Modernist Magazines and Digital Humanities

    During World War I, Poetry magazine often included poems that related indirectly to the war in their emotional out-pourings on subjects such as death, as well as poems that served reflected the need for distraction in the form of romantic adoration of women as figures of innocence. In the post-war issues of Poetry, narrative poems make a distinct appearance in the magazine, indicating a shift in the consciousness of writers. As opposed to urgent emotional pleas, or brooding personal thoughts, which often were included in the previous volumes, there are many more imaginative and emotionally distant poems which take the form of narratives and songs.
    One such poem is “Crescent Moon,” by Elizabeth Robert Madox, which appears in the July issue of 1921, which includes three lines of non-word syllables, representing singing, in a poem which is only nine lines long. The subject matter itself is light--children delighted by catching sight of a crescent moon--and the rhyming pattern is similarly very simple. In January of 1922, another more distinctly narrative poem was published: “The Witch of Coos,” by Robert Frost. This poem is unusual in its inclusion of heavy quoting of two characters which appear in the text, even including the labels “The Mother,” and “The Son,” before each speaks. This imparts a theatrical mood, which is furthered by the narrator’s lack of emotional response within the poem. The events are recounted, and the response is left up to the reader. “White as the Snow,” by Edward Sapir, is a third poem that reads like a story, with no emotional response written in, and--like the other two poems--includes quoted dialogue. The subject matter includes a woman’s evasion of an unwanted marriage.
    The trend toward narrative poetry in post-war times may have reflected a lack of urgency, along with a sense of relief, and the desire for entertainment. Such poems being published during the so-called ‘roaring 20’s’ follows the decade’s interest in indulgence and freedom: the reader is left to chuckle, rejoice, or be astonished--with freedom of choice and individuality unifying these poems in their themes.
 

In the year following World War I, a great deal of darker themes became apparent in various poems published in the magazine Coterie. 1920 brough about a new freedom to discuss more sordid topics, as the world had just been affected by a great war. There are many poems that depict images of loss and death quite literally from the battleground, as well as figuratively, (as in lost love, and such); however, several of these poems in particular have something beyond that in common, and that is that they allude to references of music in the poetry.

In the April, 1920 issue, a poet named Conrad Aiken had a set of peoms published which are both reminiscent of life and ponder on death. Both exhibit a strong sense of music within their context. The first poem, "Portrait of One Dead" tells the somber story of a woman caught between life with and without her lover, who had gone for reasons that are unexplained. Her life at both stages is contrasted by a world with music and without: "This is her room: on one side there is music-/ On one side not a sound./ At one step she could move from love to silence..." The halls and the rooms of the house itself are described as "sonorous," the love letters she receives are "fragrant with music," which ignites a sense of reverberance in the reader; one can almost feel the vibrations of the music. The sensation of sound is so prominent, it becomes metaphorical for the girl's life. In the poem she dies, which is best described in the lines, "You do not know how long she clung to the music,/ You did not hear her sing," as if the playing of the music runs parallel to her physical life. The poem that follows directly after, "Coffins", again describes life as music: "We are like music, each voice of it pursuing/ A golden separate dream, remote, persistent,/ Climbing to fire, receeding to hoarse despair." The poem depicts a winter night in a town where death looms, inevitable, to take its inhabitants. Aiken is adament about using music as a metaphor for life. When death is in the eyes of someone, it is as thought the music runs out: "They are blown away like windflung chords of music;/ They drift away; the sudden music has died." It puts music in the light of being merely a span of time; It glissandos, crescendos, carries through the wind and is gone, fleeting, like life. He goes so far as to personify music as "sinister" and "troubled."

These themes are apparent again in the same issue and in later months. Further into the issue, a poem by C. B. Kitchin called "Requiem- July 17th, 1919" alludes to music in its very title. A requiem being a prominent musical piece that is sung as a mass at a funeral or in time of death, the work depicts a gruesome scene of death that disturbs the scenario of a peaceful, quiet night. In the September, 1920 issue, a poem called "An Unreturning Thing," by Gerald Gould describes the death of a child like "the hush before the orchestra begins." These poets not only describe music as an essential factor of life, but it is to them, as though, it is life in itself.