Late Nineteenth-Century American Women's Nature Poetry and the Evolution of the Imagist Poem

Late Nineteenth-Century American Women's Nature Poetry and the Evolution of the ImagistPoemAuthor(s): Paula BennettSource: Legacy, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Fall 1992), pp. 89-103Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25684457 .

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Late Nineteenth-Century American Women's Nature Poetry and the Evolution of the

Imagist Poem

Paula Bennett Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

The point de repere usually and conveniently taken as the

starting-point of modern poetry is the group denominated

"imagists" in London about 1910. ?T. S. Eliot

While researching Emily Dickin

son for my last book, I became aware that nineteenth-century nature

poetry by American women formed an

enormous body of lost work to which Dickinson was heavily, if silently, in debted. After completing the book, I

began collecting this poetry for a pro jected anthology. Working from A to

Z, I skimmed every nineteenth-century

periodical, gift book, and anthology in the Widener Library collection at Har

vard University, Xeroxing poems of sufficient quality to merit possible in clusion. Within three months I had col lected more than six hundred poems, the majority drawn from such presti

gious literary magazines as the Atlantic

Monthly, Century, Harper's, Galaxy, the Midland Monthly, the Overland

Monthly, and Scribner's. More to the point, I had a radically

revised view of the development of women's poetry in the United States, a

view that, among other things, now

situates Dickinson's stylistic and the

matic innovation firmly within a bour

geois women's poetry movement oc

curring between 1859 and 1900. In this article I would like to share some of

what I have discovered about women's nature poetry in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. I then wish to

speculate on the connection between this poetry and that produced by

women poets in the first two decades of the twentieth century, in particular by those women poets whom literary his

torians, following Ezra Pound's initia

tive, have chosen to call "imagists."1 On the basis of the poems I have

collected, I now believe that a direct line can be demonstrated between

women poets writing in the late nine

LEGACY, Vol. 9, No. 2 Copyright ? 1992 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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Legacy

teenth century and the major women

poets of early modernism. More than

that, it can be shown that stylistic and thematic changes in women's poetry between the late 1850s and 1890?

changes that, among other things, help account for the surprisingly positive re

ception Dickinson's poetry enjoyed in 1890 on first publication?are basic to the evolution of the early modernist poem. "If Emily Dickinson had written

to-day," Grace S. Musser observes in

her 1896 review essay of Dickinson's work, "she would have found herself in the full sweep of the art movement,

which contends for originality and freshness of expression, at the sacrifice

of every art form?instead of the hack

neyed, which is powerless to really ex

press" (Buckingham 476). The "art movement" to which Mus

ser alludes was no new birth. It was the

product of changes that had been oc

curring in women's poetry in particular over the preceding four decades, in ef

fect, over the period in which Dickin son herself wrote. In the next two dec

ades, between 1900 and 1920, this movement would burst into bloom in

the phenomenon we call early modern

ism. But the soil had been prepared years before, and in this preparation the

work of bourgeois American women

poets, especially those writing about

nature, or writing poems heavily de

pendent upon nature imagery (as, for

example, many of H.D.'s and Amy Lowell's poems also are), was crucial.2

By the end of the 1850s, marked formal and thematic shifts begin to appear in

bourgeois women's nature poetry that

help lay the foundations for the early

modernist lyric. To illustrate how strik

ing these shifts can be, I would like to take two poems published in the same

June 1859 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Dickinson's favorite magazine reading

(Capps 128-34, 148). The first poem, "Spring," by A. C. Brackett (Anna

Callender), is a strictly conventional treatment of its familiar subject. In

deed, it is a poem that would have been

equally at home in any of the period's many religiously-based ladies' maga zines, the primary outlet in the United States for bourgeois women's poetry until the late 1850s.3 Like other poems of its type, Callender's "Spring" dis

plays the "hackneyed" language to which Musser alludes and on which the sentimental poetry of an earlier genera tion of writers, male and female, noto

riously depended. I quote the first two stanzas:

Ah! my beautiful violets,

Stirring under the sod,

Feeling, in all your being, The breath of the spirit of God

Thrilling your delicate pulses, Warming your life-blood anew,?

Struggle up into the Spring-light; I'm watching and waiting for you.

Stretch up your white arms towards me, Climb and never despair;

Come! the blue sky is above you,

Sunlight and soft warm air. Shake off the sleep from your eyelids, Work in the darkness awhile,

Trust in the light that's above you, Win your way up to its smile.

"Spring's" confused?yet ultimately,

rich?blending of erotic and spiritual impulses, its inspirational quality, and

its subordination of the speaker's indi

vidual voice and situation to a public

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Paula Bennett

persona?a subordination mediated

through the very conventionality of its

language?are typical of the nature po

etry bourgeois women produced in

great quantities throughout the first half of the century. As Annie Finch argues, the "lack of a privileged central

self, in conjunction with the elevation of public, communally shared values such as religion and family love, is what

gives [this] . . . poetry that quality we

have defined as 'sentimental' and alien ates it from contemporary, post-ro

mantic canons of aesthetic taste" (5). In such poetry, which, because of

the very publicness with which it treats

"personal" or, better, domestic emo

tion, I would like to call "high" senti mental, the conventionality of the

speaker's discourse is the poem's es

sence and at least part of its appeal. Such poetry is not meant to be a vehicle

for the poet's idiosyncratic psyche or

uniquely personal vision, nor does it claim to be. Rather, it speaks in the unified voice of a single cultural point of view, a view that addresses, as it

were, in public language the values and concerns of women's "private" sphere, and which finds in nature a relatively unproblematic reflection of women's

(i.e., the violets') relation to God.

But if this is true, then the second poem, "Bloodroot," by Emily S. For

man, published in the same issue of the Atlantic, takes a giant step toward a

very different aesthetic and a very dif

ferent point of view. For in this poem's

extraordinary specificity, as well as in

its multiple ambiguities, the individual ized subjectivity that presumably char acterizes the modern lyrical voice?a

voice that claims to inscribe the unique

ness of a personal, and frequently alien

ated, vision?can clearly be heard.

Beech-trees, stretching their arms,

rugged, yet beautiful, Here shade meadow and brook;

here the gay bobolink,

High poised over his mate, pours out his melody.

Here too, under the hill, blooms the wild violet;

Damp nooks hide, near the brook, bellworts that modestly,

Pale-faced, hanging their heads,

droop there in silence; while South winds, noiseless and soft,

bring us the odor of Birch twigs mingled with fresh buds

of the hickory. Hard by, clinging to rocks, nods

the red columbine; Close hid, under the leaves, nestle

anemones,?

White-robed, airy and frail, tender and delicate.

Ye who, wandering here, seeking the beautiful,

Stoop down, thinking to pluck one

of these favorites, Take heed! Nymphs may avenge.

List to a prodigy;? One moon scarcely has waned since

I here witnessed it.

One moon scarcely has waned, since, on a holiday,

I came, careless and gay, into this

paradise,? Found here, wrapped in their cloaks

made of a leaf, little White flowers, pure as the snow,

modest and innocent,?

Stooped down, eagerly plucked one of the fairest, when

Forth rushed, fresh from the stem broken thus wickedly,

Blood!?tears, red as of blood!? shed through my selfishness!

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It is not just the metrical sophistica tion, the enjambment, forced pauses, and use of assonance in preference to

rhyme, that distinguishes this poem from Calender's "Spring." Nor is it

simply Forman's greater attention to

detail, the many concrete and accurate

specifics?the beech trees, violets and

anemones, the birch twigs mingling with fresh buds of hickory?that mark "Bloodroot" as written in a different

voice.4 Forman has used her poem to

tell a story. The story is a complicated and elusive one, told, possibly, albeit

ambiguously, by a speaker who may? but need not be?male. It deals with a

careless seduction, a bloody and painful loss of innocence, very possibly a lit eral, but, at the least, a spiritual, rape.

And in telling this story, however

allusively, Forman has radically altered

her/our relation to language, to conven

tion, to poetry itself. By setting her

poem at the moment of fall rather than, as does Callender, at the moment of

redemption, she has irrevocably sepa rated it?and us, her readers?from the

"communally shared values such as re

ligion and family love" upon which

high sentimentalism depended and which, as Ann Douglas has demon

strated, accounted for so much that was

conventional or "hackneyed" in its ex

pression (254-56 and passim)?the white-armed violets that safely "climb"

toward light "and never despair" pre

cisely because they know a beneficent

"God" is watching them. For the bloodroot, there is no safety,

neither in light nor in shadow. It is

raped where it hides, "wrapped in [its] cloa[k]." And this changed point of view results in a changed style as well, at once more ambiguous, more com

plex, more "personal" and idiosyn cratic, than anything high sentimental

ism, with its assumption of a

benevolent and seamless divine and nat

ural order, permitted. If Forman's

poem is indebted, as it probably is, to classical depictions of rape in nature, from Hyacinth to Philomel, it echoes these earlier texts in order to suggest,

without specifying, the poet/speaker's own reservations respecting the values

and attitudes of the writers such as Cal

lender who preceded (and, indeed, still

surrounded) her. Drawing on one set

of "communally shared stories," For man has challenged another set to make

her own personal location?her point of view?clear.5

Although Dickinson was receiving the Atlantic in 1859, there is no way to know whether Forman's poem influ

enced her?or, indeed, whether she even read it. But in terms of nature

poetry written by other nineteenth

century American women, "Blood

root" is an unequivocal foretaste of

things to come: a movement in this

poetry toward greater concrete detail, more ambiguous and flexible stylistic expression, and toward a much wider?

and more disturbing?range of themes

and voices than high sentimentalism, with its commitment to religiously based domestic and cultural values, al

lowed. By 1859, the intellectual struc

ture supporting high sentimentalism

was, in fact, under siege in virtually every quarter of the culture from the

women's rights movement to the publi cation of Darwin's Origin of Species (eloquently defended by C. J. Sprague in the 1866 Atlantic). It is not surpris ing, therefore, that the poetry which

depended upon this structure would

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Paula Bennett

also undergo radical transformation in

the years immediately to come. Nor is

it surprising that the voices of individ ual women poets would begin to

emerge with a particularity they did not

possess before, as each woman poet

struggled in her own way to reconcile

her new knowledge and sense of self with her relation to her craft and with

changes in the culture at large. I do not have space here?nor is it

necessary?to trace this transformation as it occurred step by step between 1859 and 1880. Suffice it to say that by 1880

American women were writing a very different kind of nature poem than they wrote prior to 1859. Not only is much of the vagueness and "hackneyed" form

of expression gone?at least in the most

effective examples of their poetry?but the perspective has changed as well.

Writers turned from voicing publicly held values to what I would call poetry of "private"?or better, perhaps, pri vatized?vision. In these poems, the

domestic and spiritual commonplaces that dominated the first half of the cen

tury give way to the speaker's own

personal and often unarticulated rela

tionship to the natural phenomena she

describes. These poets still identify strongly with nature and write about it, or in reference to it, constantly. But the

significance they attribute to nature is

considerably harder to determine. For

some, as in Margaret Deland's extraor

dinary "Noon in a New England Pas

ture," published in the August 1887

Harper's New Monthly Magazine, the

natural world has been completely sec

ularized and no framework of values, traditional or otherwise, sustains it, ex

cept, perhaps, those values generated within itself.

With scattered birch the pasture's slope is crowned;

The sunburnt grass that clings to

mountain-sides,

Cropped by small mouths of timid sheep, scarce hides,

Like a scant coverlet, the hard dry ground,

Through which, with stony ledge or rocky knee,

The strong world breaks. The

ragged ferns that fill Each dimple on the shoulders of

the hill Rustle with faint sharp sound if but

the bee

Slips through their stems to find his

mossy nest.

With soft, thick, wilted leaves the mulleins grow,

Like tall straight candles with

pale yellow glow, Their stalks star-flowered toward

the cloudless west.

The crooning cricket with an

endless song Jars the hot silence. The

crumbling fence is grayed By the slow-creeping lichen, held

and stayed By arms of wandering rose, that,

tough and strong, Bind firm its slipping stones. The

rusty brier And scarlet fingers of the bitter

sweet

Cast a light shade that shelters from the heat

A thousand voiceless little lives.

Higher Than maiden birch or solitary pine,

Poised in the brooding blue, on

speckled wings, A hawk hangs motionless: so

straight he flings His shadow to the earth, like

plummet-line

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It drops through seas of air. As in a swoon

Of light, the great world lies, and life stands still,

Wrapped in a breathless hush; till

up the hill Drift dappled shadows of the

afternoon.

There are a number of things one can

observe about this poem. To begin with, it is a poem written in a specific voice, a voice differentiated, it should be noted, as much by locale as by vi sion. As in Dickinson, it is a voice that

"see[s]?New Englandly" (#285). Un like Callender's "Spring," therefore,

which could, in effect, be located al most anywhere (just as it could be spo ken, presumably, by almost anyone,

certainly by any bourgeois Christian

woman), the speaker's particular or in

dividualized subjectivity?her location or positioning?is central to Deland's

poem.

At the same time, however, one of

the poem's ironies is that this particu

larity is conveyed entirely at second hand. That is, we experience it "objec

tively," through the accumulation of concrete specific details which the

speaker observes but in which she or he has no direct part. Thus the singularity we attribute to Deland's speaker is the

singularity she attributes to what she sees: the "hard, dry" yet flower-filled land, the "tough," "strong" roses that

bind the lichen-covered "slipping stones," "the thick, wilted leaves" of

the mullein, the plummeting shadow of the hawk. These are the individuating details or "images" that compose this

poem. They, or rather the speaker's relation to them, or the values the

speaker assigns to them, or, perhaps,

even finds in them, are what the poem is about. They are its "all."

And because they are "all," both lin

guistically and in terms of content, "Noon in a New England Pasture"

stands on the very brink of the modern world. Ultimately isolating in its vi sion?at least in respect to social and

religious concerns?this poem preaches no lesson, draws no moral, references no God, seeks to enunciate no com

munal value system. In such a poem, the natural world stands outside any reference to a transcendent vision or an

explanatory metaphysic, although most

assuredly a modern sense of nature?

divorced from transcendent meaning? underlies and sustains it. Rather, like

Wallace Stevens's "jar," which to my mind represents the quintessential modern poem/object, the New England pasture Deland evokes in this poem simply is. That is, it is a (collective) aesthetic object that presents itself as its own excuse for contemplation. The val ues it projects are those inherent in the

disorder and harmony of the natural

world.

Even more than the great body of Dickinson's nature poetry?which sus

pends itself ambiguously between mul

tiple and contradictory possibilities? Deland's poem seems to me, therefore, to look forward to a truly modern point of view and aesthetic. The apparent

originality and freshness of its lan

guage, to return to Musser's terms, are, I would suggest, a function of Deland's

need to find in material reality, perhaps even in immanence, comforts and plea sures religion and culture could no

longer provide. Written, as David Por

ter would say, in the aftermath, this

poem assumes an aestheticized perspec

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Paula Bennett

tive on a natural world in which the absence of transcendent meaning may be the only "meaning" worth reporting back, but which, nevertheless, provides consolations?in beauty, in harmony, in sensual pleasure?of its own (Porter

9-24). While "Noon in a New England Pas

ture" is an unusually successful poem, it is not the only poem of its kind. On the contrary, what happens in it was

happening generally in women's nature

poetry by the last decades of the nine teenth century. Although never as rad

ical as Dickinson's, the stylistic fresh ness of this poetry is a function of these

poets' changing view of reality. For some women, as for some men, this new view of reality?the combined

product of Darwinism, scientific revo

lution, cultural transformation, and the

breakdown of traditional moral and re

ligious values?was terrifying. And

they could on occasion voice an Arnol

dian despair, as does Celia Thaxter, for

example, in the concluding stanza of

the highly troubled and conflicted poem, "Starlight" (1878):

Starlight and silence! Dumb are sky and sea;

Silent as death the awful spaces lie;

Speechless the bitter wind blows over me,

Sad as the breathing of a human

sigh. (134)

Or as does Charlotte Perkins Stetson

[Gilman] in the trenchant last lines of "A Common Inference," a poem whose bizarre surrealistic atheism and

bitter irony matches Stephen Crane's

equally bitter (and perverse) expostula tions from the deep:

And everywhere, in happiness and

peace,

A million forms of life that never

cease;

And one small ant-heap, crushed by passing tread,

Hath scarce enough alive to mourn the dead!

They shriek beneath the sod, "There is no God!"

But if the growing secularization of nature elicited despair in some poets, it

also helped produce the kind of proto early-modernist (nature) poem I am de

scribing here. That is, it helped produce poems in which the accuracy of individ uated details or images was, finally, the

poem's reason for being and in which

meaning was indeterminate because the

framework of communally held reli

gious and domestic values had been re

moved, poems, that is, in which the

image speaks for itself and for the

poem/poet, to use Pound's term, "re

vealing" whatever there is to be re

vealed.

In such poems (as, I believe, in ima

gist poetry generally), art begins to take the place of nature as the focal point of the poet's interest, as, for example, in

the first two stanzas of Lillian Shuey's 1892 "In Mendocino." Here the poet's attempt to convey the visual experience of the ocean leads her to create patterns of repetition, including assonance and

alliteration, which dominate any other

"value" the scene might possess and are

the means through which emotion and

meaning are simultaneously conveyed:

The breath of the sea and the

cypress,

A misty and pungent air;

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Legacy

Shadows of tall trees bending Into the bright sea glare.

The white spray washing the

headlands, The white gulls wheeling home,

Dipping their wings in the breakers, And treading the swift sea foam.

Or as in Martha T. Tyler's "April," a

brief and not altogether successful

spring poem, published in 1893, which

begins with the resonant inquiry:

Crocuses, a morning meadow,

Apple blossoms lightly stirred, Sudden rain, a wild bird's shadow,?

Which the shadow, which the bird?

In such writing, as in Deland?and

Dickinson in certain moods?art has

absorbed nature. No distinction can be

made between shadow and bird, be tween object and representation, be tween the patterns the poet describes

and the scene she witnessed. The poem and the world are one; the world, no

wider than the poet's eye, is ordered,

shaped, defined by the poet's tongue. It is, in short, or has become, a (poetic)

object: an image. And however beauti

ful or revelatory this image-object (this poem-world), it references finally only itself.

From such passages?with their con

cision and their emphasis upon the aestheticized object?it is but a short

step, therefore, to the far more radical

formal experimentation found in the nature poetry women published in the

avant-garde Chap-Book between 1894

and 1898. For this poetry, which une

quivocally functions as a precursor to

the early modernist lyrics of poets such as Amy Lowell, H.D., and Pound, is

also unequivocally the product of a

purely aesthetic orientation toward the

natural world. Here, for example, is

"Creation," by Eleanor B. Caldwell:

Aeons of time, infinite space, Blackness and chaos interlace.

Suddenly, a streak of light shot through? On a pin-head of earth, a red cock crew.

With a cunning metrical allusion to Poe, here is "Flying Fish," by Mary McNeil Scott. The future wife of Ernest Fenollosa, Scott also wrote pseudo Oriental lyrics a good twenty years be fore Pound?at her behest?put his

stamp upon her husband's work (Sted man 739-40).

Out where the sky and the sky-blue sea

Merge in a mist of sheen There started a vision of silver things, A leap and a quiver, and flash of wings, The sky and the sea between.

Is it of birds from the blue above Or fish from the depths that be, Or is it the ghosts, In silver hosts,

Of birds that were drowned at sea?

And finally, here is Ann Devoore's "An

Electric-Light Pole." Not particularly successful in itself, this poem neverthe

less presents a stunning anticipation of

Pound's most well-known "imagist" poem, "In a Station of the Metro." Like

Pound, Devoore juxtaposes the tech

nological with the natural (the electric

light pole with the blossoming tree), using concise images of dark and light in order to illuminate, as it were, a

"modernist" perspective on the modern

world:

O Boughless tree, that bars the sky, All naked, grim, and stark,

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Paula Bennett

Your blossoms, in a hundred homes, Bloom out and light the dark!

Aside from precision and novelty, it is the deliciousness of the obscurity that

impresses in these poems. They are

playful poems, poems in which the au

thor-speakers, recognizing, as it were, the radical meaninglessness of the

world, substitute sharply defined aes

thetic effects for what we would ordi

narily call common sense. That is, they are self-consciously art, precisely the

kind of self-conscious art to which

Musser was probably referring when

she alluded in 1896 to an "art move

ment." And if this self-conscious "art

i-ness" links them to Emily Dickin son?and later Wallace Stevens?on the

one hand, it links them on the other to the artfulness of their most immediate

precursors and post-cursors, to Deland

and Shuey as well as to Pound, Amy Lowell, and H.D. Here, for instance, is

Lowell's "Autumn" (1917), a typical

example of the Boston poet's presum

ably Pound-inspired, "Oriental" imita

tions:

All day I have watched the purple vine leaves

Fall into the water.

And now in the moonlight they still

fall, But each leaf is fringed with silver.6

And here is H.D.'s "Oread," one of

the early group of poems to which Pound affixed the label "Imagiste," thus effectively severing 'the poet from

the (women's) tradition to which, for all her "Grecian" hardness, she initially

belonged.

Whirl up, sea?

Whirl your pointed pines. Splash your great pines On our rocks. Hurl your green over us, Cover us with your pools of fir.

In respect to the poetry I have been

describing, Lowell's and H.D.'s use of

free verse, like Pound's, unquestion

ably represents a new and significant

departure, making possible a spareness

rhymed verse finds difficult to achieve. But every other element of their poems, from their drive toward concision to

their emphasis on aesthetic effect and on concrete, arresting details to "pres ent" nature (a nature whose "spiritual" values, insofar as it has any, can no

longer be linked to communally held Christian eschatological beliefs), had al

ready been established in women's na

ture poetry by 1895, after decades of arduous work. If, as Cyrena N. Pon

drom eloquently argues, H.D.'s lyrics served Pound as the model for the "im

agist" poem, then the work of precur sor women poets, poets whom Pound,

Lowell, and H.D., along with Dickin

son, failed to acknowledge, was vital to

this poem's?and this style's?evolu tion, whatever other influences may also have been brought to bear.7

What I am saying, in short, is that

what the early modernists added to make the "imagist" poem (free verse) was hardly more crucial than what they found?all the other elements of the

imagist poem waiting for them in the poetry that women, in particular, had

been developing over the preceding fifty years. "Use no superfluous word, no

adjective that does not reveal some

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thing," Pound declaimed in his famous 1913 set of "don'ts" for Imagists. "Don't use such an expression as 'dim

lands of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete.

It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the

adequate symbol" {Literary Essays 4-5; my italics). Yet in 1912, twenty-five years after Deland, and eighteen years after Caldwell, Pound, in his obsessive need to imitate the voices of ages past, could still write in one poem:

Be in me as the eternal moods of the bleak wind, and not

As transient things are?

gaiety of flowers. Have me in the strong loneliness

of sunless cliffs And of grey waters.

(Personae 67)

And in another, sounding very much like Emily Forman, only less specific:

No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,

Soft as spring wind that's come

from birchen bowers. Green come the shoots, aye April in

the branches.

(Personae 71 )8

Nor, with the exception of Stephen Crane, John B. Tabb,9 and a few free verse experiments by T. E. Hulme and

Edward Storer, have I found any male

poet, British or American, who was

doing appreciably better?not even, al

though some might wish to disagree, William Butler Yeats. Indeed, I have found few who were, in whatever dif

ferent ways, doing as well, at least

where concision and focus on the image were concerned.

In "Astigmatism," a poem as brutal as it is brilliant, Lowell suggests that the

most significant contribution Pound

made to the history of American poetry in the first two decades of the twentieth century was not the creation of the

imagist poem, or even the formulation

of its "laws"?although this formula

tion was obviously central to early modernism's emerging self-conscious ness as a poetic movement. His contri

bution was to eliminate from serious

scrutiny the work of all (women) poets who did not meet, as Dickinson would

say, his "criterion for tune" (#285),

among them, ironically, many Lowell

herself was equally eager to dismiss

(Walker 19-22).10 Having marched

through meadow and woodland, decap

itating unacceptable flowers with his

high phallic cane, Pound's persona, the "Poet" in this poem, comes to a garden, still searching for the "roses" that are

the only sort of "flowers" he allows.

"Astigmatism," I should note, is dedi

cated to Pound, "with much friendship and admiration and some differences of

opinion."

Dahlias ripened against a wall,

Gillyflowers stood up bravely for all their short stature,

And a trumpet-vine covered an

arbour

With the red and gold of its blossoms.

Red and gold like the brass notes of

trumpets.

The Poet knocked off the stiff heads of the dahlias,

And his cane lopped the

gillyflowers at the ground.

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Paula Bennett

Then he severed the trumpet blossoms from their stems.

Red and gold they lay scattered, Red and gold, as on a battlefield; Red and gold, prone and dying. "They were not roses," said the

Poet.

Peace be with you, Brother. But behind you is destruction, and

waste places.

(Lowell 34)

There is rape; and then there is rape. As in Forman's poem, flowers here are

gendered female and, clearly, they do not simply represent poems; they rep resent the female authors of those

poems as well. In the name of male

canonical judgment, these poem-au thor-flowers have been beheaded. Be

heading, in this case, is de-flowering.

De-flowering, at least of this sort, is

rape.

Were women authors writing in the

last two decades of the nineteenth-cen

tury raped of their poems by up-and coming (male) poets, British and Amer ican, whose own stylistic development had (perhaps) been thwarted by edito rial demands or by their own desire to continue writing in mainstream poetic traditions? Here is T. E. Hulme's

"Above the Dock," published by Pound in Ripostes in 1912 and fre

quently cited (along with Hulme's five other poems) as an example of "pre

Imagist Imagism" (Jones 48; Gage 88

89).11 Unlike its companion pieces that

employ free verse, in form and tech

nique "Above the Dock" unequivocally harks back to work done by Chap Book women poets eighteen years be

fore.

Above the quiet dock in midnight, Tangled in the tall mast's corded

height, Hangs the moon. What seemed so

far away Is but a child's balloon, forgotten

after play.

And here, by way of contrast, is the

opening stanza of "Spring Song" by another British poet, John Davidson, which was published in the Chap-Book in 1896. Be it remembered that the

Chap-Book was, presumably, dedicated to publishing specifically avant-garde

writing.

About the flowerless land adventurous bees,

Pickeering hum; the rooks

debate, divide, With many a hoarse aside,

In solemn conclave on the budding trees;

Larks in the skies and ploughboys o'er the leas

Carol as if the winter ne'er had

been; The very owl comes out to greet

the sun; Rivers high-hearted run;

And hedges mantle with a flush of

green.

In the same issue of Chap-Book, tucked in the final pages (Davidson's poem opens the issue), Dorothea Lummis

Moore published "Evolution," a "re

visioning," as it were, of Caldwell's no

less startling "Creation," which ap

peared in the magazine two years be

fore.

Chaos and Night and Silence: these. Then moving masses in a mystery.

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Legacy

Sudden a globule leaps to space and flees To light and law and history.

With its larks and ploughboys, David son's poem, like other poems by Amer

ican as well as British male poets in the

Chap-Book, it is not so much bad as

simply dated. Moore, the woman poet,

willing to follow the lead of another woman poet and make her own strange

leap into space, is a good decade ahead of him?and ahead of her own "time," at least as that time was defined by the

principal male poets of her day: not just Davidson but Madison Cawein, Bliss Carman, Eugene Field, and Archibald

Lampman, male Chap-Book poets all. As Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gu

bar observe, by the 1870s women poets had become the dominant voices in po

etry published in the leading periodicals in the United States (142-43). And it is in their poetry, especially their nature

poetry, that many of the most radical

changes in poetic style occur between 1859 and 1900. Between 1900 and 1925,

when, in effect, men like Eliot and Pound helped bring the revised mod ernist canon of American poetry into

being, all this poetry, which was la beled sentimental?whether or not it was?was lost. By the time Conrad Ai

ken edited the Modern Library's "com

prehensive" anthology of American po

etry in 1929, only four nineteenth

century women poets were deemed

worthy of inclusion (whereas Stedman, in his 1900 anthology, had included one hundred and fifty). Within another two decades not a single nineteenth-century woman poet beside Dickinson could be found in anthologies devoted to Amer ican literature. It was as if the hundreds

of women writing poetry during the

nineteenth-century (approximately three hundred by my count) had never been. Pound's astigmatic judgment, a

judgment with which, alas, many early modern women poets concurred, had

been telling. But, as I have tried to show in this essay, the work of these lost poets was fundamental to the evolution of the early modernist poem, whatever

other sources, both in the United States

and abroad, this poem might have had and however important the adoption of

free verse, in particular, was to it.

In conclusion, I would like to suggest that basic changes in poetic style cannot be attributed to individual authors? even the most original, such as Dickin son herself. As E. H. Gombrich has

argued in respect to the visual arts, such

changes reflect shifts in cultural values, and they occur slowly over extended

periods of time as new techniques to

express these values are developed by the artists involved (3-30). As in late

nineteenth-century women's nature po

etry, they can be tracked almost mo ment to moment, as specific writing strategies appear (or disappear). The in vention of "imagism" by Pound in 1912 was one such moment, but the ground work for this moment (and for early modernist poetry as a whole) had been laid decades before, in good part by

American women nature poets, poets who found in nature's details the means

and ends of their aesthetic effects, the raison d'etre for their poems. It is time

we returned to these poets' garden and

restored their flowers, flowers whose

heads the process of canonization in

this century has all too effectively cut off.

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Paula Bennett

Notes

I wish to thank Richard Marius and Barbara

Johnson, both of Harvard University, for help ing me gain access to Widener Library. I also

wish to thank Adalaide Morris and Edward Brunner for their thoughtful and supportive cri

tiques of this essay.

1. Anticipations of the imagist lyric in nine

teenth-century women's poetry were first ob

served by Emily Stipes Watts, with respect to Edith Thomas (150). Joanne Dobson makes the same tentative observation in regard to Helen

Hunt Jackson (94). In this article I have tried to turn their intuitions into a solid case.

2. A second, related development in wom

en's nature poetry, which I will not treat here, led to the "genteel" nature lyric, as practiced by Louise Chandler Moulton, Lizette Woodworth Reese, and, ultimately, Sara Teasdale. Because of

its distinctively "feminine" qualities (tendencies toward vagueness, emotionalism, romanticism), this form of the women's nature lyric may have been less threatening to male critics, and these are the turn-of-the-century women poets whose names are still remembered, however slightly, in

literary histories (see, for example, Perkins 88 and passim).

As their many erotic poems on flowers and

gardens testify, H.D. and Amy Lowell drew

heavily on both kinds of women's nature lyrics, although I will discuss only their debt to the

pre-imagist kind here.

3. Although there is no space to discuss it here, the rise of the secular literary journals? and their willingness to accept women's writing

(even if only, as some argue, as filler)?had a

profound role in the development I describe. The first real stylistic changes in women's poetry appear in 1858 in the early issues of the Atlantic.

4. Forman has re-created the bloodroot's

natural habitat correctly, down to the last detail.

For those unacquainted with the flower, it emits a bright red juice when plucked; hence its name. And for those confused by the reference to columbine, Forman is referring to the wild east

ern columbine, which blossoms in April and

early May, at the same time as the bloodroot (Dana 25-26).

5. In questioning my characterization of the modernist lyric as "privatized" later in this arti

cle, Adalaide Morris provides the following ex

tremely astute description of Forman's (and

H.D.'s) poetic strategy:

I would argue that the tropes the imagists used to express "the individual" aren't

"privatized" references but refer back to

cultural sources that are worth exploring. To give just one example, you note in Forman's poem a narrative of careless

seduction that counters "communally shared values such as religion and family love," but to tell this story Forman goes back to communally shared stories of classical mythology, tales that also in form much of H.D.'s nature poetry. This

poetry seems so startling and apt partly because in it nature once again fills with female spirits: dryads, nymphs, neriads, and village girls rescued from the "care less seductions" of the gods, demi-gods, and satyrs. Most of these stories are tales

of attempted rape and subsequent meta

morphosis, tangles of sex and spirituality, licences not only to talk about the erotic but to inhabit the natural. What Forman doesn't do is to put the story in a female voice, the voice of the "oread"?but it's

the same story nonetheless (Morris).

I would simply counter that in alluding to the

"communally shared stories" of another period and culture, H.D. and Forman were still writing from a more personalized position than was

Callender (or other high sentimentalists), for whom Christian "myth" was, in fact, public truth. The later poets' use of myth is designed, among other things, to mark their distance from the popular culture of their day.

6. "Autumn" from The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell. Copyright ? 1955 by Houghton Mifflin Co., ? renewed 1983 by Houghton Mifflin Co., Brinton P. Roberts, and G. D'Andelot Belin, Esquire. Reprinted by per mission of Houghton Mifflin Co. All rights reserved.

7. The search for the roots of Imagism has

preoccupied scholars for decades. See, for ex

ample, Jones, Perkins, Gage, Kenner, and the

articles by Pondrom and Laity in Friedman and DuPlessis. I do not disagree with any of this material. I am merely adding to the probable sources for the early modernist style.

8. From Personae by Ezra Pound. Copy

right 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permis sion of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

9. Tabb, however, is an explicit case of cross

over between male and female writing. An ad

mirer of Dickinson, and strongly influenced by her (Buckingham 440-41), he wrote a number

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Legacy

of Dickinson imitations as well as epigrams sim ilar to those published by women in the Chap Book, where, somewhat belatedly, he also pub lished. Among other things, his work suggests, therefore, that Dickinson's influence may be

present in all this later poetry, thus situating her, because of the delayed date of her publica tion, at both the beginning and the end of the

developments I am describing. Along with Tabb, a second male Chap-Book poet, Philip Goetz, was also writing in this style. With the exception of Tabb, all well-known male poets of the day, however, were not.

10. Walker rightly observes that Lowell was

eager to separate herself from her nineteenth

century female precursors, and, certainly, as Ed

Brunner has recently reminded me, she waxed

as contemptuous of "sentimentality" as Pound

himself. Nevertheless, her writing betrays her. For all her modernity, she drew heavily on

nineteenth-century women's poetry traditions,

especially in her erotic poetry (where flowers are identified with women as they are throughout nineteenth-century verse). And in "Astigma tism," I believe that, consciously or uncon

sciously, she is paying tribute to these poets (as well as trying to protect-defend herself).

11. In order to demonstrate this poem's "ru

dimentary" imagist technique, Gage reduces it to "an imagist haiku" by eliminating all unnec

essary words: "The moon, / Tangled in the corded masts: / A child's balloon, forgotten" (89). With somewhat less success (given its initial

materials), Devoore's poem can be similarly re

duced: "Boughless tree / Your blossoms, in a hundred homes, / Bloom and light the dark."

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"Spring." Atlantic Monthly 3 (1859): 737.

Buckingham, Willis J., ed. Emily Dickin son's Reception in the 1890s: A Documen

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Caldwell, Eleanor B. "Creation." Chap Book 2 (1894): 72.

Capps, Jack L. Emily Dickinson's Reading, 1836-1886. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966.

Dana, Mrs. William Starr. According to the Season: Talks about the Flowers in the Order of their Appearance in the Woods and Fields. New York: Scribner's, 1894.

Davidson, John. "Spring Song." Chap Book 4 (1896): 545.

Deland, Margaret. "Noon in a New En

gland Pasture." Harper's New Monthly Magazine 75 (1887): 454.

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