[In the following essay, Woolley surveys the work of such women poets as Eunice Tietjens, Alice Corbin, Mary Aldis, and Marjorie Allen Seiffert in the context of the Chicago Renaissance, noting that these writers challenged and confirmed various stereotypes regarding women's language and writing choices.]

If anyone has a delicate and quick way of living it is always not so important to people as if he had a strong and heavy way of saying.

—Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years' War, 250-51

Women poets in Chicago, like their novelist counterparts, faced a specific set of challenges due to the self-conscious development of a midwestern literature dependent on vernacular language. As female voices were being devalued in the region's publications, women who wrote fiction reminded their readers of women's importance in social welfare movements. The example of women reformers/orators so important to the novelists, however, did not suggest a Chicago style to the poets. Instead, the poets found authority in relation to editors who privileged conversation as a way of doing business. Both Harriet Monroe and Margaret Anderson, founder and editor of Poetry and the Little Review, respectively, formulated the philosophies of their magazines in response to debates with others, especially women associates. In publishing magazines, they tried to capture the excitement of their own discussions about literature. The intellectual communities these two editors fostered allowed women to experiment with poetry that challenged the conventions of women's speech and its representation. Yet this newfound linguistic freedom did not produce the same results in art and in life, as barriers that had been overcome in one sphere often remained in another.

The work of the women poets and editors appears much more varied thematically and stylistically than does the work of the women novelists. The social conventions of the novel, such as the romance plot, could be forgone in both poetry and editorials. Yet the former was not always a genre where women could find their voices, as evidenced by the eclecticism in much of their production. Editorials, in contrast, almost always projected confidence; as editors, women experienced certainty about the importance of their mission. Choice of genres, then, plays a key role in what women can and cannot say and in how they will express their thoughts. Equally important is the community to which a woman poet belongs and her perception of its stimuli, constraints, and linguistic norms.

The poets discussed in this chapter—Eunice Tietjens, Alice Corbin, Mary Aldis, Florence Kiper Frank, Marjorie Allen Seiffert—challenged and confirmed stereotypes of women's language. Their literary ventures especially merit analysis at a time when feminist scholarship is weighing the benefits of community for women's work, language, and development. Such landmark studies as Nancy Chodorow's Reproduction of Mothering and Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice have underlined the significance of women's connections to others for their sense of self and moral reasoning. In Women's Ways of Knowing, Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule also stress the importance of “connected knowing” (Belenky et al. 101) for women's success as learners. Contrasting the results of their research on the learning processes of a diverse group of women with developmental studies done of young men at Harvard, the authors conclude, “For women, confirmation and community are prerequisites rather than consequences of development” (194). Some scholars have argued that consciousness of belonging to a community has shaped women's language, although whether this speech should be celebrated, overcome, or simply acknowledged as differing from men's language remains a subject of debate. After visiting women's colleges, reporter Margaret Talbot, writing in the Washington Post, remarks that the kind of conversation praised for promoting women's learning “began to feel a bit like torpor” (17). Encouraging women's development in the context of community also may create false expectations, for, according to Iris Marion Young, many visions of community are counterproductive as models of social and political organization.

In what ways, then, did Chicago's women poets benefit personally and professionally from membership in active literary communities where women held positions of authority? How, if at all, did making conversation a model for publishing inspire them to write poetry? How did they choose to represent speech in an environment that included frequent conversations with other women? How did the privileging of conversation reinforce or combat stereotypes of women's language? Discussing “men's language” and “women's language” poses the risk of overgeneralization. As do many others, Talbot worries that “[s]preading the message that traits like cooperativeness and competitiveness are gender-coded … is risky business. It threatens to revive old stereotypes of women as gentle, intuitive caretakers and men as tough-minded aggressors” (19, 30). Despite these dangers, research continues on “masculine” and “feminine” language, and those who work with women (teachers, therapists, and organizers, for example) still wonder how best to facilitate their interactions. This sort of reflection can help to produce conditions under which women find their own voices, but it can also lead to a limiting of women's rhetorical options if only one form of exchange is considered appropriate, ethical, empowering, or feminist. Although the example of this group of Chicago women leaves today's controversies unsettled, their poems, editorials, memoirs, and letters provide a historical precedent for debate concerning gendered forms of oral interaction.

.....

Scholars have tended to think of modernism in terms of communities—for example, Bloomsbury, Mabel Dodge's salon, various French locations that Gertrude Stein made home, Alfred Stieglitz's gallery in New York, and gatherings hosted by Carl Van Vechten, A'lelia Walker, and Georgia Douglas Johnson. Though individual modern writers have distinguished themselves, each nevertheless remains associated with a particular city or group. According to Cary Nelson, “most poets work within a contextualized sense of what is possible rhetorically: what innovations are made available to them by the work of their contemporaries; what tendencies are to be emulated, transformed, or resisted; what issues it seems necessary (or unimaginable) to address; what cultural roles have been won over or lost for poetry” (70-71).

Eunice Tietjens, who worked for Poetry in several capacities and contributed to the Little Review, offers several clues to poetry's cultural roles in Chicago. In “A Plaint of Complexity,” she describes a woman who manifests a different personality for each of the cities in which she has lived:

And I've a modern, rather mannish self
Lives gladly in Chicago.
She believes
That woman should come down from off her shelf
Of calm dependence on the male
And labor for her living.
She likes men,
And equal comradeship, and giving
As much as she receives.
She likes discussions lasting half the night,
Lit up with wit and cigarettes,
Of art, religion, politics and sex,
Science and prostitution. She thinks art
Deals first of all with life, and likes to write
Poems of drug clerks and machinery.

(Body 13-14)

Actual experiences in the Windy City accounted for this portrait of the Chicago woman writer and her willingness to stay up late debating controversial subjects. Monroe, Anderson, and their associates, Alice Corbin Henderson and Jane Heap, encouraged literary discussions in an area rich in the desire for them. Early-twentieth-century Chicago's hunger for literary talk, indeed, has achieved a near-mythological status, so much so that contemporary Chicagoans look back with envy. About present-day Chicago, Joseph Epstein writes, “of literary life conceived of as writers living together in some semblance of a community, meeting with one another, talking about one another's work, discussing and arguing and, yes, backbiting about reviews, books, and ideas—of this there is almost none” (“Windy City” 37). He suggests that Chicago's reputation as a once-thriving literary center makes the lack of exchange more conspicuous than similar deficiencies in other cities (38).

Even with regional self-aggrandizement, high hopes for American literature, and nostalgia taken into consideration, turn-of-the-century Chicago appears to have been a marvelous place for European Americans to live the literary life. Membership in a series of groups, clubs, salons, and centers overlapped; for instance, participants in the Whitechapel Club, Cliff-Dwellers, or the Little Room in all likelihood also attended Chicago's “little theaters” or literary discussions at Hull-House. Members of the younger bohemian crowd, who met in Floyd Dell's and Margery Currey's studios near the old World's Fair grounds, knew each other through newspaper work, Poetry, or other connections and helped launch the Little Review. A few writers strayed into the University of Chicago poetry club. Theaters and lecture series extended Chicago's literary life beyond the circles of professional writers, and William Drake notes that Harriet Monroe took seriously her magazine's motto, “To have great poets there must be great audiences too.” She and other poets often lectured to women's clubs, acting as interpreters for the new literary movements (68-72). Visiting artists were assured of a place to stay and to converse late into the night at the home of Harriet Moody. Restauranteur, caterer, and widow of the poet William Vaughn Moody, she frequently provided visitors with advice, money, and sumptuous meals (Albertine 100).

Although the accounts are probably exaggerated, memoirs and reminiscences suggest the richness of the literary conversation going on in Chicago. Eunice Tietjens writes, “I remember Floyd Dell saying once that he had to brush a poet off his desk every day at the old Chicago Evening Post before he could begin work. On Poetry we were in a far more delightful state even than this” (World 23). Margaret Anderson remembered the conversation in Chicago as superior to that of New York or Paris (Thirty Years' War 149-50), and Jane Heap, editorially refuting Harriet Monroe from New York, defended Chicago nevertheless: “I reject all criticism of Chicago, sentimentally. I have seen some of the great cities of the world and many of the finer ones. I know Chicago to the skin and bone. And Chicago has a thrall” (Anderson Little Review 273).

We have seen that such institutions as Hull-House gave the women of Chicago a distinct advantage regarding authority and visibility. Having women as editors of two of the prominent literary magazines created an advantage for women as well, but traditional gender roles were also in play. Although the women encouraged each other (see W. Drake 68; Bremer “Lost Chicago Sisters” 218-19), men frequently introduced them to Chicago's literary life or served as mentors. The poet Marguerite Wilkinson befriended Tietjens as a girl (Tietjens World 4), but she remembers actually becoming excited about the prospect of being a poet after her first evening at Currey's and Dell's: “I took my own feeble efforts at verse to these people and asked for help. It was George Cook who said the thing that released me, as the right thing said at the right moment has the power to do” (World 19). No one matched another area poet, Arthur Davison Ficke, in giving her “endlessly patient” criticism. “He would put his finger with an unerring instinct on anything slack or careless in my work and drive his point home with a fastidious irony that was devastating, but salutary,” Tietjens writes (World 58). She developed a lifelong friendship with Edgar Lee Masters as well, but nothing indicates that they exchanged works in progress. Anderson's experience was similar in that Clara Laughlin introduced her to Chicago and the process of book reviewing, but Francis Hackett, the Chicago Evening Post's literary editor, gave her her first practical advice (Thirty Years' War 22). Marjorie Allen Seiffert, of Moline, Illinois, switched from musical composition to writing poetry, due in part to a group of friends that included Ficke, Dell, Cook, Susan Glaspell, and Harry Hansen. Tietjens remembers that when Witter Bynner and “Arthur Ficke perpetrated that most amazing literary hoax Spectra, they took in the partnership Marjorie Allen Seiffert … and before long they introduced her to us” (World 62). Although the communities in which these women found themselves included women of different generations, which thus provided opportunities for role modeling and mentoring, men were crucial to launching the women's literary careers.

The women's memoirs indicate that men valued them as friends and colleagues. Yet, as discussed in chapter 3, the writing of midwestern men often stressed stereotypically male experience and diction, so much so that critics discredited other literature by associating it with femininity. Individuals certainly varied in their literary and actual treatment of women, and the following quotation from Dell's Women as World Builders (1913) exemplifies the mixture of admiration, respect, amusement, egoism, and condescension with which area men regarded new women:

We are, to tell the truth, a little afraid that unless the struggle is one which will call upon all her powers, which will try her to the utmost, she will fall short of becoming that self-sufficient, able, broadly imaginative and healthy-minded creature upon whom we have set our masculine desire.

It is, then, as a phase of the great human renaissance inaugurated by men that the woman's movement deserves to be considered. And what more fitting than that a man should sit in judgment upon the contemporary aspects of that movement, weighing out approval or disapproval! Such criticism is not a masculine impertinence but a masculine right, a right properly pertaining to those who are responsible for the movement, and whose demands it must ultimately fulfill.

(20-21)

Dell tries to take feminism seriously but assumes that women are pursuing some sort of self-improvement course ultimately designed for men's benefit. He looks forward to the day when women will be smart, strong, self-sufficient, and still eager to please the opposite sex.

Monroe and Anderson, in a sense, conformed to these sorts of expectations in the literary world. Until recently, their reputations have rested largely on their publication of famous men. To a large degree, they themselves are responsible for the way they are remembered. Of the selections Anderson included in The Little Review Anthology (1953), for instance, critical appraisals of men or works contributed by men outnumber by far women's contributions or commentary on them. Although women fared much better in The New Poetry anthology (1917), Monroe never tired of promoting what Tietjens referred to as “the great middle western triumvirate Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and Vachel Lindsay” (World 21). Yet for their sustenance and success, both editors relied on women who ultimately shared their goals while expressing disagreement at every step along the way.

Born in 1860, Monroe was part of the older generation of Chicago writers. She resided in the city of her birth for most of her life but traveled extensively. In the 1880s, she worked as a freelance writer and as a critic of music, art, and drama at the Chicago Tribune. Her poetry gained recognition when “Columbian Ode” was read at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. In 1911, Monroe sought donations in order to establish a magazine devoted exclusively to the support of poets, and in 1912, she launched Poetry (Blain 750-51).

Much of the energy Monroe brought to her editorship came from matching wits with other editors and poets. Anyone who expected her to be a woman fond of pleasing others would have been disappointed. Those who knew her characterized Monroe as a fighter (E. Williams 187), and she seemed to enjoy fighting not only to keep Poetry going but also for its own sake. In an editorial exchange with the Dial, prompted by its attack on Sandburg, for example, Monroe proclaimed, “Next to making friends, the most thrilling experience of life is to make enemies” (Poet's Life 313). She recounted in her autobiography that “a succession of clever associate editors shared my work and its rewards, and most inconsiderately their agile minds kept me scrambling for precedence” (317). Writing tongue-in-cheek about interoffice competition, Monroe nonetheless offers further descriptions of intellectual wrestling: “We women of the ‘staff’ and our visitors used to have lively discussions during those first years, and each new letter from Ezra Pound sharpened the edge of them. Poetic technique was an open forum, in which everyone's theories differed from everyone's else, and the poems we accepted and published were a battleground for widely varying opinions.” Monroe follows with an explanation of her theory that “speech rhythm is a universal principle in the poetry of languages both classic and modern” and continues:

This view, which I still adhere to, aroused much discussion in our office and out of it. I remember one night, after a dinner I had given for Robert Frost, when he and I argued about poetic rhythms till three o'clock in the morning, against a background of cheers and jeers from three or four other poets who lingered as umpires, until at last Mrs. Moody called up my apartment and asked me to remind my guest of honor (her house guest) that she was waiting up for him.

(Poet's Life 324-25)

Just as Sandburg could swap folk songs until all hours of the night, Monroe was capable of arguing metrics through the wee hours of the morning.

According to several accounts, Monroe was especially suited for verbal sparring. Tietjens recalls:

It took time for me to realize how deeply human and warm-hearted Harriet Monroe was, beneath her often prickly exterior. She grew less austere, less prickly with time, but even to the end there were moments when she froze the blood of the unknowing. I have seen her look up over her glasses at some timid young thing who had with inward quaking offered a distilled essence of soul for her editorial consideration, and blast him, or her, with a caustic criticism so devastating that visibly the edges of his soul seared and curled, like the edges of an egg frying in too hot a pan. … But it was also part of Harriet that she was conscious that she did this, and I have seen her realize suddenly what she was doing and undo it swiftly with a sure sympathy that wiped out the sting completely.

(World 25-26)

Poetry's editor, then, could exchange words in what were considered decidedly unfeminine ways, but she also could revert to more traditional forms of interaction.

Monroe's stinging tongue met its match in her original associate editor, Alice Corbin Henderson.¹ Monroe describes Henderson as “look[ing] blandly innocent, never preparing one for the sharp wit which would flash out like a sword. She was a pitiless reader of manuscripts; nothing stodgy or imitative would get by her finely sifting intelligence, and we had many a secret laugh over the confessional ‘hot stuff’ or the boggy word weeds which tender-minded authors apparently mistook for poetry” (Poet's Life 317-18). For health reasons, Corbin Henderson moved to New Mexico in 1916 (Pearce 13). Her subsequent correspondence with the Chicagoans confirms Monroe's impression of her acerbity. Remarkable for their mixture of tenderness, frankness, and occasional ruthlessness, Henderson's letters to and from Monroe corroborate Ellen Williams's judgment that no other associate could likewise “challenge and debate Harriet Monroe as a peer” (265) or “say ‘Oh, Harriet!’ at the right moment” (187). On November 18, 1918, for instance, she wrote: “I am afraid, Harriet, that you are surrounded by people who are willing to say the pleasant thing and the easy thing about POETRY, instead of the honest thing and the hard and possibly bitter thing. You may tell me it is none of my business, if you like, but if you are satisfied with POETRY. [sic] I'm not.” Henderson fills the letter with complaints, including the low rates paid to poets, the “parochial tone” reviewers have been using, the magazine's “obsession” with Midwesterners, and her own feeling of isolation.

Although Monroe never found another assistant as outspoken as Henderson, she did not stop searching. In discussing potential candidates for the vacancy left by Henderson's replacement, Tietjens, she wrote in a letter to Alice on July 3, 1917, “I want a young radical in the place.” When Helen Hoyt came on board, replacing Susan Wilburs, Monroe confided in her Sante Fe correspondent in a letter on September 21, 1918, “I am going to find Helen much more helpful than Susan. She has definite opinions and fights things out with me—even as you used to. And her opinions are more in line with a progressive policy than Eunice's were.” Monroe and Henderson seldom complained about a current associate editor, but they always rejoiced in the change of direction and the different demands initiated by her successor. Ellen Williams contends that by 1916 the magazine's conflicting interests had become too numerous for Monroe to handle gracefully: “If she managed to reconcile Kreymborg with Sandburg, and soothe Lowell and Fletcher about Pound's propaganda while restraining theirs, if the guarantors and the censor were both appeased, and the huge successes of Masters and Frost acknowledged but kept in proportion, if Pound was at least quiet about Lindsay, Harriet Monroe could not indefinitely continue to keep all the important elements of the pattern in balance” (199).

Yet Monroe's conversational emphasis at times must have made these balancing acts almost as pleasurable as fighting. She surrounded herself with people who disagreed and resolved situations by trying to keep everyone happy and a bit unhappy at the same time. In November 1912, for the magazine's second number, she stated her policy in an editorial entitled “The Open Door,” which concluded, “The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written” (Poet's Life 293). Almost six years later, the door was still open to disparate poets and editors alike. On May 10, 1918, Monroe mused in response to Henderson's criticism, “Funny how you and Eunice differ. You are sure to scam poems she loved.” Although such disagreements must have wearied her occasionally, Monroe enjoyed the energy generated when one advisor always found another's selections to be a scam.

Monroe made conflicts generated by the literary selections published in Poetry a publicity tool. Claire Badaracco writes that she used both the Dial's assaults on Poetry and the bad press Pound received in America to generate interest in her enterprise. According to Badaracco, “Monroe distributed excerpts from the 1913 papers as if they were testimonials, on handbills and advertising flyers, sending press releases containing all attacks by the Dial to all local and national press. … Similarly, Monroe used Pound's crowd bashing to involve an American public that was by and large indifferent to poetry” (45). She foreshadowed state governments' promotions of “regional identity through the ‘voice’ of its native artists who celebrated their sense of place” (40). This voice, too, she left up for grabs, publishing midwestern men and women whose techniques challenged the style she most often praised.

Poetry confirms Tietjens's impression that Chicagoans (as both writers and editors) preferred poems dealing “first of all with life … poems of drug clerks and machinery.” Yet, as a champion of the “new poetry,” Monroe had a rather flexible definition of “new,” printing both men and women who remained committed to old forms or subjects whose inspiration came more from ancient Europe and Asia than from the mountains, prairies, and cities of the New World. Williams finds “Monroe's greatest editorial vice” to be her publication of “[h]ighly literate, intelligent, even ambitious … ladies” whose “poetry fades into background music” (276). Although Williams makes a significant point, the same could be said of many of the now obscure men Monroe published, and even of the early James Joyce or D. H. Lawrence.

Monroe's practices as editor present an intriguing paradox in terms of gender roles. She stands accused of being too catholic in her tastes, including in her publication work she and the literary historians who would judge her had good reasons to abhor. Poetry, then, stands as a monument not to the best of modern poetry but instead to the editor's inclusiveness—her desire to link as many writers as possible in a diverse community of modern poets. At the same time, Monroe stepped out of the expectations of her gender by freely expressing her opinions, by encouraging raucous discussion, and by often ignoring others' emotions. Talbot observes that “from childhood on, women generally are under greater social pressure than men to hold their rhetorical fire in deference to other people's feelings” (30). Although Monroe was an editor, critic, artist, and businesswoman dealing only with highly literate people at a time when lively conversation had not largely been replaced by watching movies, television, and videos, she sets an interesting historical precedent in that she was not running a salon confined to the upper classes. In Monroe's case, contention led to the relative inclusiveness of her magazine. What effect, then, did all of this arguing—and its breaks with gender prescriptions—have on the poetry itself?

Friendly disputes encouraged experimentation, but boldness was not always happily combined with the expectations governing art in the Chicago region. In most cases, literary talk was easier for women than literary practice, where, as Alicia Ostriker writes, literary criticism often can “imply that serious poetry is more or less identical with potent masculinity” (3). Rachel Blau DuPlessis concludes that the place of woman in poetry “creates a staggering and fascinating problem for the woman writer, who is presumably a speaking subject in her work while a cultural artifact or object in the thematic and critical traditions on which she, perforce, draws” (Pink Guitar 150). In addition to these general concerns, women poets in Chicago faced the same problems as did the women novelists—that is, that midwestern writers were being celebrated nationally for being representative of the democracy, accessibility, and originality of American art, and these qualities were all linked to virility. Conversing with other artists in this atmosphere must have increased the pressure to conform, or at least to disagree with others, while responding to their questions (a variation on conformity). The poets appear to have brought more energy to conflicts about form than did the novelists, and these discussions must have muddled some poets but beneficially challenged others, providing an alternative space to the world of journalism, on which many of the Chicagoans relied for their models of plain, accessible language (Duncan 152).

The merits of free verse especially divided the editors of Poetry, and Monroe devoted several editorials to the subject of versification. As they argued half the night about metrics, Monroe and Frost most likely agreed that “no absolute line can be drawn between the rhythms of verse and prose” (Poets 287) and that the possibility existed for “a true science of speech-rhythms” (Poets 266). Yet the dispute that kept Harriet Moody waiting must have arisen over the notion of rhythm itself. Frost did not need free verse to capture the rhythms of speech, whereas Monroe found that traditional concepts of metrical regularity did not do justice to the rhythmic possibilities of the English language. She found ineffectual the terms “iambic, trochaic, dactyllic, anapaestic, etc. … not because they are entirely false but because they are inexact, and are moreover inextricably associated with false usage” (Poets 287). Musical notations for rhythm more nearly served her own purposes, which included demonstrating that pauses and syllables of varying lengths (not just stressed or unstressed) made true free verse rhythmic in its use of “bars” but not necessarily feet (Poets 269). Not surprisingly, Monroe did not single out free verse as the only road to modernity, but she especially encouraged experimentation in selecting poetry for her magazine. When Tietjens edited a few issues while her boss vacationed, she filled one entire number with sonnets. She wrote Henderson to say that she hoped Monroe would not be horrified (7/17/n.y.). Apparently, too many traditional forms, rather than radical meters, would have assaulted Monroe's sensibilities.

Monroe cited both Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as precursors to the new poetry movement (New Poetry xxxvii, xlii) but gave more attention to Whitman's free verse. Women writers in general did not easily come to terms with the national and regional fascination with Whitman, although they themselves shared and perpetuated it. Male Midwesterners Sandburg and Lindsay styled themselves as new Whitmans, but the nineteenth-century poet's sexual frankness and freedom of movement were hard for women to imitate.² Moreover, while men's voices could be impersonal, embodying the spirit of the vast American democracy, women's voices were too often considered the particular voice of local color, the strong democrat's helpmate or country cousin. How much to promote local writers, especially the archetypal “corn-fed poets of the middle states” (Henderson 11/18/18), became a matter of contention among Monroe, Henderson, and Tietjens. All three backed their male neighbors to varying degrees at different points in their careers, but none wholeheartedly followed the agenda of Sandburg, Lindsay, or Masters in her own work.

Monroe sometimes took machinery as her subject matter or wrote an occasional poem in dialect, but rarely did she use the colloquial style of her letters to Henderson. According to speculation by Ellen Williams, Monroe realized that she, too, belonged to the ranks of the many minor poets she included in her magazine. Pound's influence may have made her poetry less pompous but also more humble in the process (E. Williams 276). When her love of a struggle presents itself in her mature poetry, it does so in terms of an admiration for quiet perseverance, as in “The Water Ouzel,” “The Pine at Timber-Line,” and “Mountain Song” (New Poetry 359-60). Despite her defenses of free verse, much of Monroe's poetry conforms to conventional rhythms and/or rhyme schemes. The same would hold true for the other women poets. Free verse, perhaps because of its association with Whitman, proved difficult for them to sustain. Ostriker finds that American women poets of the modern era usually fit one of two stylistic patterns: “an extension and refinement of the traditional lyric style which concentrated on intense personal feeling” and a style that “was formally innovative and intellectually assertive but avoided autobiography” (44). The women of Chicago fall into the first group; the latter route would have alienated them from the literary conversations going on in that city. Yet Whitman's freewheeling version of the picaresque, which several of the men adopted, was not possible either. Often, these women employed rhyme and regular meter but included more trochees, spondees, phyrruses, and half-feet than typically found heretofore in English poetry. Even though Monroe's free verse consisted of an ordinary vocabulary, she never achieved the relaxed diction of her male counterparts.

Mary Aldis typifies the women poets of Chicago in that her style varied widely from one poem to the next. Her refusal to limit her formal range often resulted in awkward incongruities between style and subject matter, but as Amy Lowell observed in a review of Aldis's Flashlights, her dramatic monologues stand out as particularly effective, due no doubt to Aldis's experience as a playwright (318-20). Several of these monologues strikingly combine literary and social concerns. “Reason,” for example, is spoken by a battered wife confined in a mental hospital. In “Ellie,” a wealthy woman recalls how her manicurist died from a regimen of “Calwell's Great Obesity Cure” (91).

Of the women Monroe published, Tietjens (1884-1944)—who was a poet, novelist, mother, journalist, and world traveler—came closest to adopting a colloquial voice, but she also wrote in rhymed verse on conventional subjects for women (love, motherhood, loneliness, nature, beauty) much of the time. Even the lightest of these lyrics, however, convey a characteristic zest, as in the description of an infant as “You merry little roll of fat! / Made warm to kiss, and smooth to pat” (Body 19) in “The Bacchante to her Babe.” Her autobiography provides additional glimpses of the “rather mannish self” portrayed in “Plaint of Complexity.” She uses, for example, the type of “strenuous” metaphor for creation preferred by the naturalists (Wilson 511) to describe her memories: “I am choked up with them as an irrigation ditch is choked with debris. For the water to flow clean again among the roots of living I must grub out the lot of them, get down in hip boots, and sweat” (World 1). Tietjens admired Masters's “vulgarity, in the best sense—meaning that closeness to earth and the things of the earth which is an undoubted part of every really inclusive genius” (46). In her journalism, too, her preferences flouted gender prescriptions. She remarks that as a war correspondent assigned to France by the Chicago Daily News, “I never was really good at the strictly women's stories I was supposed to write. … Confronted with the immensity of the war, and with no newspaper training behind me, I simply could not find these things important” (141). No other woman writer from Chicago, and few of the men, excelled as she did at describing a disgusting scene in graphic detail. In this sense, Tietjens anticipates what Ostriker calls “a certain hardness of tone” (12) in contemporary American women's poetry, a posture the latter sees as “a perversely exaggerated version of an acceptable style” (89). Tietjens differed from the men in her occasional overt use of dialect or malapropisms as an assertion of her own superiority, sometimes reflecting on her class-bound relationship to her subject.

If Tietjens most nearly resembled the Sandburg strain of modernism, Florence Kiper Frank came closest to Lindsay's communal aesthetic. Of the Chicago women, she wrote the most blatantly political poetry, including “A Girl Strike-Leader,” “The Jewish Conscript,” and protests against anti-Semitism and the war. Sidney H. Bremer asserts, “While Vachel Lindsay was popularizing ‘primitive’ chants in Congo Songs (1914), his female colleagues were developing chants as public songs of urban unity” (“Lost Chicago Sisters” 219). Frank's poems of this type include “The Song of the Women,” “Speak the Women of the Warring Nations,” and “An Interpretive Dance,” which begins, “The dance of the mating! / Young men and women out of the morning sunlight / Sturdily advancing, with joyous, proud motion” (40). “In poetry, as in drama,” Bremer observes, “Chicago's women emphasize the participatory speech, rather than objectifying description, that characterizes their novelistic style, too” (“Lost Chicago Sisters” 220).

Frank's only volume of poetry, The Jew to Jesus and Other Poems (1915), supplements her confident, public voice with subterfuge on the issue of whether women could achieve the stature of Whitman. “Walt Whitman” characterizes the paradigmatic American poet and the figure emulated by some of the midwestern men as “the man with the hardy body … whom Nature claims as her own” and “not the effeminate poet, the delicate treader of flowers” (74). The poem implies both that Frank herself is no flower-treader and that as a middle-class woman she can not follow this man who travels alone and sleeps under the stars. Similarly ambivalent, the next selection in the volume proclaims, “I sing the joy of cleanliness and strength.” Although emphasizing outdoor life and sensuality, the poem does not use the sweaty imagery that distinguishes much of Tietjens's poetry. The last line concludes, “I sing the well-poised man with splendid health!” (75), but nothing excludes women. Frank, therefore, would appear to be asserting her own right to sing of bodily pleasure and experience. The poem that follows, however, calls into question whether she meant the “well-poised man” generically or not, for “The Quatrain” pleads that the reader not disregard this form despite its short length. This sort of poem does not rely on “the body's strength and grace” but on what happens “within the flashing eye” (76). Eight more quatrains follow, suggesting that the stanza Dickinson chose suits Frank better than sprawling free verse. Frank's volume extends Poetry's interoffice disputes, both affirming and challenging the poetics of Monroe's favorite discoveries. The Jew to Jesus implies that, although women like Monroe and Frank certainly could admire Whitman, they never would quite succeed him. Frank's work enraged Henderson, who responded tersely to Monroe's publication of it: “Florence Kiper stuff is the sort that seems to me unforgivable—‘not poetry’” (12/12/17).

A commuter to Chicago's literary haunts, Marjorie Allen Seiffert expressed an even deeper ambivalence than Frank had concerning women's relationship to language. “Interior” addresses the disparity between a man's and woman's ability to communicate. Seiffert writes, “Words curl like fragrant smoke-wreaths” from the man sitting by the stove. The other occupant of the room “has a bitter thing to learn. / His words drift over her … uncomforted / Her pain whirls up and twists like a scarlet thread / Among his words” (Monroe and Henderson New Poetry 467). Deborah Tannen's delineation of men's and women's tendencies to strive for independence and intimacy respectively when communicating helps explain Seiffert's poem (26). The man apparently defies gender socialization and seeks intimacy, but rather than reaching the woman he only increases her sense of alienation. He engages in what Tannen labels “report-talk” rather than “rapport-talk” (76-77), as evidenced by his inability to make any connection with her. The woman's inability to speak as the man does, to make her pain a fragrant wreath, implies an anxiety about making herself understood and performing literarily.

Seiffert's “Ballad of Kinfolk” implicitly addresses writers in voicing discomfort over linguistic differences:

My forefathers had lusty flesh
          And long, proud bones;
Their names, a text, their birth and death,
          Are carved on stones;
I know my body came from them,
          But nowhere can I find
If their hearts fathered my own heart,
          Their minds, my troubled mind.

(Ballads 73)

Seiffert's desire to relate to her predecessors, to find their silence something other than obliviousness to her existence, anticipates Adrienne Rich's description of the woman writer looking to literature and not finding “that absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together” (39).

Occasionally, Seiffert ventured into the “drug clerks and machinery” area but seldom as an attempt at realism. Instead, the scene usually symbolizes some other situation. “The Shop,” for instance, deals with women's restricted sphere when compared with what the speaker sees as the relative freedom of working-class men. The first two stanzas describe Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, and Greek men in a blacksmith's shop, their obvious competence at their jobs, and their easy interactions. The poem continues:

Their eyes are clean and white in their black faces;
If they like, they are surly, can speak an ugly no;
They laugh great blocks of mirth; their jokes are simple;
They know where they stand, which way they go.
If I wore overalls, lost my disguise
Of womanhood and youth, they would call me friend,
They would see I am one of them, and we could talk
And laugh together, and smoke at the day's end.

(King 80)

The woman feels that her speech cannot be hard, solid, simple, confident, or democratic, many of the adjectives midwestern men used to glorify workers. She is capable of speaking plainly, but womanhood disguises her abilities.

Seiffert never wrote in dialect or slang. Like Lindsay, Frank, Langston Hughes, and the Irish poet Padraic Colum, however, she worked with musical forms, which were often seen as linked to the lives of ordinary people. Alice Corbin collected, translated, and wrote songs as well. A letter to Monroe reveals her ambivalence, nevertheless, about the place of musically inspired poetry in the modern milieu. Asking Monroe's opinion of a series of New Mexican poems, Corbin mused, “Do you think this digression into folk-song and ballads reactionary—or progressive? Quien sabe!” (Henderson 5/11/17). We have seen the pertinence of her question in connection with Sandburg and Lindsay, whose application of folk sources could be both radical and nostalgic. The question of folk songs' progressiveness or retrograde status held particular significance for women, who had problems with credibility when using the vernacular. With ballads, Seiffert strived, like other modern poets, to make the old new. While the rhyming ballad casts her as the feminine singer, this form also allows her to represent sexual double standards and the psychological damage they do to women. “The Ballad of the Cougar” tells the story of a young farm wife's disappearance. We see the clues from the neighbors' perspective: “One window faces toward the wood, / Its casing scored by a pointed claw, / And here a mark that might be blood / Reveals the print of a padded paw. …” The bed reveals “tawny hairs from an animal's hide. / Why do they think the woman died?” (Ballads 93). The husband has been seen hunting at night and claims that he cannot speak of what he knows. The poem ends with reports that a boy has heard the wails of a dying cougar.

The evidence does not reveal whether the cougar came in through the window and onto the bed or off the bed and out through the window. The claws, hair, and blood serve as synecdoches for an attack or a sexual act. The man may be hunting the beast that attacked his wife, or it may be that she turns into a cougar at night. Does the farmer have to kill the cougar in her? Perhaps there is no place for a woman driven to nocturnal rambling. With the ballad, Seiffert places herself within a long poetic tradition, circumvents the issue of vernacular language, and yet responds to modern themes. “The Ballad of the Cougar” works aesthetically and thematically because a cougar-woman is not inconsistent with the often supernatural and violent tone of these songs. Frequently either melancholy or witty, Seiffert's poetry at times takes a metaphysical turn, making her one of the most intellectual of Chicago's poets.

The literal and figurative conversations Monroe encouraged certainly must have stimulated women's creativity, as evidenced by their devotion to her and by the decline in American women's poetic productivity after her death (W. Drake 254). In keeping with her philosophy of the Open Door, Monroe said in the last speech she delivered, “The power and richness of our renaissance is proved not only by the ever-memorable names I have mentioned, but also by the lesser poets who crowd the twentieth-century anthologies, each with a poem or two too good to be forgotten” (Poet's Life 471). Her expansion of what counts as power and richness reflects her desire to see a broad swath of poets share in the success. She displays what Rich, quoting Whitman, describes as a “hunger for equals” (214). That hunger involved a sense of “righteous ecstacy” (Tompkins “Fighting” 590) that led to rhetorical posturing and self-promotion but also to the pleasure of straight-talking friendships and an ethic valuing diversity, experimentation, compromise, and perseverance. The poets who gathered around her adopted many of these values and continued their arguments with her in their poems, where they pondered the amount of freedom that language afforded women. The genre itself may have prevented some of these poets from adopting the journalistic standards favored by the men, but participating in a community that demanded they be assertive and often direct may have alleviated their need to prove themselves that way in print.

.....

For all her love of conversation, Monroe had a magazine to distribute, and her willingness to compromise served her well in regularly meeting deadlines and expectations for quality. Despite Margaret Anderson's differing priorities, Chicagoans formed interdependent communities around both journals. Like Monroe, Anderson published Aldis, Seiffert, and Tietjens. Shari Benstock concludes that Ezra Pound pitted the two magazines against each other by becoming foreign correspondent for both (363). Although his maneuvering was divisive, and the editors criticized each other in public and private, they had key aspects in common with one another, much more so than, for instance, Poetry did with the Dial.

In 1906, Anderson left college in her third year at Oxford, Ohio's Western College for Women, and returned home. Increasingly restless with her family in Columbus, Indiana, she moved to Chicago at the age of twenty-two after finding a job as a reviewer (Darnell 20-21). With little in the way of funding or experience, Anderson somehow began publishing the Little Review in 1914. At one point, she and her sister, joined often by friends, lived in tents on a Lake Michigan beach after being evicted from their housing. For all intents and purposes, Anderson's editing career ended in 1921 after she was convicted on obscenity charges for publishing excerpts of James Joyce's Ulysses (21). Like Monroe, Anderson both confirms and challenges stereotypes of women and their language. Indeed, comparing the philosophies of the two editors proves just how difficult categorizing language usage can be and highlights the dilemmas posed by attempts to prescribe ethical means of speaking.

Although Anderson and Monroe published many of the same people and both admired innovation, their reasons for founding magazines differed. Monroe ultimately saw Poetry serving the art of poetry and poets, who, unlike visual artists and musicians, had few sources of funding (Poet's Life 241). The Little Review, in contrast, has been categorized as a “personal magazine” dependent on the force of the editor's personality (A. Johnson 351-52). Anderson, for instance, would not have troubled herself over such questions as metrics. Jane Heap summarized the magazine's philosophy of art: “TO EXPRESS THE EMOTIONS OF LIFE IS TO LIVE. TO EXPRESS THE LIFE OF EMOTIONS IS TO MAKE ART” (Anderson Strange 19). Anderson herself wrote, “As a touchstone, I divide my responses to Art into four categories. The first produces loss of breath; the second, tears; the third, musical reward; the fourth, mental reward” (Strange 43). This fourth stage should not be confused with intellectual appreciation, for Anderson also stated, “INTELLECTUALS DO NOT HAVE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCES” (Strange 112). She envisioned a magazine that would allow her to live by “filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer” (Thirty Years' War 35). As this goal suggests, the magazine, whose first number appeared in 1914, involved its readers in an ongoing process; it appeared sporadically and with scant attention to production values, at least until Jane Heap signed on in 1916 (Blain 22, 506-7). In 1930, Anderson reflected on her first years as editor, stating, “What I needed was not a magazine but a club room where I could have informed disciples twice a week that nature was wonderful, love beautiful, and art inspired” (Thirty Years' War 47).

Being modeled after conversation did not mean that the Little Review shared Poetry's enthusiasm for modern speech and diction. On the contrary, John Cowper Powys sounded a note distinguishing art from life, complaining about Dreiser's novels, “[P]eople are permitted to say those things which they actually do say in real life—things that make you blush and howl, so soaked in banality and ineptitude are they. In the true epic manner Dreiser gravely puts down all these fatuous observations, until you feel inclined to cry aloud for the maddest, the most fantastic, the most affected Osconian wit, to serve as an antidote” (Anderson Little Review 49). The Little Review could be seen as a haven for those Chicago writers with no interest in representing the spoken language of the Midwest (or anywhere else, for that matter).

Yet the magazine borrowed from spoken forms in other ways. Ellen Williams writes, “The Little Review seems like a live conversation, full of contradictions, unexpected allusions, and false starts.” Broader than Poetry in the sense that it was not limited to any one genre, the Little Review published essays as well as fiction and poetry. In contrast to Monroe's confident, focused essays, dialogues often served as a format for criticism or editorial commentary. Williams observes, “Margaret Anderson's magazine had a vitality that kept it interesting on the brink of chaos, but the editor was in constant danger of seeming silly” (148).

The epigraph to this chapter indicates that Anderson was well aware of the dangers of her whimsical manner and had experienced scorn firsthand. For almost two decades now, the risks of sounding silly have likewise concerned feminists interested in language.³ Polemicists such as Sally Miller Gearhart, for example, have urged women to reclaim forms of communication that traditionally have been labeled “weak” or “yielding” (201) as part of a “rejection of the conquest/conversion model of interaction” (200). Although, obviously, print provides us with the only evidence for judging how Chicago's women conducted themselves, they left clues as to the ways they confirmed or challenged these linguistic stereotypes and expectations. In her willingness to appear as the good listener, or the scatter-brained hostess to a sundry gathering of writers, Anderson makes the idea of woman as nurturing environment (Gearhart 200) a method of print communication.

Anderson would not have accepted, however, Gearhart's premise that “any intent to persuade is an act of violence” (195). Like Monroe, Anderson eclectically embraced contributors and preferred seeming disarray to dogma, but unlike her older competitor, who could sympathize with both poets and patrons, Anderson remained utterly confident that she understood everything better than almost everyone else. Her attitude toward persuasion differed fundamentally from that of Heap, whom she called “the world's best talker” (Thirty Years' War 103). Heap, Anderson felt, could supply all who listened with the truth. She confesses to making every effort to exhibit Heap's talents wherever people gathered, a tactic that made the two of them “much loved and even more loathed” (107).

Jane of course didn't like it entirely.

It's an awkward role for me. You're the buzz and I'm the sting.

And she didn't at all share my obsession about enlightening the world.

Why should I care what people think? They should think the way they do. I've nothing to say to them. And I don't want them to know what I think. I believe in silence of the people, by the people and for the people.

This would send me into a panic. Imagine allowing the intellectuals to stagnate in stupidity when a word or two from her would change their mental life!

(Thirty Years' War 108)

While Anderson seems to have taken fewer pains than Monroe to unify her magazine and to maintain continuity, she more adamantly desired to convert others to her elitist philosophy. Although Gearhart's model would categorize both women as violent, they manifested their desires for power differently.

Heap's refusal to attempt persuasion should not be equated with non-violence either. In answer to Hart Crane, who praised the Little Review but pointed out that its editorial comments too often “become merely personal” instead of tackling “the real question,” Heap explained,

I make quite an effort to miss the “real question.”

When I was little I could never see a strange cat without shying a stone at it with hoots of challenge. I like cats, I never tried to hit one; I have rescued and even wept over cats, but I like to see them run. There is something in their nature that calls for the stone. Many people call for the stone. … Yes, you may call us personal. We try to address our remarks to the person we have in mind rather than, as is the convention, to the (or a) literary state.

(Anderson Little Review 284)

Here Heap describes an enjoyment of what Tannen identifies as characteristics of male interaction: self-display and vying for advantage (86). Indeed, Thomas J. Farrell writes that the “female mode” of rhetoric shuns “unnecessary antagonism” and “usually does not seek to entertain sympathizers or irritate opponents in the same delightedly deliberate manner as the male mode does” (916). Yet Heap's emphasis on the personal distinguishes the kind of dialogue she claims to like from what Nancy K. Miller describes as the behavior of a prominent male critic, who can debate with colleagues in an extremely harsh manner “and then walk off, and it's as if he'd played a squash game and then went home to take a shower” (Gallop 354). Heap's analogy between literary criticism and throwing rocks at cats shows that she does enjoy it as a game, but consequences are taken into consideration. The positions one takes in literary debates are not disinterested, disembodied, or transcendent, and, her playfulness notwithstanding, Heap refuses to pretend otherwise.

Anderson came to rely on her interaction with Heap in much the same way that conversations with Henderson had honed Monroe's sense of modern poetry. By Anderson's account, Heap believed that her friend could learn the skills needed for adversarial communication, and Anderson worked to convince Heap that talk, though valuable as an end in itself, could serve as a preliminary stage of writing, especially writing for the Little Review. Anderson recalls the efforts required to make her reticent partner write, including transcribing her speech in longhand (Thirty Years' War 109-10). Heap likewise struggled to teach Anderson about public speaking: “Our talk explored also the psychology of combat. Jane taught me new ways to defend myself, taught me to develop my powers of speech instead of placing myself guilelessly in the enemy's hands, taught me that revenges induce respect. She taught me how to gauge an audience—how to give what was desired or merited but no more—that giving too much was as bad as giving too little. I pounced on this knowledge. I assimilated it. And I have almost never been able to use it” (Thirty Years' War 124). Anderson wanted to persuade and did not appreciate strategy; Heap knew strategy but did not wish to persuade. Their dilemma illustrates the difficulty of categorizing masculine, feminine, feminist, or nonfeminist speech because any personal style results from complex individual combinations of knowledge, motivation, perception of audience, sense of gratification, and maybe even genetics, along with communal standards deriving from occupation, family, ethnicity, regional background, gender, class, and age. Anderson ironically makes this point in this chapter's epigraph, in which she protests the privileging of “a strong and heavy way of saying.” In this excerpt from her autobiography, she frequently uses the impersonal “man” and “he” to refer to her own predicament as a female speaker, while also parodying Gertrude Stein, whose subversion of “patriarchal poetry” is now considered revolutionary (see, for example, Grahn). An individual's language use, then, easily surpasses the categories outlined by stereotypes, sociolinguists, rhetoricians, polemicists, and literary critics.

Moreover, for Chicago's women poets and editors, the medium often is not the message. Challenging prejudices in art did not always mean overcoming them in other kinds of situations, and, as Monroe's career demonstrates, aggressive speech and love of confrontation did not always produce cutting-edge poetry. Although Tietjens wrote in a direct manner that men often admired, memoirs portray her as one of the “nicest” members of the Chicago group. Monroe describes her as “a clever talker in three or four languages” but “less ruthless than Alice, more tender toward the hapless aspirants whose” poetry they could not accept (Poet's Life 324).⁴ Tietjens herself lists as one of her tasks at Poetry “to soften and tone down in the visiting poets these unexpected attacks of severity that sometimes seized” Monroe (World 26). Her ability to write in the virile Chicago voice notwithstanding, she performed the traditionally feminine peace-making role (8/16/17).

Isolation was one of Seiffert's chief complaints as a poet, and, while her poetry eloquently criticized linguistic gender roles, she had trouble surmounting them. Her social graces, rather than any desire to “labor for her living,” afforded her access to the literary life she desired, but her “hostess instincts” (Steinem 181) apparently complicated her life as a poet. As Monroe wrote of Seiffert and her friends,

Their dinners were superlative for food and service, and for a quick fencing of witty talk among intimates intellectually up-to-date. Witter Bynner in those days could keep any party going brilliantly, and with Ficke and Marjorie (the three “Spectrists”) to flash back—not to speak of other clever guests—one had need to keep one's wits sharpened. Marjorie, a round-faced red-cheeked beauty, walked into the Poetry office early in 1917, and we became close friends, dipping back and forth into each other's atmospheres.

(Poet's Life 424-25)

Although Seiffert may have fenced with Monroe and her dinner guests, their rapport appears to have been different in kind than that between Monroe and Henderson. In the years after Monroe's death, Seiffert wrote to Masters, lamenting her sense of having been left behind. Feeling too old to fit in with the younger poets coming to prominence, even if she were to be asked to join their conversations, she confided, “I'm sure I couldn't do as well as blessed old Harriet.” Her letter also suggests that, even though she matched wits with her colleagues, she remained aware of her role as hostess. “People have such a horrid habit of dying and moving away, or espousing causes and losing their talent for uncontroversial human intercourse,” she complained. “And then when two get divorced, they cannot meet in peace at the same dinner table, and one hates to take sides by inviting either” (10/1/n.y.).

Such pairs as the cougar-woman from “The Ballad of the Cougar” abound in Seiffert's poetry; twins and mirror images occur repeatedly.⁵ Moreover, she led something of a double life. As a wealthy mother of two residing in Moline, Illinois, she kept up her obligatory social schedule, spoke to local groups, and entertained her literary friends from the area. At the same time, she could easily travel to Chicago by train to visit Monroe and the others. Vacations also gave her the opportunity to compartmentalize her life. She spent several weeks every year in New York, meeting with publishers and friends, as described in her correspondence with Idella Purnell: “Your letter reached me here, on my annual vacation of two weeks, during which I cease being ‘a gentle wife / And a tender mother’ and am the remains of a poet instead” (4/16/n.y.).

Basing his analysis on an unpublished story, “Rebellion,” William Drake concludes that “Seiffert conceived of her creative life in terms of gender conflict; the role of the creator is male, but it is kept in slavery … by the grip of domesticity.” We see her inability to “escape by uniting herself with the liberated woman of her imagination” (115) in another letter to Purnell, in which Seiffert invites her to a soiree she is throwing in New York. “And by the way,” she asks, “do you know any lovely creatures of the fair sex who are pretty good poets and would accept a second-hand invitation to such a party?” She goes on to explain that they will need “a poetic cutie to help entertain the men!” (5/12/n.y.). She obviously does not consider herself a mere “poetic cutie” but nevertheless feels obligated to ensure that the men are amused, even at the cost of self-alienation.

While their exclusion from literary history has made a sense of community essential for most women writers, the need to please others also has proved debilitating. Tietjens, for instance, obviously enjoyed the camaraderie of Chicago literary life but found that working at Poetry made doing her own writing difficult (8/16/17). Without the support of a strong group of women, several of the poets discussed here in all likelihood would not have achieved what they did. Yet living the literary life may have substituted at times for writing literature, and the expectations of the community may have constrained individual development. That none of Chicago's female poets achieved the stylistic singularity or full-fledged poetics of a Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, or Sara Teasdale suggests as much.

Several writers balanced “the energy of creation and the energy of relation” (Rich 43), but no clear formula emerges. Both Harriet Monroe's stern approach and Margaret Anderson's impassioned method effectively kept Poetry and the Little Review from meeting the same fate as the Freewoman, which Pound and his associates took over, changing its name to the Egoist (Benstock 364). Writers gravitated to their disparate appropriations of the “masculine right” of “weighing out approval or disapproval.” Many found Monroe's warm but prickly nature intriguing, and, as Jane Rule has written of Anderson, “Claiming to be breathless, she more often lets in great gusts of fresh air” (148). Contemporary feminists should be able to learn from their example, but drawing any general conclusions about nurturing yet nonconfining communities is difficult because, despite the differences in their goals, philosophies, and means of communicating, Monroe and Anderson produced many of the same successes and shortcomings.

Chicago's women poets responded to the opportunities and demands of their community by raising the question of prejudices toward women's language, but they found their individual measures of freedom in varying ways. Literary conversations were stimulating and potentially disenabling. Try as they might, Chicago's women could not always escape the imperatives of gender roles in the social ritual of conversation, which could demand the stereotypically feminine behaviors of accommodating others and deferring to their needs. Embracing conflict defied prohibitions but produced mixed results because, according to Tannen, “status and connection are bought with the same currency” (94). In other words, identical words can constitute either an appeal for community or an assertion of superiority, both of which in turn can incite or squelch creativity.

Henderson and Monroe exemplify this ambiguity. As long as they shared the same goal, an energetic frankness and a willingness to give and to receive criticism confirmed their friendship. When conflicts developed over the division of royalties from their anthology, The New Poetry, however, their verbal aggressiveness only increased the bitterness as each felt compelled to keep stating her case more and more vigorously. Even though they hired lawyers to arbitrate, they could not quit fighting. Tannen believes that what the listener hears, rather than what the speaker says, often comprises the message of a conversation; she comments, “Each of us decides whether we think others are speaking in the spirit of differing status or symmetrical connection” (37). Although Monroe and Henderson were writing rather than speaking, the deterioration of their friendship demonstrates the importance of reception in forming a sense of community and fostering creativity, for the very characteristics that first cemented their relationship eventually led them to suspect that each wanted an unfair advantage over the other.⁶

As had Monroe and Henderson in the early days of Poetry, Anderson and Heap heard disagreement as a form of connection, in part because they perceived it as a welcome violation of social conventions. “The result of our differences,” Anderson wrote, “was—argument. At last I could argue as long as I wanted. Instead of discouraging Jane, this stimulated her. … I had always been confronted with people who found my zest for argument disagreeable, who said they lost interest in any subject the moment it became controversial. … I had never been able to understand why people dislike to be challenged. For me challenge has always been the great impulse, the only liberation” (Thirty Years' War 122-23). Anderson not only found arguing with Heap mentally stimulating; she also used this kind of challenge as a metaphor for their lesbian sexuality. The following account of their summer together in California discloses their deepening relationship:

By early autumn our conversations on the ranch had attained such proportions that our physical lives had to be completely readjusted to them. There was such a spell upon us when our talk went well that it was difficult—it was destroying—to break it up by saying good-night, going to bed, and calling out from one room to the other our final intellectualizations. It seemed to me that this shock could be avoided with a little ingenuity. So I moved our beds (divans) into the living room, placing them on the floor at each side of and at right angles to the fireplace. Between them I put a low table and we dined in pajamas in order to avoid the brutality of breaking up the conversation to undress. There was nothing to do after dinner but push the table away, light another cigarette, and when we could talk no more fall off to sleep under the impression that we hadn't stopped.

(Thirty Years' War 128-29)

Like Monroe and Henderson, Anderson and Heap cannot stop arguing, but their inability to conclude has different consequences. Today, too, some women find vigorous debate liberating while others are silenced by it, and feminists disagree about how best to prepare women to participate in public and professional life. Teresa de Lauretis posits that two different desires divide feminists: “an erotic, narcissistic drive that enhances images of feminism as difference, rebellion, daring, excess, subversion, disloyalty, agency, empowerment, pleasure and danger” and “an ethical drive that works toward community, accountability, entrustment, sisterhood, bonding, belonging to a common world of women” (“Upping the Anti” 266). Elsewhere, Lauretis argues that homophobia prevents many feminists from grasping the interrelatedness of these drives because their combination occurs necessarily in lesbian feminism (30-32). We can see the presence of both of these tendencies in Heap's and Anderson's relationship, where the element of rebelliousness makes arguing pleasurable and emancipatory but also necessitates a stronger connection, including moving beds into the same room, dining in pajamas, smoking together, and falling asleep when they can no longer talk.

Yet Anderson and Heap keep a coffee table between them, at once a sign of independence and intimacy. Although their sexual orientation helped to make disagreement erotic and friendly, they needed both community and individuality, as did the other women in Chicago. We have seen that Monroe desired both to create a worldwide community of poets and to promote Poetry's own identity and status. Heap wished to establish a conversation between Europe and the United States (Little Review 272), but, simultaneously, Anderson refused to remain rooted in any one physical community. She moved the Little Review to New York in 1917 and to Paris in 1922.⁷ The editors of both magazines could bring together independent thinkers because women were breaking out of old forms of socialization by smoking, giving and taking, and talking about art, religion, politics, and sex, but they were not yet in structures where “disciplinarity, professionalism, and institutionalization” (Messer-Davidow 283) could both mold and set them against one another. Even so, these groups rarely crossed boundaries of race or class; the differences over which they disagreed were not the conflicts that divide and anger people on the streets. Perhaps they could all argue freely because, unlike the novelists who focused on social questions, their common mission was largely an aesthetic one. The dependence of artistic creation on privacy certainly had been well established at the time these women wrote (see Olsen), but the shape and success of modernist communities was still being tested.

Just as the results of open disagreement depended on the attitudes of the parties listening, the appearance of challenging stereotypes or reenacting them depends on reception as well as on performance. On the one hand, metrical poetry, elevated diction, and eclecticism can confirm the poets discussed here as literary ladies; on the other hand, their emphasis on women's language, their adaptation of a masculine aesthetic, and their dissatisfaction with any one particular poetic form can be seen as challenges to stereotypes of women's speech and writing. Their projects support both kinds of reactions because prejudices created by language can never be completely undone through language, because women found some stereotypes less confining than others, and because most women combine, in varying proportions, some degree of tradition and rebellion.

Women poets and editors joined the chorus making up the Chicago literary voice by creating implied speakers, imagining poetry as public song, reflecting on women's use of language, enacting policies, and calling attention to situations where women's talk was vital. As editors, Monroe, Henderson, Tietjens, Anderson, and Heap opened avenues to other women and, based on their own needs and desires, mixed traditionally feminine and unfeminine behavior in ways that challenge distinctions between femininity and masculinity. Like Kate Barrington, the heroine of Elia Peattie's Chicago novel, The Precipice, these women made the dynamics of their private conversations a basis for public discourse. With a modern sense of reflexiveness, however, they referred to their literary lives, creating the impression that they conducted personal interactions as public debate. The apparent disparity between their art and their lives illustrates the tensions and diverse sources of pleasure within the need for conversation itself. The women poets' productivity, spurred by their conversations, illustrates that the “ordinary” speech favored by Chicago writers came in various forms and could be represented through a number of aesthetic preferences—or resisted altogether. Using conversation as a model for running magazines consolidated artistic communities and allowed for varied exercises of women's authority; what remains of their conversations now makes audible the splendid dissonance behind the lyric poetry of the women that Monroe, Henderson, Anderson, and Heap published.

Notes

1. She went by Alice Corbin Henderson in her role as editor and Alice Corbin in her role as poet.

2. Ostriker notes that, when Ella Wheeler Wilcox's Poems of Passion appeared in 1881, shocked critics protested that she could “out-Swinburne Swinburne and out-Whitman Whitman” (43). By the time Poetry was founded, however, Whitman had been even further outdone, in ways that women could not adopt.

3. In 1975, Robin Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place presented what the author believed to be the usual characteristics of women's speech. Politeness, ultra-correctness, uncertainty, and humorlessness were some examples (A. Hill 10). Although her methods and findings have been all but rejected, “[i]n her intent to be a goad to future research,” writes Alette Olin Hill, “Lakoff has been wildly successful” (18). Ensuing studies have grouped “women's language” with “powerless language” or that of disadvantaged people in general (O'Barr and Atkins). Others have foregone assessments of effectiveness or ineffectiveness while seeking to understand men's and women's conversational styles (Tannen).

4. Being liked for clever talk may have depended on compensatory, nonthreatening qualities. Monroe was older than most of the poets with whom she dealt, Henderson was cherubic-looking, and Tietjens was tactful. Few, in contrast, found Amy Lowell's verbal assertiveness endearing. Being a large Easterner put her at a disadvantage whenever she came to Chicago.

5. Ostriker discusses the idea of the monstrous in contemporary women's poetry (74) and observes that “to be a creative woman in a gender-polarized culture is to be a divided self” (60).

6. Monroe and Henderson began the correspondence about royalties in October 1921 and were still airing their differences in August 1922. See their letters in the Alice Corbin Henderson Collection, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

7. Later, Anderson and Heap studied under George Gurdjieff. The Fiery Fountains alludes to a breakup with Heap and describes Anderson's relationship with singer Georgette LeBlanc. Anderson writes that adopting Gurdjieff's philosophies was extremely difficult initially, but the book is mainly a testimony to her new outlook. Her relationship to LeBlanc is characterized by harmony and unspoken agreement. Perhaps relationships based on argument cannot endure, or maybe the intense pressure Anderson experienced while studying with Gurdjieff produces this kind of accord.