Late Modernism in Manhattan: Mary Barnard and May Swenson

Abstract

This article maps the poetry of Mary Barnard (1909–2001) and May Swenson (1913–89) in relation to late modernist practice in mid-century New York. Exploring their work with image and rhythm, and their respective engagements with the legacies of Imagism and Objectivism, the article finds that Barnard and Swenson innovated poetry and poetics which took account of the example of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, while extending their experimentation. If, in the 1940s, some of Barnard's and Swenson's contemporaries felt modernism's rails terminate, this article gives voice to two ‘new’ New York women poets who were quietly yet surely extending the line in exciting, experimental directions while resident in Manhattan. It concludes with a reconsideration of their work and significance in the light of recent developments in modernist studies.

Keywords:

• American poetry
• Mary Barnard
• Imagism
• late modernism
• modernism
• New York
• Objectivism
• May Swenson

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹According to Barnard, the issue ‘foundered with twelve of my poems onboard … I could only console myself with the thought that I went down in very good company: Cummings, W. C. Williams, Marianne Moore, Auden, Tate … a minor shipwreck probably meant nothing to them, but to me it was a bitter disappointment’ (Barnard 1984: 69).

²Deutsch is described on the New Directions website as a ‘native New Yorker who began publishing poetry while a student at Barnard College. She soon became involved with the Imagist movement, and translated and anthologized German and Russian poetry’. See http://ndbooks.com/author/babette-deutsch (viewed 15 June 2015).

³Correspondence between Deutsch and William Carlos Williams signals his special gratitude to her in this respect. See, for example, the letter from Williams to Deutsch of 1943 (no specific date) in Thirlwall (ed.) (1957: 209).

⁴Provisionally entitled The ‘new’ New York Poets: Late Modernism in Manhattan, the book aims to examine the critical connections between Mary Barnard, Reuel Denney, Babette Deutsch, May Swenson, T. C. Wilson and others both in relation to each other and in light of the influences of Pound, Moore and Williams.

⁵Jarrell does not use this phrase exactly, but draws on an equivalent metaphor of the railroad as an expression of literary movements. Of modernism, he wrote in 1942: ‘It is the end of the line. Poets can go back and repeat the ride; they can settle in attractive, atavistic colonies along the railroad’ (Jarrell 1981: 81).

⁶Recent reassessments of both poets can be found in Barnsley (2013) and Crumbley and Gantt (eds) (2006).

⁷See Barnard (1940) and New Directions in Prose and Poetry, vols 11 and 12, which featured 11 of Swenson's poems between them, according to Geffen (2006: 227).

⁸Postcard from Pound to Barnard, 22 January 1934 (Paige 1971: 254).

⁹Barnard's correspondence with Pound was sizeable and provides a valuable exposition of Pound's attitude to poetry and poetics, especially in the 1930s and especially in relation to the possibilities of musical rhythm in English-language poetry. Many of these letters are now in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in both the Barnard and Pound collections; they are widely discussed in Barnsley (2013).

¹⁰This is discussed in detail in Chapter 4 of Barnsley (2013).

¹¹Scansion marks are Barnard's, which she typically marks beneath the verse. She appears, here, to be scanning with reference to her concept of the weighted syllable.

¹²My scansion marks appear above the verse, as per prosodic convention.

¹³In the second measure, the second two syllables in the phrase ‘nor rain casts’ are weighted syllables, weighted in this instance by a long vowel and a consonantal cluster.

¹⁴Pound's essay ‘A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste’ immediately followed Flint's essay (Pound 1913: 200–6).

¹⁵The quotation is from William Carlos Williams’ prologue to Kora in Hell (1918) republished in Imaginations (1970).

¹⁶‘Colors Without Objects’ was first published in Half Sun Half Sleep: New Poems; it is excerpted here as it appears in Swenson (1978).

¹⁷‘The Engagement’ was first published in A Cage of Spines (1958); it is excerpted here as it appears in Swenson (1978).

¹⁸‘An Opening’ was first published in Another Animal: Poems (1954); it is excerpted here as it appears in Swenson (1978).

¹⁹For the comparison with Dickinson, I am indebted to discussions with Marie Gordon, audience members at the Contemporary Innovative Poetry Seminar Series 2014–15 at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and also those at the 2015 Modern Language Association Annual Convention.

²⁰May Swenson's blurb is available on the New Directions website at http://ndbooks.com/book/by-the-waters-of-manhattan1 (viewed 15 June 2015).

²¹See also Swenson's ‘The DNA Molecule’, which compares the double-helix structure of DNA to the visual structure of Duchamp's famous painting (Swenson 1978: 92). She had a long-standing interest in the visual arts and Duchamp especially, playing him at chess at the MacDowell artists’ colony in the 1950s, as Cynthia Hogue reports (Hogue 2006: 134n20). Hogue, in her footnote, cites the source of this story as Knudson and Bigelow (1996: 42–5, 62).

²²Silverberg is citing paragraph 66 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1963).

²³This notion of ‘backwards and forwards’ movement along a modernist aesthetic line is one that concerns Miller (1999), a study that in part inspires this one. Miller's study examines those situated on the threshold of modernism in its early phase, at the ‘vanishing point’ of works that have gone before them, saying of its chosen authors Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis and Mina Loy that their work is characterized by ‘its linkage forward into postmodernism and backward into modernism’ (Miller 1999: 7).