According to Hannah Roche, poor old Amy Lowell has been rather hard done by and her poetry unfairly neglected by readers and critics in the 21st century.
For according to Dr. Roche, not one but two of the great white males of English literature - Mssrs. Lawrence and Hughes - both borrowed imagery and ideas from her work. The latter in his much-celebrated poem Pike and the former in the sapphic bathing scene in chapter XII of his astonishing novel The Rainbow.
For according to Dr. Roche, not one but two of the great white males of English literature - Mssrs. Lawrence and Hughes - both borrowed imagery and ideas from her work. The latter in his much-celebrated poem Pike and the former in the sapphic bathing scene in chapter XII of his astonishing novel The Rainbow.
It's an interesting argument and anything that stimulates renewed interest in Lowell and her writing is to be welcomed. Having said that, I don't find the textual evidence Roche supplies in support of her argument particularly persuasive. There are certain similarities and echoes, but to speak of influence and an unacknowledged debt is, I think, going too far.
(Nor do I believe her being an overweight lesbian is the reason Lowell isn't considered a major figure within modernism; it has more to do with the fact that her talent was pretty slender.)
Besides, even if Hughes and Lawrence - who exchanged many letters with Lowell* and considered her to be a very good friend, if a very bad poet - did plagiarise from Amy (and Roche is careful not to use this word and make such a strong claim), so what?
To paraphrase Picasso, whilst good poets, like good painters, politely borrow from others and subscribe to a bourgeois etiquette founded upon property rights, great artists steal and make ideas their own without apology.
The critic Richard Ellmann sums this up nicely in a passage written in 1967:
(Nor do I believe her being an overweight lesbian is the reason Lowell isn't considered a major figure within modernism; it has more to do with the fact that her talent was pretty slender.)
Besides, even if Hughes and Lawrence - who exchanged many letters with Lowell* and considered her to be a very good friend, if a very bad poet - did plagiarise from Amy (and Roche is careful not to use this word and make such a strong claim), so what?
To paraphrase Picasso, whilst good poets, like good painters, politely borrow from others and subscribe to a bourgeois etiquette founded upon property rights, great artists steal and make ideas their own without apology.
The critic Richard Ellmann sums this up nicely in a passage written in 1967:
"That writers flow into each other like waves, gently rather than tidally, is one of those decorous myths we impose upon a high-handed, even brutal procedure. The behaviour, while not invariably marked by bad temper, is less polite. Writers move upon other writers not as genial successors but as violent expropriators, knocking down established boundaries to seize by the force of youth, or of age, what they require. They do not borrow, they override."
Notes
Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden (Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 3.
Hannah Roche, 'Myths, Legends, and Apparitional Lesbians: Amy Lowell's Haunting Modernism', Modernist Cultures, (Sept. 2017). Click here to go to the University of York Research Database from where you can download a copy of this essay.
For a journalistic spin on this issue, see Alison Flood's article 'Amy Lowell: Ted Hughes and D. H. Lawrence "owe unacknowledged debt" to "uncelebrated" poet', The Guardian, (29 Nov. 2108). Click here to read online.
*See: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence and Amy Lowell, 1914-1925, ed. E. Claire Healy and Keith Cushman, (Black Sparrow Press, 1985).
Thanks to Dr. Maria Thanassa for providing me with the quotation from Ellmann's book.
For a journalistic spin on this issue, see Alison Flood's article 'Amy Lowell: Ted Hughes and D. H. Lawrence "owe unacknowledged debt" to "uncelebrated" poet', The Guardian, (29 Nov. 2108). Click here to read online.
*See: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence and Amy Lowell, 1914-1925, ed. E. Claire Healy and Keith Cushman, (Black Sparrow Press, 1985).
Thanks to Dr. Maria Thanassa for providing me with the quotation from Ellmann's book.
An interesting take as always, but I'd like to see a more direct analysis of Roche's claims. Do you think there's substance to her claims based on the specific words/passages she mentions in her paper? Lawrence was quite happy to include real people in his novels and fictionalise them for his artistic needs - no matter what the effect or how this made them feel, but to take someone's ideas or words is a different level of intent. It is, as Ellmann writes, to 'overide'. For the victim, it's nothing short of drowning. A follow up blog perhaps? If nothing else I'm really keen to give their letters a closer reading to see if there is any indication of this issue. Finally, if Lawrence didn't care much for Lowell's talent as a poet, as you suggest, I suspect he would have seen her taking her ideas as fair game and a form of 'rebirth'. The phoenix has many shapes and forms...
ReplyDeleteThanks James ...
DeleteNot sure this is the best place to stage the "direct analysis" you call for; or that I'm the best person to carry out such. Readers interested in Roche's argument can find textual comparisons between Lowell, Lawrence and Hughes in her essay (to which I provided a link).
My view is that the concept of intertextuality is far more radical than is often understood; that every text is an intertext whose meaning is shaped by every other text, rendering notions of originality and ownership redundant.
Every work that has ever been written is already contained in the 26 letters of the alphabet and all an author does is rearrange the order on the page (like one of those million monkeys sat before a million typewriters). Perhaps a debt of gratitude is owing to the Phoenicians and ancient Greeks, but beyond that, I don't see that thanks (or apologies) are ever owing between writers.
And, for the record, I refuse to consider art in the context of victimhood culture ...