Mary Barnard, American Imagist , livre ebook

State University of New York Press - Sarah Barnsley

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130 pages

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Perhaps best known for her outstanding translation of Sappho, poet Mary Barnard (1909–2001) has until recently received little attention for her own work. In this book, Sarah Barnsley examines Barnard's poetry and poetics in the light of her plentiful correspondence with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and others. Presenting Barnard as a "late Imagist," Barnsley links Barnard's search for a poetry grounded in native speech to efforts within American modernism for new forms in the American grain. Barnsley finds that where Pound and Williams began the campaign for a modern poetry liberated from the "heave" of the iambic pentameter, Barnard completed it through a "spare but musical" aesthetic derived from her studies of Greek metric and American speech rhythms, channeled through materials drawn direct from the American local. The first book on Barnard, and the first to draw on the Barnard archives at Yale's Beinecke Library, Mary Barnard, American Imagist unearths a fascinating and previously untold chapter of twentieth-century American poetry.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Chronology

1. “Spare But Musical”: The Poetry of Mary Barnard

2. Late Imagism

2.1 “The Only Really Worthwhile Piece of Poetry Criticism I Had Ever Read”: Pound’s Imagism
2.2 Barnard’s Imagist Local
2.3 “Sand Is the Beginning and the End/Of Our Dominion”: Barnard, H.D., and the Gender of Imagism
2.4 “We Can’t Get to the World Hard Enough or Fast Enough… We Just Must Write”: Barnard, Williams, and American Imagism

3. “A Would-Be Sappho”

3.1 Sappho and the Imagists
3.2 Barnard’s Sapphic Imagism
3.3 Barnard’s Sapphic-American Modernism

4. “A New Way of Measuring Verse”

4.1 Barnard and Pound: An ABC of Metrics
4.2 The Weighted Syllable
4.3 “A Well-Conceived Form within which Modification May Exist”: Barnard, Williams, and the Question of American Measure
4.4 “An Idiom AND a Swing”: Sappho: A New Translation

5. “A Bright Particular Excellence”: The Achievement of Mary Barnard

Epilogue: The Mary Barnard Papers: A Note

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

USA

United States of America

États-Unis

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	31 octobre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438448572
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1598€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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M ARY B ARNARD , A MERICAN I MAGIST
Portrait of Mary Barnard, from the Mary Barnard Papers in the Yale Collection of American Literature. Courtesy of Elizabeth J. Bell.
Mary Barnard , A MERICAN I MAGIST
S ARAH B ARNSLEY
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS
Front cover: Portrait of Mary Barnard, from the Mary Barnard Papers in the Yale Collection of American Literature. Courtesy of Elizabeth J. Bell.
Back cover: Untitled watercolor by Mary Barnard, from the Mary Barnard Papers. Courtesy of Elizabeth J. Bell.
Published by
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY , NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnsley, Sarah, 1974–
Mary Barnard, American Imagist / Sarah Barnsley.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-4855-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Barnard, Mary—Criticism and interpretation. 2. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Modernism (Literature)—United States. I. Title.
PS3503.A5825Z54 2013 811’.54—dc23
2012049543
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for Louise and Zachary
C ONTENTS
L IST OF I LLUSTRATIONS
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
C HRONOLOGY
C HAPTER O NE
“Spare but Musical”: The Poetry of Mary Barnard
C HAPTER T WO
Late Imagism
2.1 “The Only Really Worthwhile Piece of Poetry Criticism I Had Ever Read”: Pound’s Imagism
2.2 Barnard’s Imagist Local
2.3 “Sand Is the Beginning and the End /of Our Dominion”: Barnard, H.D., and the Gender of Imagism
2.4 “We Can’t Get to the World Hard Enough or Fast Enough … We Just Must Write”: Barnard, Williams, and American Imagism
C HAPTER T HREE
“A Would-Be Sappho”
3.1 Sappho and the Imagists
3.2 Barnard’s Sapphic Imagism
3.3 Barnard’s Sapphic-American Modernism
C HAPTER F OUR
“A New Way of Measuring Verse”
4.1 Barnard and Pound: An ABC of Metrics
4.2 The Weighted Syllable
4.3 “A Well-Conceived Form within which Modification May Exist”: Barnard, Williams, and the Question of American Measure
4.4 “An Idiom AND a Swing”: Sappho: A New Translation
C HAPTER F IVE
“A Bright Particular Excellence”: The Achievement of Mary Barnard
E PILOGUE
The Mary Barnard Papers: A Note
N OTES
B IBLIOGRAPHY
I NDEX
I LLUSTRATIONS F RONTISPIECE Portrait of Mary Barnard, from the Mary Barnard Papers in the Yale Collection of American Literature. Courtesy of Elizabeth J. Bell . F IGURE 1 Publicity photo of Mary Barnard (1940) for Five Young American Poets . Photo by Hermine Duthie Decker. Mary Barnard Papers. Courtesy of Aletha Decker Carlton . F IGURE 2 Untitled watercolor by Mary Barnard (12 × 9 ). Mary Barnard Papers. Courtesy of Elizabeth J. Bell . F IGURE 3 Sketch by Mary Barnard: Washington sawmill (external view), ca. 1920s. Mary Barnard Papers. Courtesy of Elizabeth J. Bell. F IGURE 4 Sketch by Mary Barnard: Washington sawmill (internal view), ca. 1920s. Mary Barnard Papers. Courtesy of Elizabeth J. Bell. F IGURE 5 Ocean Park, Long Beach Peninsula, Washington, ca. 1920s. Photo attributed to Mary Barnard. Mary Barnard Papers. Courtesy of Elizabeth J. Bell. 35 F IGURE 6 Columbia River Gorge, view from Chanticleer Point, Oregon, June 2005. Photograph by Sarah Barnsley. F IGURE 7 Facsimile draft of Mary Barnard’s fragment no. 42, with ink annotations by Ezra Pound. Mary Barnard Papers. Courtesy of Elizabeth J. Bell and New Directions Publishing Corp.
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have happened without the immeasurable support shown by Elizabeth J. Bell, literary executor for the estate of Mary Barnard, and her husband, Bruce Bell, over the past ten years. From the moment I stepped off the plane at Portland International Airport in summer 2003, a complete stranger, they have done nothing but encourage and assist me in my happy Mary Barnard projects. Through email, letter, phone, and cherished visits, Betty has gone above and beyond to read my work, offer clarifications, suggest directions, and fuel my research with such golden materials that I have never once forgotten the great privilege afforded me. Heartfelt thanks are due to Bruce for his wisdom, insight, good humor, and, it must be said, his knack of selecting the very best wine to round off a hard day’s scholaring—and for teaching me to drive on the wrong side of the road. Both have become dear friends to me and my family.
Neither this friendship nor my interest in Mary Barnard would have evolved without Ellen K. Stauder at Reed College, who introduced me to Mary Barnard’s work in 1995 and then to Betty Bell in 2001. Thank you for quietly watching as I got on with it and for generously giving your time to the Mary Barnard Centenary at Reed in 2011.
Thanks are due to other friends and colleagues in the Pacific Northwest: to James Anderson, Mary Barnard’s publisher and long-term champion, for enchanting Barnard conversations and for the gift of letters that I’ve since donated to the Beinecke; to Thomas Donovan, a close friend of Mary Barnard’s, who did me the kindness of alerting me to the KBOO radio recording of Barnard reading; to Anita Helle and Peter Sears, for their profundity of knowledge and their magnificent contributions to the Mary Barnard Centenary; to Mary Barnard’s friends, including Anita Bigelow, Dorothy Blair, Harris Dusenberry, Sue Hennum, Cynthia Kimball, Mary Pat Peterson, and her cousin, Suzanne Ila Gray, all of whom have helped to illuminate my picture of Mary Barnard through the generosity of conversation and, in the case of Sue Hennum, through a wonderful sharing of papers accompanied by the world’s most delicious blueberry pie. Thank you to Robin Tovey, James Kahan, and all at Reed College who enabled the Mary Barnard Centenary to take place and to Reed alumnus Constance Puttnam for kindly talking to me about her correspondence with Mary Barnard.
On the other side of the Atlantic, I cannot forget the thanks due to friends and colleagues at Goldsmiths, University of London: to Helen Carr, for supervising my PhD thesis on Barnard (and for all the “after sales service”); to Maura Dooley, for examining it so warmly; to Chris Baldick and Caroline Blinder, for their early encouragements; and to Padraig Kirwan, for keeping my spirits high and my coffee cup filled. Thanks are due to scholars and poets across the two nations: Richard Deming, Nikolai Duffy, Suzanne Heyd, Emma Kimberley, Emily Jeremiah, David Murray, Katrina Naomi, and Eric White. Your interests in my project gave me the confidence to keep doing it.
This may be a slim book, but it is one built out of archives. In addition to those provided by Betty Bell, I have enjoyed substantial assistance from Gay Walker and Mark Kuestner of Special Collections at Reed College Library and from Patricia Willis, Nancy Kuhl, and all the staff at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. I was greatly honored to receive the H.D. Fellowship in American Literature at the Beinecke over 2007 and 2008 to complete the research of this book.
An earlier version of the discussion of Mary Barnard’s “North Window” in chapters 1 and 2 was originally published in Western American Literature ; an earlier version of section 2.3 in chapter 2 was originally published in Paideuma .
A shortened version of chapter 3 is due to appear in the “Hellenism Unbound” edition of Synthesis scheduled for Fall 2013.
Thank you to James Peltz, Jen Stelling, Laurie Searl, Anne Valentine, and Catherine Chilton at SUNY Press.
Thank you, finally, to Louise, for being there from the beginning, and to Zachary, for arriving at the end. This book is my gift to you.

Grateful acknowledgements are due to James Anderson, for permission to print from the unpublished transcript of the address given by him at the Memorial Service for Mary Barnard, Vancouver, Washington, September 4, 2001; Bob Arnold, for permission to reprint from his unpublished correspondence; Elizabeth J. Bell, for permission to reprint from unpublished and published material by Mary Barnard, including cover art and illustrative material under copyright by Barnardworks and now held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Elizabeth J. Bell, for permission to reprint from her unpublished correspondence; Robert Bertholf, for permission to reprint from his unpublished correspondence; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for permission to reprint an excerpt from an unpublished letter dated May 6, 1973, written by Elizabeth Bishop to Mary Barnard, copyright © 2012 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust, printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate; Reed College, for permission to reprint previously unpublished correspondence by Victor Chittick; Erik Reece, for permission to reprint from previously unpublis