Odd . . . It seems a tad weird John Hollander doesn't mention Harriet Monroe's importance nor influence during the art's Modernist heydey; wonder why? Did Poetry reject the guy?
Monroe founded and edited the magazine in 1912; and, IIRC, she had already hit her fifties when she did so; but, her support of (and / or correspondence with) Pound, HD, Eliot, WCW, Sandburg, Frost, Stevens, et.al., proved crucial to the survival of some of them, particularly since, BION, the most "famous" poet of the twenties, Edna St. Vincent Millay, sat on the Guggenheim jury and rejected the Fellowship application of, among other "new-fangleds," Cummings (of all poets, a fact still boggling my mind; but, curiously, one providing yours truly with strength and sustenance when I see writers such as the far more talented Daphne Marlatt being overlooked in favour of lesser novelists and poets who seem to oinkishly hog those big-bucko prizes while wallowing in the limelight far too often to believe).
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts stupidly; that's politics for you (and me, too, unfortunately). Funny, innit?
Er, no, actually, it isn't; it is to howl in horror, especially when you discover one of our leading "lady" novelists pays far more attention to her stock portfolios and real-estate investments these days than she ever paid to her vomiticious spew of highly lauded (except by a few stupid critics like you know who) works of sublimely incandescent luminosity to the sNzth degree. Oracular, eh?
Odd . . . It seems a tad weird John Hollander doesn't mention Harriet Monroe's importance nor influence during the art's Modernist heydey; wonder why? Did Poetry reject the guy?
ReplyDeleteMonroe founded and edited the magazine in 1912; and, IIRC, she had already hit her fifties when she did so; but, her support of (and / or correspondence with) Pound, HD, Eliot, WCW, Sandburg, Frost, Stevens, et.al., proved crucial to the survival of some of them, particularly since, BION, the most "famous" poet of the twenties, Edna St. Vincent Millay, sat on the Guggenheim jury and rejected the Fellowship application of, among other "new-fangleds," Cummings (of all poets, a fact still boggling my mind; but, curiously, one providing yours truly with strength and sustenance when I see writers such as the far more talented Daphne Marlatt being overlooked in favour of lesser novelists and poets who seem to oinkishly hog those big-bucko prizes while wallowing in the limelight far too often to believe).
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts stupidly; that's politics for you (and me, too, unfortunately). Funny, innit?
Er, no, actually, it isn't; it is to howl in horror, especially when you discover one of our leading "lady" novelists pays far more attention to her stock portfolios and real-estate investments these days than she ever paid to her vomiticious spew of highly lauded (except by a few stupid critics like you know who) works of sublimely incandescent luminosity to the sNzth degree. Oracular, eh?
(That'll be the pay-back day.)