Mapping the Modernists Projects:::By Autumn, Erin, Charles, Kenzie, and Josh

You can jump directly to the map by clicking here. The map will open in Google Maps, but we recommend that you view the map in Google Earth. If you hover your cursor above the “Satellite” icon in the upper-right corner of the map, you can toggle between the Google Earth view and the traditional map. If you would like some background on what the transnational signifies first, please continue reading below.

Jahan Ramazani’s essay “A Transnational Poetics,” has significantly framed our mapping project, spurring us to explore the lives of our ten poets by tracing their movements from one location to the next.  As his essay points out, the study of literary history has largely glossed over transnationalism; therefore a reshaping of the way we study is required to fully understand these on-the-move poets.  Typically, students encounter poets’ biographies which consist of brief descriptions of their birth, work history, major publications and death.  Poets are traditionally defined as “American” or “British” and studied as such, with their transnationalism reduced to footnotes and asides.  Although, according to Ramazani, “humanistic disciplines must draw artificial boundaries to delimit their object of study,” this practice of boundary-drawing is problematic (332).  It reduces the understanding of the poet’s identity and eliminates the recognition of myriad influences that exist outside of one’s birth and death places.

Because of this long-standing tradition, there is a need for a re-moving of boundaries to include meta-homeland influences that had an impact on these people.   This would allow transnationalism to be pulled from the background to the forefront of study, granting it the recognition it rightly deserves.  As Ramazani argues, “Globe-traversing influences…have arguably styled and shaped poetry in English from the modernist era to the present” (332).  These influences extend beyond the physical location of the poet to encounters with influential entities from other cultures such as Eliot’s interest in South Asian cultural materials and Pound’s Imagism’s “indebtedness to East Asian models” (336).

Claude McKay as a constable in Kingston in 1909

Recognizing these influences allows one to reposition their viewpoint to one that allows the revelation of “unexpected affinities” such as that between Eliot and McKay.  Though both modernist poets, based on biography alone one may not realize what they have in common.  For Ramazani, “taking a transnational approach allows one to see that both poets “redefined cultural identities in migration, worked in various Englishes, [and] reimagined homelands” (340).  It is exactly what Ramazani terms these “cross-cultural…experiential and textual” (Ramazani 342) relationships that one can expect to gain from a transnational approach that may not be accessible

Langston Hughes

through other approaches.  “Poetries that seem native or provincial or local often turn out to be vitally exogamous,” Ramazani concludes (350).  Transnationalism untangles original boundaries in order to make new, previously hidden connections.

A transnational approach does not aim to remove an individual’s ethnicity or nationality from their study.  It instead recognizes both these influences while also including the various outside factors that created poets who were “agglomerations of exceedingly complex origin” (353).  Along with this recognition comes the realization that trying to pin down where one is “from” is problematic.  One approach, Ramazani suggests, is to say “you’re from where you had an influence” (344) such as the case with McKay and his profound significance on the Harlem Renaissance when he actually lived elsewhere.  Even this approach, however, does not serve to define McKay’s identity.  Broadening “umbrellas” such as modernism, instead of using terms like “from” or “was influential in,” is also problematic because it can “whitewash differences and tensions” (353) that should not be looked over.  Ramazani seems to advocate an avoidance of pinning down these

Claude McKay

transnational poets to one particular place and instead recognizes these poets’ whereabouts and influences in their entirety as a means of a more complex identification.  One cannot simply be reduced to “Southern” or “American” when their experiences and influences extended so far beyond borders of any region or country.

Thus, in order to achieve the aims of recognizing transnationalism, we must move away from a “mononational paradigm” (354).  This will enable a deeper, and perhaps new, understanding of the poets and poems we study by encouraging detection of, and connections with, the influences that existed outside traditional boundaries.  As Ramazani so poignantly states: “To trace complex intercultural relationships…without erasing earlier boundaries…is to begin to explain and vivify how poetry helps newness enter the world” (354).

Through our mapping project, we have tried to employ the ideals of transnational identification.  We hope this will help us (and others) garner a more thorough understanding of who our poets were and what shaped them.  The term transnationalism is used to describe the interconnectivity between people and the places and cultural aspects that help develop many different perspectives. In our project, we explored many different poets and their movements across the globe to evaluate how a transnational lifestyle might affect their literary works. Most poets are classified by a singular national identity, regardless of where they spent their time or wrote their poems because they tend to write about circumstances (political, economic, religious, etc.) that are relevant to the lives that they maintained in this nation.

An essay written by Moira Casey entitled “If Love’s A Country” explains, “transnational theory provides a useful framework for understanding both the central conflict of a novel and many of its themes and motifs. “Transnationalism” is a term predominantly employed by cultural anthropologists to theorize processes of migration and global relationships in the late twentieth-and early twenty-first centuries, but it has also been used in connection with culture and the imaginative products of cultures. Transnationalism might be understood as a “culture-oriented” counterpart to the largely economic concept of globalization.” These ideas emphasize that by branching out and attempting to grasp knowledge of other nation’s culture, we not only gain clarity of our own identity, but also obtain awareness and sympathy for a wider audience.

Another writer that looks into transnationalism through poetry is Roland Vegso. In his essay “The Mother Tongues of Modernity: Modernism, Transnationalism, Translation” Vegso delves into the universality of literature. His introduction states, “The relation of modernism to immigrant literatures should not be conceived in terms of an opposition between universalistic and particular discourses. Rather, we should explore what can be called a modernist transnationalism based on a general universalist argument.”… “The readings (of Ezra Pound and Anzia Yezierska) show that the critical discourses of these two authors are structured by a belief in universalism while showing opposite possibilities, both generated by modernist transnationalism.” To Vegso, the ultimate sense of universality comes from a “mother language,” one in which every nation would speak and fully understand. He brings forth the imagery of the American ghetto in the early 20th Century when immigration was rampant and The United States brought together people from every country in hopes of a better life.  The ghetto became the American archetype in which “every American is an immigrant”.  From this eclectic group, a sense of unity emerged and Vegso suggests that this is the ultimate sense of “high modernity.”

As mentioned before, the main issue with modernist transnationalism was with the impossibility of unity without an international language. Literature is broken down into two main components, form and content. With the many implications behind words and rhythm, translation of intent becomes almost obsolete in poetry. Vegso, while exploring Ezra Pound’s theories on translation says “while translation “internationalizes” the national canon, the universality of the Tradition cannot exist without a nationalist residue.” Vegso expands Pound’s research further by explaining the juxtaposition of sound and meaning. “A foreign language, in its meaninglessness, becomes a pure sequence of sounds for those who do not understand it. Similarly, the native tongue, in its semantic proximity, always seems to be on the verge of eliminating its own sounds by the overwhelming presence of meaning.” It seems that he is suggesting that meaning (the imagine created for the imagination) is translatable, but sound (for the ear) is not. Literature and language are the basis of communication between individuals, but also a blatant reminder of national differences. Pound states, “this communication is not leveling, it is not an elimination of differences. It is a recognition of differences, of the right of differences to exist, of interests in finding things different”.

The transnational movement has been argued and embraced from every direction; there are those who see unity as more broad than their own countries boundaries and those who do not. Vegso explains the idea of modernist transnationalism very well at the end of his essay: “we should understand modernist transnationalism as a form of universalism. It differs from classic nationalism in that the latter conceieved of the pure nation as a universal in itself. Modernist nationalism, however, already introduces the idea that the nation is the mere representation of true universality. Transnationalism however, goes one step further. It designates the idea that anything that relates to the idea of “the nation” comes about on the primary terrain of translations where no pure national identity exists.” Transnationalism and the idea of unity among literature is one that I think most people will agree is beneficial. It helps broaden our minds and awareness of things we otherwise would not be capable of understanding or experiencing.

Now, nearly five years after Ramazani’s essay was published, we are revisiting the modernist poets in a uniquely digital format by way of an internet mapping tool.  Each member of our five person group selected two pivotal modernist poets and began researching each poet’s life noting any movement from one location to another.  This process utilized a timeline that each of us produced and shared via Google Docs where we noted the year, location, and any works written/published in association with this location.  In these timelines we also included pictures and expounded further upon locations that provided more information about the location’s influence upon the poet.  Once the timelines were completed, two group members took up the task of plotting each of the ten poet’s movement across the world using Google Maps with a feature to make the map accessible/visible through Google Earth.  The other three members enlisted in the task of composing an essay to situate the idea of a transnational poet, critiques of said poets, and its usefulness in a digital age.

A visualization of this concept is important because in a digital age it is vital and now possible to have this kind of visual conversation with a concept like transnationalism.  A tool like this one can be used in conjunction with an essay like Ramazani’s, or a blog like The Mod Blog for easy accessibility and visualization of an otherwise complex notion.  For example, the map provides approximate measurement for the number of miles each poet travelled from one destination to another to illustrate just how extensively these writers were travelling.  In heavily trafficked areas one can see

T.S. Eliot

nearby movements of different poets.  One instance of this is Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts where with just a few clicks an individual is able to learn that within a short span of ten years T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Frost all attended Harvard University.  This could lead to further individual research where someone might investigate if

Robert Frost

Cambridge, Massachusetts has any shared effect on the writings of these three poets.  On a larger scale, when the map is viewed all at once, viewers are able to see at a glance which places of the world were most popular.  Then, other digital aids like Wikipedia  (which can be turned on as one of Google Map’s features) and our class Tiki Toki can be employed here to further provide any historical context on the location which may lead to discussions about their shared influences upon the poets (i.e. technological innovations, cultural movements, wars, etc).

For example, one might be interested to learn that T.S. Eliot had a vested interest in F.H. Bradley, a British idealist philosopher, and returned to Harvard University a second time in 1911 to begin to write his doctoral thesis on Bradley.  This interest seemed to have a strong influence on Eliot’s life and poetry.  In fact, Eliot went on to travel to

A young T.S. Eliot

Merton College in Oxford where Bradley taught and Eliot studied until Bradley’s death in 1924.  Bradley’s philosophy focused on monastic unity and as a British idealist he held a belief in an absolute; the assignment of a high place to reason as both the faculty by which the Absolute’s structure is grasped and as that structure itself; and a fundamental unwillingness to accept a dichotomy between thought and object.  A good illustration and significance of Eliot’s transnationalism is the fact that while Eliot was living and studying in Oxford, his “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published for the first time in Chicago, Illinois thousands of miles away from where he was residing.

H.D.’s experience of living in London, England around the same time that Eliot was living there would go on to inspire her poem “Murex” which was written about her

HD in 1921

traumatizing experience of living in London during World War I (Zajdel).  Later, H.D. travelled to Scilly Isles, England as a respite, and she wrote about her time here in Notes on Thought & Vision.  What appeared to have the most geographical influence on H.D.’s work was her trip to Egypt, Africa in 1923 where H.D. was awe-struck by the ancient Egyptian world and would use it as a symbol in her works like Palimpsest, Pilate’s Wife, Trilogy, and Helen in Egypt (Friedman).

While Eliot and H.D. were in England, one can see from the map that Mina Loy was conceiving of an idea to move to the United States in 1915.  As more proof for these poet’s transnational influence, by this time Loy’s poems had already begun to appear in American magazines while Loy was still living in Florence, Italy (Kouidis).  Americans read her work excited and were excited that they had come from Europe, and by the time Loy reached America

Mina Loy in 1917

in 1916 she was deemed the “modern woman” by the New York Evening Sun and “joined the shifting configurations of American and expatriate poets and artists grouped around little magazines such as Camera Work, Rogue, and Others.  During her time in Florence (1906-1916), Loy became involved with leaders of the Futurist movement though she never officially joined the movement and much of their notions later became targets from her satire (Kouidis).  One can also gauge from the map that none of these other nine poets were in Florence at this time and were probably not influenced by this movement.

The Mapping the Modernists Map puts into one easily accessible place these and other movements of the ten poets we selected.  Through the process of researching the poets we were each able to learn further the elements of modern poetry, and each garnered an intimate knowledge of the poets’ lives.  In doing so we were able to fully make use of available digital resources like digital library catalogs, Google, Google Maps, digital photos, etc.  The Mapping the Modernists Map is a vital component of the digital age in helping to visualize the transnationalism of the modernist poets as discussed in Jahan Ramazani’s essay, and combines all elements of those digital resources.

Works Cited

Friedman, Susan Standord. “Hilda Doolittle.” American Poets, 1880-1945: First Series.           Ed. Peter Quartermain. Detroit: Gale Research, 1987. Dictionary of Literary                       Biography 45. Literature Resource Center. Web. 6 Nov. 2011.