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Modernism at Home and Abroad Patricia C. Willis No stretch of the imagination is required to appreciate the constellation of modernist relationships when the papers of Ezra Pound, H.D., Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Matthew Josephson, Mina Loy, Carl Van Vechten, and Glenway Wescott are to be found in one library. Add to these archives those of Scofield Thayer and his magazine, The Dial, and of the magazine's art critic, Henry McBride, music critic Paul Rosenfeld, 1912, managing editor Alyse Gregory, and resident artist Gaston Lachaise, and the literary history of the period achieves a kind of critical mass. Such works as Pound's Cantos, Williams's Paterson, Stein's Making of Americans, and H.D.'s Trilogy, from the authors' own papers, are joined by such giants from Dial archive as William Butler Yeats's "Among Schoolchildren," Marianne Moore's "An Octopus," Hart Crane's "The Bridge," T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," and Wallace Stevens's "Bantams in Pine-Woods." The vast correspondence present in the archives of the period documents virtually every event of consequence to its authors, from the experiences of Pound, Stein, and H.D. in Britain and Europe during two world wars to the explosive concerts in New York and Paris of George Antheil's Ballet mécanique scored for piano, percussion, and airplane engines. Trends in publishing and editorial battles, the dwindling exercise of patronage, the strains of writers who toiled as pediatricians, librarians, or insurance executives, the search for physical therapy in Santa Fe or mental therapy in Vienna, the Jazz Age--all surround the creation of modernist literature and suggest the milieus to be explored in conjunction with it. The correspondence files of Hound & Horn (1927-34), founded by Lincoln Kirstein and named for a line from Pound's "The White Stag," contain letters of other modernists, many of whose papers are not in the library but some of whom also wrote for The Dial such as T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, and Kenneth Burke. The files of more recent periodicals situate the modernist authors among their younger colleagues. The American Review, Blues, Chimera, Fantasy, Furioso, Tiger's Eye and the papers of its editor, Ruth Stephan, Twice A Year and the papers of its editor, Dorothy Norman, and View, extend the history of modernist publishing through the 1940s.
 Comments:Ellen R.
Cordes, ellen.cordes@yale.edu |