Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women’s Poetry Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women’s Poetry An Imagist Turned Philosopher Kristina Marie Darling LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www .rowman .com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Excerpts by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), from HELEN IN EGYPT © 1961 by Norman Holmes Pearson. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Darling, Kristina Marie, author. Title: Stylistic innovation, conscious experience, and the self in modernist women’s poetry : an imagist turned philosopher / Kristina Marie Darling. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021031402 (print) | LCCN 2021031403 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793633064 (hardback) | ISBN 9781793633071 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: American poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. | Modernism (Literature)—United States. | American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. | Philosophy in literature. | English language—20th century—Style. Classification: LCC PS310.M57 D37 2021 (print) | LCC PS310.M57 (ebook) | DDC 811/.5099287—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031402 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031403 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Contents List of Figures vii Introduction: Modernism as a Reframing of Individual Conscious Experience ix 1 Reclaiming the Intellectual Agency of Women: Marianne Moore and Jamesian Psychology 1 2 “Each Alone Would Have Left Us to Our Dreams”: Avant-Garde Film, Sound Technology, and Montage in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt 25 3 Gertrude Stein: Inhabiting (and Interrogating) the Sentence 49 4 Mina Loy: A Poetics of Rupture and Resistance 73 Conclusion: Beyond the Self/Other Binary: An Afterward 95 Works Cited 103 Index 111 About the Author 113 v List of Figures Figures 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3: Film stills from Monkey’s Moon 44–45 vii Introduction Modernism as a Reframing of Individual Conscious Experience MODERNISM AND THE RISE OF THE SOCIAL SELF: RECLAIMING POEMS AS PHILOSOPHICAL TEXTS The early twentieth century represents a time of great artistic and cultural upheaval. With the rise of industry, the proliferation of urban communities, and the advent of film, individuals began to see their identities as inextricable from the mass culture that circulated around them. This notion of the self as essentially relational, constructed and shaped by one’s interactions with a larger community, surfaces in the philosophical writings of the time as well. Even in the late nineteenth century, Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and Henri Bergson had argued for an understanding of the self as being at once corporeal and relational, a locus for the various ideas, texts, and types of language that circulate within culture. In short, the once clear distinction between self and other was increasingly called into question. This breakdown of boundaries between self and world frequently manifested itself in the style of literary works. modernist poetry, like the stream-of-consciousness fiction that was being written at the time, made great use of style and technique to blur the boundaries between self and other, artist and audience, and individual and collective. This book focuses specifically on modernist poetry by women who actively engaged philosophical texts, particularly those concerned with the increas- ingly porous boundaries of the self in relation to the other. By examining texts by Mina Loy, H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore, I show that female modernists of this particular historical moment shared an interest in ques- tioning existing boundaries between self and other. Even more importantly, they sought to reclaim agency over the predominantly male philosophical discourse that had heretofore defined the boundaries of the subject in relation ix