Paris: A Poem

Last updated

Paris: A Poem is a long poem by Hope Mirrlees, described as "modernism's lost masterpiece" by critic Julia Briggs. [1] Mirrlees wrote the six-hundred-line poem in spring 1919. Although the title page of the first edition mistakenly has the year 1919, it was first published in 1920 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. Only 175 copies of the first edition were distributed. [2] In 2011, the poem was reprinted in an edition of Mirrlees's Collected Poems, edited by Sandeep Parmar, which helped create more critical interest. [3]

Contents

First edition of Paris: A Poem Cover of First Edition of Paris by Hope Mirrlees.jpg
First edition of Paris: A Poem

The poem is a psychogeography of post-World War I Paris. The speaker goes on a day-long stroll, beginning in a Metro tunnel, before emerging onto the streets and visiting sites such as gardens and museums. References to advertisements, works of art, literature, and music, as well as conversation fragments, are interspersed throughout. Parts of the poem imitate the appearance of the thing being described, such as posters and plaques. While the poem is primarily written in English, many of the lines use French and a couple of words are in Greek. Mirrlees never wrote anything similar in style after Paris.

Publishing history

The first edition of the poem, Hogarth Press's fifth publication, was printed and sewn together by hand. Due to the poem's unusual typographic elements, it was the most ambitious work the Woolfs had printed thus far. [2] The cover uses paper with a red, blue, and gold harlequin pattern. Mirrlees was very particular about the lettering and layout of the words on the page. She was still making handwritten changes to her poem in the typesetting stage. [4] Virginia Woolf had to pencil in corrections in 160 of the 175 copies of the poem. [5] The first edition still included spelling mistakes. [6] Despite Leonard Woolf's request in 1946, she refused to reissue the poem. [2] Mirrlees made significant changes to the poem when it was republished in the Virginia Woolf Quarterly in 1973. By this point she had converted to Catholicism and removed passages which she considered to be "blasphemous". [7] It was the only time the poem was reprinted while she was alive. In 2007, Julia Briggs included a facsimile copy of the poem with additional notes in Gender in Modernism. Briggs's notes were included in the reprint of Paris in Collected Poems.

Themes

World War I

The speaker encounters ghosts and spirits of fallen soldiers amidst real landmarks in Paris. She imagines little boys riding a carousel in the Tuileries becoming soldiers. [8] Mirrlees connects the image of their sticky hands with trenches. Later, she uses the image of "Children hung with amulets" to represent reincarnated soldiers. They wear "Blue smocks," a reference to the blue uniforms of the French soldiers in the war. She mentions pigeons as well, which were used extensively to deliver military information. [9]

The speaker also walks through the Place de la Concorde. For Briggs, this site represents a tension between reconciliation and danger: "Concorde," meaning "agreement" or "harmony," brings to mind the Paris Peace Conference; however, many executions have also taken place at this square. [10]

In addition, the poem refers to "petites bourgeoises" who gathered money for war victims; Picardie, a province where many of the battles took place during the war; and the First Battle of the Marne, which led to a large number of casualties for the French. [11]

Race

The beginning of the poem includes multiple references to brand names ("Zig-Zag," "Lion Noir," and "Cacao Blooker"), which Briggs describes as introducing themes of empire and blackness. [8] A reference to "YANKEES" in the poem refers to Americans who stayed in Europe after World War I. Briggs notes that some African-Americans moved to Montmartre because it was a more tolerant place. [11] Later, a description of black music notes turns into African-American musicians playing jazz. Briggs points out that although the reference to jazz introduces ideas of liberation, for a present-day reader, the language used in this scene is very racist. [12]

Influences

Mirrlees acknowledged that Jean Cocteau's Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance was a major influence for Paris. Both poems mention Byrrh and "St. John at Patmos." [2] Parmar conjectures that Mirrlees might have also been influenced by her friend Gertrude Stein. She may have been influenced by Futurism (literature), as it is likely that she read Vladimir Mayakovsky's poetry while studying languages at École des Langues Orientales in 1918. [2] Briggs positions Mirrlees within a lineage of French poets who experimented with typography, such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Guillaume Apollinaire. John T. Connor claims that her work also pays homage to the salon poems of Anna de Noailles and Agnes Mary Frances Duclaux. [13]

Reception

Virginia Woolf described the poem as being "very obscure, indecent, and brilliant." [14] However, British reviewers generally had a negative reaction to Paris when it was first published. One review from The Times Literary Supplement in 1920 claimed that the poem's use of typography "might be part of a nursery game. It does not belong to the art of poetry." [7]

Contemporary critics have noted that Paris uses techniques that anticipate important modernist works. Like Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce's Ulysses, the poem depicts a single day in a modern city and explores the unconscious. [6] With its fragmented voices and inclusion of notes written by the author, it also anticipates The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. [15] Parmar speculates that because Eliot also published his poetry with the Hogarth Press, he probably knew that Paris existed and may have even read it before writing The Waste Land. [16]

Notes

  1. ↑ Briggs 2007, p. 261
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Mirrlees 2011, p. xxxiii
  3. ↑ "Hope Mirrlees". Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation. 2018-11-26. Retrieved 2018-11-27.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  4. ↑ Mirrlees 2011, p. xl
  5. ↑ Briggs 2006, p. 84
  6. 1 2 "Paris by Hope Mirrlees". The British Library. Retrieved 2018-12-04.
  7. 1 2 "Hope Mirrlees and the Forgotten Female Modernists". TheTLS. 2011-09-26. Retrieved 2018-12-04.
  8. 1 2 Mirrlees 2011, p. 3
  9. ↑ Mirrlees 2011, p. 6
  10. ↑ Mirrlees 2011, p. xli
  11. 1 2 Mirrlees 2011, p. 9
  12. ↑ Mirrlees 2011, p. 16
  13. ↑ Connor, John (Winter 2014). "Hope Mirrlees and the Archive of Modernism". Journal of Modern Literature. 37 (2): 117–182. doi:10.2979/jmodelite.37.2.177. JSTOR   10.2979/jmodelite.37.2.177.
  14. ↑ Woolf 1976, p. 385
  15. ↑ Mirrlees 2011, p. 127
  16. ↑ Mirrlees 2011, p. xxxvii

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virginia Woolf</span> English modernist writer (1882–1941)

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Carlos Williams</span> American poet (1883–1963)

William Carlos Williams was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charlotte Mew</span> English poet (1869–1928)

Charlotte Mary Mew was an English poet whose work spanned the eras of Victorian poetry and Modernism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vita Sackville-West</span> English writer and gardener (1892–1962)

Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson, CH, usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hogarth Press</span> British publishing house

The Hogarth Press is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that was founded as an independent company in 1917 by British authors Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf. It was named after their house in Richmond, in which they began hand-printing books as a hobby during the interwar period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hope Mirrlees</span> British poet, novelist, and translator (1887–1978)

(Helen) Hope Mirrlees was a British poet, novelist, and translator. She is best known for the 1926 Lud-in-the-Mist, an influential fantasy novel, and for Paris: A Poem (1920), an experimental poem published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press, which critic Julia Briggs deemed "modernism's lost masterpiece, a work of extraordinary energy and intensity, scope and ambition."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock</span> 1915 poem by T.S. Eliot

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "Prufrock", is the first professionally published poem by American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). The poem relates the varying thoughts of its title character in a stream of consciousness. Eliot began writing "Prufrock" in February 1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse at the instigation of fellow American expatriate Ezra Pound. It was later printed as part of a twelve-poem chapbook entitled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. At the time of its publication, "Prufrock" was considered outlandish, but the poem is now seen as heralding a paradigmatic shift in poetry from late 19th-century Romanticism and Georgian lyrics to Modernism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Ellen Harrison</span> British classical scholar, linguist and feminist (1850–1928)

Jane Ellen Harrison was a British classical scholar and linguist. With Karl Kerenyi and Walter Burkert, Harrison is one of the founders of modern studies in Ancient Greek religion and mythology. She applied 19th-century archaeological discoveries to the interpretation of ancient Greek religion in ways that have become standard. She has also been credited with being the first woman to obtain a post in England as a 'career academic'. Harrison argued for women's suffrage but thought she would never want to vote herself. Ellen Wordsworth Crofts, later second wife of Sir Francis Darwin, was Jane Harrison's best friend from her student days at Newnham, and during the period from 1898 to her death in 1928.

<i>To the Lighthouse</i> 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse is a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf. The novel centres on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Plomer</span> South African-British writer (1903–1973)

William Charles Franklyn Plomer was a South African and British novelist, poet and literary editor. He also wrote a series of librettos for Benjamin Britten. He wrote some of his poetry under the pseudonym Robert Pagan.

<i>The Hours</i> (novel) 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham

The Hours, a 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham, is a tribute to Virginia Woolf's 1923 work Mrs. Dalloway; Cunningham emulates elements of Woolf's writing style while revisiting some of her themes within different settings. The Hours won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was later made into an Oscar-winning 2002 film of the same name.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Literary modernism</span> Western literary movement, originating in the late 19th century

Literary modernism, or modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is characterized by a self-conscious separation from traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound's maxim to "Make it new." This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of the time. The immense human costs of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal changes of modernity moving into the 20th century. In Modernist Literature, Mary Ann Gillies notes that these literary themes share the "centrality of a conscious break with the past", one that "emerges as a complex response across continents and disciplines to a changing world".

<i>The Counterplot</i> 1924 novel

The Counterplot is the second novel by Hope Mirrlees. Written in 1923, it was originally published in 1924, and is the only one of Mirrlees's three novels to take place in then-contemporary settings, Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists (1919) being a historical novel, while Lud-in-the-Mist (1926) is a fantasy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">On Being Ill</span> Essay by Virginia Woolf

On Being Ill is an essay by Virginia Woolf, which seeks to establish illness as a serious subject of literature along the lines of love, jealousy and battle. Woolf writes about the isolation, loneliness, and vulnerability that disease may bring and how it can make even the maturest of adults feel like children again.

<i>The Waste Land</i> Poem by T. S. Eliot

The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's magazine The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julia Stephen</span> Philanthropist and model, mother of Virginia Woolf

Julia Prinsep Stephen was an English Pre-Raphaelite model and philanthropist. She was the wife of the biographer Leslie Stephen and mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, members of the Bloomsbury Group.

Sandeep Parmar is a contemporary poet, who was born in Nottingham, England, and raised in Southern California. She currently lives in London. Parmar is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts.

<i>Freshwater</i> (play) 1935 play by Virginia Woolf; best known for being her only piece for theatre

Freshwater: A comedy is a play written and produced by Virginia Woolf in 1935, and the only play she wrote. Although only performed once in her lifetime, it has been translated into many languages and produced in many countries since. Alfred Lord Tennyson appears as a character in this play.

<i>A Letter to a Young Poet</i> Letter by Virginia Woolf

A Letter to a Young Poet was an epistolary novel by Virginia Woolf, written in 1932 to John Lehman, laying out her views on modern poetry.

Joan Adeney Easdale was an English poet from Sevenoaks, Kent. Her mother was the author Gladys Ellen Easdale, née Adeney (1875-1970). Her father, Robert Carse Easdale, left her mother during the First World War. Virginia Woolf discerned some "real merit" in her early work.

References

    This page is based on this Wikipedia article
    Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
    Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.