![]() As the essays in this special issue amply demonstrate, Bryant's fantastic elaboration of this transatlantic poetic was symptomatic of what we now call "Victorian Poetry"-a phrase coined in New York rather than in London, and one which now finds itself strung not only between continents, but between notions of "poetry" that themselves seem whimsical responses to the technology of modernity: colorful, humanistic, and (already, in 1868) somewhat pathetically out of date. This poetic notion is the real communicator: an idea of expression much more capacious than expression itself, however transmitted not the news itself but the vibrating cords that will unite nations, that will affectively perform "the welfare of the human race" that (alas) over-water politics may have failed to sustain. "My imagination goes down to the chambers of the middle sea," Bryant mused,Īs a member of the press, Bryant stressed the telegraph's speed of transmission as a poet, Bryant transfigured electric cable into a lyric impulse, a "mystic wire" that "vibrates to every emotion" on both sides of the Atlantic, a fantasy of "living human presence" where there is none, "currents of human thought" circulating around the detritus of culture and nature alike. In A Speech Given At A Formal Dinner In 1868 For Samuel Breese Morse (The Americanportrait painter who invented the electric telegraph), William Cullen Bryant began by speaking "in behalf of the press" as a New York City newspaper editor and ended by giving a bravura performance of the transatlantic imaginary he had become famous for as a poet. That Eliot's poetry, especially the early work, depicts states of internal division, disorder, doubling, or multiple voices is well known. For example, the marionettes – “my marionettes” – of “Convictions (Curtain Raiser)” are filled with naive and exaggerated desires carefully detached from the narrator who also claims them: they “Await an audience open-mouthed /At climax and suspense” and have “keen moments every day.” The narrator of “The Little Passion from ‘An Agony in the Garret’” observes himself walking and notes, sardonically, his own “withered face” as if in a mirror behind a bar: speaker and other are strangely indistinguishable. Similar figures appear in other poems, notably “Dans le Restaurant” and “Hysteria.” Yet he plays one role among many in other forms, alien and intimate figures serve, in Eliot's work, both to claim and to disavow desire. Unlike Eliot's theatrical personae, this often vile, chattering, drunken, or mad old man carries with him a horror of self-representation little mediated by a stage setting or controlled script. ![]() It is, for instance, hard to understand Gertrude Stein’s participation in poetic modernism as “intermittent.” In the wake of this study, furthermore, modernist studies as a field of inquiry has multiplied and expanded the critical discourse has chronicled and reflected the emergence of “modernisms” both as phenomena and term, while critiques across the ideological and methodological spectrum reflect a greater understanding of gender, racial, and poetic heterogeneity in a period long misunderstood as monolithic.2Ī blind, dirty, senile old man haunts the margins of Eliot's 1910 poem “First Debate between the Body and Soul.” Along with a cast of characters in Inventions of the March Hare – clowns, actors, marionettes – he inserts himself in the consciousness of Eliot's narrators as both self and other, a voice at once within and without the “I” who ostensibly speaks. Despite the “intermittent” participation of “a Gertrude Stein and a Djuna Barnes,” they contend, formal innovation of this kind is “a men’s club.”1 Like most pioneering, first-generation feminist criticism, No Man’s Land has received its share of sharp critique, some of it justified. ![]() Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have famously argued that modernism-in particular, formalist and language-centered, experimental literary modernism-was “constructed not just against the grain of Victorian male precursors” but as part of “a complex response to female precursors and contemporaries” and that the reaction “against the rise of literary women became not just a theme & but a motive for modernism.” Gilbert and Gubar implicate Pound and Eliot’s “twin strategies of excavation and innovation” and “the linguistic innovation associated with the avant-garde”-they specify puns, allusions, and “arcane and fractured forms”-in a project of cultural elitism that excludes women.
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