This is the text of the “provocation” I delivered at the Historical Poetics Now conference at the University of Texas, Austin, this weekend. A forthcoming article in Literature Compass discusses Mary Austin’s theory of free verse and its effect on modernist conceptions of Native American poetry in more detail, as does my book manuscript in progress.
A Provocation from an Americanist
Thank you to the conference organizers for inviting me to be one of the provocateurs at this event––I’ll try to live up to the designation. I’ve been charged with being the provoking Americanist, and I’m afraid I’m also really a modernist these days, so I’ll be giving my views on what historical poetics offers from the standpoint of someone who works primarily with materials from the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My provocation today consists of two main linked claims: first, historical poetics is not only about historicizing poems, and second, historical poetics can help to elucidate some of the ways that contemporary literary studies remains attached to its white supremacist foundations. Put differently, historical poetics can be one tool we use to chip away at the foundational whiteness of literary studies.
Claim 1: historical poetics does not simply mean historicizing poems. A historical poetics approach to literary study pushes scholars to ask which terms we hold stable in order to narrate the literary histories that emerge in our scholarship. Work in historical poetics starts from the premise that, as Michael Warner puts it, the modern academic critic is “a historically unusual sort of person” (“Uncritical Reading” 36) whose habits of critical reading are markedly different from the habits of most other kinds of readers. Academic critical reading is very good at elucidating certain kinds of poetic texts, but many poetic texts have been illegibile to modern literary scholars––for instance, most of the poems written and circulated in the United States in the nineteenth century.
This situation meant that, for a few decades at least, nineteenth-century American poetry was essentially disappeared from English departments, aside from works by Whitman, Dickinson, and maybe sometimes Poe. As Kerry Larson writes in the introduction to the 2011 Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, “It cannot be said of nineteenth-century American poetry that it needs no introduction” (1). For generations of scholars, it seemed self-evident that convention, rhyme, repetition, and imitation were marks of bad poetry, and that bad poetry isn’t worth the investment of time required to make it yield interesting knowledge. Hence, nineteenth-century American poetry was simply ignored. Historical poetics scholarship, along with feminist recovery projects, book history studies, and any number of allied fields, has fundamentally reoriented our view of the nineteenth century in the Americas, pushing critics instead to see how twentieth-century literary critics “ask[ed] questions that nineteenth-century American poetry didn’t seem [able] to answer,” in the words of Mary Louise Kete (15). The scholarship that has investigated how to ask the questions that nineteenth-century American poetry does answer has been as varied in method and scope as nineteenth-century American poetry itself. In general, though, such scholarship can be said to push back against the once pervasive ideas that 1) readers have always understood capital P Poetry to be a meaningful generic category, 2) that conventionality is a mark of bad artistry, and 3) that poetic forms and genres evolved in any kind of progressive way. This latter strand of criticism is the strand I want to pick up in this talk today.
With the time I have remaining, I want to present to you a case study in historical poetics, to show what happens when we no longer hold generic and formal terms––especially terms like meter and prosody––stable as we analyze poetic texts. [I have to ask you indulgence here, because I’m going to be talking about modernist studies and texts from the early twentieth century, but it’s my hope that this conversation will have some theoretical utility for scholars working prior to the twentieth century.] As a practitioner of historical poetics, I am interested in the consequences of the return of nineteenth-century American poetry for fields that have relied on its disappearance for their own existence–namely, modernism. I am especially interested in the question of how to narrate historical accounts of modernist poetry from the premise that, as Max Cavitch so eloquently puts it, “Poetry’s liberation from the shackles of meter is one of the most important nonevents in late nineteenth-century literary history” (33). When scholars of modernism talk about free verse, they still position it as a real break with the prosodic experiments of the nineteenth century. This narrative covers over the white supremacist theories of meter that developed in the modernist era. A historical poetics approach to the history of free verse poetry can, I propose, reveal how white supremacist ideologies continue to inhere in some scholarly assumptions about the relative values of various poetic forms. In other words, historical poetics is not simply about historicizing poems; it is an approach that challenges the often reflexive, unexamined narratives of progressive generic and formal evolution that sometimes continue to structure otherwise historically-minded scholarship.
My abridged case study today is part of one chapter in the racialized development of free verse in the Americas in the early twentieth century. Mary Austin created a position for herself in the 1910s through the 1930s as one of the foremost “interpreters” of Native American poetry and cultural traditions. She was appointed to the School of American Research in Native American Literature in 1918, authored the “Aboriginal Literature” entry for the Cambridge History of American Literature in 1921, and published widely on Native American literatures and cultures in popular magazines like The Nation and Atlantic Monthly. She managed to attain this stature in spite of the fact that she spoke no Native languages. Though Austin did advocate for the importance of Native American poetry, which she presented as the earliest known form of free verse, she also managed to turn free verse into a tool of settler cultural domination. Austin proposed that free verse poetry was a technology for managing time—specifically, for integrating Native Americans into the relentlessly linear march of what Mark Rifkin has recently theorized as settler time. Austin’s theories of free verse had significant, distorting effects on the way Native American oral expressions were presented as poetry in modernist anthologies. While free verse is still all too often mapped onto historical narratives about progress and democratization, Austin’s work shows that ideas about free verse were in fact part of settler attempts to control and mediate Native cultural expressions in a way that benefitted non-Native artists and literary cultures. This case study highlights the need to question the way we narrate changes in the use and theorization of poetic forms.
I don’t have the space to get into all the wonderfully baroque and twisty logic behind Austin’s prosodic theories. I just want to highlight the effects of her understanding of free verse for Native poets. Austin argued that, because Native American poetry was a type of free verse, it had a unique relationship to the blank, white space of the printed page. She explained that printing what had been oral expression as free verse poetry revealed that, much like with Imagist poetry and other compressed forms, “the supreme art of the Amerind is displayed in the relating of the various elements to the central idea” (AR 56). Austin claimed that this economy of form showed that “the Amerind excels in the art of occupying space without filling it” (AR 56), both literally and literarily.
Furthermore, Austin argued, Native American poetry was “for the most part of the type called neolithic” (AR 20), and was incapable of being translated into the modern world without the resources of the English language. Austin’s logic went thusly: she argued that “accent does not appear to have any place in Amerind poetry” (AR 61). This mattered because accent in poetry was “a device for establishing temporal coincidences” (AR 63), both metrically within a poem and in a larger historical sense. Without the technology of accent, Native poetries were destined to remain firmly rooted in their “Neolithic” moment. By being translated into English-language poetic forms, however, that Neolithic verse could be brought into the future, and in the process the English-language interpretations of Native verbal arts would become privileged poetic objects. English free verse interpretations were needed to unpack the fossil poetry of Native verbal arts in order to preserve a cultural heritage that would otherwise have been lost in the inevitable march of historical and generic progress. Non-Natives (and only non-Natives) could create a “temporal coincidence” between the beginnings and the ends of poetry, according to Austin, through their use of accented poetic rhythms in “aboriginal” free verse forms. It had been the technology of poetic accent that had allowed Vachel Lindsay to create “points of simultaneity” between “the Mississippi and the Congo” (AR 32) in his free verse poetry, and it would be the technology of accent that would lead non-Native poets to nurture “the common root of aboriginal and modern Americanness” (AR 54) into what Austin called “the rise of a new verse form in America” (AR 9). The right poetic rhythms, in other words, wielded by white poets, could create material linkages between the past and the future, making history visualizable and graphically representable as the rhythms of modern poetry. Rhythm was a time machine that moved between the “unaccented dub dub, dub dub, dub dub, dub dub in the plazas of Zuñi and Oraibi” (AR 11) and the accented “chuff chuff of a steam engine” (AR 64). This translation across time would make those primal unaccented rhythms intelligible to the non-Natives on board the forward-moving train. Not coincidentally, Austin repeatedly returned to this image of a train as a sort of time machine running back and forth on a single track between the rhythms of “primitive” man and modern man, a la Back to the Future Part III. Running this track, according to Austin, allowed both rhythmic systems and both types of man to merge into a singular and inevitable creation—namely, the modern American.
Austin’s theories of Native American poetry as neolithic free verse affected the design of anthologies of Native American poetry in the modernist era. Take, for instance, the 1918 anthology The Path on the Rainbow, to which Austin contributed the introduction and seven “interpretations” of ethnographic translations of Native American songs.
The anthology was hugely commercially successful, and the form of the anthology was widely imitated well into the twentieth century. And that form is deeply influenced by the logic of generic and cultural succession. The anthology performs the metabolization of Native American oral arts by white poets in its very design. The anthology first presents literal translations of Native American songs and oral expressions, made by non-Native ethnographers and divided into “songs” from various geographical regions. Labeling these works as “songs” may seem to indicate an awareness that “poetry” and “verse” are non-Native categories, but the anthology works to fit these transcribed and translated oral expressions into a stadial theory of generic evolution, in which the earliest poetry was a communally authored oral expression that included ritual dance as a necessary component, and in which the end goal of generic evolution is individually authored printed poems. In the table of contents to The Path on the Rainbow, the translators of the collected “songs” are named, but they are not named in the text of the anthology itself, reinforcing the idea that the songs were anonymously or communally authored.
These ethnographic translations are followed by “Interpretations” by Constance Lindsay Skinner, Mary Austin, Frank Gordon, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Pauline Johnson. Where the ethnographic translations are marked by the names of their collectors and the tribal groups that produced them, the “interpretations” do not have consistent textual apparatuses to explain which sources, if any, the poets were interpreting, indicating that the cultural specificity of the oral arts of different Native groups mattered less to the anthology’s editors than the ways those oral cultural productions were interpreted by non-Native authors.
The message of this design is clear: as “neolithic” poetry, Native American verbal arts were waiting for more “advanced” literary artists to polish and perfect them. The anthology made Native American poetry “productive” for American literature. Its seemingly unsystematizable, unaccented poetic rhythms would be incorporated into the system of English-language poetic rhythm, meaning that Neolithic Native cultures would be brought into the modern world on settler terms. Austin’s introduction ends with a call to action for non-Native poets: the translators of Native American poetry had done their job, according to Austin, but “The interpreter’s work is all before him” (xxxii).
So, why have I yammered at you about problems in modernist studies for so long? I hope to have made a convincing case for the need to interrogate the terms that can easily go unquestioned in historicist work. One can historicize a poem without ever questioning why we call that text a poem; it is harder to historicize a poetic term or form or genre without questioning how ideological investments have shaped and continue to shape our literary histories. This, from my vantage point, is what historical poetics approaches offer to scholars working in any historical period. In the case study I’ve presented, I’ve tried to show that accepting one historically-situated understanding of a poetic form can perpetuate exclusionary, racist, colonialist lines of thought. To continue to narrate the advent of free verse as a break with the past, without acknowledging the white supremacist colonial thinking that helped to create that idea of a prosodic break, seems to me to be a pretty serious problem. It may be a problem specific to modernist studies, but I hope this talk can provoke discussion about the terms in other periods that tend to get stabilized or reified.
Works Cited
Austin, Mary. The American Rhythm. Harcourt Brace, 1923.
—. “Introduction.” The Path on the Rainbow, edited by George W. Cronyn, Boni and Liveright,
1918, pp. xv–xxxii.
Cavitch, Max. “Stephen Crane’s Refrain.” ESQ, vol. 54, no. 1, 2008, pp. 33–53.
Kete, Mary Louise. “The Reception of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry.” The Cambridge
Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, edited by Kerry Larson, Cambridge
University Press, 2011, pp. 15–35.
Larson, Kerry. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American
Poetry, edited by Kerry Larson, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 1–14.
Warner, Michael. “Uncritical Reading.” Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, edited by Jane Gallop,
Routledge, 2004, pp. 13–38.