When we teach Paris: A Poem, we find ourselves repeatedly facing the same pedagogical question: what do we want our students to see when we read this poem? Hope Mirrlees’s text is at once a personal, lyric exploration of post-war Paris and a work of printed visual art. It is a modernist long poem written by a single author as well as an example of the kind of feminist modernist collaboration possible in small, independent presses. When faced with a poem like this that showcases its intentionally...

“How on earth, we wonder, could a man of Yeats’s gifts take such nonsense seriously?” exclaimed W. H. Auden. “How could Yeats . . . take up something so essentially lower-middle class—or should I say Southern Californian?” [1] Auden’s incredulous geography was more accurate than he knew. Perhaps the peak of Yeats’s lifelong interest in what Auden dismissively called the “mumbo jumbo of magic” (“mediums, spells, the Mysterious Orient— how embarrassing”) were the “sleeps,” joint experiments by W...

In a lecture entitled “Fairytale about Three Sisters: Painting, Architecture, Sculpture,” influential fin-de-siècle Russian architect and devotee of the art nouveau style Fyodor Shekhtel proposed that, “architecture, painting, and sculpture ought to go hand in hand in friendly collaborative work; this friendship, of course, encompasses equally artists working in furniture, bronze, ceramics, painting on glass and all the other branches of applied art. [1] By anthropomorphizing artistic genres as...

The collaboratively produced 1980 no wave opera John Gavanti is loosely based on Mozart’s 1787 Don Giovanni, itself a telling of the Don Juan legend that was adapted by the Italian librettist Lorenzo da Ponte. The two works are quite different. Whereas Mozart’s original is magisterial, punctuated by moments of comedy and the macabre, the modern update is cacophonous and irreverent. Although there are occasional, glib references to the source material, the newer work is constructed around a dense...

For years, I have asked students in my modern and contemporary literature survey to compare the passages in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) (the latter a clear homage to the former) in which the narrator and characters perform parallel exegeses of a classical masterpiece. In Chapter 5 of Howards End the main characters attend a live performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5; in Chapter 7 of On Beauty they attend a summer outdoor concert series featuring...

Mid-century modernism in music largely flowed in two streams. One was the austere, hermetic music of composers such as Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Their “serialist” music was built from refined, logical, even mathematical systems, but listeners often experience it as the opposite: haphazard, frustrating, incomprehensible. [1] Akin to the flat, polished surfaces of mid-century architecture, such music offers few graspable sonic hooks by way of melody, harmony, or...

One of the best-known feuds in American literature is the attempted collaboration between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. In 1930, they decided to cowrite a play based on Hurston’s field work in African American southern folk culture and her unpublished story “The Bone of Contention.” However, The Mule-Bone never met page or stage in their lifetimes and it ended their friendship. Or, to use Hughes’s now famous hand-written manuscript notation, “the authors fell out.” Henry Louis Gates Jr...

Strong and Weak Ties: The Joyce Circle and the Press-Cutting Bureau In a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated December 18, 1937, James Joyce’s secretary Paul Léon described how Finnegans Wake (1939) in its final phase required multiple accomplices to reach completion: it takes some five or six other people to check the corrections, verify the additions and read the proofs. Himself, he does the composing part quite alone and from what I hear of Mr. Joyce, he works daily to about five in the...

On February 5, 1927, a delegate of the Alaska Native Brotherhood, Reverend Samuel G. Davis (Haida), wrote to the founding President of the National Council of American Indians, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, seeking solidarity. Writing on Alaska Native Brotherhood official letterhead, Davis tells about his family and then thanks Bonnin for her ongoing work on behalf of American Indian peoples. He writes, “I am very Proud of you for your work,” and expresses his commitment to “do the same thing here in Alaska.”