Contemporaries and snobs PDF
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Contemporaries and snobs Modern and ConteMporary poetiCs Series Editors Charles Bernstein Hank Lazer Series Advisory Board Maria damon rachel Blau duplessis alan Golding susan Howe nathaniel Mackey Jerome McGann Harryette Mullen aldon nielsen Marjorie perloff Joan retallack ron silliman Jerry Ward Contemporaries and snobs Laura riding edited by Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm the University of alab ama press Tuscaloosa introduction, supplemental notes, bibliography, and index copyright © 2014 The University of ala bama press tuscaloosa, ala bama 35487- 0380 all rights reserved Manufactured in the United states of america Contemporaries and Snobs © Cornell University Library First published 1928. restored © owned by division of rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. typeface: Minion and Futura Cover image: Courtesy of Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm. Cover design: Mary elizabeth Watson ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of american national standard for information sciences—permanence of paper for printed Library Materials, ansi Z39.48-1 984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication data riding, Laura, 1901–1991. Contemporaries and snobs / Laura riding ; edited by Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm. pages cm. — (Modern and contemporary poetics) originally published: Garden City, n.y.: doubleday doran, 1928. includes bibliographical references and index. isBn 978-0-8173-5767-2 (quality paper : alk. paper) — isBn 978-0-8173-8737-2 (e book) 1. poetry. i. Heffernan, Laura, editor. ii. Malcolm, Jane editor. iii. title. pn1136.J27 2014 808.1—dc23 2013030768 Contents acknowledgments vii We Must Be Barbaric: an introduction to Contemporaries and Snobs ix 1. poetry and the Literary Universe 1 i. shame of the person 1 ii. poetry, out of employment, Writes on Unemployment 5 iii. escapes from the Zeitgeist 10 iV. poetic reality and Critical Unreality 21 V. poetry and progress 31 Vi. The Higher snobbism 39 2. t. e. Hulme, the new Barbarism, and Gertrude stein 51 3. The Facts in the Case of Monsieur poe 86 editors’ notes 113 Chronological Bibliography 123 index 127 acknowledgments We would like to thank the division of rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl a. Kroch Library, Cornell University for their assistance. elizabeth Fried- mann’s knowledge of Laura riding’s life and letters is vast, and she provided us with crucial insight at key stages of our research. Charles Bernstein and Josephine park were our earliest readers and supporters. our thanks also to Jeremy Braddock, Lisa samuels, and rachel Buurma for their help along the way. We must be barbaric an introduction to Contemporaries and Snobs Laura Heffernan and Jane Malcolm i was, as a poet, an inveterate propounder of a necessity of non- distinction between person and poet. —Laura (riding) Jackson, “an autobiographical summary” Laura riding’s Contemporaries and Snobs, first published in 1928, drew a line down the center of the literary scene in the late 1920s. With characteristic incisiveness, riding divided friends from foes: she counted as enemies those “snobs,” or critics, who sought to systematize and professionalize modern po- etry. as allies, riding counted all “contemporaries” who continued to honor poetry as an in di vidual and eccentric practice. yet riding’s bold and uncon- genial treatise was not merely a call to arms in and of the modernist moment. For readers today, it offers a compelling account—by turns personal, by turns his tori cal—of how the institutionalization of modernism denuded experi- mental poetry. Most importantly, Contemporaries offers a counter history of the idiosyncratic, of what the institution of modernism left (and leaves) be- hind. With Gertrude stein as its fig urehead, the book champions the non- canonical, the “barbaric,” and the under- theorized. riding’s nuanced defense of a poetics of the person in Contemporaries represents a forgotten but es- sential first attempt to identify and foster what is now a well-d efined poetic lineage that leads from stein to the experimental avant-g arde. riding began writing Contemporaries in 1926, but the book did not ap- pear until early 1928. The latter half of the 1920s was a prolific period for riding. Her A Survey of Modernist Poetry, written with robert Graves, ap- peared in late 1927, followed by Contemporaries in February of 1928, Anar- chism Is Not Enough (the creative sequel to Contemporaries) in May, and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (also written with Graves) in July. Contempo- raries is the most ignored of this varied bunch, perhaps because it responds so directly to the criticism and poetry of its moment. riding takes her read- ers on a remarkably thorough tour through the “self- criti cal, severe, sophis- ticated” literary scene of the 1920s (53). among other influential treatises,
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