Young, Blithe, and Whimsical

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Timberman Newcomb
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Conceptual Model ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Contemporary American Poetry ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
The Masses

This chapter challenges the conceptual model dominating histories of modern American poetry from the 1940s, in which political and aesthetic radicalism are seen as mutually exclusive responses to twentieth-century modernity, by analyzing the avant-gardism of The Masses. It considers how The Masses, together with several other little magazines, enriched the New Verse movement by joining and competing with Poetry: A Magazine of Verse as vibrant venues of contemporary American poetry. It explains how The Masses, by putting ideology above artistry, placed itself beyond the pale of true modernism. It argues that the verse published in The Masses was more than just belated sentimentalizing or Marxist sermonizing with no significant role in the emergence of modern poetry. On the contrary, the magazine had a substantial institutional and aesthetic impact upon the New Poetry. The chapter also contends that The Masses's eclectic and iconoclastic poetics of modernity was strongly aligned with the experimental spirit later valorized by historians as modernist.

American Poetry on the Brink, 1905–12

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Timberman Newcomb
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
The Status ◽  
Precipitous Decline ◽  
The Masses

This chapter examines the crisis in American poetry during the period 1905–1912. Between 1900 and 1905, poetry in the United States was perceived to be in precipitous decline, and many questioned its very survival. No one assumed sustained responsibility for the publicizing and reviewing of new books of verse, the identification of emerging poets and trends, or the preservation of periodical verses past their immediate moment of publication. Aspiring poets felt isolated and useless, actively discouraged from writing for anyone except their own closeted muses. This chapter first provides an overview of the status of American poetry in the years before 1912 before discussing how its fortunes changed after October 1912, a period which saw the explosion of creative and institutional activity in a wide variety of venues such as the so-called “little magazines.” Examples of these little magazines are Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The Masses, Others, and Seven Arts.

How Did Poetry Survive?

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Timberman Newcomb
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Literary History ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
World War ◽  
Novel Technique ◽  
Little Magazines ◽  
The Masses

This book traces the emergence of modern American poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century. With a particular focus on four “little magazines”—Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The Masses, Others, and Seven Arts—the book shows how each advanced ambitious agendas combining urban subjects, stylistic experimentation, and progressive social ideals. All four were profoundly affected by World War I, and the poetry on their pages responded to the war and its causes with clarity and strength. While subsequent literary history has favored the poets whose work made them distinct—individuals singled out usually on the basis of a novel technique—the book provides a denser, richer view of the history that hundreds of poets made.

Modernism, Empiricism, and Rationalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Dimensional Spectrum ◽  
Culture History ◽  
The World ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Rule Out

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

A Culture in Crisis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Fischer-Lichte
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Ideal ◽  
The Masses ◽  
Of Greece ◽  
New Devices

Chapter 4 investigates the role of the new image of Greece in the first decades of the twentieth century. ‘A Culture in Crisis: Max Reinhardt’s Productions of Greek Tragedies (1903–1919)’ addresses two problems: first, the new body ideal and its liberation from the restraints imposed on it until then, and, second, the division within society of those who made a cult of their individuality and the rapidly growing masses of the proletariat. While in Reinhardt’s Electra (1903) Gertrud Eysoldt displayed her body as that of a maenad or a hysteric, a number of new devices were developed in Oedipus the King (1910) and the Oresteia (1911), both performed in a circus, which temporarily transformed the masses of actors and spectators into a—theatrical—community. The chapter also discusses Leopold Jessner’s production of Oedipus (1929) as a quest for a ‘philosophical theatre’ (Brecht).

Orphans of the Empire: Lhasa’s Chinese Community from the Qing Era to the Early Twentieth Century

Modern China ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 009770042096992
Author(s):  
Huasha Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Influence ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Chinese Population ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
Academic Assessment ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Traits ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

This article analyzes the transformation of Lhasa’s Chinese community from the embodiment of an expansionist power in the early eighteenth century to the orphan of a fallen regime after the Qing Empire’s demise in 1911. Throughout the imperial era, this remote Chinese enclave represented Qing authority in Tibet and remained under the metropole’s strong political and social influence. Its members intermarried with the locals and adopted many Tibetan cultural traits. During the years surrounding the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, this community played a significant role in a series of interconnected political and ethnic confrontations that gave birth to the two antagonistic national bodies of Tibet and China. The community’s history and experiences challenge not only the academic assessment that Tibet’s Chinese population had fully assimilated into Tibetan society by the twentieth century but also the widespread image of pre-1951 Lhasa as a harmonious town of peaceful ethnic coexistence.

School Knowledge for the Masses: World Models and National Primary Curricular Categories in the Twentieth Century.

1993 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 529
Author(s):  
Kenneth Teitelbaum ◽  
John W. Meyer ◽  
David H. Kamens ◽  
Aaron Benavot
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
School Knowledge ◽  
The Masses

Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry

1988 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 365
Author(s):  
Margaret Dickie ◽  
Charles Altieri ◽  
R. W. (Herbie) Butterfield
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Contemporary American Poetry

scholarly journals Institutions and Interest Groups: Meat Provision in Mexico City, c. 1850–1967

Mundo Agrario ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (46) ◽  
pp. e130
Author(s):  
Maria-Aparecida Lopes ◽  
Reynaldo De los Reyes Patiño
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Supply System ◽  
Working Poor ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
The Masses

This paper examines Mexico City’s meat supply system from the 1850s to 1967. During this period, whereas some urban centers in the Americas replaced traditional provisioning methods – abattoir system – with meatpacking companies, Mexico City continued to rely on the municipal monopoly to provide meat for the masses. This study focuses on the role that ranchers, cattle purveyors (introductores), and slaughterhouse (rastro) workers, alongside city officials, played in this process. It shows how these actors evolved accommodating to any authority in power, regardless of ideology. As interest groups, introductores, workers, and ranchers not only delivered a service to city dwellers but with varying degrees of influence, they also provided essential political support to governments. For their part, city officials protected these associations as a means of managing supplies and in the name of public order. Such a mutually beneficial relationship allowed both (interest groups and the municipality) to resist meatpacking conglomerates well into the twentieth century. The work underscores that although at occasions these arrangements facilitated meat provision, in others, they hindered the extension of animal proteins to the working poor – one of the main goals of post-revolutionary Mexico.

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