Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Modernist poetry in the United States developed in large part in a context of feminist and socialist political activism. During the 1910s, Greenwich Village was the undisputed American center for the innovative arts. The Village was home to Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery and his magazine Camera Work, The Ferrer Modern School, meeting places of the Provincetown and the Washington Square Players, the feminist discussion club Heterodoxy, several literary and artistic salons, and the offices of The Masses, Mother Earth, Woman Rebel, The Glebe, Trend, Rogue, Bruno's Weekly, The Chimaera, Others, The Little Review, and other little magazines. Poets living in the Village during this early radical period included Hart Crane, Alfred Kreymborg, Mina Loy, Edna St Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Lola Ridge, Wallace Stevens, Genevieve Taggard, William Carlos Williams (briefly), and Elinor Wylie. This interactive community of writers, artists, and political radicals like Emma Goldman moved New York's modernism away from purely aesthetic concerns, foundationally linking social and gender politics with art. American modernism, in this regard, was radically different from European avant-garde movements and from ways it has been conventionally portrayed, as both antipolitical and politically conservative.In Chicago women were very active in the innovative literary scene. There Harriet Monroe and ... log in or subscribe to read full text