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Paris: A Poem

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

First Edition of Paris: A Poem

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

Publishing History

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

Themes

World War I

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

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

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

Race

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

Influences

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

Reception

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

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

References

• Briggs, Julia (2007). "Hope Mirrlees and Continental Modernism". In Scott, Bonnie Kime (ed.). Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections. University of Illinois Press. pp. 261–306. ISBN 978-0252074189.
• Briggs, Julia (2006). Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0748624355.
• Mirrlees, Hope (2011). Parmar, Sandeep (ed.). Collected Poems: Hope Mirrlees. Carcanet Press. ISBN 978-1847770752.
• Woolf, Virginia (1976). Nicolson, Nigel; Trautmann, Joanne (eds.). The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume 2, 1912-1922. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0156508827.

Other Exercises

Article Selection

Hope Mirrlees (Paris: A Poem)

• There is a dead article link for Mirrlees's Paris: A Poem in the Wikipedia article for Hope Mirrlees. Mirrlees's other novels, on the other hand, have their own articles. I could create an article for Paris: A Poem.
• Paris: A Poem was written and published in 1919. It depicts a day-to-night snapshot of post-war Paris that is full of reminders of war and death, as well as references to WWI and the Paris Peace Conference. Critics have claimed that her work anticipates T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, among other important modernist works. In recent years, Mirrlees's long, modernist, experimental poem has begun to gain critical attention and praise from scholars. From the perspective of our work in class, her poem is significant because it is an instance of a female perspective on the aftermath of the war in poetry.
• Possible Sources
  • Briggs, Julia. “Hope Mirrlees and Continental Modernism.” Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections, edited by Bonnie Kime Scott, Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 2007, pp. 261–306.
  • Connor, John T. “Hope Mirrlees and the Archive of Modernism.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 37, no. 2, Winter 2014, pp. 117-182.
  • Mitton, Matthew. “Rediscovering Hope Mirrlees.” Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 24, no. 4, 2013, pp. 368–370., doi:10.1080/09574042.2013.857966.
  • Mirrlees, Hope. Collected Poems. Edited by Sandeep Parmar, Carcanet Press Ltd, 2011.
  • “Paris by Hope Mirrlees.” The British Library, The British Library, 21 Jan. 2016, www.bl.uk/collection-items/paris-by-hope-mirrlees.
  • “Hope Mirrlees.” Modernist Archives Publishing Project, www.modernistarchives.com/person/hope-mirrlees.
  • University of Maryland has a collection of Hope Mirrlees papers in their archive: https://digital.lib.umd.edu/archivesum/actions.DisplayEADDoc.do?source=MdU.ead.litms.0045.xml&style=ead#series3.a

Marian Allen

• Wikipedia has flagged this article has requiring additional citations for verification.
• There is a quotation section with one stand-alone quotation that is not even cited. It needs a citation for where this quotation comes from and there should be some explanation as to why this quotation matters.
• There should be a list of her published works at the end of the article.
• There should be a separate section that goes into more detail about her works and career.
• There should be some references to scholars discussing her work. Some of the references in the list are missing full citations. There should be more books and/or articles cited.
• Possible Sources
  • “Marian Allen.” The Poetry Society, poetrysociety.org.uk/poets/marian-allen/.
  • Khan, Nosheen. Women's Poetry of the First World War. Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1988.
  • Kendall, Tim, editor. The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry. Oxford University Press, 2012.
  • Puissant, Susanne. Irony and the Poetry of the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
  • Morton, P. Lusting for London: Australian Expatriate Writers at the Hub of Empire 1870-1950. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
  • Newman, Vivien. Tumult & Tears: an Anthology of Women's First World War Poetry. Pen & Sword History, 2016.
  • “The Wind on the Downs.” Waterlines, waterlines.org.uk/blog/the-wind-on-the-downs/.
  • “Marian Allen.” Austlit: Discover Australian Stories, Transnational Literature, www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A45791?mainTabTemplate=agentWorksBy.

May Wedderburn Cannan

• Wikipedia has flagged this article as having insufficient inline citations that make the sources unclear.
• Unlike some other poets known for their war writing, Cannan does not have separate sections about her involvement in or writing related to the war.
• The section on her later life is very sparse. There are only three sentences.
• While the article lists a bibliography of her works, it does not go into detail about her writing or its reception.
• There needs to be more scholarly works (books and papers) in the sources. Only five sources are sited in the reference and not one is a secondary text source.
• Possible Sources
  • Cervo, Nathan A. “Cannan’s Rouen.” Explicator, vol. 66, no. 1, Fall 2007, pp. 33–34.
  • Freeman, Grace. “May Wedderburn Cannan: The Forgotten Female Poet of World War I.” All About History, www.historyanswers.co.uk/history-of-war/may-wedderburn-cannan-the-forgotten-female-poet-of-world-war-i/.
  • “May Wedderburn Cannan (1893 - 1973).” Scottish Poetry Library, www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/may-wedderburn-cannan.
  • “May Wedderburn Cannan | World War I.” Discover War Poets - WW1, warpoets.org.uk/worldwar1/poets-and-poetry/may-wedderburn-cannan-2/.
  • “May Wedderburn Cannan.” Lives of the First World War, livesofthefirstworldwar.org/lifestory/4945397.

Article Evaluation

Hannah Duston

• Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?
  • Everything in the article did relate to the topic of Hannah Duston. I found it distracting in the introduction that the second paragraph has six sources after the first sentence while the first paragraph only has one source after the date. I thought that the sources could be distributed more evenly. I also thought that the names used to describe the Abenaki people were inconsistent as sometimes they were referred to as "Indians," others as "Abenaki," or "Native American." I found this inconsistency to be distracting.
• Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?
  • Overall, the information seems up to date. There's even a citation to the recent Smithsonian article published on Duston in 2018. I was also impressed that the article cites Sara Humphreys's article (published in the Canadian Review of American Studies) "The Mass Marketing of the Colonial Captive Hannah Duston." I thought that the Controversy section could be elaborated. It vaguely says that "some" view her one way and "some" another without attributing these opinions to certain people. Granted, there are citations at the end of the paragraph, but I thought that these sources could be attributed within the article itself as well. I thought this issue could be remedied by not just citing the academic sources but briefly describing their main arguments.
• What else could be improved?
  • I thought there could be more sentences on the way Duston's story appears in literary works because each of the writers rewrite her story in different ways. As it is written now, given its generalizing tendencies, one might get the impression that 19th century writers wrote about Duston similarly.
• Is the article neutral? Are there any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
  • Overall, the article appears to be neutral. It also attempts to attach claims to sources. For instance, in the biography section, parts of Mather's account are quoted. None of the claims appear to be heavily biased.
• Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
  • I thought that details on all sides of the controversy were not fleshed out enough, as in, I did not think there was enough explanation as to what made people feel sympathetically or not towards Duston.
• Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article?
  • The links I checked work and the sources seem to support the claims in the article. The sources appear to be relevant to the information in the article and its claims. I thought some of the distribution of in-text citations could be improved, so that it's clearer which sources are supposed to support which claims.
• Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
  • The summary of Duston's story in the first paragraph of the introduction does not have any references. Rather, there are a lot of references at the start of the second paragraph. The sources referenced in the introduction appear to be non-fiction/academic books. Each of these writers have individual biases as scholars who are making arguments. In the last sentence of the second paragraph, the stated opinion is labeled as being that of "some scholars." Overall, the sources seem to be from academic books and articles, local newspapers (detailing news at the local level that wouldn't be found elsewhere), and articles from reputable organizations like the Smithsonian.
• What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
  • The two main questions: whether the statue of Hannah Duston was really the first statue of a woman in the US; why the spelling Duston is used rather than Dustin.
• How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?
  • The article is C-Class and Mid-importance. It is part of WikiProject Women's History, WikiProject Biography, and WikiProject United States.
• How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?
  • One of the users in the Talk page (Umfoster) argued for a view that is sympathetic towards Duston and claimed that the article is biased for not taking this view. Another user edited out Umfoster's changes, saying they were a non-sequitur.
  • The Wikipedia article focuses a lot more on the memorials of Duston than we discussed in class (since the article itself was originally created out of interest for her memorials). It talks less about the literary re-interpretations of her story, which was our focus as a class on archives.