Abstract
On first looking into T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, Edmund Wilson described the poem as ‘not, in any formal sense, coherent’; he later characterised Eliot’s poetry overall as often ‘much too scrappy’ (p. 138). Academic critics would vigorously refute Wilson’s demurrals, establishing modernism at the pinnacle of contemporary literature and depicting it as – contrary to appearances ‒ carefully designed, unified and coherent. Writing in 1949, Elizabeth Drew insisted that a deep, archetypal ‘figure in the carpet’ unifies ‘The Waste Land’, and marvelled at the ‘very number of cultures and associations which are absorbed into its structure’.1 This tension between coherent meanings and fragmentary, ‘scrappy’ details lies at the centre of Bartholomew Brinkman’s illuminating study.
Brinkman argues that a larger binary between coherent, closed systems of order and heterogeneous, incommensurable particulars structured the print culture of the early twentieth century. Readers and other cultural agents needed tactics to cope with an oversupplied and diverse landscape of print objects; Brinkman arrays these tactics on a continuum between two opposed kinds of ‘textual accumulation’: scrapbooking and book collecting. Scrapbooking was a kind of personal, creative negotiation: the scrapbooker took clippings with both public and personal significance and repositioned them within a collage that multiplied and transformed their meanings. Scrapbooking is thus an open form, valuing multiplicity of significance and the individualised creation of meaning. Book collecting, on the other hand, sought authoritative, complete systems that brought to heel the scrappy anarchy of print culture. The collection of rare and fine editions (and, eventually, the library archive of modern poetry) operated on assumptions of objective, lasting value and an ideal ordering of objects. For Brinkman, the book collection shares a logic with the New Critical poem: an organic whole whose parts function inseparably to build an objective meaning and a manifest value. Poetic modernism emerged through a series of negotiations between the poles of scrappiness and tradition, Brinkman argues, with the forces of unity and coherence reaching ascendance at mid-century with the canonisation of a select group of (mostly) male writers.
Brinkman seeks to revise this critical history to restore and revalidate the scrappiness of print culture, embodied not only in scrapbooks but in the busy layouts and miscellaneous content of mass magazines and newspapers. Brinkman’s study thus shares an agenda with much recent modernist scholarship: the effort to re-conceptualise modernism’s relations to mass culture, previously thought to be overwhelmingly hostile. Poetic Modernism hews close to details and therefore avoids overgeneralising on this point: modernism emerges as neither uniformly hostile nor entirely friendly to mass print culture. Rather, Brinkman’s schema reveals a deep structure of thought underlying the ways in which writers, readers, critics, publishers and archivists conceived of their work amid a ‘snippet culture’ in print culture’s ‘age of bulk’ (pp. 19, 173). He carefully observes that the ends of his continuum are not pure or absolute: the dream of the complete, perfectly ordered book collection is thwarted by the perpetual lure of the next new find. The scrapbook, subjective and improvised as it is, shares the collection’s impulse to preservation: why else clip and save in the first place?
Brinkman’s theorisation of this scene is fresh and lucid, and the individual chapters are researched with commitment and creativity. There Brinkman finds the tension between coherence and heterogeneity ‒ between the collection and the scrapbook ‒ playing out in Francis Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the most important (and best-selling) general poetry anthology of the nineteenth century; in Poetry magazine; in Marianne Moore’s collage poems; in T. S. Eliot’s Faber & Faber editions of the selected poetry of Moore, Ezra Pound and Rudyard Kipling; and in the establishment of modern poetry archives at the Library of Congress and the University of Buffalo. This book’s originality begins here: with chapters focusing not on individual writers or works but on institutions and genres.
The material on Poetry magazine and on Marianne Moore is particularly strong. Poetry, Brinkman argues, began with a vision of poetry as engaged in the social world. But the magazine’s design ‒ isolating poems attractively with ample white space and without the competition of advertisements or other content ‒ cut in the opposite direction, positing the poem as an autonomous art object, carefully arranged for contemplation, like a painting in a gallery. Brinkman reads Moore as deeply shaped by her practice of scrapbooking; her mature collage poems work like scrapbook pages, arranging and assembling quotations and references to produce ‘heteroglossic sites where different scraps are brought together, retaining their individual distinctions but adopting new meanings through juxtaposition and recontextualization’ (pp. 115; 120). Eliot’s assertive ordering of Moore’s poems in Faber’s 1935 Selected Poems fit uneasily with Moore’s ‘scrappy poetics’, Brinkman argues; Eliot was invested in the gathering New Critical notion of a coherent, organic tradition, and he arranged Moore’s poems to suggest a corresponding unity in her oeuvre. In doing so, Eliot defused her scrappy poetics ‘by trying to resolve her contingent and serendipitous production into textual unity’ (p. 150).
Brinkman goes on to argue that other practitioners of poetic collage ‒ notably the ultra-canonical Eliot, Pound and William Carlos Williams ‒ can be read against a New Critical orthodoxy by foregrounding the scrappiness at their heart. Pound and Williams admitted that The Cantos and Paterson, respectively, didn’t quite cohere. (Pound later recanted, or re-Cantoed, if you prefer.) ‘Read in the context of Moore’s scrappy poetics’, Brinkman writes, ‘the long collage poems of Eliot, Pound, and Williams demonstrate the achievement of open-ended accumulation against what is often taken to be an assumed good of symbolic closure’ (p. 139). My only quibble with Brinkman lies in such moves as this one, which temporarily put down pretty firm stakes in quite shifty sands (which, to his credit, Brinkman has shown to be shifty). In this case poems which first appeared incoherent, and were later posited by critics as really unified by complex (and opaque) patterns, are read anew by Brinkman as triumphs not of organic wholeness but of scrappy diversity. But scrappiness or coherence ultimately lie, if not in the eye of the beholder, in the complex made up of the beholder and his or her acculturation, ‘protocols of reading’ and historical moment. Brinkman sometimes overplays such claims, as when he posits the collecting urge as completist or Palgrave’s Golden Treasury as an ‘objective anthology’. (Collectors are more enamoured of the contingency of random finds, and Palgrave had scrappier methods than Brinkman allows, I think.) Brinkman is right, finally, to note that modern poetry archives are arranged on a logic of completeness and organic unity. But as researchers, we are free to read them against the grain ‒ to foreground the loose ends and the scraps rather than the implied narrative of artistic heroism. Indeed, that’s the kind of reading Brinkman is doing here, brilliantly.
Note
1. E. Drew, T. S. Eliot: The Design of his Poetry (London, 1949), p. 38.