnight (1937). These works are both formally innovative, blurring the boundaries between poetry and drama, causing Edmund Wilson to complain that Millay had “gone to pieces”. Moreover, both works engage in performances of masculinity, with women all but absent. Aria da Capo, first performed by the Provincetown Players in 1919, dramatizes the conflict between two shepherds as an allegory for the First World War. Conversation ventriloquises an all-male dinner party, ranging through the political issues of the Depression era and foreshadowing the war to come. I use both works to argue that Millay has a more interesting relationship to masculinity and modernism than has been hitherto captured by critics. Millay voices men in innovative ways, radically challenging constructions of both gender and poetic form in the process. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Women Poets: Generations, Geographies and Genders)

10 pages, 205 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“Bury Your Heart”: Charlotte Mew and the Limits of Empathy

by Elizabeth Black

Humanities 2019, 8(4), 175; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8040175 - 8 Nov 2019

Viewed by 3869

Abstract

Charlotte Mew’s strikingly original and passionate poetry remains under-examined by modernist critics, yet it holds great importance in presenting an alternative version of modernism that foregrounds issues surrounding gender, sexuality and otherness. Mew’s work explores key modernist themes such as alienation, fragmentation and psychological disruption from the perspectives of those on the margins of society, and in doing so challenges narrow definitions of the movement by highlighting the multiplicity and plurality of voices and concerns within it. Whilst Mew’s decentred position often informs painful reflections on shame, exclusion and powerlessness, the culmination of so many marginalised voices in the poems and Mew’s overriding compassion for the vulnerable creates a powerful challenge to the centre that contests traditional accounts of modernism as defined by white, European men. This article will explore how female experience informs Mew’s exploration of empathy between the marginalised and how personal experience of gender-based oppression inspires compassion for other vulnerable groups who suffer under similar power dynamics or social prejudices. It will consider how female experience shapes both the content of the poems and her choice of poetic forms that allow for concealment of self against the fear of exposure. It will also draw upon contemporary feminist readings of modernist literature and emotion to examine the ways in which gender informs Charlotte Mew’s treatment of key modernist themes and how this challenges conventional understanding of the movement. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Women Poets: Generations, Geographies and Genders)

15 pages, 237 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Intertextuality, Christianity and Death: Major Themes in the Poetry of Stevie Smith

by Judith Woolf

Humanities 2019, 8(4), 174; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8040174 - 1 Nov 2019

Viewed by 3404

Abstract

Stevie Smith, one of the most productive of twentieth-century poets, is too often remembered simply as the coiner of the four-word punch line of a single short poem. This paper argues that her claim to be seen as a great writer depends on the major themes which—in addition to “death by water”—she shares with T.S. Eliot: Anglicanism and the modern reworking of classical literature, with a strong, and in her case sometimes autobiographical, emphasis on female protagonists. Where the female figures in Eliot’s The Waste Land are seen as parodic and diminished contemporary versions of their classical originals, Smith enters and reimagines her classical sources, testing the strength of the narrative material which binds Phèdre, Antigone, Persephone and Helen of Troy to their fates. In contrast to Eliot’s adult conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, Smith became a convert to agnosticism, engaging in a passionate poetic argument with the faith of her childhood, which led her to challenge Eliot himself. She brings both of these themes together in the most personal of her poems, which celebrate, and ultimately invoke, Thanatos, “the only god/Who comes as a servant”, and who puts a merciful end to all stories by “scattering... the human pattern altogether”. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Women Poets: Generations, Geographies and Genders)

18 pages, 279 KiB

Open AccessArticle

“Always Trembling on the Brink of Poetry”: Katherine Mansfield, Poet

by Gerri Kimber

Humanities 2019, 8(4), 169; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8040169 - 23 Oct 2019

Viewed by 4457

Abstract

Today, Katherine Mansfield is well known as one of the most exciting and cutting-edge exponents of the modernist short story. Little critical attention, however, has been paid to her poetry, which seems a strange omission, given how much verse she wrote during the course of her life, starting as a very young schoolgirl, right up until the last months prior to her death in 1923. Even Mansfield devotees are not really familiar with any poems beyond the five or six that have most frequently been anthologised since her death, and few editions of her poetry have ever been published. Mansfield’s husband, John Middleton Murry, edited a slim volume, Poems, in 1923, within a few months of her death, followed by a slightly extended edition in 1930, and Vincent O’Sullivan edited another small selection, also titled Poems, in 1988. Unsurprisingly, therefore, critics and biographers have paid little attention to her poetry, tending to imply that it is a minor feature of her art, both in quantity and, more damagingly, in quality. This situation was addressed in 2016, when EUP published a complete and fully annotated edition of Mansfield’s poems, edited by myself and Claire Davison, incorporating all my recent manuscript discoveries, including a collection of 36 poems—The Earth Child—sent unsuccessfully by Mansfield to a London publisher in 1910. This discovery in 2015 revealed how, at the very moment when Mansfield was starting to have stories accepted for commercial publication, she was also taking herself seriously as a poet. Indeed, had the collection been published, perhaps Mansfield might now be celebrated as much for her poetry as for her short stories. Therefore, this article explores the development of Mansfield’s poetic writing throughout her life and makes the case for her reassessment as an innovative poet and not just as a ground-breaking short story writer. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Women Poets: Generations, Geographies and Genders)

13 pages, 266 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Gwendolyn Brooks and the Legacies of Architectural Modernity

by Jo Gill

Humanities 2019, 8(4), 167; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8040167 - 22 Oct 2019

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 4984

Abstract

This essay reads the work of poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, in terms of its critical engagement with the architectural modernity of her home city, Chicago. Taking her poetry from A Street in Bronzeville (1945) through to the 1968 collection, In the Mecca, as a primary focus, the essay traces the significance of Chicago style architecture on Brooks’ aesthetic. It was in Chicago that some of the first tall office buildings were designed; it was here that structural steel and glass were first used to distinctive architectural effect, and it was here, in 1893, that the World’s Columbian Exposition was held—an event that, for better or worse, was to shape American architecture well into the twentieth century. Brooks’ poetry is alert to this history, attuned to contemporary debates about urban design and sensitive to architectural experience and affect. This context informs and shapes her work in often unexpected ways. Her approach is often oblique (registered in metaphor, style, and voice) but nevertheless incisive in its rendering of the relationship between architecture, modernity and power. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Women Poets: Generations, Geographies and Genders)

13 pages, 278 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Living up to Her “Avant-Guardism”: H.D. and the Senescence of Classical Modernism

by Suzanne Hobson

Humanities 2019, 8(4), 162; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8040162 - 14 Oct 2019

Viewed by 2247

Abstract

In a journal entry from 1957, H.D. writes that Adorno’s description of the aging of modernist music might easily apply to the fate of her own work in the post-war period: “Among other fascinating things, he [Adorno] says that Bartók ‘could not quite live up to his own avant-guardism’ [sic] […]. I felt the phrase applied, in a way, to myself and my Helen sequence” (H.D. 2015, p. 40). H.D.’s remark refers to her long poem, Helen in Egypt (1960), which, with its engagement with classical sources and epic themes, seemed to some to be a throwback to an earlier modernist period in which Pound, Joyce, Eliot and H.D. herself had looked to ancient models as a means of reinvigorating modern literature. What did it mean for H.D. to feel that her work had outlived its time, to be a first-generation modernist still writing in that mode after many of her peers and their achievements had passed into history? This article explores H.D.’s sense that her practice was at odds with contemporary demands for poetry to answer to immediate historical concerns. It also considers her case against the critics in letters, notes and in Helen in Egypt which contains its own defense of the relevance of classical modernism to the post-war present day. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Modernist Women Poets: Generations, Geographies and Genders)

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