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Новый филологический вестник. 2019. №1(48). --
A.V. Shvets (Moscow) ORCID ID: 0000-0002-1492-2511
"NOT ALL OBJECTS ARE EQUAL": THE POETICS OF NEW YORK IMAGISM
Abstract. The paper focuses on the poetic community associated with a New York little magazine, Alfred Kreymborg's Others (that saw its publishing peak at around 1915). The poets in question include E. Pound, A. Lowell, O. Johns, A. Kreymborg, S. Cannell, W.C. Williams. The author concentrates on a peculiar device that is noticeable if we take into account a corpus of published poetry. Namely, it is the expression of an affective state through a reference to an object, a household item. Drawing on late formalism ("the literary everyday" concept proposed by Tynianov and Eykhenbaum, literary sociology avant la lettre) and newer literary trends (media- and sociologically-oriented approaches to literature, represented by B. Herzogenrath), the author outlines a way of establishing a correspondence between a literary technique and its context. The author suggests that we trace the genesis of a literary structure back to the communicative exchanges and practices embedded in the poetic community, thus factoring out the form-content distinction in favor of media-oriented accounts of literary texts. Here the poetic community is conceived of as a medium, the literary everyday constitutes a force acting upon that medium in order to produce a literary form, and a literary form emerges in the process of tight coupling between the two. Giving an account of the literary everyday of the magazine community and its material and social contexts (apartments, cafés, bars), the author posits that this interaction between the community as a "medium" and its literary everyday had shaped a speech orientation toward friendly, informal communication in which the emphasis is placed on understatements and non-verbalized implications. That led to the emergence of a new poetic technique: using a reference to an object as a vehicle of affective experience.
Key words: imagism; Alfred Kreymborg; William Carlos Williams; Ezra Pound; poetic communities.
А.В. Швец (Москва) ORCID ID: 0000-0002-1492-2511
«Не все вещи равны»: поэтика нью-йоркского имажизма
Аннотация. В статье рассматривается творчество группы поэтов, ассоциируемой с малотиражным журналом А. Креймборга «Others» в 1915 г. (включая Э. Паунда, Э. Лоуэлл, О. Джоунза, А. Креймборга, УК. Уильямса, С. Каннела). В фокусе внимания - приём, заметный на материале корпуса публикуемых в журнале стихов: выражение аффективного состояния посредством указания на вещь, предмет быта. Опираясь на интуиции позднего формализма («литературный быт» Тынянова и Эйхенбаума как протопроект социологии
литературы) и новейшие методологические разработки (медиология литературы -Б. Херцогенрот), автор по-новому соотносит прием и его социальный контекст. Возникновение литературной структуры предлагается искать в коммуникативных обменах, происходящих в рамках сообщества, которое укоренено в определенном материально-дискурсивном контексте. Проблематизируя оппозицию «формы и содержания», автор обращается к пересмотру и переопределению понятия «формы» как носителя смысла через призму таких терминов, как медиум, информация, плотное сцепление, речевая установка. Под медиумом предлагается понимать сообщество, обладающее особым «литературным бытом», который сложился вокруг журнала и включал различные материально-дискурсивные контексты бытования (квартиры, бары, кафе). Описывая генезис поэтического сообщества журнала и рассматривая стихи в его контексте, в итоге автор приходит к выводу, что взаимодействие «медиума» сообщества и структур литературного быта подсказали речевую установку на дружескую, интимную коммуникацию, в рамках которой были оправданы недоговоренность, вынесение смысла в подтекст. Это обстоятельство и обусловило появление нового приема: использования референции к вещи как носителя переживания.
Ключевые слова: имажизм; Альфред Креймборг; Уильям Карлос Уильямс; Эзра Паунд; поэтические сообщества.
Not all objects are equal.
The vice of imagism was that it didn t recognize this.
- Wallace Stevens
In the 1910s, poetry became a subject of radical experimentation which led to the redefinition of the very core of poetic practices. One of the attempts at devising a host of new writing techniques, undoubtedly, could be identified with imagism, a movement advertised by Ezra Pound in the essay A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste (1913). In Pound's programmatic view, the emphasis was on the "image," or "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" [Pound 1913, 200]. Nevertheless, as imagism spread across the globe, germinating in New York artistic circles, Pound's aesthetic credo was modified. When transplanted to the American soil, imagism acquired a peculiar cadence of a different cultural language.
More precisely, imagistic paradigm resonated with the aesthetic quest of a local New York community, clustering around Alfred Kreymborg's magazine, Others, around 1915. The authors who published in that magazine exhibited a tendency to deploy one and the same trope, namely, an act of referring to an object, often to a household item. That trope often figures as a substitute for a confessional, discursive manifestation of an emotional state. In the interpretation of American poets, an object as a vessel of an affective experience becomes a functional equivalent of Poundian "image."
Thus, the dissemination of imagism across the Atlantic Ocean was characterized by an aesthetic shift: while the synthetic power of an image still was at stake, the "objectness," even "thinginess," of a description was enhanced.
Often the poem would focus on a simple, plain, everyday object. While the programmatic impulse remains the same, the changes take place at the level of literary techniques.
In this paper, I will try to reconstruct the emergence of the trope in question, zooming in on its functional role in the poetic practices of Others artistic community. I will show that the new structure of poetic expression is embedded in the context of a community-as-a-medium, both material and discursive, and I will demonstrate how that structure is shaped by the communicative frames of that community.
Literary Sociology Avant La Lettre: Late Formalism
To account for a move away from an isolated literary device towards its interaction with more inclusive paraliterary systems, we need to turn to the project of literary sociology first proposed by B. Eykhenbaum and Yu. Tynianov in 1927. The discussion took place in a dialogic series of polemic article namely, Eykhenbaum's "Literature and the Literary Everyday" and Tynianov's "On Literary Evolution." Both articles came out in Na literaturnom Postu [On Literary Guard], "the journal of a radical leftist faction (the RAPP). (Eykhenbaum's article indicated his departure from Formalism to sociology of literature, for which he was criticized both by fellow Formalists such as Viktor Shklovsky and - less expectedly - by his own orthodox Marxist disciples)" [Tihanov 2004, 67]. It is important to mention that Bakhtin's circle was also instrumental in devising a sociological poetics. However, the comparison between the two is beyond the scope of this essay.
Eykhenbaum stresses the correlation between a closed "literary series" and real-life series of "the literary everyday" [Эйхенбаум / Eykhenbaum 1987] [translation by Ainsley Morse. Throughout my paper, I employ the word "series," along with Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko whose translation of Yu.Tynianov's works I see as a model attempt of recasting the Formalist vocabulary in English - A.S. ]. "The literary everyday" comprises all the external conditions, adjacent to the creation of a literary work, including "saloons," "artistic circles," "the literary everyday" of editorial boards. Those social forms of literary activities, extratextual and paraliterary, might come to the fore and become instrumental in shaping literary history, provided that they constitute an environment, conducive to literary writing and literary communication.
In his response to Eykhenbaum, Tynianov builds on Eykhenbaum's idea that "the literary everyday" [byt] is an adjacent "series" of literature. A linkage between literature and everyday life emerges at the intersection of verbalized social and material contexts of literary production and materially and socially embedded literary texts: "Everyday life is interrelated with literature primarily through its speech aspect" [Тынянов / Tynianov 1977, 278. «Быт соотнесен с литературой прежде всего своей речевой стороной» (italics in the original - A.S.)]. In other words, Tynianov approaches "everyday life" [byt] as a communication system that includes discursive practices and ready-made
frames of social interaction and is contiguous with literature. Thus, literature is a subsystem of communication within "everyday life."
Everyday life matches a communicative function with a literary form or, vice versa, fills in an empty slot of a communicative function with a literary form. Once a communicative function is divorced from a form, a form loses its "orientation" and thus stops being literary. In Tynianov's explanation:
"The orientation of Lomonosov's odes - their speech function - is oratorical. Their language is "oriented" toward recitation. Its further, real-life associations are with recitation in large palace rooms. By Karamzin's time, the ode had "run its course" as literature. Its orientation had expired, or become attenuated in its meaning, and moved on to other, everyday forms...There were no ready-made literary genres on hand, and so their place was occupied by everyday speech phenomena. The speech function -orientation - was seeking a form, and located it in "romances," jokes, rhyming games, bouts-rimés, charades, etc." [Тынянов / Tynianov 1977, 278-279].
Communication system of everyday life here is associated with the communication in an extremely official setting of a "large palace room." In that social space, the oral recitation is underpinned by the specific orientation toward textual resonance. As a result, an array of literary techniques, conducive to the enhancement of sonic quality, is attached to that purpose. Because of that, the genre of ode appears. Nevertheless, when the social space of a palace stops being the center of literary activities, the orientation toward recitation gradually wears out. Consequently, a system of devices constituting a genre disintegrates. A letter to a close friend might set up a pattern for a genre of a dialogue between people who are intimate with each other. Sometime later, a letter becomes a source of new literary techniques and itself turns into a literary form.
Therefore, the genesis of a new form could be traced back to the communicative context and communicative micro-interactions that set up a new orientation (speech function). A literary form is inseparable from its context, the content it channels, the effect it produces. Ode as a genre does not exist on its own but is rather firmly entrenched in a communicative scenario of reading a poem out loud in a large palace room. As such, ode figures as a literary interface for a social interaction.
"Information" and the materiality of medium
If we continue thinking along the lines suggested by Tynianov and Eykhenbaum, it makes sense to factor out a distinction between "form" and "content." Instead, it would be more reasonable to see them as merging in what we might term as information (whether it concerns literature or ordinary communication). The very word, information, comes from Latin informare, a verb that meant "to give form to, mould, fashion," "sketch, give an idea," "instruct, educate," or give shape to the matter so that a new meaning is formed in that process. In light of that brief excursus, information could be conceived
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of as both contents and its form. Here we are reminded of another approach to literary studies, namely, media studies, in which "forms" and "contents" are regarded as parts of a single whole (one might quote famous "The medium is the message").
Nevertheless, once we say that a literary form is, in fact, embedded within a medium, we should bear in mind that medium, in its turn, possesses materiality. In a recent essay collection on media and matter, B. Herzogenrath insists that media are, first and foremost, material entities in which a "medium" and its "content" overlap and (in)form each other, being a peculiar kind of matter organization. To illustrate his argument, Herzogenrath explains the distinction between "medium" and "form" through Niklas Luhmann's opposition of "loose" and "tight coupling," inspired by Fritz Haider's work Ding undMedium (1924):
"In Fritz Heider's book Ding und Medium (Thing and Medium)... from which Luhmann takes over the medium | form distinction, Heider uses the example of sand: sand as infinitely divisible, as a medium that functions " for " a form. The sand's loose coupling, its grain, can serve as a "carrier " for different traces, but can also generate different " forms " : sand castles, sand jets, etc. The sand consists of loosely coupled elements (small stones) that are structured by something more solid that has been imprinted on it, the foot. The sand becomes a medium because of the form imprinted on it, and the footprint as a form exists only because of the sand as medium" [Herzogenrath 2015, 3-4].
Consequently, the opposition "form - contents" could easily be replaced with a pair "medium - form." It is important to note here that medium is inseparable from forms. Rather, it expresses its "mediality" and materiality in and through a concrete structure of "tight coupling."
"Everyday life" of a poetic community and "literary everyday" in its poetry
While conceiving of Others as a poetic project, Alfred Kreymborg, its editor, pulled into its orbit various New York artistic circles proliferating in the 1910s and having one feature in common. All these circles would be informal, entrenched in a peculiar context of informal communication, such as bars, apartments, restaurants. A specific speech function and a specific pattern of communication had crystallized in the interaction of the poetic community-as-the-medium and its literary everyday, shaping a form, a set of techniques and devices. The pattern that distinguishes the poetic community of "Others" could be characterized as a reference to an object that becomes a container for an affective experience. That technique becomes central in the texts of the "Other" imagists.
Creating the Magazine: Informal Circles around Others
As Kreymborg enters New York's literary world in 1908-1909 (see Kreymborg's autobiography [Kreymborg 1925, 134]. Throughout the paper, I refer to that source as "K" with the page number in brackets. That date also figures in [Allen 1944, 419]), he comes across a lot of poetic communities. At a certain point, he is invited to a meeting of 291 group, a so-called "Round Table," a ritual of lunching together, ending at Stieglitz's gallery, "291" [Churchill 1998, 50]. That place served as a prototype of a friendly "nook," an ideal literary space. In a short note What 291 means to me (June 1914) (that pre-dated Others by one year) in Stieglitz's Camera Work, Kreymborg describes Stieglitz's studio as an all-inclusive space [Kreymborg 1914, 29; I refer to that source as "K291"]: "At times, you are discouraged. You say, I am a no-good. I am not like others. I eat, sleep, drink, breathe this bite-a-bit-o'-the-moon...What use am I? Let me die" (K291, 29). 291 is the space in which any quirk would be accepted: "We believe in you and your bit of the moon. 'Tis the only craze worth while. Bite away. And you return home the happiest invalid that ever was.. .This is what "291" means to me" (K291, 29).
But the first impulse toward the creation of a poetic community could be registered as early as 1913, when the magazine The Glebe emerged, an important transitory stage on the way to Others magazine. The idea of The Glebe belongs to Kreymborg and his two friends, Man Ray, the photographer, and Samuel Halpert, the writer. They would rent a small cottage in Ridgefield, New Jersey, and would establish a new Walden, an artistic colony where artists relied on manual labor to eke out a living. Kreymborg, Halpert, and Ray intended to buy out a printing press and publish a few issues by themselves. Each issue would be a "one-man show on an intimate scale; a few pages per issue or an occasional broadsheet" (K, 203). Again, the emphasis is on self-expression in a close, friendly circle.
The circumstances were not as favorable as Kreymborg and his friends had planned. The printing press turned out to be broken, so that Kreymborg, as the editor, had to travel to New York to find sponsors. In doing so, he found himself in Greenwich Village, the site of literary saloons and artistic bohème, famous for its artistic "colonies". One of the most well-known was Guido Bruno's garret. Bruno would commercialize his everyday routine by selling tickets for the entrance to his garret, so that everyone willing to pay a small sum could observe the artist at work: painting, doing household chores, sleeping etc. [Wetzsteon 2002, 303]. In Kreymborg's phrasing, ".with the arrival of an era of a more concerted consciousness.. .the village.. .draw[s] a heterogeneous host of men and women from all over the country pointing their hobby horses in the direction of Washington Square" (K, 208).
It is in Greenwich Village where Kreymborg found the investors, Albert and Charles Boni (later they would establish Boni & Liveright Press), co-editors of the magazine. They introduced Kreymborg to a network of authors and provided him with a valuable connection, an American expatriate of Russian origin living
in London, John Coumos. Cournos put Kreymborg in touch with Ezra Pound, who, in his turn, sent Kreymborg the manuscript of Des Imagistes anthology with a brief instruction: "[U]nless you're another American ass, you'll set this up just as it stands!" [Churchill 2006, 32]. The anthology was indeed set up as it stood and came out in February 1914.
Nevertheless, a tension arises between Kreymborg and other members of the editorial board, since they insist on publishing English-speaking authors from Pound's London network and other "European" poets. As a consequence, Kreymborg renounces his editorship. In making a choice between the local, American expression and a wider trans-Atlantic network, he prefers the latter over the former.
The Poetic Community of Others
After the editorial experience at The Glebe, Kreymborg becomes one of the Greenwich Village bohemians. Soon, he receives an invitation to publish in a small magazine Rogue from its editors, Allen and Lisa Norton. After the publication, Kreymborg is invited to an after-party taking place at the salon of an influential arts patron from the Village, Walter Arensberg, the man who promoted Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams and other poets. It was Arensberg who laid the foundation for Others by providing it with a sum of money to publish.
The magazine relied on two networks, the trans-Atlantic one, provided by Pound, and the local one, nested within Rogue literary environment. The first two issues clearly display that tendency: Mina Loy, Orrick Johns, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and Skipwith Cannell, connected through Des Imagistes anthology, are placed alongside Alanson Hartpence, Robert Brown, Mary Davis, Kreymborg himself. A trans-Atlantic reach, however, never was the intended goal of the magazine. Rather, it was avoided, as well as commercial success: ".. .the new editor had not embarked on the publication with the idea of selling it" (K, 234). The print run of approximately 300 copies targeted "private circles" (K, 235). "Others was merely to print the work of men and women who were trying themselves in new forms. A principle of rigid privacy was determined upon. There was to be in no sense of a word a group" (K, 222).
As the project of the magazine was taking shape, a community of like-minded individuals clustered around Kreymborg. Many contributors were attracted by a distant presence of poets working in the same vein and wanted to transfer a purely textual encounter into real life: "[t]he printed page was not enough: one wanted to greet the other fellow, and failing such a meeting, wished to hear about him, read about him, talk about him" (K, 240). As a result, New York-based poets (Mary Davis, William Carlos Williams (W.C. Williams actually lived in New Jersey but commuted to the city and the suburbs in his car), Walter Arensberg, Robert Sanborn, Orrick Johns, Skipwith Cannell) started gathering on weekends in the place where the headquarters of the magazine was located: Grantwood, New Jersey. They would rent a small cottage, organize a picnic,
workshop some poems, according to W.C. Williams: "We'd have arguments over cubism which would fill an afternoon. There was a comparable whipping up of interest in the structure of the poem. It seemed daring to omit capitals at the head of each poetic line. Rhyme went by the board. We were, in short, "rebels" and were so treated" [Williams 1951, 136].
Judging by Williams' testimony, we could assume that the mechanics of a poem boggled the mind of many poets coming to Grantwood, so that a collective quest for an answer appeared in response. Therefore, a cross-pollination of creative impulses was indeed observable. As the year rolled by, approaching winter, poets would relocate to New York City, to Kreymborg's small studio, and host public readings in galleries (WCW, 136). An "ideal format" for those meeting was outlined by Williams in one of his letters: "We were to have a clubhouse - above 42nd Street.We could have a large room for exhibitions of pictures, silk goods, sculptures, etc. Here we could have our social meetings. Then again we could use this room for plays and readings" [Williams 1957, 32].
We learn from the same letter that this idea was doomed, since there were only two short meetings, and then the enthusiasm abated. Kreymborg was running out of start capital, the subscriptions did not pay off, the printers lost interest as there was nothing to offer in exchange for their services. Two anthologies published in 1916, meant to promote the journal and attract new sponsors, failed to do so. The meetings became infrequent, the submissions were so irregular that joint issues appeared. On the whole, a consistent editorial policy is nowhere to be found and the magazine gradually comes to an end. In 1919, Williams puts the last nail in the coffin, announcing in the editorial that the magazine would no longer be published.
Objects in the "Literary Everyday" of "Other" Poets
As we have shown, the "literary everyday," the medium, of the "other" imagists consists of informal, friendly circles, grounded in material contexts of informal, intimate communication. The literary life is the reverse side of a life lived in a shared social setting of an apartment, a cottage, a bar, a café. Such a space shapes new communicative frames: an interaction with an intimate friend in a familiar, homely surrounding, filled with various household objects, with an emotional meaning attached to them. As a result, speech function is oriented at a confidential expression of personal affects. The very process of communicating such emotions relies heavily on understatements and indirect suggestions, phatic beatings around the bush, casual conversations, with latent deeper meanings, usually focusing on banal household items.
Due to pecuniary constraints, the preference was given over to shorter verses since a thin magazine was more viable in financial terms. That also goes for the look of the magazine. Others displayed an austere visual design, with white pages almost devoid of any decorative elements and framed by wide margins, which was largely due to the absence of technological contrivances used to embellish the space of the page. As a result, the poem would be exhibited on an
unmarked page, in the center, isolated by the wide empty margins, the way an isolated object might be put on display at a museum. Consequently, the poem, taken in its material, physical shape, looked like an object, a bibelot or a toy placed in a homely surrounding.
Imagism "Brahmins": Pound, Amy Lowell
An object as a vehicle for an affective experience is a trope that we observe in the poems of imagist "brahmins," poets from the trans-Atlantic network centered around Ezra Pound. Such poems include Lowell's The Peddler of Flowers (August 1915). All three poems are exemplary in terms of imagist verbal economy. In each poem, we have an ostensibly object-centered image, hinting at an emotional drama but never communicating it directly. A poem tells a story with an emotional subtext, but it never uncovers the emotion itself. Rather, the reader is supposed to reconstruct the affective plot by following object-based clues.
Let us take a look at Pound's poem:
ANOTHER MAN'S WIFE
She was as pale as one
Who has just produced an abortion.
Her face was beautiful as a delicate stone
With the sculptor's dust still on it.
And yet I was glad that it was you and not I
Who had removed her from her first husband.
[Pound 1915, 85]
In Pound's short poem the objective equivalent of an emotion is "a delicate stone with the sculptor's dust still on it." It is metaphorically compared to "another man's wife," who came across her lover, pale "as one who has just produced an abortion." A delicate stone that still carries an imprint of a chisel suggests a certain degree of completion but at the same time connotes a violent treatment of the material in the process of turning it into an inanimate sculpture. Thinking along these lines, we could say that the woman looks like a sculpture, the exemplary specimen of harmony. At the same time, deep inside, she violently deadens the sensibility of her affectations. This complex emotional experience is only connoted by the object-based image of a "delicate stone," is rendered and framed through it. In other words, the affect here is shown but never told.
A similar drama might be observed in Lowell's poem:
THE PEDDLER OF FLOWERS I came from the country With flowers, Larkspur and roses, Fretted lilies
In their leaves,
And long, cool lavender.
I carried them
From house to house,
And cried them
Down hot streets.
The sun fell
Upon my flowers,
And the dust of the streets
Blew over my basket.
That night
I slept upon the open seats
Of a circus,
Where all day long
People had watched
The antics
Of a painted clown.
[Lowell 1915, 19]
In Lowell's poem we have a series of object-centered images: rare flowers, dust of the streets, circus seats. Ostensibly visual references oust the avowal of feeling: the story of a failure is extremely concise and terse, devoid of any directly expressed emotion. Still, each reference to an object impels the reader to construct an affective context around the object and turn it into a story. Thus, the objects in this poem contain a host of associations, impossible to verbalize directly.
On the whole, in the poetry of imagist "brahmins" object-centered descriptions abound, making a thing a container for affective "content." Nevertheless, as a rule, an emphasis on commonplace objects is less pronounced. Pound and Lowell saturate the poem with objects, but do not focus much on things and objects, characteristic of a private, intimate setting.
The "Periphery": Orrick Johns, William Carlos Williams, Skipwith Cannell
The tendency to delegate the affect to an object is observable in the poems of the local poets based in New York. Some of them had already published in various Imagist anthologies. However, the majority of them was known to be on the periphery of the movement. These poets include William Carlos Williams, Orrick Johns, Skipwith Cannell.
Orrick Johns also deploys a strategy of centering the image upon an object in his Olives. Johns' short verses attach the emotions to object-like containers, ostensibly visual equivalents. Let us look at an example:
SHOE-STRING Little old shoe,
You need a shoe-string;
I shall find one for you,
For without it you are helpless
As a man who studies regulations,
But with a yellow one
Like a woman who is bald. [Johns
1915, 9]
The description of a familiar object, a shoe without shoe-strings, triggers a series of associations: a man who studies regulations; a bald woman. In both cases, a shoe-string, or, rather, a shoe without it, stands for an affective complex comprising a feeling of helplessness and lack of satisfaction, a sympathetic attitude toward that state. A common item is charged with the affect and channels it, ostensibly displays it.
Williams Carlos Williams, in his turn, displays a command of imagist poetic techniques by engaging a series of object in order to convey an experience that is hard to put into word. Let us have a look at his Ogre.
THE OGRE Sweet child,
Little girl with well shaped legs
You cannot touch the thoughts
I put over and under and around you.
This is fortunate for they would
Burn you to an ash otherwise.
Your petals would be quite curled up.
But this is all beyond you - no doubt.
Yet you do feel the brushings
Of the fine needles:
The tentative lines of your whole body
Prove it to me:
So does your fear of me,
Your shyness:
Likewise the toy baby cart
That you are pushing -
And besides, mother has begun
To dress your hair in a knot.
These are my excuses [Williams 1915, 24-25].
In this poem, the exterior, or the visible dimension, indirectly renders inner
state of the speaker. The doctor is examining a teenager and feels attracted to her. Sexual drive is hinted at by a series of metaphoric suggestions that describe the beginning of puberty: "petals quite curled up," "brushing of the fine needles." There are also object-centered indicators of that significant change: toy baby cart, hair knot. Those are social signs of the onset of puberty. Those ostensible object-based signals are just "excuses" for triggering a chain of associations and affects that could not be expressed directly (mostly because the very expression is tabooed). That is why the "invisible" thoughts wrapping the girl all around are folded into the objects that contain them.
The expression of an affective experience through an object might be seen in Skipwith Cannell's poetry, for instance, in his The Coming of Night in which the emotional content is communicated by the means of an extremely homely image, an old cup with dregs of tea:
I had lit my candle to make a song for you.
But I have forgotten it for I am very tired;
And the candle. . . a yellow moth. . .
Flutters, flutters,
Deep in my brain.
My song was about, 'a foreign lady
Who was beautiful and sad,
Who was forsaken, and who died
A thousand years ago.'
But the cracked cup at my elbow,
With dregs of tea in it,
Fixes my tired thought more surely
Than the song I made for you and forgot. . .
That I might give you this. [Cannell 1915, 26]
As we can tell, the cup is pretty old and possesses almost no value. The contemplation of that cup with the dregs in it is retroactively projected on a failure to write a poem. In both cases, a feeling of frustration and disappointment is observed. The image of a cup only externalizes that affective message.
To conclude, the poems of the imagist "periphery" are dominated by the trope of referring to a common, regular household object. That trope is usually embedded within the context of intimate, private communication. As a result, the trope of linking emotion to an object is used to express private emotions which are sometimes extremely hard to share and verbalize. These affective experiences are communicated through understatement and contained within such objects as cups, toy baby carts, shoes, etc.
Conclusion
An orientation toward intimacy and privacy as the defining features of the "literary everyday" energize the potential of a specific communicative
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framework. In that community, indirect communication of the emotion, often meant for a close friend or a circle of friends, is valorized. It is the communication that allegedly does not require much discursive expression since the interlocutors already know each other too well. Hence, we get a peculiar literary technique: the reference to an object that serves as a means of expressing affective experience. By talking about things and around things, the speaker manages to stage an inner drama focusing it on a household item. While Trans-Atlantic Imagism only hinted at that expressive possibility only but never realized it properly, New York local poetic community chose that particular scenario and translated it from the realm of ideas into life.
REFERENCES (RUSSIAN)
1. Тынянов Ю.Н. Поэтика. История литературы. Кино. М., 1977.
2. Эйхенбаум Б.М. О литературе. М., 1987.
3. Allen Ch. «Glebe» and «Others» // College English. 1944. May. Vol. 5. № 8. P. 418-423.
4. Cannell S. The Coming of Night // Others. 1915. August. Vol. 1. № 2. P. 26-27.
5. Churchill S. Making Space for «Others»: A History of a Modernist Little Magazine // Journal of Modern Literature. 1998. Autumn. Vol. 22. № 1. P. 4767.
6. Churchill S. The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry. Aldershot, 2006.
7. Herzogenrath B. Introduction // Media Matter. London, 2015. P. 1-16.
8. Johns O. Olives // Others. 1915. July. Vol. 1. № 1. P. 9-12.
9. Kreymborg A. Troubadour. New York, 1925.
10. Kreymborg A. What «291» Means to Me // Camera Work. 1914. June [publ. January 1915]. № 47. P. 29.
11. Lowell A. The Peddler of Flowers // Others. 1915. August. Vol. 1. № 2. P. 19.
12. McFarland G. Inside Greenwich Village:A New York City Neighborhood, 1898-1918. Amherst, 2005.
13. Pound E. A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste // Poetry. 1913. March. Vol. 1. № 6. P. 200-206.
14. Pound E. Another Man's Wife // Others. 1915. November. Vol. 1. № 5. P. 85.
15. Tihanov G. Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe?: (And Why Is It Now Dead?) // Common Knowledge. 2004. Vol. 10. Issue 1. P. 61-81.
16. Wetzsteon R. Republic of Dreams. Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960. New York, 2002.
17. Williams W.C. Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams. New York, 1957.
18. Williams W.C. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York, 1951.
19. Williams W.C. The Ogre // Others. 1915. August. Vol. 1. № 2. P. 24-25.
REFERENCES (Articles from Scientific Journals)
1. Allen Ch. «Glebe» and «Others». College English, 1944, May, vol. 5, no. 8, pp. 418-423. (In English).
2. Churchill S. Making Space for «Others»: A History of a Modernist Little Magazine. Journal of Modern Literature, 1998, Autumn, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 4767. (In English).
3. Lowell A. The Peddler of Flowers. Others, 1915, August, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 19. (In English).
4. Tihanov G. Why Did Modern Literary Theory Originate in Central and Eastern Europe?: (And Why Is It Now Dead?). Common Knowledge, 2004, vol. 10, issue 1, pp. 61-81. (In English).
(Articles from Proceedings and Collections of Research Papers)
5. Herzogenrath B. Introduction. Media Matter. London, 2015, pp. 1-16. (In English).
(Monographs)
6. Tynyanov Yu.N. Poetika. Istoriya literatury. Kino [Poetics. Literary History. Cinema]. Moscow, 1977. (In Russian).
7. Eykhenbaum B.M. O literature [On literature]. Moscow, 1987, pp. 428436. (In Russian).
8. Churchill S. The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry. Aldershot, 2006. (In English).
9. McFarland G. Inside Greenwich Village: A New York City Neighborhood, 1898-1918. Amherst, 2005. (In English).
10. Wetzsteon R. Republic of Dreams. Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960. New York, 2002. (In English).
Anna V. Shvets, Lomonosov Moscow State University.
M.A. in Philology (MSU), M.A. in Comparative Literature, (University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA), Ph.D. student at Discourse and Communication Department at MSU.
E-mail: [email protected]
Швец Анна Валерьевна, Московский государственный университет им. М.В. Ломоносова.
Магистр филологии (МГУ), магистр в области «Сравнительное литературоведение» (Университет Джорджии, Атенс, Джорджия, США), аспирант кафедры общей теории словесности МГУ.
E-mail: [email protected]
