[MUSIC] Hi, I'm Melissa Girard, a faculty member at Loyola University Maryland. And I'll be talking today about modernist women's poetry and the sentimental tradition. By starting with Teasdale we can see how this poetry is connected by shared themes, imagery, and formal choices. In this section of the lecture, I'll look at a range of writing by Teasdale, Millay, Wiley and Taggard to show how a comparative perspective can deepen our understanding of this poetry. I'll trace one of the key tropes that runs throughout this poetry. Its use of financial or economic metaphors. Love Songs for instance contains poems titled Barter, Debt, Riches, and Jewels. In these poems, Teasdale establishes a new emotional economy. One that values women's thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Here is Jewels by Sarah Teasdale. >> Jewels by Sarah Teasdale. If I should see your eyes again, I know how far their look would go. Back to a morning in the park with sapphire shadows on the snow. Or back to oak trees in the spring when you unloosed my hair and kissed the head that lay against your knees in the leaf shadow's amethyst. And still another shining place. We would remember, how the dun wild mountain held us on its crest. One diamond morning white with sun. But I will turn my eyes from you as women turn to put away the jewels. They have worn at night and cannot wear in sober day. >> Teasdale's turn away in the final stanza is a rejection of the reciprocity demanded by the classic romantic exchange. You take my heart, and I take yours. As in The Kiss, the poem asserts a new autonomy in the face of love. Jewels values women's desire above the market logic of a heteropatriarichal society. The sapphires, amethysts, and diamonds with which women's affections have traditionally been bought and sold. Edna Saint Vincent Malay makes a similar declaration in her poem Spring when she announces, beauty is not enough. And in her sonnet, Love is Not Blind, Millay writes, Well I know what is this beauty men are babbling of; I wonder only why they prize it so. Like their high modernist contemporaries, Millay and Teasdale were in pursuit of new formal and emotional depths for women's poetry. Their poems critiqued dominant gender ideology, a world of feminine surfaces that leaves them wanting. In her poem, Sheltered Garden, HD also criticizes this world of border-pinks, clove pinks, wax-lilies, herbs, sweet-cress. I have had enough, HD writes. I gasp for breath. Elinor Wylie makes a similar declaration in her extraordinary sonnet sequence, Wild Peaches. Down to the Puritan marrow in my bones, Wiley writes, there's something in this richness that I hate. Rather than consumers of this traditionally prized feminine stuff, modernist women poets considered themselves to be producers in a new emotional economy. Genevieve Taggard's extraordinary sonnet, Everyday Alchemy highlights the radical potential of this economic shift. >> Everyday Alchemy by Genevieve Taggard. Men go to women mutely for their peace; And they, who lack it most, create it when they make because they must, loving their men, a solace for sad bosom-bended heads. There is all the meager peace men get-no otherwhere. No mountain space, no tree with placid leaves, or heavy gloom beneath a young girl's hair. No sound of valley bell on autumn air, or room made home with doves along the eves. Ever holds peace like this poured by poor women out of their heart's poverty, for worn men. >> Everyday Alchemy is built around the same ideal of romantic reciprocity that Teasdale also challenged. Like Jewels, the poem gives women control over this effective exchange. Women create and make solace, not out of duty or obligation, but because of desire. Notice that they must loving their men. As a result, Taggard locates a latent source of power in women's domestic labor. A piece, quote, poured by poor women, out of their heart's poverty, for worn men. Everyday alchemy thus transforms the domestic. The scene of home, family and marriage, into a site of working class solidarity. An affect of refuge from capitalism's dehumanizing and deindividuating forces. In the early 1920s, Taggard and Millay both began their careers in the Bohemian world of New York's Greenwich Village. Bohemianism introduced these two poets to an unusual combination of radical feminists and free love philosophy through the writings of Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger. And, 19th century aestheticism. A line of Bohemian thought that they traced from Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde, through the mysticism of William Butler Yates. Along with Louise Bogan and Eleanor Wylie, Taggard also served on the Editorial Board of Measure, a now largely forgotten little magazine in print from 1921 to 1926, which Taggard helped to found. However, in the 1930s, Taggard rejected her earlier poetry, and insisted upon a fundamental distinction between herself and the so called sentimental women poets she had once worked alongside. In an 1938 interview in the Daily Worker, Taggard said her earlier poetry had been a symptom of the quote, foolish ideas popular in that Bohemian moment of the 1920s. Taggard said, I hadn't really as yet found a way of writing. Most of the poems in my first few books were about love and marriage and having children. Taggard is right that her earlier poetry is filled with love, marriage, and children. The stuff of women's lives and experiences. But she had once believed that these topics were importantly political. The literary critic Nancy Burke, who provides an important critical study of Taggard's writing, attributes Taggard's change of heart to the growing orthodoxy of the Marxist left. Which, by the late 1930s, no longer endorsed the revolutionary potential of womens' personal, emotional expressions. But I would suggest that Taggard's comments are also a function of the changing literally academy and this historical moment. In the 1930s, Taggard left Bohemia for an academic position. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931, and served on the faculty of Mount Holy Oak, Bennington, and Sarah Lawrence Colleges. From which she published an anthology titled, Circumference: Varieties of Metaphysical Verse, 1456-1928. And the feminist biography, The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson. Taggard would secure this tenuous critical authority, in part, by distancing herself from a women's poetic tradition that was falling quickly out of fashion. [MUSIC]
