The Little Art Colony and US Modernism

U.S. Modernism at Continent’s End: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos historicizes and theorizes the significance of the early twentieth-century little arts colony as a uniquely modern social formation within a global network of modernist activity and production. Emphasizing communities rather than single artists, and modernist activity instead of products, this study considers modernism as social, aesthetic, and political processes that developed differentially in response to local and global pressures. In addition to offering a historical overview of the emergence of three critical sites of modernist activity—the little art colonies of Carmel, Provincetown, and Taos—this study offers new critical readings of major authors associated with those places: Robinson Jeffers, Eugene O’Neill, and D. H. Lawrence. Continent’s End tracks the radical thought and aesthetic innovation that emerged from these villages and reveals a surprisingly dynamic circulation of persons, objects, and ideas between the country and the city and back again, producing modernisms that were cosmopolitan in character yet also site-specific.

Robinson Jeffers, the Art Worker and the ‘Carmel Idea’

Poet Robinson Jeffers’ conflicted relationship with Carmel’s tourist economy and his own role, as its widely-recognized poet laureate, within it provides the focus of the second chapter in this section. Concentrating on the early, notorious narrative, Tamar (1924), this chapter extends a discussion of modernist primitivism in Carmel to show how Jeffers reformulates what might otherwise be understood as an exotic and entertaining spectacle of local colour as a scathing political commentary that is aimed both locally and globally. Tamar, a terrifying poem that centres on a dissolute young man who fantasizes about going off to war as a pilot in order to escape problems at home, indicates how the experience of international war profoundly affects the lives of a pastoral farming community on the West Coast. As Jeffers shows, being far from the national capitols of government and culture neither isolates nor insulates the family from modern violence. Further, the poem presents the tragedy of the World War as divine retribution for the long and violent history of Western colonialism and imperialism, material and spiritual traces of which have collected on Carmel’s gorgeous beachfront property.

Reception Theory, New Humanism, and T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot has been a major, if challenging, figure for students of reception and the Classical Tradition, and is implicated in an important debate on historicist versus aestheticist models of reception study. This article challenges assumptions about his position on, and practice of, reception. The politics implicit in theorists’ references to Eliot is teased out, and the position he took in response to inter-war New Humanism is shown to be predominantly historicist. An analysis of The Family Reunion (1939) then suggests that the Modernist-poetic approach he therefore took to the Oresteia broke so decisively with existing models of reception as to have called the fact of reception into question. The play is also shown to build on H.D.’s experiments in translation and to respond to Aeschylean receptions by Robinson Jeffers and Eugene O’Neill. It is further suggested that it anticipates several aspects of recent Reception Theory.

The Origins of the Arabic Prose Poem

This chapter considers the origins of Arabic prose poem which, as understood by the Beiruti modernists, seemed to arise from an act of auscultation, or attention to interior rhythms. But how do these rhythms synchronize with the dynamism of modernity? How does the private music of the prose poem accord with what Adonis calls “the rhythm of our new life, a rhythm that renews itself in every instant”? Does the qasidat al-nathr originate abroad, or does it well up from the self? Although the Shi'r poets often translated foreign authors such as Robinson Jeffers and Saint-John Perse as though they belonged to a hoary native tradition, the Arab modernists' most common way of harmonizing these sources is to suppose a subject, namely “man,” who serves as a figure of mediation, translating from one side of this caesura to the other.

Jeffers, (John) Robinson (1887–1962)

Renowned as the ‘poet of Carmel-Sur’, Robinson Jeffers held a place of prominence in American literature from the mid-1920s through to the 1930s. He lived in seclusion with his family at Tor House, which he built from sea-worn granite on a promontory in Carmel, California. In Carmel he developed his signature style of graphically tragic narrative poems and verse dramas, typically set in the surrounding landscape and accompanied by meditative lyric poems exploring related themes. Jeffers eschewed high modernism’s post-symbolist aesthetics for what he saw as its withdrawal from reality, crafting instead a free verse style that employed long, rhythmically stressed lines and a solemn tone. His prosody and themes are coloured by his non-anthropocentric philosophy, which he named inhumanism. Jeffers’ critical acclaim turned to disfavour during the Depression and the Second World War; his popularity fluctuated, and finally dwindled. Critical interest in Jeffers’ works was renewed in the 1970s and 1980s, and readership has since increased, particularly due to the timeliness of his acute environmental aesthetics.