Eliot, Emerson, and transpacific modernism

First author draftAccepted manuscrip

T. S. Eliot and Transpacific modernism

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in American Literary History following peer review. The version of record: "Patterson, Anita. "T. S. Eliot and Transpacific Modernism." American Literary History, vol. 27 no. 4, 2015, pp. 665-682." is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajv042.Japonisme is a term often used to describe the shaping effects of Japanese culture and aesthetics on European art, but by the 1880s a similar trend emerged in the US, influencing popular culture as well as fine arts and poetry. This essay examines how Japonisme figured T. S. Eliot's development as a poet, focusing on Boston as a world city that was rapidly becoming global. It shows how Kakuzo Okakura, an art historian and curator of Asian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts during the time when Eliot was a Harvard undergraduate, and Masaharu Anesaki, a pioneer in the study of comparative religion who lectured on Mahayana Buddhism there when Eliot was a graduate student, inspired transpacific intercultural dialogue that would last the poet a lifetime. Eliot's formative encounter with Okakura and Anesaki raised his awareness of his family history in a region with longstanding ties to Asia; it nurtured his ambivalent engagement with such Boston-area writers as Emerson, whose prior interest in Confucianism laid a foundation for Eliot's modernism; and the encounter taught Eliot valuable lessons about moral action and impersonality, culminating in poems such as Four Quartets

The American legacy of "Prufrock"

The essay cluster brings together leading Eliot and modernist scholars to commemorate the centenary of the publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Together, they reexamine the circumstances surrounding the poem’s original publication, recontextualize its allusions, and reconstruct its reception over the past century. Patterson examines the American roots of Eliot’s ironic love song, often considered through the lenses of European poetry and philosophy. Dickey returns to the poem’s early reception to challenge the now established narrative that “Prufrock” shocked early readers, showing how often his contemporaries associated the poem with Decadent or Aesthetic precedents. Ricks returns to the poem’s first publication in Poetry Magazine to understand how the poem’s first readers would have encountered the text and how this context would have mediated the reader’s experience. Cuda situates Eliot’s poem vis-à-vis current discourses on late modernism and demonstrates how lateness and belatedness feature centrally in the poem. Finally, Schuchard examines Eliot’s literary and religious allusions, showing that his allusive method is in full force even in his first poetic masterpiece

Deux poètes du Nouveau Monde: Edgar Allan Poe et Saint-John Perse

Alors que les critiques ont étudié en détail l’intérêt que portait Baudelaire à Edgar Allan Poe, très peu a été dit au sujet de sa possible influence sur les écrits de Saint-John Perse . Cette omission est d’autant plus surprenante que Perse s’était procuré son premier exemplaire des Poèmes et Essais de Poe dès 1906 et qu’il possédait en outre bien d’autres éditions de cette œuvre, en anglais comme en français, dont la célèbre traduction de Mallarmé datant de 1897. Dans sa jeunesse, Perse détenait une photo de Poe qu’il gardait sur son secrétaire, allant même jusqu’à imiter la pose de ce dernier au moment de son propre portrait en 1906. Plus tard, lorsqu’il vivait à Georgetown, il avait accroché une photo de Poe près de sa porte d’entrée de sorte que ce soit la première chose que les invités voient en franchissant le seuil. Lorsqu’il rencontra pour la première fois Paul Valéry en 1912, ses premiers mots auraient été : « Edgar Poe et vous, [êtes] les deux hommes que j’ai le plus souhaité connaître ». Il y a des références majeures à Poe dans sa correspondance, dont notamment le souhait, formulé à maintes reprises, que celui-ci soit toujours vivant . En 1909, Perse écrit ainsi à Jacques Rivière en évoquant la récente publication du poème symphonique de Florent Schmitt, Étude symphonique pour le « Palais enchanté » D’Edgar Poe. Par ailleurs, dans une lettre à Allen Tate datant de 1949, il écrit aussi : « Vous savez qu’envers et contre [T. S.] Eliot, je garde mon affection à Poe, pour tout ce qu’il porte en lui de virtuel. »Accepted manuscrip

"'Projections in the Haiku Manner': Richard Wright, T. S. Eliot, and Transpacific Modernism"

Accepted manuscrip

Modern poetry and haiku

Wright wrote and published poetry throughout his career, culminating in the remarkable collection of “projections in the haiku manner” which he composed in the last years of his life. This analysis contextualizes Wright’s late turn to haiku in relation to his larger body of work; his reading of scholarship on haiku and Japanese Buddhism; his involvement with the Partisan Review during the 1930s; his revisionary engagement with modernist poetry, including Ezra Pound’s haiku-inspired imagism as well as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; and his affirmation of Emersonian pragmatism. I conclude by exploring the transmission of Wright’s legacy to contemporary African American poets such as Sonia Sanchez, whose liberating experiments with haiku have resulted in new expressive possibilities.Published versio

“I've known rivers”: Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, and the emergence of Caribbean modernism

Centering the analysis on three poems by Jacques Roumain—including two published in Haiti-Journal in 1931, the same year Roumain first met Langston Hughes, “Quand bat le tam-tam,” which Hughes himself would eventually translate, and “Langston Hughes”—this article traces the chronology of encounters between Hughes and Roumain, calling attention to their shared affinities with poets such as Walt Whitman and Jules Laforgue, in order to explore the dynamics of influence between Hughes and Roumain, and to deepen our understanding of Hughes's contribution to the emergence of Caribbean modernism. Drawing on groundbreaking scholarship by Brent Hayes Edwards, Carolyn Fowler, Arnold Rampersad, J. Michael Dash, Michel Fabre, Madhuri Deshmukh, Henry Louis Gates, Homi Bhabha, Seth Moglen, and others, the author argues against a conceptualization of influence as mimicry, opening possibilities for research on Hughes's placement within the global cross-currents of high modernist and avant-garde influence in the New World.Accepted manuscrip

Emerson in Iran: the American Appropriation of Persian Poetry, by Roger Sedarat

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Emerson, Saint-John Perse, et la poétique moderniste

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