The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics

THE ECOLOGY OF MODERNISM

MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY POETICS

Series Editors

Charles Bernstein

Hank Lazer

Series Advisory Board

Maria Damon

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Alan Golding

Susan Howe

Nathaniel Mackey

Jerome McGann

Harryette Mullen

Aldon Nielsen

Marjorie Perloff

Joan Retallack

Ron Silliman

Jerry Ward

THE ECOLOGY OF MODERNISM

American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics

Joshua Schuster

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Garamond and Futura

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover illustration: Poster with a personification of Pollution, c.1920 (litho), Chekhonin, Sergei Vasil’evich (1878–1936) / Private Collection / The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Images

Cover design: Emma Sovich

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schuster, Joshua.

     The ecology of modernism : American environments and avant-garde poetics / Joshua Schuster.

         pages cm. — (Modern & contemporary poetics)

     ISBN 978-0-8173-5829-7 (paperback) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8853-9 (ebook) 1. American poetry—History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)—United States. 3. Ecology in literature. 4. Environmental protection in literature. 5. Literature, Experimental—United States. I. Title.

     PS310.M57S38  2015

     811’.509112—dc23

2015009288

Contents

Preface: Conceptualizing Modernism’s Ecologies

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Regeneration through Pollution

1. Fables: On the Morals of Marianne Moore’s Animal Monologues

2. Ambience: How to Read Gertrude Stein’s Natures

3. Blues: Race and Environmental Distress in Early American Blues Music

4. Traffic: Noise as an Ecological Aesthetic in the Art of John Cage

5. Contaminated Life: Biopolitics after Rachel Carson

6. Conclusion

Afterword: Where Is the Oil in Modernism?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Conceptualizing Modernism’s Ecologies

This book is a kind of quadrat. Just the introduction of a square changes what it means to look at the ecology of modernism.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Frederic Clements, a botanist and perhaps the first self-identified ecologist in the United States, felt that the study of ecology needed to definitively cleave itself from amateurism to attain the status of a veritable science. If the prototypical figure of nineteenth-century naturalism was a stroller ambulating through the woods, then Clements sought a diametrically opposed figure: a well-trained ecologist familiar with scientific methods who replaced sentiment with objective calculation. This scientist needed a basic unit of study, a universal minimal ecological object, a standard of measurement to compare across any given landscape. Clements placed a tape measure on the ground in the shape of a one-meter square, called this unit a quadrat, and studied whatever living matter dwelled inside this square. He took temperature, light, and weather readings within this frame, and with this data in hand, he announced the founding of a scientific ecology.

The quadrat is a simple shape with curious consequences for the study and conceptualization of ecology. Whether or not it sets the standard for a basic unit of ecological science (quadrats are still used today, especially in undergraduate courses introducing students to the study of plant ecology), the quadrat frames a scene of becoming self-aware of ecology as a problem of modernity. The quadrat is an instrument that is both objective and arbitrary. It merely demarcates any given plot of land over a portion of time as ecologically relevant. But this very registration of a unit of environmental study in turn gave form to and made legible a series of new ecological problems regarding stability and change, objectification and care, and the uneasy overlap of matters of fact and matters of concern (to use Bruno Latour’s terms¹). Clements states in Research Methods in Ecology (1905), In its simplest form, the quadrat, as the name implies, is merely a square area of varying size marked off in a formation for the purpose of obtaining accurate information as to the number and grouping of the plants present. . . . This made it possible to ascertain the relative rank of the species of layers and formations, and enabled one for the first time to gain some idea of the minute structure of a bit of vegetation. . . . Changes, which would otherwise be incompletely observed and imperfectly recorded, are followed in the minutest detail and recorded with perfect accuracy.²

With the outline of a mere square placed in the landscape, Clements thought that a true ecological science would take over: rational, Cartesian, parceled out in units, instrumental, objectively accurate, recording the relative rank of species. Clements believed that the quadrat would usher in a new paradigm of nature study that did not depend on human observational preferences. According to Clements, The solitary investigator must replace trained helpers by automatic instruments or ecographs. These have the very great advantages of giving continuous simultaneous records for long periods, and of having no personal equation (23). The quadrat (one of these ecographs) would do its work in the absence of any human presence, and this was indeed one of its strongest selling points. This instrument could out-endure the hardiest backwoods wanderer, recording data on the ground dispassionately and indefinitely. Furthermore, the quadrat could be placed anywhere, any time. This means that ecology could happen anywhere and at any moment. A simple thought, perhaps commonplace now, but it was quite bold in its day. For such an attitude stood in direct contrast with much of nineteenth-century thought about nature that had assumed certain landscapes were more important and timelier than others. Nature had to meet standards of beauty, sublimity, and other hierarchies of value in order to be worthy of attention. This is the nature featured in numerous romantic and Victorian poetries, laden with ornate emotional expectations and sumptuous biological and geographical forms. From this perspective, the narrative of what mattered in nature seemed already established and its moral trajectory well plotted. Only certain aesthetically compelling landscapes tethering nature to the notion of the good seemed worthy of study. The disturbance of the beautiful would then demarcate the end of nature.

The quadrat and other scientific tools and methods, Clements claimed, replaced this nineteenth-century worldview with a distinctly modern one: anything could be ecological, and ecological change was an open-ended process without a script that favored morally freighted outcomes. The quadrat measured an arbitrary spatial size and time period; Clements well knew bioregions didn’t conform to neat squares, and he recommended scaling quadrats as needed to study wider areas. But rather than settling the debate about what constituted the basis of ecological study, Clements did not realize that the quadrat opened the whole discussion anew. From then on, ecology becomes more than just a science—it is a formal and conceptual question, too. At the outset of the twentieth century, ecology is as much about organisms interacting with environs as it is about finding new ways to conceptualize, imagine, record, and document ecological change. Such documentation also involves becoming aware of how recording affects what one records. The square is a site for observation and for reflecting on how observation works. What the square makes visible is how modern ecology is about random encounters as much as watchful care, chance or aleatory events as much as attentiveness toward preserving an ecosystem from disturbance. Instead of a preset narrative about what matters in nature, modern ecology is about whatever happens to any ecology in particular. Furthermore, the one-meter square frames a scene of tension between representation and intervention, or merely recording as compared to active preservation of a landscape. These issues that mark ecology as a modern science, as this book will show, are also the same issues for thinking about the stakes of ecology within modernist art.

Clements had his own hopes for what he would find in the quadrat. At the same time as he conceived of the one-meter square as a unit of ecological study, he developed a theory of how ecosystems over time tend toward a state of mature growth and maximum species complexity. Clements argued that ecosystems succeeded one after another until a climax state was reached, marked by stability in the distribution of large and small plants and animals. One version of the use of the quadrat involved ripping out all the vegetation in the square to reveal the bare soil, and then studying in what successive order plant life returned to the space inside. This theory of succession proved quite popular among ecologists in the early decades of the twentieth century, until criticisms were raised by British ecologist Arthur Tansley in the 1930s against the notion that landscapes inexorably trended toward such climax states. Tansley argued that catastrophic changes proved just as important to ecosystems and also pointed to grasslands and oceans as complex ecologies that showed no characteristics of progression.³ Tansley suspected Clements’s theory of harboring vestiges of nineteenth-century attitudes toward wanting to find a predetermined narrative of development in nature.

Indeed, Clements feared a kind of anarchy of ecology, worried there would be no apparent order of ecological events within the quadrat, just as he dismissed the amateur naturalist who wanted to find sentimental purpose in the landscape. While Clements thought the quadrat would remove human preference from ecological study, his argument for succession ultimately borrowed much of its conceptual framework from civilizational theories of human development, and, more pointed, capitalist theories of economic progress through competition in a supposedly level playing field. Clements’s own biases limit the usefulness of his theories, but his method had the advantage of observing nature as a dynamic space in situ, thereby transitioning the field of ecology to the study of the world in motion, ever-exposed to change and disturbance, the appearance and disappearance of life. Furthermore, Clements’s search for a principle of change over time allowed for a comparative method of ecological conditions applicable across different landscapes. One can study different rates of change and thereby compose a more reliable map of how a landscape is being stressed relative to similar environs. Comparison, a methodological approach useful in studies of other phenomena of modernity, becomes a tool as much as data gathering. The square can measure biodiversity succession just as well as dissolution or depletion.

Environments are not permanently fixed by essence, soil, or any other factor; the quadrat frames environs as ambient spaces that are constituted by whatever happens inside them, whatever life does inside the square. Clements effectively sought to remove the human factor in order to study the human factor, among other ecological actors. He also, perhaps inadvertently, helped make the study of media and mediation, including problems of reliable instrumentation and method, as important as the study of the environment. The environs and the representation of the environs cannot be studied apart from each other. A modern, self-reflexive ecology begins when the frame is included in the landscape and the landscape is already recognized as a frame, even as we well know that ecology exceeds whatever square, box, or frame one would want to perceive it by.

I introduce Clements’s use of the quadrat in this book’s preface to serve as an example of what this book is about: how concepts of modern ecology intertwine with issues of modernist aesthetics. Instead of examining ecological tools, I look at a range of modernist-American cultural objects as exemplary of how forms and environs co-constitute each other. Throughout this book I discuss how the representations of environs and environmental care are not necessarily the same thing, yet are nonetheless hard to demarcate and often depend on each other. Comparing different representations of environs allows for environmental care to become legible in the first place. Ecological science and ecological art thus face similar questions of method and conceptualization. This book is about how modernist American artists sought to try out new ways of representing environs, experimenting with new kinds of framing, which made environments legible in new ways. But this new legibility did not always involve making a consistent connection between representing environs and engaging in a sustained environmental activism. In the modernist artworks I look at, sometimes representations of environs introduced a gap between observation and care. Sometimes new representations allowed for a traversing of this gap. Wallace Stevens’s Anecdote of the Jar encapsulates this issue of the gap between framing environs and intervening within the frame. This well-anthologized poem is often cited as describing the regretful imposition of human order onto a previously wild nature:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.⁴

The jar could be understood as a kind of curved quadrat, placed in a landscape in order to see what happens in a given space when the simple fact of a frame is put down. The introduction of the jar opens a gap between representation and landscape; in this gap both artifice and wilderness are engaged in a process of transformation where each step of the change in form affects the next step. The hill beckons the jar; the jar transforms the shaggy, slovenly wilderness of the hill; the jar shapes the air around it; the round form of the jar brings a sense of scale to the surround; the outline of the jar brings out other outlines; the poem itself is a jar-shaped form placed upon a page, and so on. This poem shows the becoming of forms in a landscape and how forms affect other forms. In other words, this poem’s attention to human and nonhuman interactions, and how concepts and forms affect environs, articulates a distinctly modern view of ecology. Representation happens at the moment of human contact with landscape, but the legacy of this contact is not only about human agency, as jar, hill, wilderness, air, and poem vie in their becoming form. Once the I does an intentional act, the poem, landscape, and jar take over, and causality is conveyed through a cascading series of the word it. Before the matter of dominion takes over the scene at the end of the poem, ambiguously suggesting either a human-controlled or a jar-controlled agenda, the poem gives an account of how forms emerge in and through environs composed of multiple agents.

This poem, like the quadrat, can be seen as a kind of land art or conceptual art that offers a small-scale allegory for this book. The quadrat, the jar, and the poem are generative constraints that help conceptualize how environs become and unbecome. Yet questions remain as to whether self-consciousness about form in modernism opens onto or veers away from an awareness of environmental problems entailed by human dominion. In this book, then, I examine the way American modernists experimented with different forms in order to discuss how representing environmental change became a primary thematic and conceptual concern that had varying effects on environmentalist thought and action during the period. The chapters include case studies of fables in Marianne Moore, ambient poetics in Gertrude Stein, early recorded blues by southern black musicians, and John Cage’s attunement to the way silence includes potentially any sound and invites any environs as worth hearing. These modernists broke from earlier narratives of nature popular in the United States that assumed an inexhaustible plenitude on earth, while deeming only certain landscapes aesthetically valuable. They stumbled onto the idea that any representational form can engage with the existence of any particular environs. Additionally, the artists studied here register into aesthetic terms some of the conceptual and material ramifications of large-scale environmental changes occurring in modernity. However, their own art often shows inconsistent engagements with broader environmentalist themes that were at work in the very shaping of their own experiments with new environmental forms.

Just as a quadrat can be placed anywhere, any word or form can take on ecological importance: this is one of the guiding principles of this book, and a key discovery in the modernist aesthetics of ecology. In T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, waste is a central topos for both the perilous state of global environments and the poem’s form, but so are the other words in the title, as Louis Zukofsky cheekily proved in his Poem beginning ‘The’. Other examples of a kind of aesthetics of the quadrat abound in modernism and beyond. Malevich’s black square, Williams’s so much depends / upon as setting for any given object, Rauschenberg’s white painting, Josef Albers’s squares, and Cage’s Lecture on Nothing put frame and form on the same plane. Joseph Kosuth’s Any Two Meter Square Sheet of Glass to Lean Against Any Wall (1965) entails leaning a large sheet of glass on any given wall, creating an instant art space that is nothing but the fragile, transient, and transparent fact of the diaphanous square. Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963–65) is another example of how forms and environs co-constitute each other in an arbitrary square of wet weather. More recently, David George Haskell, in The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (2012), writes of daily visiting a hoop-sized spot of land in the Tennessee woods nearby his home over a year’s time in order to watch everyday changes in the landscape. David Liittschwager, in A World in One Cubic Foot (2012), placed a one-cubic-foot square made of stainless steel rod painted green in different ecosystems across the globe and photographed all the plants and animals that passed inside each square over a twenty-four-hour period. In these examples, the units of a modern ecological awareness are time, space, event, and form, rather than hierarchy of value, fitness, or function. The ambient, transparent square can thus be understood as the opposite of the black box. The legacy of the modernist moment in ecology opens onto the notion that any ecology might happen as forms and environs mediate each other. What follows in this book is a study of how modernist American artists reached this view of their environs as open-ended and invigorating while tenuously grappling with the effects of modernization. Modernists responded to a growing public awareness of the difference between environs and environmentalism with a range of attitudes—from celebrating pollution to mourning human presence to developing cultural forms that could register uneasy ties to stressed-out landscapes. This book discusses the ways that modernist-American artists began to consider how ecology became a formal and aesthetic question as much as a scientific and ethical one.

Acknowledgments

I would read a book made up of just acknowledgments. Here is my contribution.

I remember going to protests for Earth Day and other environmental causes my first year in college, but I had no idea really what I was doing and why I was there. I am deeply thankful to have had the time and support to begin to understand the long arc of these experiences. I have found the University of Pennsylvania, where I obtained my undergraduate and graduate degrees, to be a place of wonder and welcome. This book grows out of my research on how modernists engaged with aesthetic questions of biology and organic form. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Bob Perelman, Susan Stewart, and Heather Love provided incisive guidance and enthusiasm for my work even as it walked a complicated path. Jean-Michel showed me what it means to live the life in love with theory; he has been a guardian angel to me and so many other scholars. Bob and Susan showed me the enchanted world behind the curtain of poetry was just as inviting as the scene of the poem itself. Heather taught me how to write a work that spoke in the present, and she also taught me how to make research intense and eloquent in itself.

I cannot think of what my life would be like had I not met Al Filreis and become part of the Kelly Writers House while at Penn. At the first-ever meeting to discuss what the Writers House would become, I remember Al starting us off by saying, Forget budgets or institutional expectations, what would you imagine doing in this space if you had no limits? The Writers House, now thriving for two decades, seems to me to be one of the last utopias. I hope this book lives up to it.

The generosity and intensity of intellectual engagement at Penn buoyed me during my time there and beyond. I want to thank Charles Bernstein in particular for the radicalness of his kindness. Also at Penn I gained much from the wisdom of Warren Breckman, Jim English, Colin Dayan, Paul Saint-Amour, Jo Park, and Andrew Norris. I will never forget Kathy Change. I met many kindred spirits in graduate school who shared in all the range of hopes, disappointments, and late-night drinks that make up the beautifully ambient world of scholarship. I want to thank especially Vance Bell, my companion who would use his keys to open the Frankfurt School at any hour, Louis Cabri, Aaron Levy, Kristen Gallagher, Bernie Rhie, Jessica Lowenthal, Hannah Wells, Jonathan Hsy, Nancy Srebro, Joe Drury, Dillon Brown, Laura Heffernan, Joshua Ratner, Julia Bloch, Ian Cornelius, Melanie Micir, and Sarah Dowling. Andy Gaedtke’s conversation and collaboration made each day so full and unforgettably Philly. I am so thankful to have Benjy Kahan as a friend and reader for life. Andy and Benjy helped me see the unbearable sweetness and lightness of graduate study every day.

Books often can grow in the cracks of other books; in my case this book really began to be the book I needed to write when I substituted ecology for biology. My home institution now, The University of Western Ontario, has provided a warm welcome and support at every step of the way to making this book happen. I am grateful for inspiring conversations and feedback from colleagues Thy Phu, Bryce Traister, Mary Helen McMurran, Matthew Rowlinson, Pauline Wakeham, Michael Groden, Stephen Adams, Jonathan Boulter, Kate Stanley, Tunji Osinube, Lily Cho, Tilottama Rajan, Jan Plug, and Nandi Bhatia. While at Western I received material support for this book from an ADF Small Grant, a SSHRC Internal Research Grant, and an SSHRB Bridge Grant. The libraries at Western have provided me crucial references and I would not have been able to write this book without this help. I am very grateful for the ongoing encouragement from my peers in the American Studies reading group, the students and faculty at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, and the Centre for Environment and Sustainability at Western. I have enjoyed learning from the insights and acumen of many graduate students at Western including Rasmus Simonsen, Tim de Jong, and Thomas Barnes. Michael Sloane has helped make this book both a little cleaner and a little dirtier as a research assistant and good friend.

In the manuscript stage, this book benefited from the keen insights of two anonymous readers whom I would like to thank. Dan Waterman at the University of Alabama Press shepherded this book through to publication with his warmth and responsiveness, much to my esteem. Joanna Jacobs contributed her perceptive and thoughtful insights as a project editor. Also sections of the book benefited from the kind input of Jeanne Dubino, Ziba Rashidian, Douglas Armato, Glenn Wilmott, Stephen Voyce, and feeback from audiences at Ryerson University, York University, the Modernist Studies Association, and the Petrocultures group at the University of Alberta.

Many good friends and family members have joined me on this long journey to finish this book. I want to thank in particular Roland and Francine Haddad, Igal Haddad, Jason Wolenik, Joe Kung, Nelson Sun, Mark Litton, Leon Levin, Victor Levin, Ann Dychtenberg, Benjamin Hollander, Peter Diaz, Evan Castel, David Goldstein, and Fabian Salgado and the weekend socceristas. My mom and dad and brothers have supported and cheered for me and helped make my dreams come true. I thank them as best I can every day. With all my heart I give this book to them. This book is dedicated to my three great loves, Marina, Reuven, and Raphael. Elephants, toads, trains, guitars, gardens, dirt, mushrooms—they are all here for you.

A portion of chapter 1 was published as The Fable, the Animal, and the Moral: Reconsidering the Fable in Animal Studies with Marianne Moore’s Elephants, in Representing the Modern Animal in Culture, eds. Jeanne Dubino, Ziba Rashidian, and Andrew Smyth. 137–54. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.)

A section of chapter 2 appeared as The Making of Tender Buttons: Gertrude Stein’s Subjects, Objects, and the Illegible, Jacket 2, 2011.

A section of Chapter 5 appeared as Biopolitical Ontology after Rachel Carson, The Word Hoard 1, no. 2 (2013): 8–16. I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to the editors for publication of these essays.

Introduction

Regeneration through Pollution

Leaning over the railing of the Brooklyn ferry, Walt Whitman watched the boat shuttle between two industrial zones along the East River and wrote Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. The river, actually a tidal straight, churned under the numberless masts of ships that crowded the port. Whitman stared at his destination and saw On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly in the night, / Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.¹

In a poem that sings of how love flows and spreads like water and wind, and imagines these spreading across many generations after Whitman’s, it is easy to forget how industrialized and mechanized this poem is. And, it should be added, polluted. Whitman would have seen raw sewage and industrial waste being dumped directly into the waters around Manhattan, creating seas of filth and slicks of ash, until laws passed in the late 1880s halted the practice.² Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall! Whitman urges (313). Whitman gives iconic status to smoke floating from chimneys as pennants and his poetics of breath always inhales deeply whatever vapors he encounters. Amidst air thickened with ash and ordure, this is a poem of continual respiration and regeneration: Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d (309).

Whitman’s organicist ideology absorbs industry into a vision of ever-growing and ever-flourishing refresh’d lands and waterways, and with regard to the visibly soot-exhaling foundries, he offers a trope new to poetics: regeneration through pollution. Leo Marx points to a similar moment in Thoreau’s Walden when he gazes on gooey snow by train tracks melting and mixing with coal ashes debauched from the train. Thoreau celebrates the ugly beauty of this scene, which Marx reads as a pageant evoking the birth of life out of inorganic matter.³ The trope of regeneration by way of pollution carries forward into modernism and manifests in different ways, from exuberance to elegy. Toxic refreshment is celebrated by the Italian Futurists and F. T. Marinetti, who, in The Futurist Manifesto (1909), drives into a ditch of muddy water of a factory gutter, imbibes the nourishing sludge, delights being covered in celestial soot, hurls insults at the gouty naturalists around him, and begins his declaration of principles.⁴ For Marinetti, pollution primitivizes and modernizes at the same time; muck is raw, primeval mud mixed with futuristically iridescent industrial waste. Not to be outdone, the London-based Vorticists, in their manifesto, hurled curses at the flabby sky that can manufacture no snow,⁵ which they believed effeminizes Britain with a drizzly climate that leads to vegetable humanity (15). The Vorticists relished the prospect of replacing romanticized nature with an industrial island machine. . . discharging itself on the sea (23–24), lauding industries that reared up steel trees where the green ones were lacking (36). What unifies these writers is the sense that urban grime, smokestacks, and industrial waste, far from being debilitating, actually are energizing, invigorating, aesthetically promising manifestations of the modernist celebration of the new.

Another variation on this modernist trope opens William Carlos Williams’s pastorally titled Spring and All, which begins with a self-mocking monster project of world mass murder of species. After nearly all life has been wiped out, Williams shows a world without us: Houses crumble to ruin, cities disappear giving place to mounds of soil blown hither by the winds, small bushes and grass give way to trees which grow old and are succeeded by other trees for countless generations.⁶ Aware of the theory of plant succession proposed by Frederic Clements at the turn of the century, Williams transplants this model to poetry. The first poem in the volume moves along a road to a contagious hospital surrounded by muddy, dried, lifeless fields. The first sign of life is the indistinct, zombie-like They—They enter the new world naked, / cold, uncertain of all / save that they enter (183). These They are plant shoots, but really mean any life. The longstanding American motif of regeneration through violence, described by Richard Slotkin,⁷ intersects in Williams’s poetics with regeneration of life by way of scenes of wasteland, sickness, and filth juxtaposed with scenes indicative of urban vitalism such as electrically glowing cities, skyscrapers, baseball crowds, and jazz dives. Williams rhapsodizes a poetics of slumming, in industrial effluvia or in other, mostly poor people’s intimate moments. Although he repeatedly claimed to be aghast at Eliot’s desiccated vision of modernity in The Waste Land, both poets are drawn like rag pickers to places of refuse, garbage, and pollution, for these spots of modernity act as gateways through which both poets and masses pass, regenerated either by denunciation and purification (Eliot) or by reveling in the way industrial detritus covers us all (Williams).

The trope of regeneration through pollution or natural destruction appears widely across modernist literature, from Eliot’s poems of urban decay, to Carl Sandburg’s Smoke and Steel, to the burnt hills of Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River, to the many instances of urban gothic in modernist fiction, where refuse, chemicals, smoke, and overcrowding intensify the senses.⁸ Earlier, in romanticist literature, pollution was anathema, and by World War II, accounts of pollution revert back to excoriated status.⁹ Lawrence Buell describes how the trope of toxic discourse has its effective beginning in the work of Rachel Carson in the 1960s and is rooted in an appeal to informing the public that wasteful and unhealthy dumping of chemical and industrial matter does biological and moral harm, and that the prevention of pollution must be prioritized over any developmental agenda.¹⁰ But in the first half of the century, toxicity has a peculiar aesthetic attraction that makes it a signature feature of the modernist era.

These effusions over pollution in modernism point to a moment so different from our own. Modernism was never very green—if by green we