Historical poetics asks scholars to historicize the terms by which they encounter poems. This panel draws inspiration from Meredith Martin’s suggestion, in The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860-1930 (2012), that poets such as T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Mina Loy, H.D., William Carlos Williams, and W.B. Yeats “deserve reexamination along historical and prosodic lines” (186-7). While scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry have availed themselves of the tools of historical poetics, scholars of twentieth-century poetry who have done so–such as Erin Kappeler, Naomi Levine, and David Nowell Smith–continue to be few. The Historical Poetics group at Princeton emphasizes “what has changed” in discourses of poetry since 1900, but the panelists here agree that even twentieth-century poetic discourses deserve historicization, particularly along generic lines, which Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson have suggested to be the central issue for scholars of historical poetics.
Das will begin with a discussion of Sri Aurobindo, a Cambridge-educated prize-winning Classicist who specialized in Greek iambics and Latin hexameters. Das focuses on select sections from Aurobindo’s epic poem in blank verse Savitri (1940) to argue that blank verse is a metrical form Aurobindo chose to reflect the rhythmic potential of the iamb for the heterodoxical spiritual-ascetic practice he advocated. Das’s critical prosodic approach to Aurobindo’s poetics combines biopolitical and political theological lenses of analysis. She argues that a historical poetics approach, elucidated by scholars of nineteenth-century poetry like Yopie Prins, Max Cavitch, and Meredith Martin, if adapted to twentieth-century poetry, could fill the noticeable gap in scholarship on twentieth-century meter and bring critical prosody closer to global twentieth-century history.
Yanota will continue this discussion of the mid-twentieth-century epic by situating H.D.’s use of the genre in her late work within a broader discourse surrounding epic. H.D.’s late long poems such as Vale Ave lend themselves well to what Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have referred to as ‘lyricization,’ despite their length. Yet recognizing H.D.’s epic project within these poems reveals a Romantic strand of modernist epics that read as ‘epic’ insofar as they foreground visionary and occult elements and a beyond-human conception of time. Yanota contends that we must understand the modernist epic’s Romantic inheritances if we are to understand fully the modernist epic’s own relationship with history and the scope of the epic tradition’s impact on modernist poetry.
Naydan will elaborate on Yanota’s discussion of poetic genre by looking toward the New Modernist Studies’ archival turn, where pulp magazines have received far less scholarly attention than Little Magazines. Naydan examines the American pulp fiction magazine Weird Tales (1923-1954) to argue that Weird Tales functioned as a handbook for amateur poets to feel like they could be a part of and contribute to an accessible community organized around fantasies of whiteness. Naydan shows how this poetic community consolidated around an idea of poetry as a reproducible, generative form that embedded forms of racial recognition into genre expectations. Examining this strain of mass cultural genre poetry in the early twentieth century opens up new pathways for thinking about the intersections of race, format, and genre in twentieth-century studies.
Finberg will conclude the panel by discussing writing by Madeline Gins and Eleanor Antin that uses techniques of procedure and constraint to respond to formations of gender and marketization in the 1970s. As Wendy Brown and Lisa Duggan have shown, for feminist discourse emerging at that time, “the public sphere” came to denote anything outside the domestic sphere, and the gendered body was often the site of discussions about state censorship or commodification. Finberg suggests that forms of procedure and constraint are best considered as a unique verse culture, one that has material influences and ramifications.
This panel brings together a range of approaches that belong to historical poetics while honing in on some of its central tenets: poetic form and genre categories as historically contingent, for example, or the lyric as an overly capacious category. We engage and build on current scholarship by showing how historical poetics charts new directions for studies not only in modernism, as Martin has suggested, but also in the twentieth century more broadly.