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Collecting
as Modernist
Practice
Hopkins Studies in Modernism
Douglas Mao, Series Editor
Collecting
as Modernist
Practice

Jeremy Braddock

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Baltimore
© 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved. Published 2012
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Braddock, Jeremy.
Collecting as modernist practice / Jeremy Braddock.
p. cm. — (Hopkins studies in modernism)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-0364-9 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4214-0364-1 (hardcover : acid-free paper)
1. Modernism (Literature) 2. Collectors and collecting.
3. Anthologies—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN56.M54B746 2012
069'.409—dc23 2011019906

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more
information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or specialsales
@press.jhu.edu.

The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly

book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at
least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible.
For Rayna
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Collections Mediation Modernism 1

1 After Imagisme 29
The Lyric Year and the Crisis in Cultural Valuation 29
The Anthology as Weapon 39
The Others Formation 50
Reprisal Anthologies 64

2 The Domestication of Modernism: The Phillips

Memorial Gallery in the 1920s 71
Pictorial Publicity 71
Subconscious Stimulation, a Professional Public
Sphere 77
Problems in Collecting Pictures 87
Akhenaten, Patron of Modernism 93

3 The Barnes Foundation, Institution of the New

Psychologies 106
Against Dilettantism 106
A System for the New Spirit 111
Collection and Institution 125
The Art of Memory in the Age of the
Unconscious 137
viii Contents

4 The New Negro in the Field of Collections 156

Sage Homme Noir 156
Precursor Anthologies 159
Coterie, Movement, Race 173
The Heritage of The New Negro 185
Downstairs from the Harlem Museum 194

5 Modernism’s Archives: Afterlives of the Modernist

Collection 209
Two Termini 209
Two Consecrations 212
Two Archives 214

Notes 229
Bibliography 279
Index 301
 Acknowledgments

The earliest thinking for this project began with the inspiration of two re-
markable teachers, Phil Harper and Tim Morton. The work took shape under
the brilliant guidance of Jean-Michel Rabaté, who first listened to my incho-
ate effusions about the Barnes Foundation and The New Negro (responding
with “collecting!”) and then spent many hours in conversation with me as
the project evolved. I am equally indebted to Susan Stewart, who has been
an assiduous respondent and inspiring mentor from almost the beginning; it
is impossible to think of a better reader for these pages. Jim English encour-
aged me to pursue questions of institutionality more thoroughly, advice that
proved to be decisive as I revised and rewrote the manuscript. Michael Awk-
ward, too, was a smart, perceptive reader. Many other teachers, colleagues,
and friends in Philadelphia contributed to the intellectual life of this book:
Bob Perelman, Margreta de Grazia, Michèle Richman, Vicki Mahaffey, Craig
Saper, Ilan Sandler, Ben Austen, Kathy Lou Schultz, Tyler Smith, Gabriela
Zoller, Hester Blum, and Martha Schoolman.
My research was greatly aided by many archivists and librarians. I am
happy to acknowledge the expertise of John Pollack and Dan Traister of
the Rare Books and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania,
Nancy Kuhl at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, James May-
nard of the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo, Karen Schneider
of the Phillips Collection, Katy Rawdon and Deborah Lenert of the Barnes
Foundation, and Joellen El Bashir of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Cen-
ter at Howard University. In a similar spirit I thank Bruce Kellner, who pro-
vided guidance concerning the collection of Carl Van Vechten, and Suzanne
Churchill, who helpfully answered questions about Alfred Kreymborg and
Others.
x Acknowledgments

Since leaving Philadelphia, I have benefited from the challenging read-

ings of new colleagues. I thank Evan Kindley, Crystal Bartolovich, Bill Solo-
mon, Marlon Ross, Chris Raczkowski, Nick Jenkins, and Sean Shesgreen for
their insights. I am grateful for conversations with Brent Edwards, Wanda
Corn, Bill Maxwell, Janet Lyon, Pamela Smart, Hal Foster, Max Pensky, Jim
Longenbach, Dan Blanton, and Guy Ortolano, among many others. Teach-
ing for a year at Haverford College, I was lucky to have the collegial en-
gagement of Gus Stadler, Tina Zwarg, Kim Benston, and Raji Mohan. And I
am very thankful, too, for the support and advice of colleagues during my
two years at Princeton, especially Daphne Brooks, Claudia Johnson, Valerie
Smith, Diana Fuss, Ben Baer, Zahid Chaudhary, Meredith Martin, Oliver Ar-
nold, and Jennifer Greeson.
Before arriving at Haverford, I received a postdoctoral fellowship from
the Cornell University Society for the Humanities. Grants from the English
department and from the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University
later provided important support during the project’s final stages, and the
University’s Hull Memorial Publication Fund provided a subvention of the
book’s production costs.
To support the revision and expansion of this book, I received a year’s
fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center. Cornell University gave me
additional support during my year of leave. My wonderful year at Stanford
helped me to understand much more thoroughly what I had been working
on all along, and I am enormously grateful to the staff of the center and to
the other fellows, especially Ben Lazier, Jim Clifford, Paul Kiparsky, Liisa
Malkki, Chris Rovee, and Gerry Bruns. During that year, I was fortunate also
to participate in the Stanford Workshop in Poetics, organized by Roland
Greene and Harris Feinsod. I thank them and the other participants of the
seminar.
At Stanford, Eric Messinger and Aaron Quiggle were valued research as-
sistants. And at Cornell, Corinna Lee and Bernadette Guthrie helped me pre-
pare the manuscript for publication.
I have been very grateful for the support of my colleagues at Cornell. In
particular, I wish to thank Dagmawi Woubshet, Sabine Haenni, Tim Mur-
ray, Molly Hite, Dan Schwartz, Roger Gilbert, Andy Galloway, Nick Salvato,
Mary Pat Brady, Eric Cheyfitz, Medina Lasansky, Judith Peraino, Margo Craw-
ford, Shirley Samuels, Camille Robcis, Dan Magaziner, and Jenny Mann, all
of whom helpfully answered questions. Many of them also generously read
parts of the manuscript and provided suggestions for revision.
Acknowledgments xi

At the Johns Hopkins University Press, Matt McAdam has worked tire-
lessly on behalf of this book: I give him my sincere thanks. I wish also to
thank Jesse Matz, John Xiros Cooper, and one anonymous reader of the
manuscript; each of them made suggestions that have greatly improved
this book.
Series editor Douglas Mao has been far more than that title conveys.
He has been a brilliant reader of this project for many years, and he has my
unending gratitude.
Damien Keane and Jon Eburne have long been invaluable intellectual
companions; it is easy for me to see their influence throughout this book,
and I look forward to continuing to repay my debts to them. Kevin Bell, Jessie
Labov, Gabrielle Civil, and Jim Mutton have provided brilliant friendship for
a still longer time. More recently, David Suisman has been a terrific reader,
interlocutor, and friend. And I thank Joe Wessling, Jeff Goldman, Tim Albro,
Matt Kelley, David Quintiliani, Dave Solomon, and the Big Mess Orchestra,
friends whose work, on the lower frequencies, speaks for me.
Special thanks go to my brother, Nathaniel, and my parents, Robert and
Sarah. It makes me happy to think that my book has in some way mar-
ried my father’s prescient academic study of Tudor bureaucracy with my
mother’s unsurpassed mind for provenance and patrimony.
This book was written twice, its first pages written just after I met Rayna
Kalas, and written again in the company of our brilliant and beautiful daugh-
ter, Astrid. To Astrid I give my undying love and thanks; I am happy to be
able finally to answer, yes, this book is in the library. And to Rayna, who has
brought such intelligence and passion to these pages and to their writer, I
dedicate this book with my love.

The author has made every effort to identify owners of copyrighted mate-
rial. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

Permission to quote from the William Carlos Williams Papers has been
granted by The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University
at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
The letters of Amy Lowell are quoted by permission of the Trustees under
the Will of Amy Lowell.
Permission to quote from the correspondence of Duncan Phillips and from
The Phillips Collection Oral History Program has been granted by The
Phillips Collection Archives, Washington, DC.
xii Acknowledgments

The Barnes Foundation has granted permission to quote from the corre-
spondence of, and unpublished material written by, Albert C. Barnes.
Permission has been granted to quote from materials held in the archives of
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Permission to quote from the papers of Alain L. Locke has been granted by
the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
Permission to quote Countee Cullen’s poem “Heritage” has been granted.
Copyrights held by Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, admin-
istered by Thompson and Thompson, Brooklyn, New York.
Permission to quote Helene Johnson’s poem “Bottled” has been granted by
the Helene Johnson and Dorothy West Foundation for Artists in Need.
The correspondence of Carl Van Vechten is printed by permission of the
Carl Van Vechten Trust.
The correspondence of Anne Spencer is quoted with the permission of the
Anne Spencer House and Historic Garden Museum.
Permission to quote the correspondence of Charles S. Johnson has been
granted by his son, Jeh V. Johnson.
Permission to quote the Charles D. Abbott correspondence has been
granted by Neil G. G. Abbott and by The Poetry Collection of the Uni-
versity Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
Previously unpublished correspondence of Ezra Pound, copyright © 2010
by Mary de Rachewiltz and Omar S. Pound, is reprinted by permission
of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Permission to quote the correspondence of Nancy Cunard has been granted
by her literary executor, Robert Bell.
Collecting
as Modernist
Practice
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction:
Collections Mediation Modernism

A study of the central role of the collection within modernism might simply
start by observing how many modernist artworks themselves resemble col-
lections. We could begin by pointing to the citations and quotations that
mark Ezra Pound’s Cantos and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and, following
Marjorie Perloff, connect these strategies to the collage aesthetics of futur-
ist painting, synthetic cubism, and Dada.1 Alternatively, we might follow
André Topia’s suggestion that another kind of collection, the archive, is the
principal referent for the writing of Eliot, Pound, James Joyce, and Gustave
Flaubert.2 The archetypes of the collage and the archive would each find a
correspondence in Walter Benjamin’s well-known claim that he wished to
compose a manuscript entirely out of quotations, or in the passages that
constitute his unfinished Arcades Project (a text whose resemblance to the
Cantos J. M. Coetzee has proposed).3 In a related vein, we could include the
works produced under the banner of Soviet factography in the 1920s.4
Looking to the United States, and invoking still another important form
of collecting, one could point to the early blues poetry of Langston Hughes,
in Fine Clothes to the Jew, or Sterling Brown, in Southern Road, to under-
score those poems’ more than accidental resemblance to the transcrip-
tions of folk songs that had been published in the collections of scholars
such as Natalie Curtis Burlin (under the aegis of the Hampton Institute) or
John Wesley Work (at Fisk University). This recognition may in turn remind
us of the pointedly blurry line between Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction and
her anthropological work as a collector of folklore, as well as the evocations
of a vanishing folk culture in the writing of William Butler Yeats and Jean
Toomer.5 Hurston’s anthropological training under Franz Boas could then
return us to Eliot and Pound, whose debts, respectively, to James George
Frazer and Leo Frobenius are well known. And we could finally note the
2 Collecting as Modernist Practice

thematic importance of collecting in novels of the period, from Ulysses,

whose opening pages feature the English character Haines who has come
to Dublin to collect Irish folk material, to Wallace Thurman’s roman à clef
Infants of the Spring, where variations on the word “collection” provide a
leitmotif of the novel’s assessment of New Negro institutions.6
As this heterogeneous list reveals, what might be broadly named a “col-
lecting aesthetic” can be identified as a paradigmatic form of modernist
art. And yet to isolate the collection as an available form for art obscures
the constitutive role of the collecting practices that the works invoke: ar-
chiving, ethnography, museum display, anthologization. It is significant
that nearly all of the works listed above were produced in the 1920s, not at
the historical origin of what would later be called modernism, but rather
at the high-water mark of “high modernist” productivity. The emergence
of a collecting aesthetic at this secondary moment signals a more general
concern with the art’s institutional representation and future authority:
just as Pound heralded The Waste Land as “the justification of the ‘move-
ment,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900,” Hughes would write, a few
years later, “we build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how.”7
Such questions had special currency in the United States, where the works
of modernism were received within a relatively fluid, or unformed, institu-
tional field. At the beginning of the 1920s, it was not simply the case that
no American museums were prepared to commit to the representation of
modernism; nearly all of them remained unbuilt. This was also true for the
American literary field, which would have no Poet Laureate until 1937, and
where a history of canon-defining anthologies was far shorter and thinner
than it was in Britain.8 To consider the institutional reception of the new
work of art was for this reason to consider the very nature of the institu-
tions themselves. It was in this situation that material collections of art
and literature were advanced as means not simply (or even primarily) of
institutional consecration but of cultural and social intervention.
In this book, I do not aim to reveal and interpret a range of canoni-
cal works according to their secret affinity as collections but rather argue
that if a collecting aesthetic describes a salient form of modernist art, it is
because it bears witness to a larger set of crises and possibilities that the
collection could both represent and address. Most critics have understood
collecting as a mode of subject formation, what Jean Baudrillard termed “a
discourse addressed to oneself.”9 An echo of this self-referential world of
private consumption can be found in Lawrence Rainey’s influential Institu-
Collections Mediation Modernism 3

tions of Modernism, which claims that “[m]odernism, poised at the cusp of

th[e] transformation of the public sphere, responded with a tactical retreat
into a divided world of patronage, collecting, speculation, and investment,
a retreat that entailed the construction of an institutional counterspace,
securing a momentary respite from a public realm increasingly degraded,
even as it entailed a fatal compromise with precisely that degradation.”10
This powerful thesis, as we will see, accounts very well for certain key fig-
ures, such as the patron and collector John Quinn. More typically, however,
the collection was not a form of retreat, but instead a means of address-
ing the work of art to the public, modeling and creating the conditions of
modernism’s reception. Presuming in advance the social potential of the
new art, American collectors believed that the often radically innovative
work of modernism promised a broad transformation of institutional cul-
ture and even social practice at this inaugural moment of reception. Rather
than constructing a regressive “institutional counterspace,” the modernist
collection was figured as what I will call a provisional institution, a mode of
public engagement modeling future—and often more democratic (although
the meaning of this word would be contentious)—relationships between
audience and artwork.
The two most prominent forms of modernist collecting were the pri-
vately assembled, but publicly exhibited, art collection and the interven-
tionist literary anthology. Privileging the cultural authority of painting and
poetry, these collective forms nevertheless stood in contrast to the grandly
narrativizing institutions of the nineteenth century such as the civic mu-
seum or the historical anthology. Modernist collections aimed instead to
determine the constituents of the movement, group, or field, in gestures
that were by turns restrictive (because of the constitutive selectivity and
exclusions of a given collection) and synthetic and enabling (where the col-
lection’s disparate pieces represent a new, hitherto unimagined form of so-
ciability and set of affiliations). The aesthetic dimensions of the modernist
collection also indicated a belief in the virtue of maintaining a connection
to the idiosyncratic subjectivity of the collector who had assembled them.
With this in mind, it is possible to see a series of instructive homologies
between the art collection and anthology forms: the heterogeneity of ob-
jects in Albert Barnes’s galleries and Alain Locke’s New Negro anthology, the
emphasis on the avant-garde formation that marks the practices of Kath-
erine Dreier’s Société Anonyme collective and Alfred Kreymborg’s Others
anthologies, the popularizing (and also patrician) affinities of the literary
4 Collecting as Modernist Practice

impresario Amy Lowell and the art collector Duncan Phillips. Such collec-
tions, moreover, are related not only by formal resemblance but by the ac-
tual transactions among the collectors, artists, and authors.
The homologies are revealing, but collectors of art and of literature were
also keenly aware of the limitations, as well as the possibilities, of their
specific media. Within the general field of collections, the genres of the
anthology and the art collection were complementary, but also unequal and
competitive, modes of aesthetic and institutional expression. An anthology
could circulate among and recruit disparate audiences in a way that was
not possible for a gallery exhibition (even the few that toured), whereas
an art collection could index economic to cultural value in a way that was
more difficult for the commercial form of the anthology. Modernist anthol-
ogy prefaces repeatedly made anxious reference to the acknowledged cul-
tural prestige of modernist painting; collectors like Barnes and Phillips were
readers of modernist anthologies, and their own promotional texts at times
emulated that collective form.11 As I will finally argue, the failure of the
anthology form to secure a patrimony for literary modernism (one compa-
rable to the works that would be enshrined at the Museum of Modern Art)
eventually led to the ascendancy of another form of institutional collecting:
the university archive.
Although canons have been more recently challenged, revised, and ex-
panded, the midcentury institutionalization of the works of modernist art
and literature in, respectively, the museum and the university continues to
obscure the practices that once associated them much more closely. Taken
together, the collective forms of the anthology and the art collection (and,
eventually, the archive) define a specific field of cultural activity, doing so
at the very moment that the collection itself began to become recognized
as a paradigmatic form of aesthetic modernism. At a time when the cul-
tural value of modernist art was acknowledged but the mode of its insti-
tutionalization, its canon, and its relationship to society were undecided,
the contest for modernism’s social definition took place within this field of
collections.
To emphasize the centrality of the collection as both form and practice is
to engage two distinct senses of the term mediation. In the sense that corre-
sponds more directly to practice, collections of art and literature are mate-
rial forms that mediate between work and audience. This more sociological
sense of the term has been an implicit touchstone of all of the critical work
that has been advanced under the rubric of “material modernisms” and
Collections Mediation Modernism 5

theorized most influentially in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, which repeat-

edly emphasizes how “the entire structure of the [cultural] field interposes
itself between the producers and their work.”12 Bourdieu’s notion of the
structured field involves an entire system of practices, positions, and insti-
tutions, of which collecting would only be one element. In this sociological
register, the individual work of modernism is mediated by the collection’s
often polemical apparatus (such as prefaces or self-promotional criticism)
and acquires further meaning and context in relationship to the other works
in the collection (by organization, arrangement, and display). In addition, the
economic and cultural authority of the collector may exert a determining
influence not only on reception but on production itself, as in, for instance,
Phillips’s critical interactions with artists whom he supported financially,
or in the way figures like Pound and Locke imposed changes on poems
before admitting them into their anthologies. In such cases the practice
of mediation can become a determinant of form, as Bourdieu recognizes:
“Few works do not bear within them the imprint of the system of positions
in relation to which their originality is defined.”13 The individual collector,
expressing sensibilities both aesthetic and institutional, holds a particular
form of agency within this system of positions.
This more practical conception of mediation corresponds most nearly to
what Raymond Williams identifies as the term’s typically “negative” articula-
tion, where “certain social agencies [in this case collectors and collections]
are seen as deliberately interposed between reality and social conscious-
ness [here, the work of art and the public], to prevent an understanding
of reality.” In this view, the collection’s apparatus hinders and obscures the
“truth” of the individual work. But Williams also identifies another sense
of mediation, “related, if controversially,” to the constitutive agency of aes-
thetic form itself, and immanent to the work of art. What Williams intends
by this (and as it was taken up by other critics, notably Fredric Jameson) is
to provide a complex, rather than reductive, account of the way in which
the objects of culture mediate the social. Unlike the obstructive activity of
a collector (among other cultural intermediaries), this form of mediation is
“positive and in a sense autonomous”; it is “a direct and necessary activity
between different kinds of activity and consciousness.” On one hand, the
positive sense of mediation is specifically opposed to a pure or “empty”
formalism, since it asserts the mutually constitutive processes of various
levels of society (economic, political, cultural) and insists upon the material
and social character of media and form. But equally importantly, it refuses
6 Collecting as Modernist Practice

to insist upon an identity of expression among the levels of society: the

work of art could be socially determined without being required to reflect
social conditions directly: “All ‘objects,’ and in this context notably works
of art, are mediated by specific social relations but cannot be reduced to an
abstraction of that relationship.”14
These critical traditions of mediation—sociological and formal—seem
relatively independent. But their independence will be more difficult to
sustain if we insist that a material collection is itself an aesthetic object,
even, more pointedly, an authored work. In this view, the collection pos-
sesses the properties of an individual work even as it interposes between
the artists’ works and audience. Shaped by sensibilities that are aesthetic
and epistemological, the anthology and the art collection exist not simply
for the sake of their individual works; they are also systems with mean-
ing in themselves.15 As a form, the collection expresses something inherent
within modernity—as, for instance, the “loss” of a grand narrative instigates
a search for new social, aesthetic, or political affiliations in the present,
or a wish to reinvigorate or rewrite historical traditions. It assimilates the
“fragments” shored against Eliot’s “ruins,” or is a means of “creating a usable
past,” in the words of Van Wyck Brooks’s 1918 essay. What may be empha-
sized is that Williams’s second sense of mediation need not be restricted to
the aesthetic forms licensed by convention: a mediated representation of
the social totality may be found in a collection as well as in an object recog-
nized as an autonomous work.
At the same time, if the collection is understood as a powerful determi-
nant within a Bourdieuian “system of positions,” or within the structure of
the cultural field, we can begin not only to appreciate the collection as a
powerful model for the originality of modernist art but also to see the way
it could be fashioned as a provisional institution. As provisional institution,
the modernist collection was a means of intervening in and reforming cul-
tural practice, doing so on the basis of its form: the collection’s aesthetic
arrangement, as well as its inclusions and exclusions, was a representation of
ideological position. This is evident, among other places, in the way Ameri-
can modernist collections mediated the broader social problematic of race,
whether explicitly, as in the cases of Alain Locke and Albert Barnes, who
each insisted on the interrelationship of modernism and black culture, or
obliquely, as in the cases of the Spectra anthology and the collection of
Duncan Phillips, where race appears as what Jameson would call an “absent
cause.” To recognize the collection as both an immanent (or formal) and a
Collections Mediation Modernism 7

practical form of mediation is therefore also to recognize the collection’s

centrality both to the “autonomous” work of modernism and to further-
reaching questions of social practice.
The collectors themselves were deeply concerned about the degree to
which the social significance they perceived as inherent to modernist art
in its formal aspects could be made to correspond to transformations in
cultural and social practice. Commenting specifically on the modernist pe-
riod, Williams observed that “since the late nineteenth century, crises of
technique—which can be isolated as problems of the ‘medium’ or of the
‘form’—have been directly linked with a sense of crisis in the relationship
of art to society, or in the very purposes of art which had previously been
agreed or even taken for granted. A new technique has often been seen,
realistically, as a new relationship, or depending on a new relationship. Thus
what had been isolated as a medium . . . came to be seen, inevitably, as social
practice.”16 Implicit in Williams’s formulation is the special capability of the
work of modern art to register the transformation of society in advance
of its actual occurrence, something the poet and anthologist Pound also
intuited in naming great artists “the antennae of the race.”17 David Simpson
has pointed out, however, that the problem with this formulation is that it
appears to depend on a necessarily retrospective judgment of modern art,
since Williams “fails to make clear how we are to establish that [the social
contradictions immanent within the work of art] are in fact ‘pre-emergent,’
indications of a social formation about to take form, rather than simply
idiosyncratic or arbitrary.”18
Modernist collectors were motivated by what Williams identified as the
“sense” of a connection between radical aesthetic form and transformative
social practice (mediation in the immanent sense), but they were impelled
also by the fear that without the proper forms of practical mediation the
works in question might simply remain, in Simpson’s words, “idiosyncratic
or arbitrary.” The very tenuousness of this connection between the aes-
thetic and the social authorized the ambitious collecting projects of figures
like Dreier and Barnes (or, later, Nancy Cunard) who wished to establish
working-class, or interracial, audiences for modernism and its institutions.
It also, in a more conservative register, informed Phillips’s wish to banish
avant-gardists such as Léger from his collection out of concern about the
political implications of the artist’s collectivism and antihumanism, and it
prompted Alain Locke’s purging of radical racial politics from the pages
of The New Negro. In order to appreciate the way a range of modernist
8 Collecting as Modernist Practice

collections obtained the agency of provisional institutions—and without

uncritically lamenting the loss of modernism’s true social potential—it will
be helpful to examine two transitional events, one pertaining to art collect-
ing and the other to anthologies, that involved the transmission of Euro-
pean modernism to a new cultural situation in the United States. It is in the
wake of these events and the exchanges they elicited that the stakes of the
cultural struggle would become clearer.

In February 1927, the American Art Association buildings in New York

City hosted the auction of paintings and sculptures that had been owned
by the New York lawyer and patron and advocate of literary modernism
John Quinn. The auction of 819 pieces comprised five sessions held over
the course of four days and marked the final dispersal of one of the first
and greatest modern art collections in the United States, one that included
sculptures by Constantin Brâncuşi, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Raymond Du-
champ-Villon, and Jacob Epstein; canvases by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso,
Georges Braque, Henri Rousseau, André Derain, Georges Seurat, Gino
Severini, Wyndham Lewis, and Jules Pascin; and hundreds of African and
Asian objects.19 Several of these contemporary artists were represented in
considerable depth in Quinn’s collection, as suggested by the Paris dealer
Paul Rosenberg’s purchase, en bloc, of fifty-two Picassos in advance of the
auction.20 Notable among the many pioneering pieces Quinn had owned
were Matisse’s Blue Nude (1907) and the early version of Marcel Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase (1911), works now consecrated in the Baltimore
and Philadelphia Museums of Art, respectively, but which had been the
two most controversial pieces at the foundational International Exhibition
of Modern Art of 1913 (the “Armory Show”), of which Quinn had been a
major patron.21
Quinn had been dead for three years by the time of the 1927 auction. Al-
though his will stipulated that the collection be sold in order to support his
sister Julia Quinn Anderson, there was considerable debate among Quinn’s
friends and executors—and also within the American art world—about the
manner in which the collection should be dissolved.22 At issue was whether
the enormous collection (more than 2,500 pieces in all) should be sold at
one monumental auction or, for fear that such a massive event would flood
the modern art market and draw down prices, it should instead be dissolved
over the course of several years by private dealers. In the end, a compro-
mise was reached according to whose terms the collection was liquidated
Collections Mediation Modernism 9

between 1926 and 1927 in a variety of forums: there were “authorized pri-
vate sales” held for the benefit of collectors and dealers like Rosenberg, a
separate “memorial exhibition” and sale at the New York Art Center, an auc-
tion at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, and, finally, the 1927 American Art Asso-
ciation auction, which dispersed the remainder of the collection.23 Quinn’s
library and manuscript collection, which contained several artifacts that
would be crucial for the institutionalization of literary modernism (several
manuscripts by Joseph Conrad and a complete handwritten draft of Joyce’s
Ulysses), had already been sold at auction shortly before his death.24
The publicity that surrounded the final public auction places it among
the most sensational United States art events to have followed the Armory
Show of 1913. Yet to appreciate its importance, historically and sociologi-
cally, it is worth a brief glance at a seminal auction from the previous de-
cade, the sale of the Peau de l’Ours collection in Paris in 1914. That collec-
tion of 145 fauvist and cubist pieces, specializing in the early work of Picasso
and Matisse, had been assembled by a coterie of thirteen collectors led by
the businessman André Level. La Peau de l’Ours was an experiment in art
investment (the name, “the skin of the bear,” referred to a parable by Jean
de La Fontaine about speculation) whose telos had been the agreed-upon
sale of the entire collection after ten years of acquisitions. Making Modern-
ism, Michael FitzGerald’s excellent study of Picasso and the development of
the modern art market, opens with the authoritative account of the Peau de
l’Ours sale, an event whose enormous economic success—it earned 116,545
francs, more than quadrupling the initial investment—marked a transforma-
tion in the economy of modernist art. In FitzGerald’s words, critics sympa-
thetic to modernism “perceived the auction as a confirmation of the art’s
importance that their own aesthetic evaluations could not confer.”25 Its fi-
nancial success and the great publicity it generated demonstrated the aes-
thetic and financial convergence of the avant-garde with the public sphere
that had become visible by the start of the First World War. If, over the
course of a decade, modernist art in Paris had significantly appreciated in
value, both cultural and economic, private collectors like Level and his col-
leagues were key agents of that “appreciation.”
Despite its significant transformation in the wake of the war, an interna-
tional market for twentieth-century art was an acknowledged reality by the
time of Quinn’s death a decade later. Quinn himself had been instrumental
in providing that market with a transatlantic dimension when in 1913 he
had successfully lobbied against a United States government tariff on the
10 Collecting as Modernist Practice

importation of art less than twenty years old, an intervention that made
the Armory Show possible.26 The impressive performance of the market for
modern art, however, was not guaranteed, as the considerable negotiations
concerning the maximization of profit from the sale of Quinn’s collection
indicate. The problem of the market, moreover, concerned both Quinn’s
beneficiaries and the still-living artists whose work was represented. In-
deed, FitzGerald has speculated that Rosenberg (who was himself Picasso’s
dealer) may have purchased the block of Quinn’s Picassos in order to guard
against the possibility of his artist’s market value suffering as a result of
relatively wide market availability, and Duchamp later admitted that he had
performed a similar service at Brâncuşi’s request.27
Uncertainty persists today about the relative market achievement of the
Quinn sales. The Hôtel Drouot auction was the most unqualified success,
with Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy (1897, now at MoMA) selling for 520,000
francs or $102,900.28 Yet total sales and profits have been a matter of more
debate. In relation to Quinn’s expenditures, over the course of his life, of
about $500,000, Quinn’s biographer, B. L. Reid, claims that Quinn lost around
$100,000.29 It is more likely that the sales turned a profit; Aline Saarinen
has proposed $750,000 as an estimate; Judith Zilczer suggests they made
$600,000.30 What is certain, as well as telling about the status of the American
market for modernism, is that many of the more radically modernist pieces
in the February 1927 auction sold for less than Quinn had initially paid for
them. The New York Times noted the lower prices commanded by the “radi-
cals” represented at the auction,31 but this observation did not, in turn, lead
to a repudiation of Quinn’s tastes or of modernism tout court. The perceived
cultural value of the collection was not questioned in fine arts publications
such as the Dial, the Arts, or Art News, and even in the mainstream press such
challenges were uncommon.32 The instructions in Quinn’s will had, in fact,
already indicated that he expected his more radical pieces to obtain lower
prices when they were dispersed at auction among fellow private collectors
such as A. Conger Goodyear, Samuel Lustgarten, and E. Weyhe and through
off-market sales to other individual collectors, including Walter Arensberg
(who bought the Nude Descending a Staircase) and Katherine Dreier.33 He was
also aware that the major American museums were not yet ready to commit
to modernism, which ruled out the possibility of a major bequest the likes
of which are now common. Although he left perhaps his greatest Seurat to
the Louvre (The Circus, 1891, now at the Musée d’Orsay), the public recep-
tion of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Painting exhibition that he
Collections Mediation Modernism 11

had helped to stage at the Met in 1921 had not left him sanguine about a
large donation in the United States.34 Indeed, when Goodyear led the charge
for Buffalo’s Albright Gallery to make one of the few institutional purchases
from among Quinn’s modernist pieces (Picasso’s La Toilette, 1906), it had the
consequence of his not being reelected to the gallery’s board of directors
the following year.35
By 1927 the demonstrable interrelation of economic and aesthetic value,
which it had been the acknowledged accomplishment of the Peau de l’Ours
auction to reveal, had become a more complex proposition. That complex-
ity obtained in the United States in a particular way; no clear correspon-
dence could be drawn between the prices obtained at the Quinn auction
and the critical importance of individual works or artists. This was true in
part because of the desire to manage a market for modern art that was
still in the process of development, but also because the question of pub-
lic access to the works, in galleries or, eventually, in public museums, was
now becoming a matter of interest and concern. Whereas the economic
value of modern art was expected to prove itself in the long term, its value
as cultural capital was in an important sense more immediate, even if—or
especially because—public institutions were not yet alive to it, and it was
on the basis of this cultural capital that the more significant conversations
about Quinn’s art turned.
In these conversations, the crucial object of consideration was arguably
less the individual works Quinn had acquired than the collection itself as a
collection. One argument that had been made in favor of dispersing Quinn’s
entire collection in a single monumental auction, by critics including the
Independent’s Frederick James Gregg, was that it would operate, precisely,
as a monument to Quinn’s impressive achievement as a collector, while also
permitting a fleeting grasp of the breadth of the collection in a relatively
public situation.36 This argument was homologous with the dismay pri-
vately expressed by other figures, among them the dealer Joseph Brummer
and the collector Duncan Phillips, that the collection should be dissolved
at all rather than being preserved in the form of a modern art museum.37
Importantly, neither of these positions foregrounded the autonomy of the
individual artist in the way that Rosenberg’s and Duchamp’s market inter-
ventions had done, even if they were still concerned with the relative valua-
tion of individual artists. Nor did they, entirely, prioritize Quinn’s autonomy.
Whereas these reactions to the impending auction appeared ostensibly to
be homilies to Quinn’s capabilities of discernment, in an important way they
12 Collecting as Modernist Practice

extended beyond the subjective dimension of the collector’s taste. As the

public aspect of the debate necessarily implied a question of the public as
such, the cultural meaning of the subjectively assembled collection began
to be transformed from a representation of the individual collector’s excel-
lent taste to a body of works that possessed an internal logic, which in turn
suggested the parameters of a new field of art and a new set of institutional
protocols. Thus, what could be called in the most vulgarly materialist terms
the evidence of Quinn’s aesthetic consumption now found as its legacy a
larger question of aesthetic reception. What could be preserved by pre-
venting the collection’s dissolution was the fashioning of a representative
body of modernism, as well as an ideological justification of its inclusions
and exclusions, its method of organization, and its new orientation to the
public. In the moment of its translation from the realm of private property
and taste to the possibility of its social and public authorization, the private
collection began to become imagined as a particular kind of institution—a
provisional institution—representing and providing social meaning for the
cultural capital that modernism could now claim. At the same time, the
individual sensibility that marked the assembly of the personal collection
presented itself as a sign that could be directed against the hegemony of
official institutions such as the academy or the public museum.38
It would not require, by the 1920s, the intervention of Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti to reveal the sense of crisis that surrounded the civic museum
in the United States. Whereas Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” had in 1909
famously declared museums to be “cemeteries! [i]dentical, surely, in the
sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to each other,” by the time
of the Quinn auction, public discourse in the United States revolved around
a similar problematic and availed itself of a comparable rhetoric.39 As early
as the mid-1910s, for example, Lee Simonson would complain in two New
Republic articles about J. P. Morgan’s relentless accumulation of objects for
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in precisely this way:

This practice of unending accumulation, which displays everything and reveals

nothing, is the direct result of a policy of mere acquisition, seemingly the only
policy our museums are able to conceive. . . . Private collecting, which is private
hoarding, is a vagary. But public collections, which are only public hoarding, are
a social blunder.40

The few collectors who still insist on creating monuments to themselves in the
form of miscellanies of art objects will erect wings to their private mausoleums
Collections Mediation Modernism 13

in which to expose them. Having failed to humanize art museums, they may suc-
ceed in humanizing the cemeteries.41

Situating the museum as a potentially necrophilic institution, Simonson of

course stopped short of Marinetti’s call to “set fire to the library shelves!
Turn aside the canals and flood the museums!”42 Instead, he left open the
possibility for a new kind of ownership that might reform, rather than
purge, the libraries and museums, and which might find its form in a new
mode of collecting.
Such a conclusion would be more difficult to draw if it were not the
case that the modernist collectors who were still active in 1927 actively
devised public institutional identities for their collections—and, with one
very qualified exception, pointedly avoided the term museum in doing so.43
A concern not only to represent modernist art publicly but also to use that
occasion to restructure the relationship of the work of art to its audience
was operative in all the significant American collections of the 1920s after
Quinn: Duncan Phillips’s Memorial Gallery (founded 1918, opened 1921),
Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme (1920), Albert Barnes’s Barnes Foun-
dation (founded 1922, opened 1925), A. E. Gallatin’s Living Gallery (1927).
This is something that could not have been said for Quinn, who did little
to make his collection visible even within the walls of his own apartment.44
Although in the early 1910s Quinn had expressed interest in establishing a
gallery for contemporary art, he grew increasingly reluctant to lend works
for exhibition and specifically opposed any notion of educating the public.
“Peripatetic exhibitions cheapen art,” he wrote in 1924; “[a]rt, great art, the
great art of Matisse and Picasso is never for the mob, the herd, the great
public .”45 In this sense, Quinn’s practices affirm Rainey’s thesis that mod-
ernism responded to the “transformation of the public sphere . . . with a
tactical retreat into a divided world of patronage, collecting, speculation,
and investment.” Indeed, Quinn’s predisposition toward private ownership
had been publicly evident at the 1923 sale of his library and manuscript col-
lection, where the auction catalog featured a quotation from Edmond de
Goncourt’s will that declared, “these things of art which have been the joy
of my life . . . shall all be dispersed under the hammer of the Auctioneer,
so that the pleasure which the acquiring of each one of them has given me
shall be given again.”46
The emergence of a newly socialized dimension of private collecting
can be discerned in the writing of the formerly working-class figure Albert
14 Collecting as Modernist Practice

Barnes. In 1915, Barnes described the pleasure of buying art in terms that
recall Quinn: “when the rabies or pursuit of quality in painting, and its en-
joyment, gets into a man’s system[, a]nd when he has surrounded himself
with that quality, bought with his blood, he is a King.”47 Seven years later,
however, the newly public identity of Barnes’s collection, as well as his
hopes for a radically democratized audience, was suggested in the Barnes
Foundation’s bylaws, which proclaimed “that it is the plain people, that is,
men and women who gain their livelihood by daily toil in shops, factories,
schools, stores and similar spaces, who shall have free access to the art gal-
lery.”48 This new position does not mark a change in the status of ownership,
but rather in its orientation, from a Baudrillardian “discourse addressed to
oneself” to a form of ownership that is also a mode of communicative knowl-
edge, endowing its works with collective social meaning and (appropriatively)
summoning them to the purpose of cultural intervention.
From this perspective, we can perceive a homology between the public
form of the modernist art collection and the modernist anthology, which
each select a series of works to be included or excluded, create meaning out
of their material association, and justify their collective meaning in prefa-
tory apparatuses and critical writing. At the same time, the problematics
of copyright and formal and material difference (anthologies may circulate,
individual poems may be used to contradictory ends in different antholo-
gies) also impose important and irreducible distinctions. We could observe
generally that with the anthology the terms of ownership are inverted: it is
the anthologist who expresses a form of symbolic ownership of the poems
while the reader may be the owner of the collected work, participating
in what Barbara Benedict has called “the private possession of culture.”49
And it is possible to see in the modern art collection a reciprocal desire to
overcome its own material limitations. As Pamela Smart has observed in her
excellent study of the Menil Collection, “Domenique de Menil . . . speaks
of an alchemy by which we might all become collectors, albeit vicariously,
rather than merely passive consumers.”50
Whereas significant portions of Quinn’s acquisitions are now significant
portions of major American museums—the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metro-
politan Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Fogg Art Mu-
seum—Quinn’s collection was initially dispersed among individual collec-
tors largely because the relatively few American institutions that did exist in
the mid-twenties were reluctant to invest in modernist work. Those private
Collections Mediation Modernism 15

collections that were still being assembled in 1927, however, would tend
not to meet with the same fate as Quinn’s. By midcentury, it would become
customary for major American museums to acquire individual collections
in their entirety.51 This practice has had the effect of naturalizing the transi-
tion of a private collection, assembled according to the rubric of subjective
choice, to its “final” residence in the public institution, which, as Walter
Benjamin conceded, “may be less objectionable socially and more useful
academically” than the hermetic form of private ownership exemplified by
Quinn.52 The extent to which such an institutional economy has come to
determine the field of art consumption in America can be judged by the
comparatively recent wooing of the Detroit art collector Lydia Kahn Win-
ston Malbin, who insisted in 1986 that “[t]hey’re going to have to wait until
I’m dead to find out” who would gain control of her important collection of
Italian futurist works.53 When that event transpired, “they” discovered that
Malbin had left the heart of her collection to the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York, with 103 remaining pieces placed on auction at Sotheby’s
in May 1990.54
But as the debates around the Quinn auction demonstrate, the trans-
mission of the private collection to its “final” residence in the public mu-
seum was not a destiny agreed upon in advance, even for some of the
collectors (such as Dreier or Gallatin) whose pieces did end up in such insti-
tutions. What has often been taken to be a natural transition from private
ownership to a public representation of modernist art obscures a field of
struggle for cultural authority that must be understood as a signal dynamic
of modernist culture in the United States. Indeed, at this point the meaning
of the word “modernism” (itself not quite an anachronism in the literary
field) was itself tellingly hazy. Its indeterminateness demonstrated its social
availability, applying as it might to aesthetic objects or more broadly con-
ceived ideologies, for appropriation within various institutional systems.
Jean-Michel Rabaté has stressed that “[m]odernism remains a vaguer and
more abstract notion that derives its impetus from the lumping together of
all the ‘isms’ of a given period that [it] believes it discovers in the ‘modern.’
Like philosophy for Hegel, modernism as a concept always intervenes at
the end of a process of creation or gestation; one could speak of the ‘owl of
modernism’ along with the ‘owl of Minerva’ that takes its flight at dusk.”55
With this temporal view of field formation in mind, we might suggest that
modernism’s owl began its flight not at midcentury, as has been usually
believed, but rather at this earlier moment of collecting. This is evident in
16 Collecting as Modernist Practice

the different canons and ideologies that are proposed by the various col-
lections of art. But it is true in a related way of the anthology form, which
emerges in the 1910s as the genre par excellence of “all the isms” (futur-
ism, imagism, spectrism), composing a field that was received collectively
as modernist verse, as I show in chapter 1. And the anthology persisted
throughout the 1920s, as I show in chapter 4, as an instrument of future
reconfigurations and arguments about the aesthetic and social agency of
the modernist cultural project as such.
It is because of its increasing emphasis on social practice that the oc-
casional, coterie, or interventionist anthology endured, indeed flourished,
as a salient provisional institution. It had an agency distinct from, on the
one hand, that of the more expressly canon-defining modernist antholo-
gies such as those of Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson (The New
Poetry, 1917) or Louis Untermeyer (beginning with Modern American Poetry,
1919), which augur the Norton and Longman institutions and make com-
paratively few claims upon the social.56 And it differed, on the other hand,
from the institution of the little magazine, which played a decisive role in
the promotion of modernist art and literature, but which (like individual
exhibitions of art) played a comparatively weaker role in arguing for the
terms and meaning of its long-term reception. Whereas the distinctions
among these forms of literary collections are not absolute—the Little Re-
view would at times refer to itself as an anthology, and annual anthologies
such as Amy Lowell’s Some Imagist Poets were subject to the rhythms of
serial publication—it was the unique capability of the interventionist an-
thology not merely to identify but perhaps more accurately to interpellate
collective formations in the service of the volume’s social reason for being.
Such occasional anthologies, constructed under the appropriative curation
of an often controversial editor, are homologous, not identical, with the
art collections that competed for authority in the years leading up to and
following the Quinn auction. In order to demonstrate further this homol-
ogy and the primacy of the occasional anthology within this dynamic, we
will turn to an example apparently hostile to modernism: Edward Marsh’s
Georgian Poetry.

In London in 1912 Edward Marsh, then private secretary to First Lord of

the Admiralty Winston Churchill, conceived of Georgian Poetry together
with his friend Rupert Brooke, who had been recently disappointed by the
poor sales of his first book of poems. For Marsh, the aim of the anthology
Collections Mediation Modernism 17

project was to redress a decline of public interest in contemporary poetry

by employing the modern techniques of publicity that until that time had
only been used in the promotion of novels.57 The Georgian poets were pri-
marily young and unknown English male writers whose work demonstrated
an inclination toward bucolic themes, an apparently titillating sensibility, a
somewhat relaxed approach to meter, and above all a valorization of ordi-
nary speech.58 While Brooke believed that the new volume should be the
“herald of a revolutionary dawn” marking a break with the torpor of Victo-
rianism, Marsh’s preface made the more measured claim that these writings
were gathered together “in the belief that English poetry is now once again
putting on a new strength and beauty” and stressed that “we are at the
beginning of another ‘Georgian period’ which may take rank in due time
with the several great poetic ages of the past.”59 Marsh and Brooke were in
agreement that their strategy should be to differentiate Marsh’s selections
from what Edmund Gosse would call the “exaggerated sonority” of Victo-
rian poetics and from the still-popular historical anthologies of the Victo-
rian period assembled by Francis Turner Palgrave and Arthur Quiller-Couch
(whose Oxford Book of Victorian Verse was published simultaneously with
Marsh’s first anthology).60 As Marsh’s more careful language tacitly acknowl-
edged, the Georgian intervention was at the same time very conservative
in relation to the highly publicized activities of Marinetti, who in London
that year had staged a sensational series of lectures on behalf of futurism,
one of which Marsh had himself attended.61 Whether or not Marsh was
knowingly borrowing Marinetti’s model of an interventionist anthology—
the latter’s I poeti futuristi also appeared in 1912—his gesture was one that
clearly sought to reorient the established form of the traditional literary
anthology to the perceived present crisis of readership.62 The first words
of Gosse’s 1913 review nevertheless indicated the connection to the avant-
garde: “This attractive volume is at once an anthology and a manifesto.”63
When Marsh approached Harold Monro about the possibility of his Po-
etry Bookshop publishing the collection, Monro agreed only on the condi-
tion that Marsh would provide insurance against what he saw as the likely
failure of the project. Any profits made would be split equally between
Monro and Marsh, the latter dividing his portion among contributors as
royalties. The Poetry Bookshop printed five hundred copies that were to
be made available just before Christmas; priced cheaply at three shillings
and six pence, they sold out before the holidays. Georgian Poetry 1911–1912
went on to sell fifteen thousand copies, going through twelve printings in
18 Collecting as Modernist Practice

just five years. The second Georgian volume sold nineteen thousand copies,
leading to a run of five volumes in total, ending in 1922.64 Marsh’s success
with the first edition allowed him quickly to distribute three pounds to each
of the book’s contributors; poets collected for the third volume received as
much as eight guineas. Walter de la Mare guessed that the five poems he
contributed to the first Georgian Poetry had brought him almost as much
money as his first three single-authored volumes combined. The success of
Marsh’s collections, moreover, provided a model for publishers and editors
that would significantly shape the field of poetry—from conventional verse
to the avant-garde—for more than two decades. As Aaron Jaffe has critically
observed, “[i]t was Georgian Poetry that first created the staging ground for
replacing pretensions of comprehensiveness or completeness [i.e., the his-
torical anthology] with pretensions of selectivity.”65 The year that the fifth
and final Georgian volume appeared, by which time anthologization was
seen as a liability by some poets, among the numerous poetry collections
was Harcourt Brace’s American Poetry 1922, a self-described “American com-
panion” to Georgian Poetry.66
The very title “Georgian poetry” indicated both a connection between
the poems and the political establishment and a desire to forge a histori-
cal continuity between the romanticism that flourished under George III
and the present reign of George V (“another ‘Georgian period’ ”). By 1917,
Gosse could claim that Georgian Poetry had indeed been responsible for “a
revival of public interest in the art of poetry,” yet the series’ unforeseen
success soon prompted questions about poetic authority that Marsh could
not have anticipated.67 In a withering 1919 review of the fourth installment
of Georgian Poetry, John Middleton Murry intimated the outlines of an obvi-
ous crisis for the poetic field, unintentionally produced by Marsh’s success:
“Before the ‘boom’ took place, the Poet Laureate was our single poetical
institution, about which were grouped one or two Poets Laureate. After the
‘boom’ we observe a certain displacement in the heavens. ‘Georgian Poetry’
is a new fixed star . . . sufficient to outshine the old and familiar constella-
tion.”68 Nor was Murry the first critic to have observed that Georgian Poetry
had “displaced” the authority of the office of the Poet Laureate. The fact
that the stratospheric success of the first Georgian volume had coincided
with the death in 1913 of Alfred Austin, Tennyson’s successor as Poet Lau-
reate, had led a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement to suggest that
Marsh’s project would establish a new form of authority in the place that
Collections Mediation Modernism 19

Tennyson’s death had left vacant.69 The TLS review registered the degree to
which Austin’s tenure was perceived to have been a failure, but Murry’s re-
visiting of the connection in 1919, six years after the appointment of Austin’s
successor Robert Bridges, indicates how deeply the literary marketplace
had become involved as an arbiter of literary value in the intervening years.
Whereas Marsh’s affiliation with political authority, as well as his conserva-
tive tastes, soon became all too reminiscent of an earlier model of aesthetic
production and valuation, the example of his success as the editor of the
Georgian volumes suggested a new range of possibilities for anthologists
promoting more radical work. Just as the Peau de l’Ours collectors would in
the very next year confirm the power of the marketplace to confer cultural
value upon art beyond the systems of the Salon and the museum, the Geor-
gian anthology appeared to promise a similar mode of cultural authorization
for poetry, one based on its carefully managed commodification.70 However
unintentionally, Georgian Poetry had established the anthology form as a
provisional institution that displaced older regimes of cultural valuation.
Very shortly after the publication of the first Georgian anthology, no
less implicated a figure than Marsh’s publisher Harold Monro issued the
first installment of the journal Poetry and Drama, whose contents included
a positive review of Georgian Poetry, an announcement for a forthcoming fu-
turist number of the journal, and a notice about Ezra Pound’s newly formed
school of imagisme. Also in this first issue was an ambiguous obituary for Al-
fred Austin that Monro had written himself: “We regret to have to record the
death, on June 2, of the Poet Laureate, Mr. Alfred Austin. The news having
only reached us on the eve of going to press, we are unable in this number
to attempt any estimate of his poetry. Born at Headingley, near Leeds, on
May 30, 1835, Mr. Alfred Austin was appointed Laureate in 1896. With his
death it is probable that the official post will be abolished” (my emphasis).71
In a letter written to Brooke later that summer, Marsh described having to
reprimand his publisher Monro for his willful outburst against the Laureate-
ship, but he also portentously made note of the new literary development
that Monro had briefly mentioned in the same issue of Poetry and Drama:
“Wilfrid [Gibson] tells me there’s a movement for a ‘Post-Georgian’ anthol-
ogy, of the Pound-Flint-Hulme school, who don’t like being out of G.P. but
I don’t think it will come off.”72 Although Marsh wished to deny it, these
exchanges made manifest the new function of the anthology as a model for
a new set of cultural hierarchies and relationships.
20 Collecting as Modernist Practice

Hoping to participate in Marsh’s success, the “Post-Georgian” anthology

did “come off,” in the form of Pound’s Des Imagistes, which appeared in
the following year, 1914. Monro himself would be the London publisher of
the anthology, but the book also appeared in two forms that same year in the
United States, first in the February 1914 issue of the Glebe, a New York maga-
zine run by Alfred Kreymborg and Man Ray, and the following month in book
form under the imprimatur of Albert and Charles Boni, who would be the
publishers of Alain Locke’s New Negro anthology a decade later. Although
the anthology form would later become for Pound the almost typological
sign of the conspiratorial dimensions of culture under capitalism, in 1912
(the year of the first Georgian Poetry volume) Pound expressed much more
sanguinity about the market: “Did not the palaces of the Renaissance have
an advertising value? . . . At any rate in these new [New York] buildings
the mire of commerce has fostered the beautiful leaf. So commerce has,
it would seem, its properties worthy of praise—apart from its utility.”73
Whereas Rainey has shown in Poundian imagism a rear-guard response to
Marinetti’s radical publicity experiments, one might make an equally strong
case for Pound’s wish, however fleeting, to use the example of Marsh’s suc-
cessful anthology as a means of confirming the value of modernist poetry
in the marketplace.
While relatively widely reviewed, Des Imagistes proved to be a financial
failure and a great disappointment to Pound. The commercial fortunes of
his second foray into the field, 1915’s Catholic Anthology, were even more
disastrous. In the United States, however, the example of Pound’s first an-
thology was galvanizing. As is well known, three subsequent anthologies
compiled and promoted by the commercially savvy Amy Lowell brought
imagism a financial success comparable to that which had been enjoyed by
Georgian Poetry. That this success did not eclipse her anthologies’ associa-
tion with the public controversies of modernism can be judged by a dispar-
aging comment made by the art collector Duncan Phillips—before his con-
version to modernism—that connected Lowell’s poetics with the paintings
exhibited at the Armory Show: “[Matisse] is even more crude in his obvi-
ousness than is Miss Amy Lowell when she calls attention to her unrhymed
cadences.”74 Lowell’s anthologies helped produce a public consciousness of
modernist poetry so great as to sustain an elaborate hoax perpetuated by
the poets Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Bynner, who in 1916 pseudony-
mously fabricated and promoted a rival anthology and school of “spectrist”
verse that they notably offered as a literary equivalent to “Futurist Paint-
Collections Mediation Modernism 21

ing.”75 The Spectra hoax was so successful as to elicit subsequent publica-

tions of new work by the imaginary Emanuel Morgan and Anne Knish in
Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine and in the Little Review—not to mention
an entire “spectrist” issue of Kreymborg’s Others—before being exposed in
1918.76 Spectra confirmed that the anthology form had quickly become the
preeminent material expression and justification of a series of practices—in-
cluding magazine publication, reviews, and public readings—that centered
around the production, promotion, and self-definition of modern poetry,
particularly as a collective formation (whether Georgian, imagist, futurist,
or spectrist). Such practices, which had found their earliest articulation in
Marsh’s work on behalf of Georgian Poetry, had particular authority in a
country that did not yet have a Poet Laureate.
But perhaps the most telling evidence of the new position of anthologies
in the commercial and institutional field of modernism came a decade later
in two texts jointly authored by Laura Riding and Robert Graves. The first of
these, 1927’s Survey of Modernist Poetry, is notable for having been the first
attempt to associate the term modernism with a specific set of poetic prin-
ciples, notably the proto–New Critical concepts of the commensurability of
form with content and the self-sufficiency of the poetic object. Riding and
Graves distinguished a properly ahistorical modernism from modernisms
that made unwarranted reference to modern “civilization” or to history, and
they also poured scorn on work whose claims of innovation were really
merely those of a misguidedly faddish contemporaneity.77 It was the latter
tendency that they pointedly identified with what they called the “commer-
cial advertising of poetry,” of which imagism (a style by then fifteen years
old) was for them the most notable avatar (RG 55). In this view, the wish to
make poetry seem up-to-date was a betrayal of the larger imperative of the
necessary ahistoricism of modernist poetry, and its imagist commodifica-
tion served as the most damning sign of this historical capitulation.78
It was no coincidence, then, that the following year’s companion volume
should have been titled A Pamphlet against Anthologies. This was an even
more combative text that decried the several forms of “trade anthologies”—
or “commodit[ies] destined for instructional, narcotic, patriotic, religious,
humorous and other household uses”—that they held to be exemplary of
the ruinous commercialization of poetry and possessing a promiscuously
collective form that violated the autonomy of the individual poem and
poet (RG 165).79 Here they strategically spared mention of the imagist and
Georgian models until the very end, yet the force of their argument spoke
22 Collecting as Modernist Practice

throughout to what had become the legacy of those anthology models. In

Riding and Graves’s view, the only truly legitimate anthology forms were
the collection of fugitive verse and what they named the “non-professional,
non-purposive collection.” What they meant by the latter was something
akin to a commonplace book, a self-made collection of personally chosen
poems whose virtue “diminishes with the increase in the number of persons
for whom it is made” (RG 163). As they went on to elaborate, “Even an hon-
est private anthology loses most of its value when published as a public an-
thology. The poems included have become part of the anthologist and have
lost their original context. This does not harm the anthologist, but it makes
him a bar between the readers of the anthology and the poem, and thus
prevents a direct introduction to the poem by the poet himself, who alone
has the right to give it. [It is a] tyranny which no personality has a right to
exercise over the reader” (RG 169). This judgment against such mediations
has, not without reason, anticipated a number of recent studies of antholo-
gies.80 But Riding and Graves’s valuing of the “honest private anthology”
also reveals a meaningful affinity with the kind of private ownership and
experience that had been exemplified by the art collector John Quinn (as,
for example, in Quinn’s citation of de Goncourt’s will), but not by his more
publicly oriented successors.
The authors’ complaint about the transition from the “private anthol-
ogy” to the “public anthology” obtained a more specific articulation in their
contempt for editors who instrumentalized poetry toward any political or
social end. They inveighed heavily against collections of patriotic poetry, a
tradition to which Georgian Poetry had partly contributed (RG 211–12, 229).81
But this was only the most obvious form of what they saw to be a far wider
problem, and they offered as more pernicious examples Henry Harrison’s
recent Sacco-Vanzetti Anthology and Carl Sandburg’s poem “Cool Tombs,”
the repeated anthologization of which they noted had helped launch an
American movement to repatriate the corpse of Pocahontas. What the Sur-
vey of Modernist Poetry had attempted to preserve under the mantle of the
“plain reader’s rights” (RG 5–16) could in this context be saliently described
as the individual poet’s—or, better, the individual poem’s—rights, rights that
should not be subjected to any prior determination by a private-turned-
public anthologist.
Yet such gatekeeping also tacitly confirmed that the true legacy of the
imagist and Georgian experiments was to have made available a set of social
Collections Mediation Modernism 23

and institutional possibilities for literary collections that hewed paradoxi-

cally closely both to the models of the anthology “specializing in publics”
(RG 167) and to the subjectively determined “private anthology”—collec-
tions that, in other words, served a particular set of social and aesthetic
agendas while at the same time bearing the subjective mark of the antholo-
gist. By the time Riding and Graves published their text, such anthologies
were as likely to be collections of poetry by anarchist or socialist writers
as they were to be patriotic collections. But in the United States, the most
significant subfield of literary collections in this period was undoubtedly
the African American anthology. Indeed, the anthology could reasonably be
claimed as the preeminent black literary form of the twenties, enacting as
it did a performance of collectivity and interpellation, political demand and
representation, and also, in some cases, canon formation. As Brent Hayes
Edwards has stressed, however, the decisive characteristic of these antholo-
gies was their role “not in confirming the canon, not in a backward-looking
survey of the high points in a trajectory, but instead in founding and en-
abling the very tradition [they document], ‘at the beginning rather than the
end of literary history making.’ ”82 And in this, such texts must be seen as a
necessary extension of the field of modernist-interventionist anthologies.
Indeed, it was precisely this social potential of the anthology form, when
translated into the field of black letters, that Ishmael Reed represented in
his own Harlem Renaissance–themed novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972), where the
revolutionary energies of “Jes Grew” assume their material form as an an-
thology circulating throughout New York City: “some sort of anthology that
will upset the nation,” as Woodrow Wilson Jefferson surmises.83
The most influential of these collections was Alain Locke’s New Negro an-
thology of 1925. Riding and Graves notably fail to mention The New Negro—
or any other black anthology—by name. Yet they do betray a knowledge
of the field, and likely the anthology itself, in their outrageous designation
of Countee Cullen, the poet to whom Locke had given pride of place in his
anthology, as a “white man’s negro, a burnt-cork minstrel.” In concluding
that “modern negro poetry so labelled [sic] is only inferior white poetry,”
they intimated that any specifically racial referent in a modern poem should
be viewed as one more invocation of the contemporary “civilization” that
disqualified it as true “modernist” poetry (RG 230). And because the anthol-
ogy was such a central form for 1920s black literary production, Riding and
Graves’s argument extended logically from the poetry itself to the mode of
24 Collecting as Modernist Practice

its collective representation and circulation. Thus, Edwards’s assertion that

“the anthology is a means more broadly to grapple with modernity itself ”
is confirmed by the negative example of Riding and Graves’s attempt to
claim, first, a modernism with no necessary relationship to modernity and,
second, a world where there could be no legitimate social function for the
anthology form.
The interrelation of these proscriptions grows still clearer when we rec-
ognize that the poets most valorized in the Survey of Modernist Poetry—E. E.
Cummings, Gertrude Stein, and Riding herself—were modernists whose
styles would be least assimilable within a concept of a “collecting aesthetic.”
While Riding and Graves acknowledged that the work of assembling an an-
thology closely “resembles creation,” they did not recognize such work to
be a salutary model of modernist intertextuality (RG 169). And while they
suggested that the integrity of the anthology form implied the correspond-
ing construction of a “composite author,” the modernist intersubjectivity
that such a form of authorship represented was construed to be a threat to
the purity of an eternal and individualist modernism (RG 186). The forms of
textual sociability, referentiality, and collectivity that they worked to exile,
in other words, were themselves the language of the modernist collection,
and this was exactly the modernism against which Riding and Graves di-
rected their own collective labors.
In both practice and theory, Riding and Graves prefigured the protocols
of close reading that became the cornerstone of literary study in later de-
cades (and in this light A Survey of Modernist Poetry contains readings that
still merit revisiting). Their work also marks an early stage in what became
the dominant definition of modernist autonomy. This definition, ironically
set forth in a joint-authored text, exiled collective expression as a legiti-
mate category of aesthetic production or representation. As the argument
extended into the Pamphlet against Anthologies, it categorically excluded Af-
rican American writing according to the same terms that it had disqualified
contemporary reference in poetic language, and thus negatively conjoined
ethnic identity with modernity itself—a connection that was also central,
as I will argue, to Bynner and Ficke’s satirical Spectra anthology. The effort
to delegitimate anthologization as a cultural practice, finally, proved to be a
means of denigrating the collection as an aesthetic form. In this sense, the
Pamphlet was much more than an idiosyncratic and particularized invective
against the commodification of poesy. Its argument against anthologies was
constitutive of a larger argument about modernism and thus participated,
Collections Mediation Modernism 25

albeit from a slightly different position, in the same contest for institutional
authority that had been engaged by modernist anthologies themselves.

Riding and Graves’s critical interventions had been in part impelled by the
congruity between what I have been calling a collecting aesthetic and an
emergent formation of modernism. As this suggests, the forms and prac-
tices broadly at issue extended beyond the Anglo-American poetic field
that Riding and Graves had addressed. A decade later, the same congruity
between modernist form and the collection would inform another well-
known critique of modernism, that of György Lukács in the seminal essay
“Realism in the Balance” (1938). Here Lukács made no distinction between
Riding and Graves’s dehistoricized “true” modernism and the “false” mod-
ernism that they had attacked; rather, he issued a categorical condemna-
tion of aesthetic modernism as such, whose embrace of fragmentation and
obscurity betrayed a credulous acceptance, in Lukács’s view, of the alien-
ation of modern life under capitalism. For Lukács, modernism could be
negatively characterized by the way it willingly surrendered the obligation
to represent “the overall objective social context and [flouted] the ‘insis-
tence on all-round knowledge’ required to do it justice.”84 Because this is
evidently such a different set of concerns from those that motivated Riding
and Graves, it is all the more remarkable to discover that the conclusion
of his essay caustically derides numerous apparently distinct forms of col-
lecting, which are presented as so many modes of false consciousness—or
as so many figures for modernism itself. These include “any swank who
collects stained glass or negro sculpture,” anyone who “collect[s] old folk
products indiscriminately,” the avatars of “an artiness which artificially col-
lects and aestheticizes about the primitive,” the modernists who “regard
the history of the people as a great jumble sale . . . a heap of lifeless objects
in which one can rummage around at will, picking out whatever one hap-
pens to need at the moment,” and, finally, the intellectuals who would
reduce the classics “to an anthology and then to reassemble whatever ‘ma-
terial is suitable.’ ”85
Lukács objects to the appropriative violence and bourgeois privilege that
is implicit in these acts of collecting, but his deeper objection is epistemo-
logical. In Lukács’s view, the collection is both emblem and instrument of
modernism’s cavalier refusal to attempt to envision society, or history, in
its totality. Replacing this kind of comprehensive vision with a more met-
onymic one, modernism (here represented by the collecting aesthetic of
26 Collecting as Modernist Practice

cinematic montage) “abandon[s] any attempt to mirror objective reality,

[and] give[s] up the artistic struggle to shape the highly complex media-
tions in all their unity and diversity and to synthesize them as characters
in a work of literature.”86 Whereas Riding and Graves struggle ferociously
against the possibility that the collection might be a figure for “true” mod-
ernism, Lukács takes the identity of modernism with the collection (includ-
ing, explicitly, the anthology) as a precondition of his argument in order to
inveigh against the fragmentary knowledge that these forms produce.
It was precisely from the context of the Lukácsian concept of reification
and its “complex mediations” that Fredric Jameson, in The Political Uncon-
scious, worked to recuperate a heroic capability for literary modernism. Like
Raymond Williams, Jameson argues against the necessity of “affirm[ing] the
identity” of social relations and aesthetic form. “[O]ur aim,” he stresses,
“is rather to demonstrate the ways in which modernism—far from being a
mere reflection of the reification of late nineteenth-century social life—is
also a revolt against that reification and a symbolic act which involves a
whole Utopian compensation for increasing dehumanization on the level
of daily life.”87 As is true for Lukács, Jameson views the abstraction that
defines modernist aesthetics as corresponding to the abstraction of social
life under capitalism—“a historically new experience”—but as is untrue for
his predecessor, the fragmentary character of those aesthetics also provides
compensation for what has been lost in reality. And most notably for our
purposes, Jameson also offers as a privileged example of that compensation
the character of Stein in Conrad’s Lord Jim, a revolutionary-turned-capitalist
who “becomes a butterfly collector, that is to say, essentially a collector
of images. [He gathers] fragments of a quantified world [now] libidinally
transcoded and Utopianly transfigured.”88
For Jameson, this act of aesthetic compensation, here figured both by
Conrad’s impressionistic style and (allegorically) by the very act of collect-
ing, must necessarily remain in the realm of the imaginary. But his revision
of the Lukácsian position is worth briefly remarking because of its affinities
with the still more heroic role that Walter Benjamin would reserve for the
collector in his later writings. Indeed, it is tempting to speculate whether
Lukács had meant indirectly to attack Benjamin, whose essays “Unpacking
My Library” (1931) and “Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian” (1937) had
already appeared in Germany by the time “Realism in the Balance” was pub-
lished. In the first of these essays, Benjamin had proposed that it is only in
private collections that “the objects get their due,” but in his drafts for the
Collections Mediation Modernism 27

Arcades Project, Benjamin was ready to make a larger and more categorical
set of claims on behalf of the form of the collection: “What is decisive in
collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in or-
der to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind.
. . . It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the
object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly
devised historical system: the collection. . . . We construct here an alarm
clock that rouses the kitsch of the previous century to ‘assembly.’ ”89 In this
late formulation, the Benjaminian collection provides a form of “Utopian
compensation” against the loss of real historical knowledge in an increas-
ingly “irrational” world, but as is untrue of Jameson’s allegorical example,
it also expressly gestures toward the possibility of its one day becoming a
mode of transformative practice.90
It is tempting to find in Benjamin’s redemptive private ownership a mas-
ter theory for the modernist collection as such. But for our purposes, it
will be more useful to read his work as part of a more general structure of
feeling that found a particular articulation, as well as a set of institutional
possibilities probably unimagined by Benjamin, in the United States. If, as
Paul Holdengräber has proposed, the collection constitutes “the master-
trope of Benjamin’s work” as a whole, that claim can be enriched as we
understand the collection to be, more generally, one of the “master-tropes”
of modernist culture.91 Benjamin’s account valorizes the role of the collec-
tor’s subjectivity—a source of antipathy for Lukács as it is for Riding and
Graves—and he also makes visible the importance of comprehending col-
lecting as a mode of practice as well as an aesthetic (or historical) form. But
what does not appear in Benjamin’s writing is the possibility of the collec-
tion obtaining, as it did for the figures to be studied here, the instrumental
agency of a provisional institution.
To figure the collection as a provisional institution is no doubt to sacri-
fice, in some measure, the revolutionary or Utopian character of which Ben-
jamin dreamed. Yet as James Clifford has insisted, we must see in the phe-
nomenon of collecting “both a form of Western subjectivity and a changing
set of powerful institutional practices.”92 Following Clifford, we can claim
that in the interwar period a particular sense of the social agency of art—a
sense rooted in Clifford’s collecting subjectivity—emerged to contest, in
Benjamin’s words, the “wholly irrational character of the object’s mere pres-
ence at hand” within the dominant institutional structure and to propose
new modes of the object’s integration. The private collection offered itself
28 Collecting as Modernist Practice

as a powerful instrument of cultural intervention, available to a wide variety

of aesthetic and social interests, because of the momentarily indefinite insti-
tutional situation in the United States of the early twentieth century. It was
because of this unusual situation that the Quinn auction could have elicited
such impassioned and far-reaching responses, that Des Imagistes could have
a much stronger influence and longer life than it had in England, and, more
generally, that a heretofore hermetic form of acquisition and possession
could be invested with such transformative potential. To study the con-
flicted field of collections that emerged in response to those opportunities
is to grasp again the other destinations that once seemed possible for the
modernist project.
 1 After Imagisme

The Lyric Year and the Crisis in Cultural Valuation

By the time Ezra Pound’s anthology Des Imagistes appeared in London,
it had already circulated in New York in two forms. It was published as the
February 1914 issue of Alfred Kreymborg and Man Ray’s journal the Glebe,
and in early March the same sheets were bound as a book appearing under
the imprint of Albert and Charles Boni, the same publishers who would
later publish Alain Locke’s New Negro anthology. In April, it was released in
London under the imprimatur of Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop, which
had published Edward Marsh’s wildly successful Georgian Poetry anthology
sixteen months earlier. Very unsuccessful in the country where Pound had
mostly lived since 1908, Des Imagistes would be far more influential in the
United States both in the example it set for free verse and for the cultural
function that could subsequently be claimed for the anthology form. De-
spite its commercial failure, Des Imagistes established a standard for the
circulation and the writing of modern American poetry. It also proved to
be a salutary example for future anthologists to react against. For its part,
Pound’s collection had both emulated and implicitly attacked two recent
anthologies that had been very successful in London: F. T. Marinetti and
Paolo Buzzi’s avant-garde I poeti futuristi and the conservative Georgian Po-
etry. But if these books were Pound’s points of reference for assembling
and promoting imagism, it was a different anthology—Ferdinand Earle’s The
Lyric Year—that conditioned its reception in the United States. The short-
sightedness of The Lyric Year, as well as the controversy it elicited, revealed
a new set of possibilities and desires for the social role of poetry in America,
and it was to these desires that the more limited and tendentious example
of Des Imagistes seemed to speak.
30 Collecting as Modernist Practice

The Lyric Year was an early example of a “prize anthology.” It comprised

one hundred poems by American poets, ordered alphabetically by name
and chosen from, Earle claimed, ten thousand submissions. One thousand
dollars in prize money was divided among the authors of the three best
poems, as chosen by a jury composed of Earle, Edward J. Wheeler, and
William Stanley Braithwaite. Published at the end of 1912, the same year as
the futurist and Georgian collections, Earle’s Lyric Year was promoted as an
innovative, forward-looking text. Its publisher, Mitchell Kennerley—who
would soon publish D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers—had already estab-
lished himself as a publisher of socially and sexually progressive books.1 A
decade later Kreymborg would remember him as “the white hope among
publishers [of poetry].”2 In the year preceding its release, Kennerley vigor-
ously promoted the project; it received three separate advance notices in
the Dial alone, where it was called, without irony, “an extremely interesting
experiment in poetical encouragement.”3
Kennerley’s belief in the project, as evidenced by his energetic promo-
tional work, was rewarded in the very short term, as the book was widely
reviewed and went through two printings in its first year.4 Yet despite this
apparent success, Kennerley soon abandoned his plans to make The Lyric
Year an annual competition and anthology. This change of heart came in
response to an unforeseen public outcry against the jury’s award selec-
tions. While the first prize had gone to Orrick Johns for his social protest
poem “Second Avenue,” popular sentiment declaimed loudly in favor of
“Renascence” by the nineteen-year-old Edna St. Vincent Millay, a poem
chosen for The Lyric Year but accorded no special recognition. The con-
troversy, which occupied the popular press for weeks, launched Millay’s
career and, some have claimed, the career of modern poetry in the United
States. As early as 1925, Kreymborg could perceive that the “Renascence”
scandal had publicly signaled the coming obsolescence of an older regime
of cultural valuation. But although the episode would in retrospect re-
semble the later contests for legitimation characteristic of modernism’s
cultural economy (the phenomenon of the legitimating scandal), Millay’s
poem did not become a cultural fault line in the sense that Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase would the following year at the Armory Show,
or as imagist poetry would, slightly less sensationally, shortly thereafter.
The near-unanimous support for “Renascence” within the public sphere
indicates that a different cultural economy was still operative at the mo-
ment of Earle’s anthology.
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