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Mock Modernism: An Anthology of Parodies, Travesties, Frauds, 1910-1935
How was the modernist movement understood by the general public when it was first emerging? This question can be addressed by looking at how modernist literature and art were interpreted by journalists in daily newspapers, mainstream magazines like Punch and Vanity Fair, and literary magazines. In the earliest decades of the movement – before modernist artists were considered important, and before modernism’s meaning was clearly understood – many of these interpretations took the form of parodies.

Mock Modernism is an anthology of these amusing pieces, the overwhelming majority of which have not been in print since the first decades of the twentieth century. They include Max Beerbohm’s send-up of Henry James; J.C. Squire’s account of how a poet, writing deliberately incomprehensible poetry as a hoax, became the poet laureate of the British Bolshevist Revolution; and the Chicago Record-Herald’s account of some art students’ “trial” of Henri Matisse for “crimes against anatomy.” An introduction and headnotes by Leonard Diepeveen highlight the usefulness of these pieces for comprehending media and public perceptions of a form of art that would later develop an almost unassailable power.

1111744403
Mock Modernism: An Anthology of Parodies, Travesties, Frauds, 1910-1935
How was the modernist movement understood by the general public when it was first emerging? This question can be addressed by looking at how modernist literature and art were interpreted by journalists in daily newspapers, mainstream magazines like Punch and Vanity Fair, and literary magazines. In the earliest decades of the movement – before modernist artists were considered important, and before modernism’s meaning was clearly understood – many of these interpretations took the form of parodies.

Mock Modernism is an anthology of these amusing pieces, the overwhelming majority of which have not been in print since the first decades of the twentieth century. They include Max Beerbohm’s send-up of Henry James; J.C. Squire’s account of how a poet, writing deliberately incomprehensible poetry as a hoax, became the poet laureate of the British Bolshevist Revolution; and the Chicago Record-Herald’s account of some art students’ “trial” of Henri Matisse for “crimes against anatomy.” An introduction and headnotes by Leonard Diepeveen highlight the usefulness of these pieces for comprehending media and public perceptions of a form of art that would later develop an almost unassailable power.

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Overview

How was the modernist movement understood by the general public when it was first emerging? This question can be addressed by looking at how modernist literature and art were interpreted by journalists in daily newspapers, mainstream magazines like Punch and Vanity Fair, and literary magazines. In the earliest decades of the movement – before modernist artists were considered important, and before modernism’s meaning was clearly understood – many of these interpretations took the form of parodies.

Mock Modernism is an anthology of these amusing pieces, the overwhelming majority of which have not been in print since the first decades of the twentieth century. They include Max Beerbohm’s send-up of Henry James; J.C. Squire’s account of how a poet, writing deliberately incomprehensible poetry as a hoax, became the poet laureate of the British Bolshevist Revolution; and the Chicago Record-Herald’s account of some art students’ “trial” of Henri Matisse for “crimes against anatomy.” An introduction and headnotes by Leonard Diepeveen highlight the usefulness of these pieces for comprehending media and public perceptions of a form of art that would later develop an almost unassailable power.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781442644823
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Publication date: 03/06/2014
Pages: 448
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Leonard Diepeveen is a professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Preface

Part I

Literary Targets

I. Poetry

Free verse

  • Squire, John Collings.
  • "The Man Who Wrote Free Verse." The London Mercury June 1924: 127-37. Rpt. in The Grub Street Nights Entertainments. London: Hodder and Stoughton 1924 and New York: George H. Doran Company, 1924. 239-64.
  • "If a Very New Poet had Written ‘The Lotus-Eaters.’" Tricks of the Trade. London: Martin Secker, 1917. 65-67.
  • "The Poetry of Broken Shackles." Collected Parodies. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1921. 180-81.
  • Randall, Alfred E. "Experiment in Free Rhythm." The New Age 6.18 (March 3, 1910): 414.
  • Seymour, William Kean. "Thirty-four: A Very New Poet: To Be or Not to Be." A Jackdaw in Georgia, a Book of Polite Parodies and Imitations of Contemporaries and Others. London: J. C. Wilson, 1923. 76-77.
  • Fitzgerald, F. Scott. From This Side of Paradise. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920. 232-34.
  • Taylor, Bert Leston. "The Muse Untrammeled." A Penny Whistle: Together with the Babette Ballads. New York: Knopf, 1921. 42-43.
  • Adams, Franklin P. "To a Vers Librist." Something Else Again. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920. 43-44.

    • Prose Poetry

  • Squire, John Collings. "The Simple Prose-Poem." From Collected Parodies, 185.
  • Golden, Sue [pseud] "The Reader Critic. So This is Art!" Little Review 3.8 (Jan 1917): 27.
  • Untermeyer, Louis. "Amy Lowell, Brushing up Her Polyphonic Prose, Declaims Fortitude." —-and Other Poets. New York: H. Holt and Company, 1916. 62-63.

    • Imagism

  • Massingham, Harold. "Recipe for an Imagist Poem." Form 1.1 (April 1916): 41.
  • Upward, Allen. "Correspondence. The Discarded Imagist." Egoist 2.6 (June 1, 1915): 98.
  • Holley, Horace. "Correspondence. Imagists." The Egoist 1.12 (1914): 236.
  • "Imagiste Love Lines." Columbia Jester. Rpt. in Life January 18 1917: 69.
  • Bechhöfer, C.E. "Pastiche." The New Age 15.20 (1914): 481.
  • Aldington, Richard. "Penultimate Poetry." The Egoist 1.2 (1914): 36.
  • Morgan, Emanuel [Witter Bynner]. "Spectrum. ‘Opus 96’." The Little Review 4.3 (1917): 25.
  • "Pathology des Dommagistes." The Chapbook. 23 (May 1921): 21-24.

    • Edgar Lee Masters

  • Savage, Henry. From A Long Spoon and the Devil. Being Fish Quaint and Queer from the Spoon River, the Property of Edgar Lee Masters, Poached by H. Savage. London: Cecil Palmer, 1922.
  • Hoffenstein, Samuel. "Birdie McReynolds." Year in, You’re Out. New York: H. Liveright, 1930. 164-65.
  • Seymour, William Kean. "A Spoon River Casualty." In Parrot Pie. Parodies and Imitations of Contemporaries. London: G. G. Harrap & Co., 1927. 145.
  • Adams, Franklin P. "The Conning Tower." In Bliss Perry, A Study of Poetry. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920. 208-09.

    • The Sitwells

  • Knox, Edmund George Valpy. "Spokes: Or an Ode on Ebullitions of Eccentricity that Ought to have been Overcome in Early Childhood." Parodies Regained. London: Methuen & Co., 1921. 31-34.
  • Seymour, William Kean. Three Parodies of Edith Sitwell. A Jackdaw in Georgia, a Book of Polite Parodies and Imitations of Contemporaries and Others. London: J. C. Wilson, 1923. 1-7.

    • T. S. Eliot

  • Seymour, William Kean. "The Love-Song of J. Ernest Odol." Parrot Pie. Parodies and Imitations of Contemporaries. London: G. G. Harrap & Co., 1927. 43-45.
  • Untermeyer, Louis. "Einstein among the Coffee-Cups." Heavens. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922. 147.
  • Scott, F. R. "Sweeney Graduates." McGilliad 1.2 (Apr. 1930): 9.
  • Palmer, Herbert. From Cinder Thursday. London: Ernest Benn, 1931. 11-19.
  • Hoffenstein, Samuel. "The Moist Land—A Parody of Eliot’s Poem." New York Tribune, Sunday 28 January 1923, sec. VI, p. 24. Rpt. in Samuel Hoffenstein, Year in, You’re Out. New York: H. Liveright, 1930. 107-117.
  • Ward, Christopher. "The Dry Land." The Triumph of the Nut, and Other Parodies. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1923. 170-78.

    • Ezra Pound

  • Untermeyer, Louis. "Ezra Pound." —-and Other Poets. New York: H. Holt and Company, 1916. 55-57.
  • Bechhöfer, C.E. "More Contemporaries. A Poem of Milton." The New Age 15.13 (1914): 308.
  • Knox, Edmund George Valpy. "The Rovers." Parodies Regained. London: Methuen & Co., 1921. 87-91.
  • Seymour, William Kean. "Twenty-nine: Mr. Ezra Pound. Boat Race." A Jackdaw in Georgia, a Book of Polite Parodies and Imitations of Contemporaries and Others. London: J. C. Wilson, 1923. 69.
  • Taylor, Bert Leston. "A Line-O’-Type Or Two." Chicago Daily Tribune, April 18 1913: 8.
  • R., W.. "Contemporomania. From 'A Line-O'-Type or Two.'" Chicago Daily Tribune April 11 1913: 6.

    • Others

  • Ford Madox Ford. "Literary Portraits—XXXIX. Mr W. B. Yeats and his New Poems." Outlook, 33 (6 June 1914), 783-84.
  • E. E. From "The New England Poets See a Ghost" New Yorker (28 March 1925), 16.
  • Crane, Hart. "America’s Plutonic Ecstasies" and "OF AN EVENING PULLING OFF A LITTLE EXPERIENCE (with the english language)" 1923. Complete Poems of Hart Crane. Ed. Marc Simon. New York: Liveright, 2000. 157, 179-80.
  • Widdemer, Margaret. Selections from A Tree with a Bird in It: A Symposium of Contemporary American Poets on Being Shown a Pear-Tree on Which Sat a Grackle. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922.

    • II. Fiction

  • J. G. T. [Thurber, James]. "More Authors Cover the Snyder Trial." The New Yorker 7 May 1927: 69.
  • White, E.B. "Is a Train." The New Yorker 27 October 1934: 26.
  • K. D. "When Helen Furr Got Gay with Harold Moos: A Narrative Written in the Now Popular Manner of Gertrude Stein." Vanity Fair October, 1923: 37.
  • Gibbons, Stella. Cold Comfort Farm. London, New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1932. 31-34, 38-39, 43-44, 92-93.
  • Parker, Dorothy. "Once More Mother Hubbard—As Told by F. Scott Fitzgerald." Life, July 7, 1921.
  • Ward, Christopher.
  • "Paradise be Damned!" The Triumph of the Nut, and Other Parodies. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1923. 105-118.
  • "The Blind Booby." Twisted Tales. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1924. 55-64.
  • "A Loose Lady." Twisted Tales. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1924. 65-74.
  • Knox, Edmund George Valpy. "Mystery" In Apes and Parrots: An Anthology of Parodies Collected by J.C. Squire. Cambridge: Washburn and Thomas, 1929. 261-66.
  • Rose MacAulay. "Week-end at the Hoppers." In Parody Party. Ed. Leonard Russell. London: Hutchinson, 1936. 19-35.
  • Seymour, William Kean. "Peter Gink." In Parrot Pie. Parodies and Imitations of Contemporaries. London: G. G. Harrap & Co., 1927. 148-53.
  • Beerbohm, Max. "The Mote in the Middle Distance." A Christmas Garland. London: William Heinemann, 1912. 3-10.
  • Squire, J.C. "If Henry James had Written the Church Catechism." From Tricks of the Trade. 68-70. Rpt. In Collected Parodies, 91-93.
  • Miles, Susan. "Wednesday or Thursday." The London Mercury 11:65 (March 1925): 475-78.

    • Part II

    Parodic Modes

    I. Verse Commentary

  • Marquis, Don.
  • "The Sun Dial: To G. S. And E. P." New York Evening Sun, October 3 1914.
  • "The Sun Dial: The Golden Group." New York Sun, March 26 1915. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
  • Crane, Carl. "The Reader Writes." Rpt. in What Cheer: An Anthology of American and British Humorous and Witty Verse Gathered, Sifted, and Salted, with an Introduction by David McCord. Ed. David McCord. New York: Coward-McCann, 1945. 189-90.
  • Adams, Franklin P. "To the Neo-Pseudoists." By and Large. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1914. 84.
  • Samuel, Horace B. "Futurist Dress." The New Age 15.7 (1914): 152.
  • Taylor, Bert Leston. "A Line-O’-Type or Two." Chicago Daily Tribune March 26 1913: 6.

    • II. Manifestos

  • Knish, Anne, and Emanuel Morgan [Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Bynner].
  • "Preface." Spectra. A Book of Poetic Experiments. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1916. ix-xii.
  • "The Spectric School of Poetry." The Forum June 1916: 675-77.
  • Meyer, Ernest L. "An Introduction to Ultra-Violet Poetry." Wisconsin Literary Magazine (January 1917): 111. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
  • Cranks, 1921. An Anthology. Compiled by Obert, Sebert, and Ethelberta Standstill [pseud.]. London: A. H. Stockwell, 1921.
  • Harrison, Harold B. "Pastiche. Initial Manifesto of the ‘Fatuists’ to the Public." The New Age 10.22 (1912): 524.
  • Marquis, Don. "Fothergil Finch, The Poet of Revolt." Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916. 24-28.
  • Triboulet, John. "Pastiche. Euphemisme; or, What You Will." The New Age 16.16 (1915): 434.

    • III. Modernist Methodologies

  • Squire, John Collings.
  • "Short Cuts to Helicon." Life and Letters. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1920. 26-31.
  • "Editorial Notes." The London Mercury August 1928: 337-46.
  • Untermeyer, Louis. "The Manufacture of Verse." Heavens. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922. 97-105.
  • "Modern Masterpieces." Chicago News, April 11 1923.
  • Sherman, Stuart Pratt. Points of View. New York: Scribner’s, 1924.
  • Eastman, Max. The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931. 76-78.
  • Lyall, Mary Mills. From The Cubies’ ABC. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913.
  • Harrison, Harold B.
  • "Letters to the Editor. Cubism." The New Age 14.21 (1912): 671
  • "Letters to the Editor. Una Picarsita." The New Age 10.14 (1912): 334.
  • "Letters to the Editor. Picasso." The New Age 10.9 (1911): 212-13.
  • "Notes and Comment: Cubist Literature." [unknown] 1913? Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
  • Taylor, Bert Leston. "A Line-O’-Type or Two." Chicago Daily Tribune March 20, 1913: 6.
  • Bribby. "The Original Cubist." Chicago Daily Tribune. March 20, 1913, page 1.
  • Taylor, Bert Leston. "A Line-O’-Type or Two."
  • Chicago Daily Tribune March 25, 1913: 8.
  • Chicago Daily Tribune April 5, 1913: 8.
  • Street, Julian. From ""Why I Became a Cubist." Everybody's Magazine March 1913: 814-25.
  • Jerdanowitch, Pavel [Paul Jordan Smith]. Disumbrationism. Paul Jordan-Smith Papers, UCLA Library of Special Collections, Box 42.
  • Exaltation ["Yes, We Have No Bananas"]
  • Aspiration
  • Capitulation
  • Selver, P. "Short Cuts to Literary Success." The New Age 18.9 (1915): 205-07.
  • A., E. L. "Letters to the Editor. Post-Impressionism." The New Age 8.7 (1910): 166.
  • Reynolds, Frank. "Post-Impressionist Expressions." The Illustrated London News, December 3, 1910: 883.
  • Adams, Franklin P. "The Conning Tower." Chicago Evening Post April 9. 1913: 8.
  • Marquis, Don. From "Voke Easely and his New Art." Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916. 84-88.
  • Monro, Harold. From Some Contemporary Poets. London: Leonard Parsons, 1920. 9-16.
  • Knox, Edmund George Valpy. "The Trotsky Touch." A Little Loot. London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1920. 176-180.
  • Ernest Boyd. From "Aesthete: Model 1924." The American Mercury, January 1924. 51-56.

    • IV. Modernist Criticism

  • "Cubist Art Is Explained Clearly by a Post-Impressionist Writer." Chicago Inter-Ocean, Mar 21, 1913. 5.
  • Taylor, Bert Leston. "A Line-O’-Type or Two." Chicago Daily Tribune March 28. 1913: 8.
  • Bechhöfer, C.E.
  • "Pastiche. More Contemporaries." The New Age 15.4 (1914): 92.
  • Brookfarmer, Charles E. [C. E. Bechhöfer]. "Futile-Ism. Or, All Cackle and No Osses. (Report of Lectures on "Vital English Art," by Messrs. Marinetti and C, R. W. Nevinson, Dore Galleries, Friday Evening, June 12.)."

What People are Saying About This

Martha C. Carpentier

“It is a delight to meet such characters as J.C. Squire, Edmund George Valpy Knox, and Don Marquis, as well as to see more familiar writers such as Louis Untermeyer and Ford Madox Ford poke fun at the pretenses of their contemporaries.”

Marsha Bryant

“Mock Modernism is fascinating, and sometimes even delightful. I have never seen anything quite like it.”

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