Locating modernism: Constructions of place in W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes.

Abstract

Anglo-American modernism is frequently regarded as a literary movement without place, an international phenomenon created by expatriates and exiles. Modernist poetry, in particular, with its complex and difficult formal procedures, has not been widely read for its engagement with particular landscapes and places. This study counters that trend, arguing that the changing interface between culture and environment during the first decades of the twentieth century provided a crucial subtext for modernist literary production. Using W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes as its central examples, <italic> Locating Modernism</italic> suggests that these writers engaged deeply with place, rethinking for a new century the complex processes by which environments and culture confer meaning on one another. This study blends recent theoretical insights from both environmental studies and textual theory, suggesting that for Yeats, Moore, and Hughes, places are texts, imagined and written into existence, and also that texts are places, physical environments through which literature circulates in culture. Accordingly, <italic>Locating Modernism</italic> examines not only the language of the poems it studies, but also the material texts that carried those poems into the wider world, the physical environments that shape and inform the poems' meaning. Chapter One argues for the importance of environments, both physical and textual, in the shaping of modernist literary production, discussing Yeats's Blood and the Moon, Moore's An Octopus, and Hughes's Shakespeare in Harlem as preliminary examples. Chapter Two examines the importance of Irish landscapes and places to W. B. Yeats's cultural nationalism, looking particularly at his poems about Sligo, Coole Park, and Thoor Ballylee. Chapter Three places Marianne Moore's rigorously constructed poetry in the context of industrial America's ambivalent attitude toward wilderness, focusing especially on her volume <italic>Observations</italic> and on her editorial work at <italic>The Dial</italic>. Finally, Chapter Four reads Langston Hughes's <italic> The Weary Blues</italic> and <italic>Fine Clothes to the Jew </italic> to illustrate Hughes's idea of Harlem as a distinctly African American metropolis. This study proposes a modernism situated in particular historical and geographical locations, suggesting that the conventional idea of the modernist writer in exile might be complicated by a better understanding of modernism's engagement with place.