A Landscape for Early 20th-Century Poetry: Pastorals of the Little-Magazine Avant-Garde

This article considers four poems published in the little magazine The Dial in its 71st volume, which appeared in 1921. A forum for the transnational avantgarde at the time and home to Modernist poets such as Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound and others, this magazine provides insight into the main concern...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPresses universitaires de Strasbourg no. 54; pp. 39 - 53
Main Author Käck, Elin
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Recherches anglaises et nord-américaines 2021
Subjects
eco-criticism
Hart Crane
Malcolm Cowley
Marianne Moore
Maxwell Bodenheim
éco-critique
eco-criticism
Moore (Marianne)
Hart Crane
Cowley (Malcolm)
Bodenheim (Maxwell)
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Summary:This article considers four poems published in the little magazine The Dial in its 71st volume, which appeared in 1921. A forum for the transnational avantgarde at the time and home to Modernist poets such as Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound and others, this magazine provides insight into the main concerns of the writers of its time and constitutes a space where the relationship between Modernism, pastoral, landscape, and geology is explored. Marianne Moore’s “A Graveyard,” Hart Crane’s “Pastorale,” Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Summer Evening: New York Subway Station,” and Malcolm Cowley’s “Mountain Valley” will be discussed together with both historical and more recent theories on landscape and aesthetics, nature, and the Anthropocene, including Alexander Blok’s response to the 1908 earthquake in Sicily and Ludwig Mediner’s 1914 call for new forms and techniques for the representation of urban environments in the visual arts. Placing these poems in a conversation with both contemporaneous and more recent theories on landscape and aesthetics, nature, and the Anthropocene makes it possible to discern how these poets’ awareness of the aestheticizing practices involved in representations of nature informs their work, and to understand how they work to destabilize simplistic nature-culture dichotomies.
ISSN:0557-6989
3000-4411
DOI:10.4000/ranam.800