the poetry of Alice Meynell and its literary contexts, 1875-1923

194 Pages·2017·1.76 MB·English

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LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School
2013
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Jared Hromadka
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
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Hromadka, Jared, "The laws of verse : the poetry of Alice Meynell and its literary contexts, 1875-1923"
(2013). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1246.
https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1246
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THE LAWS OF VERSE:
THE POETRY OF ALICE MEYNELL
AND ITS LITERARY CONTEXTS, 1875-1923

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the
Louisiana State University and
Agricultural and Mechanical College
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

in

The Department of English

by
Jared Hromadka
B.A., Louisiana State University, 2004
M.A., Auburn University, 2006
August 2013
for S. M. and T.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks is due to Dr. Elsie Michie, without whose encouragement and guidance
this project would have been impossible.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................................................iii

LIST OF FIGURES.........................................................................................................................v

ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................................vi

INTRODUCTION: MEYNELL AMONG THE MODERNS.........................................................1

CHAPTER 1
“THE LAWS OF VERSE”:
RHYTHM AND SUBMISSION IN MEYNELL’S LAST POEMS..............................................36

CHAPTER 2
THE EXPRESSIONAL AND THE FEMININE:
MEYNELL’S EARLY POETRY..................................................................................................75

CHAPTER 3
USES OF METER ACROSS THE TURN OF THE CENTURY:
MARY COLERIDGE, MEYNELL, POUND.............................................................................110

CONCLUSION: “SUMMER IN ENGLAND, 1914”.................................................................160

BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................178

VITA............................................................................................................................................187

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LIST OF FIGURES

1. List of blasts from BLAST No. 1..................................................................................................2

2. Alice Meynell, frontispiece to Alice Meynell: A Memoir by Viola Meynell.............................10

3. Alice Meynell, frontispiece to The Poems of Alice Meynell: Complete Edition.......................11

4. Gustave Doré, The Transfiguration.........................................................................................166

5. Icon with the Transfiguration, mosaic, late twelfth century....................................................167

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ABSTRACT

Like other poets who came to prominence in the nineteenth century but continued to
publish well into the twentieth, Alice Meynell’s work has come gradually to be occluded by the
work of her younger contemporaries, among them T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. The available
scholarship records this process of occlusion in the form of an almost complete absence of
serious discourse on Meynell’s work following her death in 1922 until the beginnings of a
modest revival of interest in her writing beginning in the 1980s. This study aims to address that
gap by giving a more complete account of Meynell’s stylistic development and technical
procedures in the field of poetry than has heretofore been available. Examining select specimens
of Meynell’s verse in the light of prosodic theories current at the time both she and her
Modernist contemporaries were writing further allows us to see, in place of the familiar narrative
of Modernism’s revolutionary break with its immediate literary past, continuities between
nineteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of what meter is and how it works. Rather than
attempting to catalogue the work of writers producing metrical poetry in the early twentieth
century, this project looks to the work of one poet and relies on intensive analysis of only a few
of her poems to trace out a literary genealogy between figures who all but never meet in critical
discourse. This approach demonstrates how Meynell’s poetry, especially in its engagement with
prosodic convention, provides a bridge which can link the work, on the one hand, of Victorians
like Coventry Patmore and Mary Elizabeth Coleridge to, on the other hand, major architects of
Modernism like Pound and Eliot, generating, ultimately, a new and alternative perspective for
interpreting poetry as a cultural practice in one of its most contested historical phases.
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INTRODUCTION: MEYNELL AMONG THE MODERNS
Behind the great, black capitals of the title running diagonally across its fuchsia cover,
the first issue of BLAST, dated June 20, 1914, proclaims, “Long live the great art vortex sprung
up in the centre of this town!” (Lewis, BLAST 1 7).1 The new magazine’s appearance had been
advertised in The Egoist for April 1 with the slogan, “END OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA”
(Weaver 140). Despite its apocalyptic self-promotion, BLAST would not live past its second
issue, but the first, in particular, remains a crucial statement of the high Modernist aesthetic just
beginning to emerge in London on the eve of the First World War. BLAST No. 1 makes its
statement most explicitly and forcefully in the series of manifestoes comprising its first thirty
pages and signed by its major contributors, among them the magazine’s editor, Wyndham Lewis,
and the twenty-eight-year-old poet Ezra Pound. These manifestoes orient BLAST’s aesthetic
within the literary and cultural milieu of 1914 by means of long and typographically striking lists
of persons, things, and ideas arranged beneath the contrasting headings, “BLAST” and
“BLESS.” The first item to be blasted is London’s “CLIMATE,” a “DISMAL SYMBOL,” a
“VICTORIAN VAMPIRE” that “sucks the TOWN’S heart” (11). Next comes “FRANCE” with
her “PARISIAN PAROCHIALISM” (13) and, then, “THE BRITANNIC ÆSTHETE” (15),
“HUMOUR” (17), and “SPORT.” And on the last page of this rhapsody of blasts, in a cloud of
names presented as almost afterthoughts in smaller type and no particular order, halfway down
the length of the page from “Codliver Oil,” we find “Clan Meynell” (21) (see fig. 1).
A reader of 1914 would probably understand the clan to include its patriarch, Wilfrid
Meynell (1852–1948), a writer and influential publisher of magazines intended primarily for
English Roman Catholics. Wilfrid’s son Francis (1891–1975) makes a likely candidate for
blasting as well: not only was he the proprietor of a private press issuing rather precious editions
of literary works, but he had also recently gained a certain notoriety for “left-wing opinions” and
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Figure 1. List of blasts from BLAST No. 1 (ed. Wyndham Lewis; London: John Lane, 1914; 21).

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consorting with socialists (Badeni 231-232). Though Francis might seem like a sympathetic
figure for the avowedly revolutionary project proselytized in BLAST, the magazine consistently
refuses to align itself with revolutionary politics, preferring instead to make its address “TO THE
INDIVIDUAL” (Lewis, BLAST 1 7). Its most overtly political statement is a patronizing appeal
“TO SUFFRAGETTES” to “stick to what you understand” and “LEAVE ART ALONE,
BRAVE COMRADES!” (151–152). Francis would go on to draw public ire for claiming a
conscientious objection to serving in the war, and he would tangle with Pound over the title of
the Catholic Anthology 1914-1915, Pound’s collection of works from leading Modernist poets
(Moody 280). But, undoubtedly, the most prominent member of Clan Meynell would have been
Wilfrid’s wife and Francis’s mother, the poet, journalist—and suffragist—Alice.
The matron of Clan Meynell’s implicit inclusion among the names of the blasted serves
Lewis’s manifesto as a signal of what the London Vortex most assuredly ought not to be. As
Alice Thompson, this one among the objects of BLAST’s derision had authored, in 1875, a
volume of poems titled Preludes that early garnered praise for its sensitivity and delicacy of
expression. No less a Victorian tastemaker than Ruskin referred to a few of the selections as “the
finest things I’ve seen or felt in modern verse” (qtd. in Badeni 52). After her marriage in 1877,
Alice Meynell would come to enjoy a considerable reputation as a journalist, political activist,
and writer of prose essays. Her next independent volume of poetry, Later Poems, would not be
published until 1901. Though Later Poems exhibits a formal complexity, emotional reticence,
and, sometimes, moral ambiguity entirely unlike the verbose and effusive lyrics and dramatic
monologues in Preludes, Meynell’s reputation as a poet would continue to be conditioned by
responses to the earlier work, and, as the years of her hiatus from poetry between 1875 and 1901
wore on, Meynell came increasingly to be invoked as the face of a bourgeois and old-fashioned
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